COVID-19 and Digitalization: Its Influence in the Dutch Real Estate Market Process

Abstract

COVID-19, disruption in society and real estate - which clearly bear characteristics of this era - and the user will have an impact on real estate. Disruptive real estate organizations clearly respond to the agility and modularity of the built environment and therefore determine the right of existence of real estate organizations. This also influences the current and future financial and functional valuation of real estate. The added value of the possible applications of digitalization of real estate processes is expressed in agility, modularity, more effective and efficient transactions, increasing transparency and a better basis for investments. This will increase confidence in fundamental parts of the real estate economy. In recent months, COVID-19 has held sway over the Netherlands and almost everywhere else in the world. Although COVID-19 began making its way through Asia in January, the Netherlands and Europe were surprised by it. The intelligent lockdown, announced in the third week of 2020 and later lifted, has now become a partial lockdown again in October 2020. This has a major impact on people's daily lives: how people live, how they work, how they shop and get groceries. Things like 'place' and 'connection' suddenly take on a whole new meaning. This has meant quite a lot for real estate. Considering the fact that COVID-19 will be present in many ways as long as no vaccination or effective medicine is available, COVID-19, as well as digitalization, will have considerable consequences for real estate, urban development and building production. The methodology is based on literature review of papers from the recently written collection of essays RICS Research & Innovation (Kok et al., 2020) in which the experts, based on current knowledge, research and insights, present a picture of what COVID-19 means for our real estate and urban development. In the following sections, we present a number of important insights and conclusions as well as a number of current research developments. These insights and conclusions are: (1) the Unique Object Identifier (UOI) respects existing identifiers and connects them, (2) COVID-19 can also stimulate the integration of technology in real estate, and (3) urban strategy foresees a future of networked regions.