How driverless cars will impact real estate

dubai - They will enable people to stay connected during a commute, upping their willingness to live away from workplace

There is a strong buzz about driverless cars and how they're going to affect our transportation. The question being asked is - when will the fully autonomous cars become a reality? The fact is that driverless cars are not a futuristic thought and the race to build perfect driverless cars has already started.

Technology companies are pouring large investments and deploying huge resources into research to shape the car of the future, that will be driverless, energy-efficient, understand traffic patterns and situations and most importantly keep the passengers safe in case of a machine failure or during bad weather. While some prototypes have already been tested, there is a long way to go before they become ready for serious production.

With all the focus of large companies in honing the technology, experts believe that complete adoption of driverless vehicles won't happen before 2030, but some vehicles with self-driving capabilities are expected to hit the market by 2020. The technology needs to be perfected before it's adopted by the masses because its influence is not only limited to transportation, but also real estate developments, infrastructure and the global economy.

Historically, as modes of transportation evolved, it changed real estate developments. Before the invention of the automobile, cities clustered around ports as ships were the only available mode to transport people and goods. The introduction of the automobile liberated people to live and work at major distances and the distance kept growing ever since as demand for residential property increased, with an increase in population.

The advent of the driverless car will enable people to travel and commute while being connected and engaging in productive work, thus increasing the willingness to live farther away from the workplace.

Location, location, location
As we know, the most important factor of determining real estate price is the location and this importance will blur and will be taken over by other factors such as size of the property and other facilities. Real estate developers can plan communities away from the city centre and focus on amenities and quality of life of the inhabitants.

Driverless cars will also have a significant effect on the usage and demand of parking spaces. Imagine being dropped at work and the car parks itself on a multilevel parking far away from your workplace and comes to pick up when needed. These multi-level parking can have refuelling, charging and maintenance facilities, freeing up space occupied by stations at prime locations. This will eliminate, or at least diminish, the need for parking spaces within commercial and residential buildings and the space can be utilised for more productive and efficient use of real estate.

Predictions are that autonomous vehicles will eradicate the need for up to 90 per cent of parking spaces in the span of the next 15 years. For new construction, developers can save on building parking spaces and pass the economic benefit onto the buyer or the tenant.

Street parking in commercial and residential areas can be utilised to build more lanes and ease the flow of traffic. Searching for a parking in major cities is in itself a challenge and a stressful exercise. According to a recent survey, an average UK motorist spends 106 days of his/her life looking for a parking slot. Saving this stress will come as a bonus apart from the economic benefits of using an autonomous car.

Autonomous cars are likely to bring a number of economic and cultural changes and have a significant effect on real estate developments. This is going to happen a few years from now. While it's difficult to predict all the transformation it'll bring into our daily lives, and how quickly we would be able to adopt the changes, it's easy to say that the change is going to be dramatic and we need to start preparing for it.

As the impact is going to be well beyond our imagination, we need to make our cities ready to accept this technical marvel. The convenience, cost benefits and safety are enough reasons for adoption of this new technology, and with the right planning, we can enlarge these advantages to create better real estate developments, cities and a more sustained future.

The writer is online marketing manager at Aston Pearl Real Estate. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policies.