The Branch – For an integrated real estate world

Digitization enables new processes in the real estate world. At the same time, there are pressing social and environmental issues. With The Branch, Halter AG has created a platform to address this. At the future new headquarters of Halter AG in Schlieren, The Branch Collab also offers space for innovative and effective work.

The digitization of the construction and real estate industry enables integrated value creation processes with new technological tools. These replace the sequential and isolated processing of the sub-phases. In particular, the clear separation between planning and execution will experience a change that is disruptive and perceptible for the participants. In professional circles, one speaks of vertical integration. Digital construction sites are inconceivable without digitally competent executing companies. It is imperative that the planning is done with the execution company in the future and no longer for them.

On the other hand, digitization also enables horizontal integration. Thanks to digitization, challenges from the fields of economy, society and the environment can also be tackled integrally through the real estate industry. Against this background, the supposed conflict of interests between economic and social interests as well as energy and climate policy issues can be seen anew.

New technologies and forms of collaboration
However, new technologies and a new process landscape in the real estate world are not enough for a more needs-based, more sustainable and more productive industry. In addition, a new understanding and a new culture of cooperation are essential. The provision of market services within closed company boundaries and hierarchical organizations no longer do justice to the more complex tasks.

Open ecosystems
These higher demands require doing business in open
Ecosystems that consist of a strategic network of entrepreneurially independent organizations. With regard to their business models, they complement each other, but focus clearly and competitively on the company's own core competencies.

The decisive feature of these ecosystems is the temporary or long-term association for certain tasks and projects. This promotes an open exchange of knowledge and skills in order to continuously increase the individual competitiveness of all companies involved and thus also the joint competitiveness of the entire network in the market. Working together in such ecosystems also requires new forms of work and collaboration – and a corresponding work environment.

The branch
With this in mind, Halter AG has initiated The Branch, a platform for integrating the real estate world. Integration of the real estate world means understanding it as part of social, ecological and economic relationships, finding marketable answers to the respective challenges and creating offers and processes that meet customer needs. In the real estate industry, too, digitalization is the most important driver of increasing productivity and at the same time the key to solving pressing social, climate and energy policy issues. With this mission, The Branch offers a virtual and physical place to address such issues together: on the one hand with a sponsoring association, the Branch Do Tank, and on the other hand with the Branch Collab with rooms for collaboration in new ecosystems.

Branch Do Tank
The Branch Do Tank association sees itself as an initiator for the transformation of the construction and real estate industry initiated in the context of digitization. The core element is the establishment of an integrated value creation process through the use of the new digital possibilities and the associated replacement of the existing waterfall model, in which linear planning in project stages and the solution of isolated individual topics dominate. An integrated real estate world means transparency about the real estate life cycle as well as the effects of spatial and urban development on resource efficiency and social structures. It is a prerequisite for solutions suitable for grandchildren. Implementation is only a question of the industry's willingness to break new ground. This requires a critical mass of innovative companies and cooperation in associations.

Branch Collab
Branch Collab offers space for innovative and effective work and collaboration between all those involved in the construction and real estate industry. An integrated real estate world requires a new understanding and a new culture of cooperation between entrepreneurially independent companies and people with complementary business and service models that work together strategically with regard to integrated value creation processes. The decisive feature of these ecosystems is the mutual open exchange of know-how and information in order to continuously increase the individual competitiveness of all those involved and thus also that of the entire network in the market. The Branch Collab is the home base of Branch Do Tank and at the same time its training place, because it offers an open collaboration environment in which the common vision is worked on every day. ■

Text: Nik Grubenmann / Bilder: Raumgleiter AG