From Meri Braziel, Director of Residential, Glide

The current UK property market would have been unimaginable to our grandparents. With the proportion of the population living in private, rented accommodation in the UK having doubled in the past decade, and with almost two thirds of almost 15 million having no intention of buying a home, ‘Generation Rent’ is here to stay. But despite these demographic changes, the living spaces provided by property developers have failed to change in tandem with the shifting demands of millennial audiences. Developers are providing living spaces specifically tailored to meet the needs of a generation who are looking for a lifestyle rather than just a space to live in; a generation who is displaying a shifting preference towards spending on experiences like travel rather than possessions.

For these digitally native millennial consumers, Wi-Fi is no longer a luxury – it is an indispensable part of their social and professional lives – and they expect it to be available from the moment they move into a new building. In a survey of 500 young professionals, 96 per cent found going without the internet to be the most frustrating part of moving home, far exceeding the second place 84 per cent who said moving their belongings. Therefore, it’s a surprising fact that 83 per cent of millennials had to wait longer than a week to be connected at their current property.

With millennials increasingly working from home and having lifestyles that rely on having superfast connectivity as standard, property developers would be wise to develop and invest in buildings that reflect the reality of today’s need for fast, reliable Wi-Fi. With the newest crop of ‘Build-to-Rent’ properties coming to market, top-tier Wi-Fi needs to come as a standard from day one, reflecting the developers’ awareness of needs of their renters.

Despite the stigma attached to ‘falling off’ the property ladder, the UK’s move towards a more European model of long term renting has a host of great potential benefits. Shrewd developers are now free to provide ‘lifestyle as a service’ to their tenants. This means providing properties with the level of connectivity needed to support the potential of emerging technology. The ‘Internet of Things’ can form an integral part of making the luxury lifestyles, which today’s experience focused millennial audiences crave, a reality. Managers of high-end rental property can make use of custom mobile applications, developed at relatively low cost by third party developers, to enable any number of high value benefits for tenants. From booking sessions with a personal trainer or yoga teacher, arranging for visitors, or interacting with a concierge – connectivity can help developers differentiate themselves from the competition, by providing perks which can facilitate real lifestyle benefits for tenants.

But benefits of connected, IoT enabled residential blocks, or ‘smart-blocks’, go far beyond this. They will allow operators to spot problems as they happen, providing the visibility necessary for landlords to react in real time to the needs of their tenants. It will also provide savings for developers, who will use building management systems (BMS) to prevent overspending on utilities (or providing lifestyle benefits for renters) for whom days of suffering a leaky roof will be over due to automatic alerts being sent to operators.

The full possibilities for what IoT could do in the future are limitless, but real, tangible benefits are already available in the here and now. Developers who are agile enough to react to the UK’s demographic changes, and who begin to utilise the possibilities of what the IoT has to offer, will be able to reap the benefits. Differentiating themselves in the eyes of millennials who value the integrated lifestyle benefits IoT connectivity can provide and building managers who need to slash costs in an increasingly squeezed UK property market, this will ensure they retain a competitive value proposition going into the future.