At Provada this year, Rhino's Xander van Baarsen sat down on the De Steen podcast with Erwin Bukkers of Chainels and Filip Schmidt of Contrast Living. The topic: the new generation of property management, and how modern building operations lift the value of real estate. The recording was made at the Chainels stand on day one of the fair.
You can listen to the full episode on Spotify (in Dutch). Here are the threads that matter most for anyone running buildings.
More service, fewer people
The demand for quality service in residential and commercial buildings keeps rising, while margins for property managers stay thin. Something has to give. Xander put the tension plainly:
You want to get more work done with fewer people, and for that you simply need a lot of data.
That is the whole shift in one sentence. The operational basics still have to run efficiently. Data is what lets a smaller team carry a larger, higher-quality workload without breaking.
From reactive to proactive operations
Traditional building operations start at the complaint. A resident notices a leaking tap, calls a service desk, and gets passed around with little visibility into what happens next. Chainels shared a telling number from their own data: 61% of the reports residents make fall outside the property manager's office hours. The nine-to-five model simply does not match when people are home and notice problems.
With the right systems connected, operations stop waiting for the complaint. Xander:
You can stay much closer to the action and clear a lot of tickets before residents even report them.
That only works when the data underneath is complete and trustworthy. Utility data is a good example: if you can see what every meter is doing, you spot the anomaly before it becomes a call.
Good data is the foundation for AI
AI is the obvious topic in real estate right now, but it is only as good as the data feeding it. Xander was direct about the order of operations:
If you want good output from AI, the foundation is good data.
Get the data layer right first. The clever applications come after, not before.
Building value is increasingly about data
A building's worth is no longer set by square meters and location alone. Xander argued the underlying data is becoming part of the asset itself, and that regulation is accelerating the shift:
The value of a building is no longer driven only by its square meters and location. It is increasingly shaped by the underlying data. It is becoming harder to get a decent loan if your sustainability data is not in order. And that is the first data set AI can actually work with.
For owners, that reframes data collection from a compliance chore into something that protects financing and asset value.
The real challenge is the existing stock
The flashiest technology shows up in new builds and retrofits. But most of the buildings that will still be standing in fifty years already exist today, and there is not enough capital in the world to bring them all up to new-development standard. Xander sees that as the biggest job ahead: getting operations and data right in existing buildings, without ripping everything out.
Trust specialists, not a one-size-fits-all box
Asked how an owner gets the data foundation right, Xander pushed back on the idea of a single tool that does everything:
There are too many building owners who think a one-size-fits-all solution will win the day. That is not how the world works. You need specialists. If you open a wine bottle with the corkscrew on a Swiss Army knife, the cork usually breaks. Collecting, processing and acting on data works the same way. Believe in the combination of specialists and the ecosystem, and it comes together.
Each building is unique, and so is each piece of technology. The work is connecting the right systems, not forcing one platform to do it all.
Where to start
The closing question to the panel: what should a developer starting a new residential building do first? Xander's answer was to work backwards from the outcome:
Start with the foundation, fast. Decide what you want to be able to deliver later, then reverse engineer how the building has to look to make that possible.
Operations and data are not an afterthought you bolt on at handover. They are a design input from day one.
Where Rhino fits
Rhino sits at the data layer of this stack. We collect and automate utility data, electricity, gas, water and heat, including submeters, across real estate portfolios. Software via smartmeter connections, or our own hardware on existing infrastructure, so the data foundation that operations and AI depend on is accurate and complete from the start.
See how this works for building operations on our Portfolio Operations page, or talk to the team about getting your utility data in order.
