Smart Building Integration into a Smart City: Comparative Study of Real Estate Development

Abstract

Smart buildings and smart cities are not the future perspectives anymore—the smart building integration into a smart city is an actual question for today and tomorrow. Development of smart buildings not only enhances the smart city concept but also promotes positivity to the urban development and national economy, and increases the quality of life of the whole population reacting to global challenges of sustainability. The innovative smart building and smart city technologies enable us to overcome these challenges by being employed through all real estate (RE) project development stages. The Evaluation Framework for Real Estate Development in Smart Cities created by the authors provides the possibility to assess the existing as well as to forecast future RE projects integration into a smart city during the whole life-cycle stage. The practical application of the presented evaluation framework was illustrated by the comparative case study. Based on the created smart building integration into a smart city evaluation framework for real estate development, 10 RE projects in Lithuania and over the world were assessed and rated by selected criteria relevant to different RE development stages. The evaluation results revealed that, especially at the design and construction stages, the existing intelligence of RE projects and/or cities is insufficient. Although real estate projects are technologically advanced as single entities, the integration into smart city networks is limited by interoperability capabilities of the cities or by different strategic goals settled by real estate developers.