Sustainability group head: city’s buildings should digitize to improve efficiency
The cause of Macau’s poor property management services is the lack of room for profit boosting, which could be improved with the introduction of smart city technologies, chairman of the sustaincia.org Terence Lee said.
Speaking as the head of a sustainable development association at a recent event of the British Chamber of Commerce, Lee highlighted during the early phase of his breakfast presentation that, according to data available to him, Macau residents have a lower price ceiling for property management fees, at around MOP1,000 per month.
In neighboring Hong Kong, residents are willing to pay three times as much as Macau residents in order to obtain property management services.
Lee identifies the low-price ceiling as the reason that property management services have not thrived in Macau, and why their quality still has a lot of room for improvement.
To illustrate this, he cited data from the city’s Statistics and Census Service, among other public entities. As of June 2019, there were nearly 5,200 buildings in the city that were at least 30 years old, roughly two-thirds of the total buildings in the city at that time.
However, as of the end-November this year, the city only had 229 licensed property management companies. He found it unbelievable, if not ridiculous, that on average companies in Macau each handled 35 buildings.
Despite these figures, he pointed out that at the end of Q2 this year, the city saw 9.2% vacancy rate in the industry, even with a monthly salary nearing MOP13,000. He found it ridiculous still that each of the city’s trained property management technicians were handling, on average, 13 structures as of October 23, 2020.
His view is that these factors combined have made t unappealing to operate a property management company or be a property manager, more commonly known as security guard or “property caretaker.”
To right this “wrong,” Lee recommends fresh technologies, and to “help those who needed help.”
Internet of Things (IoT), in his opinion, could be one of the solutions to these problems.
He gave the example of air-conditioning units operating in empty rooms, and outlined how sensor systems can be used to solve this problem.
His team has upgraded these sensors in a project co-operated by the Science and Technology Development Fund (FDCT) and the University of Saint Joseph (USJ) to collect daily-life data such as noise, air temperature and lighting levels.
When appropriately tuned, these sensors will help, for example, residents in older buildings spot leakage in their pipes.
Regarding concerns over cybersecurity, Lee has implemented a no-login strategy to ensure that minimum data is collected when the system is operating. As such, users should not be identified by their systems.
Users would still need to provide some information so as to allow property management services to oversee the service. He stressed, however, that the system developer has no way to identify a particular user.
The organization introduces itself on its website as being a “global association.” It “is an unlimited duration non-profit organization whose mission is to use technology and social affairs to encourage sustainability development.” The organization also describes how it provides an online management platform, and creates a community with opportunities for dialogue and the exchange of ideas, among other targets.
