Propmodo Technology

Greetings,

The structural scare at 235 East 42nd Street in New York City is not just another construction incident. It is a preview of the risks that come with changing the use, loads, and structural behavior of large buildings in dense urban environments. When two columns buckled inside the former Pfizer headquarters, the city could not simply send engineers upstairs with clipboards. The building was possibly still moving. The safest first responders were drones, sensors, and remote monitoring systems.

That should not become an argument against office-to-residential conversions. New York needs these projects, and one frightening incident at one building should not cloud an entire category of adaptive reuse. But it should widen the conversation. A few miles south, 161 Maiden Lane has been sitting unfinished on the Lower Manhattan waterfront for years, known for its lean and surrounded by unresolved questions about its foundation, future, and long-term condition. Pfizer was an active construction emergency. Maiden Lane is something different, and maybe more uncomfortable: a known structural concern that has simply become part of the skyline.

The lesson from Surfside, the Florida condo collapse that killed 98 people in 2021, and Millennium Tower, the famously sinking and leaning San Francisco high-rise that required a major foundation fix, is that buildings usually tell us they are changing before the public can see it. The question is whether owners, engineers, lenders, and cities are listening early enough. The same tech being used at 42nd Street in crisis, from drones to tiltmeters to LiDAR, can also be deployed before crisis conditions exist. The future of adaptive reuse will not just depend on zoning, incentives, and floor plates. It will depend on whether the industry gets serious about continuous structural monitoring before movement becomes a headline.

Let’s go!

🧭 Compass for all
Compass is rolling out its AI-powered Home Platform across its company-owned brokerage brands this summer, extending proprietary technology to agents at Coldwell Banker Realty, Corcoran, Sotheby's International Realty, and @properties in what the company is calling the largest technology deployment in residential real estate history. The platform covers the full real estate lifecycle from client acquisition through transaction management, and the strategic logic behind it is that proprietary data is the real differentiator in an era of broadly available AI models, with each additional brand on the platform feeding more exclusive signal into the system. The rollout follows the company's merger with Anywhere Real Estate and sets up a franchise network expansion planned for 2027, with the compounding data advantage growing as more agents and brands come onto a single unified system.

📀 Data warehouse
The AI-driven data center building boom is generating a significant secondary wave of demand for industrial warehouse space, as tech giants including Meta and Google lease properties near their data centers to store the construction equipment and materials needed to build and maintain them. Data center-related tenants are projected to sign leases for roughly 4 million square feet of warehouse space across the mid-Atlantic region this year, up from 2.8 million square feet last year, with JLL projecting that figure could reach 14 million square feet by 2030. The spillover is proving to be a meaningful tailwind for a broader industrial market that has struggled with elevated vacancy since the pandemic, with data center-related tenants accounting for more than 40% of new industrial leasing in the D.C. metro last year and industrial rents in Northern Virginia rising 20% over the past three years, double the national average.

🦺 Doug’s new digs
Douglas Elliman has announced the launch of Elius, a new AI-powered data company built on Google Cloud that will use the brokerage's proprietary data from its brokerage and new development businesses to create products and services it plans to eventually market externally. The move comes alongside a broader technology infrastructure overhaul the firm expects will reduce costs by automating and streamlining operations, with CEO Michael Liebowitz acknowledging the initiative will result in a significant amount of headcount reduction once the technology is implemented. The launch places Elliman directly in competition with Compass, which last week rolled out its own AI-powered Home Platform across the brands it absorbed through its merger with Anywhere Real Estate, as the residential brokerage industry accelerates its race to turn proprietary data into a defensible competitive advantage rather than ceding that value to third-party aggregators.

Propmodo Technology is edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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