As The Construction Sector Faces Hard Times, Widespread Adoption Of Technology Could Be Making It Easier

On some major construction projects in New York City, robot dogs are mapping out sites, contractors are preventing the next construction injury by using years of data from site safety platforms, and developers are using Facebook clicks to figure out which kinds of office design styles are the most attractive to those that may use them.

Amid a time of turmoil for the construction industry as supply costs rise and labor shortages run rampant, this technology is being quickly adopted by the sector to get the job done more efficiently and effectively, experts say. 

“We’re taking a step back and going, listen, the world is very different to the way that it was 50 years ago, what tools are at our disposal to be more effective at doing our jobs?” Real Estate of The Future founder Nikki Greenberg said on a Bisnow webinar Tuesday. 

Last year, the construction and development industry — a sector that has been historically reluctant to adopt technology — invested more in technology than ever before as the pandemic shutdowns and restrictions across the country forced the industry to make the change. With productivity down, 92% of construction company owners across the country added technology in 2020, according to a survey by insurance company Nationwide. 

The survey also showed that 43% of the construction owners surveyed spent money on cloud computing, a technology that has data and computational components to it. Turner Construction has used this specific kind of technology to make its workplaces significantly safer, Charlie Whitney, the company’s vice president and general manager for New York, said on the webinar. 

“It’s interesting being a construction firm, you would think that the first application that would come to mind would be something very technical,” he said. “But really where we're seeing the biggest application for the implementation of big data is safety.”

Using software created by companies like Predictive Solutions, which tracks safety risks and injuries on each construction site, Turner has grown its database to better understand when and how people are getting hurt on the job and to mitigate those injuries, Whitney said. 

“What we found is, for every recordable incident, for every time somebody gets seriously hurt, there's 10 minor incidents [and] 100 near misses,” he said. “We found that we were able to start focusing our safety efforts on where we think the next problem is going to come. If you start looking at where people stub their toe, then maybe you can avoid a broken leg.” 

The data has shown that by doing this, Turner has brought down its incident rate by 50% over the past 16 months, Whitney said.

Turner even has an AI-powered pet, a robotic dog named Spot, in the experimentation phase as a way to map out a construction site virtually, he said. 

“Spot will walk through a construction site and it will scan and develop a point cloud of all the installed works,” Whitney said.

During a recent project at The Rockefeller Group’s office building at 1221 Sixth Ave., Turner sent its client a 3D video of the site, which the client could look through at its own pace, created by a video shot with a Google camera on a hard hat, he said. 

On the design side, developers are using social media to crowdsource how to set up their new offices, panelist Silverstein Properties Executive Vice President and Director of Development Brian Collins said. 

“We’ve been on Facebook, for instance; we’ve put designs on there around ads, and see which one gets more clicks,” he said. “Presumably, the one that gets the most clicks is the most attractive of the buildings.”

But existing technology has its limits and many of those limits have to do with how isolated much of the individual pieces of technology are from other parts of the project, Collins said. 

“We all see a bunch of various proptech-type programs out there. A lot of them are extremely useful and most of them don't seem to talk to each other,” he said. “That is a huge frustration because as a developer, I want solutions from the beginning.” 

One way of improving existing technology is the implementation of case studies after each project to learn lessons and improve the products in the future, MACRO Director DeVon Prioleau said. 

“I find that owners and contractors can have a lack of consolidated information and centralized data points and the ability to effectively assemble data and readily usable format is a huge obstacle for many companies,” he said. 

Real Estate of The Future’s Greenberg said construction should look to other industries, such as mining, to further effectively adopt technology. 

“Mining is not too dissimilar to excavation,” she said. “They’ve been testing out autonomous trucks, drones for site surveys, also robots to assist humans with heavy work so … rather than have a human on a jackhammer, you’d have a machine on a jackhammer and be able to assist with that.”