Some 50 teams in London, Sydney, Boston and Toronto spent 48 hours looking at challenges in commercial real estate development, with the top three in each city taking home a share of the $20,000 (approximately £16,000) prize money.

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The winners were:

• Sydney — Team Oxford City: designed a cost management tool that uses AI to crawl design files and building specs, allowing users to compare materials and optimise costs
• Boston — Team Kaven 207: a web-based solution that leverages historical building design data to self-generate and optimise the design of building cores
• Toronto — Team Build Stream: an app to collect real-time data which incorporates the wants and needs of a building’s end user in the design and development process
• London — Team Data Space: a contractor involvement program that allows for increased cost certainty, increased value engineering and earlier access to the supply chain

“The commercial real estate industry is primed for disruption — the process we use to design and construct buildings has not materially changed in almost a century,” said Dean Hopkins, COO at Oxford Properties Group.

“If we can disrupt ourselves first, we can help guide the industry into the future.”