The Truth About Real Estate Research with Professor Andrew Baum and Andy Saull

In this episode of The Propcast we talk to Professor Andrew Baum and researcher Andy Saull to find out the truth about Real Estate Research, and talk forecasting the future of real estate.

Welcome to the podcast and a warm welcome to our guests on today’s show. Professor Andrew Baum and Andy Saull.

This morning’s topic is going to be on the truth about real estate research. So, I’ll give you an introduction to Professor Andrew Baum and Andy Saul. For the past few years Saïd Business School at Oxford University has been home to the future of real estate research group, aiming to identify how PropTech will transform the real estate business over the next 10 years. Today I’m joined by Professor Andrew Baum and Andy Saul, authors of many of the reports published by Oxford, including the latest “PropTech 2020”, a must read for anyone in the industry. Andrew Baum is the head of the Oxford initiative and was previously a professor with Cambridge and Reading Universities. He’s advised companies such as CBRE investors and Grosvenor and is the leading academic in the study of PropTech with his ground-breaking 2017 publication “PropTech 3.0” who’s updated for “PropTech 2020” was released only recently. It is said that he not only wrote the theory, but he also puts it into practice, now seemingly predicts the future.

Andy Saul as research assistant has been making his tea and collecting his washing, or so he tells me! Alongside Andrew he has also co-authored reports of the future of real estate transactions and occupation. In a previous life Andy was a professional rugby player with London based Saracens, and in England second team. However, this hardly impressed Andrew as a fellow Leicester Tigers season ticket holder. Gentlemen, I’d like to say welcome to the show. It’s such a treat to have you both on it together. I’d love to chat through the truth about real estate reset. And so Andrew, would you like to kick it off with, how did you first get into it?

Andrew 

I  started at Reading in 1974/5 as a researcher and teacher, and retrained a couple of times, did a PhD in real estate research and finance, and been hired in industry, worked at the Pru, Henderson, CBRE global investors, a variety of other places and found myself at Oxford 5-6 years ago teaching MBA students and executives, and trying to work out what it was that they wanted to know. And what they wanted to know really was what’s the future going to be like? So that’s what really kicked off the future real estate initiative.

Louisa

Andy how did you get from England rugby to Oxford University? Sport to academia, that doesn’t happen too regularly, not saying it can’t happen, but how did that start for you?

Andy 

There are probably three versions of this story. And the first one would be a complete lie, which says I’d dreamed to go to Oxford my whole life and I’d planned, and I was very meticulous. The second version, which I kind of stick to is, if you have enough conversations, you talk to enough people, enough doors present themselves and you can walk through, go down enough paths until you find somewhere you kind of feel comfortable and where you’re meant to be. So that’s probably how I ended up in Oxford. But the truth is, it was just pure panic and pure luck. My rugby career was – I’d made the decision to finish at 28 and I knew I wanted to either go into industry or study, and I’d applied for Cambridge to do these three real estate courses at Cambridge, and got declined on all three of them. And it just so happened that my good friend who I was out for coffee with, his rugby agent happened to coach the Oxford rugby team, and he said, “Why don’t you give him a ring and just talk to him about Oxford courses.” He then put me in contact with the professor of the sustainable urban development course, which is what I ended up taking at Oxford. I just completed my two-year Master’s, and whilst I was doing that, I decided to reach out to Andrew because actually it was through the Oxford careers office. I went to Oxford careers office to talk to them about potential real estate careers and anyone they had within the real estate network, and then they put me in contact with Andrew as a real estate professor at Oxford. Next thing I am doing some reading for a man making his teas as we joked about at the start, and now here I am as a full-time research assistant at Oxford. So I joke with my friends that I’m an Oxford Scientist, albeit a social scientist, but it’s still quite a quite a fun story to tell.

Louisa 

When people think of research, do you think there’s something slightly more attractive or sexy about reimagining the future of real estate? When I think of real research on say, traditional real estate and buildings, obviously I’m not a researcher, I’m a recruiter, but I’m not automatically thinking “God, I wanted to learn about that”. But when we start talking about what’s it going to look like in future, how does the whole build environment, how does it look? Do you think that will attract more people to the sector?

Andy 

I like to break this into two or three different areas of research. Yes, I’ll answer the question directly then I’ll go my lovely roundabout way of telling tales that I like to do. Firstly, yes, I think it is an exciting time to join real estate, especially from the from the tech or the data, data science perspective. However, I think a lot of people in the industry, I like to make jokes about the differences in research between what we’re doing what the industry does. So you’ve got three, three or four types of research. The first is my most hated and that is what everyone wants to do and that is the Family Fortunes research. So, we asked 100 of our clients what they thought will be the next best technology in 10 years’ time and they said ding! 44%, said blockchain 33% said IMD, and you know that means nothing. You’re asking people that don’t know about anything what they think the future is going to be.

And the second list is kind of like the “Proptextpert” side, as I like to call them and that’s just, you know, the clever people that gaze into their crystal balls “I’ve been in the industry a long time, I’ve been in development, I’ve been in technology and innovation and other industries, and here’s what I think will happen” and their points of view are equally valid. But there’s, you know, if you flip a coin 10 times, chances are someone will get 10 heads in a row. So there’s always going to be one or two that make correct predictions. And then the kind of the third area of research, which is where we sit, is extremely difficult. And that’s actually trying to empirically infer what the future might hold based on data about the past. And that is particularly a stumbling block I would say of research. And so when you when you want to say is it is research a sexy topic? I think it’s all well and good when you see the “PropTextpert” standing on the stage staring into his crystal ball and telling anecdotes about Uber and Amazon. But particularly, I think with Andrews background coming from a real estate research, we’re a lot more grounded. So perhaps, what we do was, you know, the PropTech reports are to an extent crystal ball gazing, the other reports are largely empirically founded, so not as sexy as you might think.

Louisa 

Yes, I guess going through a lot of past data, which probably is inaccurate, must be fairly frustrating and time consuming. But surely that’s why you’ve got a great research team behind you?

Andrew 

Yes, you know, it was great answer from Andy and the role of the university is to be objective, dispassionate, grounded, in fact, as much as possible, intelligent, you know, and hopefully ethical. And you don’t get a lot of that in the business world, you know, because if only because people are going to be partial, even if they’re not being cynically partial. You know, the fact that you’re trying to build a business means that you’re bound to look at that business through rose tinted spectacles. And so you see, on the circuit, you see a lot of people promoting things which they probably believe in to some extent, but it suits their book to believe in and to promote, and to get up and to try and capture the spirit of the age with young people, young entrepreneurs, young techies who are genuinely motivated to make the world a better place, as well as to make some money for themselves, to temper that with views about what the real estate real estate industry is really like, and what the problems in the real estate industry really are. It’s quite tough. And where I think we’ve been lucky is that people who read the 2017 and 2020 reports, think that we are proponents of tech change and innovation. Actually, those reports are I think they’re reasonably balanced about you know, tempering the excitement in the evangelism of the techies with the  conservatism of the property market and trying to research the future is impossible clearly, we’ve got no measures by which we can research the future so we’re playing a pretty hard game and it’s going to be a challenge to keep the keep the thing fresh and alive and exciting.

Louisa 

Andrew, having written many educational books and theory, just mentioned it’s so difficult to write about the future of business. We just saw this with the pandemic that came out of nowhere. Have you had one prediction and one part of research, which you wrote about which has come true?

Andrew 

Yes, hundreds, hundreds! So forecasters know that it’s easy to get your forecasts right, you just have to forecast lots and forecast the opposite thing. So you say, will Donald Trump be elected president -you say yes to some people or no to other people, and be right 50% of the time, I’m being a bit cynical, because forecasting is really a bit of a fool’s game. I don’t think we should really try to make overt forecasts of the future. But I really learned the lesson, I should have learned it years ago, but I learned it in 2016 when I forecast, I’d had to do a quarterly round with clients forecasting the property market for the next five years and which sector should you invest in, which not, and I said at one presentation February 2016, I think it was that Donald Trump couldn’t be elected President of the US, that the UK could not vote for Brexit, and that Leicester City wouldn’t win the premier league! I got 0 out of 3.

Louisa

Absolute shocker!

Andrew

It was an absolute shocker, I was delighted about Leicester City winning the Premier League but I wasn’t delighted about the other two things. I realised that your forecasts are tempered by your innermost emotions. So I didn’t want Donald Trump to be elected so I went around saying he wouldn’t be. I didn’t want us to leave the European Union so I went around saying that we wouldn’t vote to leave. And I wanted Leicester City to win the Premier League so badly, I couldn’t believe they could possibly do it, so my emotions got in the way of my brain. And I think my brain is now telling me that making forecasts, it’s very difficult. All you can say is that the world is uncertain. And there are certain things going on that could lead to certain outcomes. And so we have to talk about scenarios to the future rather than over forecasts on what will happen I don’t think.

Louisa 

Yeah, I guess for the forecasts you’ve previously done and research coming from, you know, Oxford, Reading and being a professor, how many times do you get challenged? I mean, I’ve seen quite a lot of people take it for gospel, but do you have people popping up writing, whether it’s say, I don’t know a journal or something saying “no, I completely disagree with this”?

Andy 

There was a good BBC article this week wasn’t there Andrew?

Andrew 

Yeah, I’d love to read Ken’s letter out to you if I could find it. So we there was something in the BBC on Saturday on its online news about retailers not being able to afford to pay their rent, and I was interviewed and tried to put the point that you shouldn’t see this as a society full of rich, undeserving landlords exploiting poor deserving tenants. You know, the landlords are often pension funds looking after the savings of old ladies in Wales and the tenants are sometimes us private equity fund finance leveraged to the hilt, businesses that are, you know, trying just trying to make as much money as they can and, and might even claim relief from the UK Government when the US bond has taken all the money out of the business in the first place. So, I was trying to set the record straight on that and I got a letter from Kenneth who runs the Phoenix nightclub in Soho, I said why don’t these businesses save for a rainy day and he said (you’re going to have to bleep this bit out!) but he said, “Well, it’s been pissing down for years” was his phrase. And he was standing there with his with his paintbrush, trying to keep the thing going while he was getting no income, no support from government, and I said, fair enough, Ken I’ll come and paint with you for a day or two because I can understand the situation. So you do get pushed back, you get pushed back from it.

You know, Oxford needs to be in the news and if you want your research to be meaningful, you need to promote it and get it out into the press. So you’ve got to be prepared to be rebutted by the general public, and other academics will often challenge but that’s a pretty small world but that is very introverted. The other challenge really is from business where you get people who, like I said, they might genuinely believe that their business area is special, they are inevitably tainted by their own personal desires and their emotions and therefore, you know, you can get into debates with people about whether blockchain is really important, whether it’s going to happen or not, whether tokenization is a good thing or not, all that stuff and usually there’s somebody with a commercial interest on the other side of the arguments.

Louisa 

Yes well, I guess no publicity is bad publicity and if someone’s challenging you the good news is people are reading a report and taking notice because I’m sure there’s so much information into the data and sites out there. This leads me onto my next question, but out of all of these sites if people want to learn about this space, obviously they should read the report, but CREtech, Unity, PLACEtech, if you want to find out more about this space, well, where do you recommend they  find it?

Andy 

Yes, I mean, you mentioned it I subscribe to all the weekly emails from Unissu, Propmodo, PLACEtech, Infabode. There’s one more – and CREtech, as you call them. And the other thing that I think is actually really quite interesting is social media. I kind of didn’t purposefully mock the “PropTextperts” earlier but what they are is extremely well read. And so, if you follow those guys on social media, you only need to follow two or three before they will start retweeting and messaging each other, and you realise who the other 10 are. And suddenly, you see all the reports that they’re discussing in their in their social media posts, and they can be highly informative, not only to understand, not only to read the report and understand but to actually hear their opinions and their debates on the topic. For someone like myself that doesn’t take care of a real estate background, I learned a lot just from reading and listening to their conversations with each other kind of a bit voyeuristically. You know, just sneaking into their Twitter and reading their stuff.

Louisa 

Will Saïd Business School be bringing out like a special PropTech course in the near future, or what are the big plans there Andrew, if any?

Andrew 

Oxford’s been talking about and delivering some online programs in FinTech, blockchain, a variety of other areas and PropTech is on the list for the for the next set of iterations. I think right now, the universities having to think very hard about how much of his teaching goes online and how much of its face to face. Those plans are getting wrapped up in in those discussions, I suspect is probably 75% likely that there’ll be a proximate cause in the next couple of years. Yes.

Louisa 

So the future changes that are occurring you know, in your annual report Future of Real Estate 3.0 you discuss, smart real estate, real estate, FinTech, real estate shared economy, data digitalisation and smart cities, Andrew out of all these which personally do you see the most change happening? Just this is a forecast, it’s not definitely will, but yeah, where do you see the most change?

Andrew 

I’m happy to go for that one. I mean, it’s all about it’s all about data and digitalisation, you know, everything follows from that. The furthest away, you know, it’s easy to make these predictions because you can never define what I mean by furthest away, but Smart Cities are a long way away. If by smart cities, you mean efficient data using gatherings of buildings and people then I think we’re a way away from that. The first thing is data digitalisation. Because, as some of the reports that we’ve put out, have said, you know, it all starts with digitalising property information that can then be used in more efficient transactions and better, better decisions. So digitalisation, definitely and the best businesses that are easiest to back out there are the ones that are just trying to work in making the data work in the property industry because it’s been pretty bad so far.

Louisa 

Andy, would you agree with this?

Andy 

To an extent, yes. So Andrew looks at this from almost like an analysis forecasting point of view, the processes of real estate, whereas smart building sectors have more to do with the actual physical construction side of real estate, how it operates. I think with things like the climate emergency, now the Coronavirus pandemic, I think there is a massive transition going on in how we actually physically equip our buildings. And I think that’s going to be hugely accelerated in smart buildings a lot more tangibly. And the real estate world understands, you know, rent per square foot and everyone has a kind of vested interest -well, apart from the tenant – everyone has a vested interest in trying to increase the rent per square foot. So, I think that buildings will only get smarter, more technology equipped. The one thing I would also point out is that these three realms, well, these four or five realms, you mentioned that we discussed in our reports shouldn’t necessarily be viewed independently. Whilst we describe them independently, because it’s very easy to break up a lot of the technology’s crossover. So smart building technology that can monitor occupancy and thus, more efficient utilization of desks can just as easily create a shared economy proposition whereby the desks have been utilized or sold on a secondary market, or rented on a secondary market

Andrew 

Great point, Andy, I mean, between the 2017 and 2020 report, we’ve seen the small building movement and the shared economy still weren’t merged together, haven’t we?

Andy 

Pretty much yeah, and then the thing that they’ll do is that’ll spin off data around what desks and what offices are in demand when, and that will completely change valuation models that will then check cash flow modelling and then you’ll get this digitalisation of data that will then be used to inform transactions. So it shouldn’t be seen as one set of separate worlds. It is all about data digitalisation at the end of the day but that will occur in very different sectors all kind of intertwined.  I that was a really vague answer at the end! That was the best I could do.

Louisa 

I think yes, it’s an unanimous agreement on data digitalisation driving it. I guess through this there’s all this  change and innovation that  to some concerns around whether it be job security from the traditional real estate industry, so if we’re focusing on data digitalisation, when I’m working with a real estate investment funds to the start-ups they’re hiring, you know, people like data scientists or data analysts, there’s been a creation of lots of other new roles. I’m trying to basically explain to a lot of people I’m working with, as you know, there will be jobs creation, it’s not just going to be purely focused around data and you know, you have to go on to study machine learning. Are there any  skills which you think people can  build on to in the future coming from the real estate world, Andrew?

Andrew 

Yeah. I mean, I think the most the most valuable skill is one that I think Andy’s got. And I think that that is going to be the most valuable in the real estate industry for the next 10 to 20 years. And that’s going to be personal relationships, capital raising, raising money to invest, you know, that we know that the world could be a much better place. We know that there is a huge amount of money out there that needs to get invested. What’s needed is the bringing together of all those opportunities with all that money. And that that isn’t done through an app you know, we that is done through personal trust and ambassadorial skills and those ambassadorial skills need to be employed by tech start-ups that have commercial offices, business development offices, whatever you call them who desperately need to go out and raise money. But you’ve also got the big property companies, the fund managers, the, you know, they need to raise capital as well. And that capital will then find its way into the right things, eventually the best buildings, energy efficiency, sustainability, all the things that we need, we know that the world needs, you need people to go out and raise that capital. So that’s going to be the most valuable skill, I think.

Andy 

Yes, that reminds me of a nice story that I heard Jules Barker, a British landlord once tell, I forget the developer, and I’m going to use I want to say – forgive me – Paddington, but I’m not sure if they themselves were there developers. Well he said that they planted thousands of trees 30 years ago, and that cost them money, not because they would receive a higher rent 30 years ago or because there was no seedling trees around, but because now 30 years into the future when you walk around the development there are lovely trees and it creates a brilliant neighbourhood. I think the skills people are going to have to understand are these sustainability skills just because we cannot yet measure the impact of social inclusion, diversity, wellness, happiness, satisfaction, that the built environment can and you know, real estate organizations, PropTech companies can influence it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing it. Because I think it’s 30 years’ time, if you’ve created a building, you’ve created an environment, you’ve created a culture that has these brilliant values, it will pay dividends, and just because you can’t measure it yet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be putting it in place. Immediately.

Louisa 

Yes, I completely agree with that. I’m just concerned about the time and I think we might just break the quarantine record by doing a whole interview without a question on COVID-19, which is obviously a very hot topic at the moment I was eager to avoid, avoid the C word, as it seems to be what everyone is talking about. But with that in mind, obviously it’s changed real estate significantly in the past few months. Andy, what do you think will be the next unforeseen shock of real estate that real estate will have to endure?

Andrew 

You know the answer to that already, don’t you? The next unforeseen shock is unforeseeable so I can’t tell you! All I can tell you is that there’s been a crisis in the financial markets and in the property markets, I think every three or four years since 1997. So the idea that this is just a huge shock, which indeed it is, but a huge shock that won’t be repeated is just wrong. You know, we’ve had ‘97 where we had the Asian debt crisis within the .com, boom and bust of ’99-2001. Then we had the SARS crisis 2003, then we have the global financial crisis. Then we have the Greek debt crisis, then we had Brexit, then we had COVID-19. So, every three or four years, something big happens, that’s unforeseen, and you know, there’ll be another one in three or four years’ time, no doubt. It means that it means that businesses have to work out what is sustainable and what is not sustainable. And, you know, good buildings, good urban environments are probably sustainable in most scenarios, you know. So a lot of nonsense being talked at the moment about the end of the city, you know, the end of the densification, the fact that everybody will work from home and work in the suburbs, completely wrong, in my opinion. I don’t think that’s a forecast. I think it’s just using an analysis of all the forces of land economics that we know about, you know, migration, the demographic structure of the population, the need for the need for entertainment, housing and the fact that we’re a knowledge economy, you know, that it’s not an accident that we’re all in London, and that there’s a PropTech sector in London. And the reason it’s there is because there’s a knowledge agglomeration in London. And we all get more valuable as people by knowing more, and we know more by not just by being online, but by meeting at breakfast, meeting at lunch going to a seminar in the evening. And so, you know, the city will survive. That’s the big thing that’s going to come through all this. But don’t be surprised if there’s another big shock in three or four years.

Andy 

Andrews knowledge of real estate is 1000 times anyone else’s in the world, which makes it a million times more than mine. I could only agree. Yes. Most of what you hear of me today I’ve kind of discussed with Andrew in the office, and then I take out and tell other people and they go “Oh you know a bit about real estate” and I still go “Yeah, no, I read it somewhere, I taught myself!” I just say Andrews opinions!

Andrew 

It’s a serious question for you too. I mean, are you spooked by COVID to the point where you consider going and living in Wiltshire or in you know, a town in Yorkshire somewhere?

Andrew 

I mean, I love Yorkshire and the sticks, and I love Wiltshire, and I would go live there, but I’m old you know, I just don’t see young people wanting to do anything else than congregate in dense urban environments.

Louisa 

Yes, I completely agree with you. I know my team and basically all my clients whether they’re large scale consultancies to start-ups, everyone’s missing that human interaction. It’s just being in the same space, you know, bouncing off different ideas, just communicating to people. And then I completely think I agree that you get more work done, when you have a couple of days to yourself, I get so much more done than when I’m not an office full of 15 recruiters, that goes without saying, but when it comes down to sharing ideas, I think definitely a half the week should you should be in an environment where you’re surrounded by people and I think also people coming out of universities, that’s what people thrive off, they miss that culture. Google and Facebook not going back to the office for next year? I think they’re going to lose a lot of their talent, people buy into that whole culture piece. So yes, the sooner the better.

We can all get back to the office and I spoke to Equiem and some of the tech and they’re going to be implementing in some of their buildings, which allows people to go back safely, you know, looking at air quality and temperature and all of that, then seeing the best that evolves, hopefully we can all resume as normal, slightly normal. I’m quietly optimistic about it. But look Andy and Andrew, this brings us to the end of the show. I’d like to thank you, once again for joining us on The Propcast. Before we go, is there anything you would like to share with our audience and listeners, and also let them know the best way to connect with you. all your details will also be put in the podcast summary at the bottom as well.

Andrew 

Yeah, have a look at the future of real estate industry websites and Oxford University that would be that would be great. And there’s a LinkedIn site that Andy knows more about than I do.

Andy 

There is a LinkedIn group you can get on to the Oxford Future real estate initiative, just search that request to join. We’re going to try and make it an open group. We research the future and all the brilliance of technology, but we can’t actually work our own LinkedIn pages! So we will, hopefully get that a bit more open in the future so, the research spreads a bit further and wider. But otherwise everything we published is on our website. And it’s amazing how many people messaged me saying, “Oh, can you please talk to me about tokenisation” and I can just quite easily say read this report and then if you have any questions, we can discuss another time because there are some really, really good insights on in those reports. So yes, have a read.

Louisa

Andy you’re going to have to find a new social set for your research team though.

Andy 

If only there was a recruiter on the call that could lookout for a real estate researcher for Andrew!

Louisa

Yes everyone, send me your CV. It’s been an absolute pleasure so thank you guys once again for coming on the podcast. And I will share all the details of this in the link below. But thank you.