Making decisions in real estate – whether buying a skyscraper, renting out office space or installing solar panels – has in most cases required showing up in person, while gathering all the necessary information was heavily dependent upon antiquated manual processes.

But now details about an entire city’s built landscape are available on a smartphone, allowing users to filter buildings by type, size or fit-out style, or dive in deeper for floorplans, tenant details, lease terms, and even virtual tours. This so-called digital mapping – a catch-all term for the application of one or multiple digital tools to provide a data-driven visualisation of properties in the context of their surroundings – is increasingly being adopted by city authorities and the real estate industry. 

While it hasn’t made visiting buildings unnecessary, it is transforming the way decisions are being made.

Building information modelling (BIM) is one of the key tools used in digital mapping. While for many years it has provided construction professionals a collaborative and interactive way to plan, design and manage projects through a 3D building replica on screen, it is only more recently being adopted by the property industry in the shape of digital twins, which incorporate live building data into a digital replica.

Epic Games, the company behind the video game Fortnite, is providing grants for technology companies to integrate its Unreal Engine’s visualisation technology into their digital twin platforms. The overall aim is to diversify its revenue, while shaking up the construction, real estate and design sectors with its video-game-quality visualisation.

Computer and cloud behemoth IBM teamed with JLL to create the advanced digital twin platform Prism. The product was developed to support one of the largest digitisation projects in the world: capturing the status of a 48-building mixed-use development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and aid the transfer of information into the operations stage.

“When you’re dealing with property sizes of several million square metres, it’s difficult to envision them with any real precision,” explains Ben Jackson, JLL’s head of project and development services at JLL Middle East and North Africa, of the decision to map the precinct digitally.

“Data is at different sites and in different systems and by the time you pull it all together into a single report, it’s already outdated.”