Tag Archives: real estate

Window allocation to the rooms benefiting the most

People seem to value having a window in their office or living room, more so than in a stairwell, closet or storage. It would be efficient and simple to design the floorplans to maximise the total benefit derived from windows. However, in both commercial and residential buildings, the corners (with the best window access) sometimes have stairwells or elevators instead of offices or living rooms. For example, in the MIT economics department (building E52), the seminar rooms have the biggest windows with the best view, and one corner of the building is a stairwell. In seminar and teaching rooms, people are supposed to look at the slidescreen or speaker, not out of the window, so the benefit of windows is little. Sometimes a window even adds negative value if the sun shines in people’s eyes and they have to spend a small amount of time closing the blinds.

If building regulations require a stairwell to have windows, thus be adjacent to an outside wall, then it would still be welfare-improving to locate offices at the corners, relegating the stairwell to the middle of a side of the building. Specifically, the side with the worst view or the side most prone to undesirable glare. Another way to comply with window requirements is to construct a shaft in the middle of the building (as in some New York highrises) and put the stairwells next to the shaft.

Dark-coloured buildings and cars are silly

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Many buildings in Australia, especially new developments, are black, dark grey or brown, or at least the roof is. Many cars are black (other dark colours are less prevalent). The dark colouring increases both cooling and heating costs, because it absorbs and emits solar and infrared radiation faster. In addition, the dark buildings are depressing and ugly. Dark-coloured cars are more difficult to notice, especially in low-visibility conditions, thus have more accidents. White or yellow vehicles are the safest (Lardelli-Claret et al. 2002, Solomon and King 1995).

For cars, the choice of black colour is probably caused by the owner’s desire to seem wealthy by making the car look expensive – limousines in films and popular culture are often black. For buildings, the association in people’s minds between colour and price is weak. If anything, light-coloured houses, reminiscent of Mediterranean villas and the White House, may slightly raise the owner’s status. The reason for dark-coloured roofs may be the cost – tar paper is a cheap material, easy to install. Windows may appear dark due to the one-way glass used. However, for walls, the cheapest material is usually bare concrete, as shown by its choice for purely functional structures (warehouses, barriers, piers, military buildings). For private dwellings, wood or brick may be the cheapest. Neither concrete, wood nor brick is particularly dark in colour, so the choice to build black or brown houses is puzzling. Maybe it is an architectural fad – fashions often trump practicality.

Rain-based waterfall in a building

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Many large buildings have a high lobby – some of these reach the roof, which in that case is often transparent. Some edifices also have an indoor water curtain in the lobby, or water running down a decorative wall. A way to save the cost of pumping the water up for such a waterfall is to rely on rain. The roofs of high buildings are flat anyway, in order to direct water into internal drainpipes, as opposed to sending the water over the eaves of a slanting roof. If the pipe from the roof is made wide, transparent and put it in the middle of the lobby, then whenever it rains, a waterfall occurs in the pipe. This works best in rainy climates and will be especially spectacular in intense rain and with a single pipe receiving the water from the whole inward-slanted roof. The lobby may become noisy though with the sound of all that rushing water.

Parking space availability detection from the air

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Much fuel and time is wasted by drivers zigzagging through a parking lot looking for an empty spot. Some parking garages have automated systems for detecting which spaces are empty and directing drivers to these using electronic displays or coloured lights on the ceiling. Drivers of course prefer to spend less time looking for a space and to find places closer to the exit, so providing availability information gives a commercial parking building a competitive advantage and reduces traffic and pollution inside it. The same availability information would be helpful for outdoor parking lots, including the tops of garages that are open to the sky.

A business opportunity is to develop an app that uses either satellite images or cameras on drones or surrounding structures (highrises or streetlights) to detect empty parking spaces and direct the drivers to these. The cheapest black and white security camera is sufficient to distinguish a car from an empty rectangle of asphalt. Even at the busiest times, such as the peak shopping hours on Saturday afternoon, the parking availability info only needs to be updated about once every 30 seconds to be maximally useful. The only hurdle for this system is the placement of the cameras, because buying two satellite photos per minute for every parking lot may be expensive for the app provider. Drones may not be permitted over urban areas. The owners of the structures surrounding the parking lot may ask for payment to allow camera installation on their property. Of course, permissions should not be a problem if the surrounding buildings are retail establishments who profit from more customers parking closer to them, but the upper floors of tall buildings are typically offices or residential spaces.

Real estate website improvements

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Almost all real estate websites I have read are missing the essential information about a lease from their search filters. The core info is whether the property is available from a certain date to a certain date, whether the minimum and maximum lease lengths allow a tenancy for the specified term, what is the monthly rent for that term. Some websites specify that information in the description of the property, but do not allow searches based on it. On some websites, the rent doubles when the term is halved, which would be good to know from the start instead of after clicking on a search result.

If the property is only rented to a specific class people, e.g. requires a number of years of good rental history, a certain income level, etc, then it would be good to know this at the start of the search, instead of during the application process.

Almost useless info like hardwood floors, granite countertops, historic building, etc should be removed or relegated to the bottom of the page.

In general, any search website should allow the user to remove specific results (that the user has deemed irrelevant) from future searches, like Craigslist does. Being able to save the search like in Craigslist is also a useful feature.

Improvements for hotels

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Commonly in hotels the room keycard has to be inserted into a slot for the lights in the room to turn on. An annoyance occurs when the lights are reset each time the card is removed and re-inserted, such as when leaving and re-entering the room (this problem and most of the subsequently mentioned ones are based on Courtyard by Marriott Chennai, but some are based on other hotels). Typically all the lights turn on and the unnecessary ones have to be turned off one by one. A simple and cheap microcomputer could remember the on-off settings of the lights and keep these until reset. Another similar problem is that the temperature of the AC or heating, as well as the fan speed, gets reset when the keycard is removed from the slot. Thus the AC has to be readjusted after each re-entry.

The keycard should work consistently, not require several attempts to operate the lift or open the room door.

It is a nice touch for a hotel to have a steam room, sauna or jacuzzi next to the fitness centre, but it would be even better if these were in working order and clean. Another nice touch is to provide slippers in the room, but if these are child-sized, then they are not very useful for an adult male. If there are two pairs of slippers in a room, then different-sized pairs would be reasonable and almost as cheap to provide as same-sized ones.

If (free) wifi is advertised, then it would be nice if it was working. Wifi problems can be detected automatically (by wifi-enabled devices placed in the corners of the hotel remotest from the routers) without waiting for annoyed guests to contact the front desk.

An electric kettle in the room is good for making tea, but placing glasses next to the kettle invites an absent-minded person to pour hot water into these, which cracks them.

The carpet should not shed hair that sticks to socks and anything else it comes into contact with (by floating in the air for example).

The fitness centres in hotels are typically less than 25 square metres. It is possible to choose machines and weights for a small room in such a way that cardio and all major muscle groups can be trained, but hotels seem to choose the machines randomly, e.g. three ellipticals and a stair stepper, but no rowing machine. Or two quadriceps training machines (leg extension and leg press), but no hamstring training machine (prone leg curl). This is despite the fact that quads are easy to train without a machine (do squats with or without weights), but hamstrings difficult.

A common problem in hotels is street noise in the room, which may be expensive to fix if the hotel construction quality is bad. One hotel in which the room was quiet despite a busy street outside was Sheraton New Delhi. A possible reason for its quietness was that the windows had two layers of packet glass, consisting of two or three layers each.

Hotel breakfasts should have a list of ingredients next to each dish, not just the name of the dish, especially when the name is unfamiliar to most visitors, e.g. the name is in the local language for a traditional ethnic dish. The list of ingredients would be especially helpful to people with food allergies, but the non-allergic would also benefit – it is easier to choose with more info. The ingredients in the list should be ordered, starting with the ones that constitute the largest percentage of the dish.

The arrangement of dishes at buffet meals should make it logistically convenient to get food, i.e. movement to and from the dishes should be unrestricted (no closely placed tables blocking the way) and similar foods should be located together. Sometimes hotels make strange food placement choices, for example I have seen soups and meat dishes alternate. Rydges on Swanston in Melbourne placed all the dishes in a small recess off the dining area, so there was a traffic jam of people trying to get into and out of that nook with their plates.

Made-to-order (live cooking) dishes at buffet meals could be prepared and distributed faster if their order system was computerised and the eaters could order the dishes from their smartphones. Peak demand time can be predicted and the cooking started in advance to speed up the delivery of the dishes. Such just-in-time production has economies of scale, so is especially easy for larger buffets.

The hotel room logistics are often strange, e.g. a narrow corridor leading from the door to the room, with wardrobes built into the side of the corridor. The doors of said wardrobes open outward, blocking the corridor. On the other hand, in the Chennai Marriott bathroom the shower stall and the the toilet were behind the same sliding door. To access the toilet, the door had to slide in front of the shower, and to access the shower, the door closed off the toilet. This would be annoying if two or more people stayed in that suite and tried to use the shower and toilet simultaneously, because both could not be behind a closed door at the same time.

Another logistical problem in both hotels and apartments is a toilet door that opens inward. When the toilet is small, the door almost hits the pot, making it difficult to maneuver around the door for entry and exit. Some toilets are so tiny that when sitting on the pot, the knees touch the opposite wall. In this case, it would be better to place the pot diagonally so the knees fit in a corner.

Two doors at the ends of a short corridor that both open into the corridor are impossible to open at the same time, which lengthens the time of passing through both doors.

Some hotels want to show how modern they are by replacing light switches with small touchscreens with LED backlighting. The little LED lights are numerous enough to somewhat light up the room when the ceiling and other lights are turned off. For sleeping, it would be good to be able to turn off the LED lights of the touchscreens.

If a motion detector turns on the light, then being able to switch off the motion detector and the light would be preferable. Sometimes the light is unnecessary, such as during the day with curtains open. The sudden bright light may also be annoying, for example when visiting the bathroom at night.

Hotel beds are usually short, so people over 180cm have their feet over the edge, unless they lie diagonally. Luckily hotel beds are usually wide, so their diagonal is significantly longer than the long side.

Saving ventilation cost by using the wind

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Most large modern buildings have active ventilation built in, meaning that electric fans drive the air through the building. The airflow direction is usually fixed at construction time. However, if the wind happens to blow from the opposite direction to the ventilation flow, then the fans require extra energy to counter the wind. On the other hand, if the wind agrees with the airflow in the building, then the fans may not need to be run at all. To save electricity, a building could have a wind direction sensor (a weather vane) on the roof connected to a switch that reverses the ventilation fans, so that the fans always pump air in approximately the same direction as the wind. If the wind is strong enough, a wind speed sensor (a small windmill or windsock) on the roof could stop the ventilation fans altogether.
The tradeoff for this adaptive ventilation system is the initial fixed construction cost and the ongoing maintenance of the weather vane, windsock and controller of the fans. All the extra components of the system (relative to the current unidirectional ventilation) are cheap and robust, so the both the fixed cost and the maintenance should be negligible.
Current ventilation systems have differently shaped air inlets and outlets in the rooms, which suggests that the system requires a particular airflow direction. In this case, adaptive ventilation may be much more expensive than the current ones, because the ventilation shafts and air vents need to be doubled. To avoid the need to build twice as many shafts and vents, have just the air inlets and outlets of the whole building switch roles with the wind direction. The rest of the system can remain unidirectional when the valves from the building’s inlet and outlet to the rest of the system switch appropriately. The air inside the building can then move in the opposite direction of the wind some of the time. In this case, the electricity saving is only realised if the building is sufficiently airtight, which is the case for modern highrises that have unopenable windows. If the air is allowed to move through the building independently of the ventilation and the wind is opposite the airflow in the system, then the fans have to overcome the air pressure difference like in the current systems. This wastes electricity.

When to open windows to cool or warm a building

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My uninsulated apartment building went from too cold to too hot in about a week, which is normal in Canberra. People have started to open the windows in the stairwell in addition to their apartment windows. The timing of the opening seems a bit misguided – people open the windows in the morning. During daytime, the air outside is warmer than the air inside the stairwell, but during the night the outside air is colder. To state the obvious: to cool down the building, open the windows for the night and close them for the day. Currently the opposite seems to happen, although I counter this trend by closing the windows in the morning when I notice them open.
In general, if you want the building cooler and the outside air is colder than the inside, then open the windows, but if the outside is warmer, then close them. If you want the building warmer and the outside air is colder than the inside, then close the windows, but if the outside is warmer, then open them. This could easily be automated with temperature sensors outside and inside the building connected to a thermostat and small electric motors opening and closing the windows. Such a system would save some of the heating and cooling costs of the building.
There may be non-temperature reasons to open and close the windows, for example to let smell out of the stairwell or to keep insects from coming in. The second reason is not relevant for my building, because all windows have bugscreens and the exterior doors have a gap an inch wide under them, which the insects can easily use to get in.

Tenancy Ending Checklist

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Before the final inspection:
Give or receive valid notice of ending tenancy in writing, resolve any dispute about this.
Confirm any arrangements for agent/landlord to access property in writing.
Schedule final inspection.
Disconnect all utilities connected in your name.
Calculate rent payable until end of tenancy and pay that amount.
Cancel direct debit if necessary.
Clean property as needed when compared to incoming condition report.
Arrange for carpet cleaning if necessary.
Remove any additions, alterations you have done to property.
Print 1) bond refund form, 2) move-in condition report (keep a copy), 3) filled or blank move-out condition report, 4) key receipt to take to final inspection. 5) Put the move-in photos and video on a laptop/other device or print them to take to final inspection.

On the day of final inspection or move-out day:
Take photos of meters (date stamped).
Take photos/videos of condition of property and do your own condition report.
Bring the required forms, photos and video to the final inspection. Attend final inspection.
Return keys and get a receipt or sign a photocopy.
Resolve any issues with condition of property.
Sign bond refund form and lodge with Office of Rental Bonds (you or the agent can do this).

Neighbourhood coordinating to keep houses small and prices high

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If apartment buildings are built in a neighbourhood of detached houses, then the house prices fall, especially next to the new apartment buildings. There is less privacy in the garden if many windows overlook it, and there is more congestion and crime if more people live nearby. The neighbourhood’s common interest may be to block the development of large buildings in it. However, an individual homeowner finds it profitable to sell to a property developer who will replace the detached house with a large apartment building, because the cost of reduced house prices is borne by the neighbours, not by the seller.
One way that neighbourhoods try to prevent this tragedy of the commons is to require all homeowners to join an association and agree to be bound by the rule that the association can prohibit new buildings or expansions. Such rule-based solutions are usually vulnerable to legal loopholes and changes in government policy that invalidate the restrictions. Game theory offers a solution without requiring any external enforcement: if one homeowner extends her house or replaces it with a bigger building, or sells to someone who will, then the neighbours respond by building apartment buildings around the property of the first breaker of the social norm of non-expansion. Then the view from the first expanded building is only the walls of the others, which makes the expansion unprofitable and deters enlargement in the first place.
The punishment for the first extension has to be certain enough to deter it. In particular, the homeowners next to the violator of the norm must be incentivised to build even at a loss. This incentive can be provided by requiring the neighbours of the homeowners next to the violator to punish those who do not punish the violator. This punishment can again be the development of large buildings next to their property. Those who refuse to punish the non-punishers can be punished the same way, etc, in concentric circles around the original violator.
The incentives provided by dynamic games such as this one may seem strange, but can be easily coordinated by a homeowners’ association without any legal power. The association simply publishes the rule that (a) enlargement of current buildings or the construction of new ones is forbidden and (b) if someone breaks the rule, then any new construction in a specified radius around the first rule-breaker is allowed. If one enlargement or new building is profitable, then typically a few extensions next to it are also profitable. The fewer neighbours of the first rule-breaker that build bigger houses as punishment, the more profitable an extension is for any neighbour. So some neighbours will punish the first violator. This will make the house prices of other neighbours fall, which reduces the cost to them of selling their houses to property developers for apartment building construction, i.e. reduces the cost of punishing the original rule-breaker.