EIKA joins the first PropTech hackathon to be held in Lithuania. Innovatively thinking specialists who have the expertise and ideas to improve the efficiency of real estate development and create more opportunities using technology are invited to participate and form teams. The hackathon will take place on January 26-28 at Vilnius Technology Park..
EIKA, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, has always paid special attention to innovation, and has been the first to offer innovations on the market many times. “We are a strong, experienced real estate developer, able to look ahead, apply innovations and world best practices, and see what can be improved. Therefore, we are one of the initiators and supporters of the PropTech (Property Technologies) gathering in Lithuania, and by joining this hackathon, we are striving for the same breakthrough in PropTech that FinTech (Finance Technologies) is currently reaping,” says EIKA CEO Domas Dargis.
In order to innovate the real estate development sector, EIKA not only joins initiatives in the market, but also promotes innovations within the company – in 2018. the EIKA innovation program was launched. It aims to encourage employees to get involved in the creation and implementation of innovations, starting with innovation development training, idea generation events, team building and idea development, and ending with the selection of the best ideas and their implementation by allocating financing. According to D. Dargys, only ideas born from internal, and not “delivered from above”, initiative and competence have the potential to turn into “bodies” – created new products, technological solutions.
There are many areas in the real estate sector where, by using technology, it is possible to implement new real estate business models, increase construction and design productivity, increase customer value, ensure the quality and speed of information dissemination both in internal construction processes and in sales processes. “At the beginning of 2017, we applied virtual reality technology to the real estate market – we gave our clients the opportunity to choose an apartment while wearing virtual reality glasses, and at the end of 2017, our clients were already choosing apartments with full decoration using virtual reality glasses, i.e. they choose which wall color suits them best, which floor tiles or flooring is more acceptable to them. Over the year, we have expanded VR technology to many functionalities and we notice that clients are increasingly using this technology and making decisions,” – D. Dargis names the possibilities of technological progress in the real estate market.
EIKA virtual reality is one of the latest examples of technological progress in the real estate market in Lithuania. And there are many challenges in the market, such as “technologizing” and connecting design and construction processes, etc. EIKA presented 5 challenges for this hackathon:
- how to ensure the quality of life of people sharing housing (co-living) and effective management of premises, using the latest IT technologies;
- how to help an apartment building community save and produce and share renewable energy with the help of new technologies and digitalization;
- how to use IT technologies to create an interactive tool that would enable the creation and use of housing documents and housing operating instructions;
- how to increase the use of parking spaces in the apartment building garage and fenced-in yard for residents and guests of the house, applying sharing economy, construction technology and IT innovations, and thus solving the shortage of parking spaces in the city;
- Can a robot (AI) create a home interior design with several options and calculate an estimate after providing the measurements of the home’s walls and engineering points (electrical wiring may vary).