TORONTO, Canada– Oxford Properties Group, a leading global investor, developer and manager of real estate, gathered over 500 thinkers for Global Hackathon competition to disrupt the design and construction process of commercial real estate buildings.
Hosted concurrently across three continents, participants in London, Sydney, Boston and Toronto spent 48 hours wrestling with the most pressing challenges in commercial real estate development. The participants were divided into 50 teams with the top three in each city taking home a share of the US$20,000 in prize money.
“The commercial real estate industry is primed for disruption – the process we use to design and construct buildings has not materially changed in almost a century. This is why we invited people to come in and hack us at this Global Hackathon competition. If we can disrupt ourselves first, we can help guide the industry into the future. We hope that the ideas and solutions we have discovered through the hackathon will inspire the industry to explore new ways of driving innovation through technology,” commented Dean Hopkins, COO at Oxford.
The first-place winners are:
- Sydney | Team Oxford City (Jacqueline Lee, Larissa Mak, Chris Rabe, Billy Zhong)
A collaborative and automated materials cost management tool that uses artificial intelligence to crawl design files and buildings specs, allowing users to quickly compare materials and optimize cost.
- Boston | Team Kaven 207 (Adam Collins, Aidan Mayer, Kelley Townley, Samantha Wile, Kristophe Zephyrin)
A web-based solution that leverages historical building design data and best practices plus incorporates regulatory and programmatic constraints to self-generate and optimize the design of building cores.
- Toronto | Team Build Stream (Kartik Budhiraja, Sukhy Dhami, Jishnu Kidile, Abhinav Meda, Abbas Rattansi, Raisa Sayed)
An application to collect real time customer-generated data to create experience-driven user personas. This data helps to incorporates the wants and needs of a building’s end users in the design and development process.
- London | Team Data Space (John Glennon, Shannon Henry, Youssef Ibrahim, James Kitchen, George Mosey, Jack Weller)
A contractor involvement program that allows collaborative and agile working to be started from the onset of the design process. This allows for increased cost certainty, increased value engineering and earlier access to the supply chain.
The winning teams were judged based on their solution, how it supported and advanced commercial real estate development, its impact on the end-users, and its feasibility.
“As a global company, it is important for us to hear perspectives and ideas from across the world. The solutions the participants came up with were unique and addressed issues the industry is contending with on a daily basis. Oxford has a vested interest in pushing the boundaries of the industry, and we will do our part to drive innovation and speed up the commercial development process,” said Hopkins.
The Hackathon is part of Oxford’s broader mission to spur new innovation in the global construction industry, which is expected to exceed $15.5 trillion in 2030. Oxford has a history of making strategic investments in the best and fastest growing PropTech companies, including most recently Honest Buildings which was recently acquired by Procore.
Oxford Properties Group connects people to exceptional places, and is the owner, developer and manager of some of the world’s best real estate assets. Established in 1960, it manages approximately $60 billion of assets across the globe on behalf of its co-owners and investment partners. Oxford’s portfolio encompasses office, retail, industrial, hotels and multifamily residential and spans more than 100 million square feet in global gateway cities across four continents. A disciplined and thematic investor, Oxford invests in properties, portfolios, development sites, debt, securities and platforms across the risk-reward spectrum. With its global headquarters in Toronto, Oxford operates out of over 15 regional offices including New York, London, Luxembourg, Singapore and Sydney. Its long-term approach to real estate investment aligns Oxford’s interests to its customers and the communities in which it operates. Oxford is the global real estate arm of OMERS.
