First working week of the year and my LinkedIn feed is filled with articles on 2020 trends and resolutions. They all make for a great read – special mention to Nikki Greenberg's, Paul McCorquodale's and Will Darbyshire's ones which gave me the inspiration to write this piece.

While the industry acknowledge the urgency of tackling climate change and the role PropTech has in addressing it, the greatest impact we can collectively have is when mass adoption of sustainability technology happens in the property sector.

The reality is that ‘buildings and construction together account for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energy-related CO2 emissions’. A whooping ‘82% of the final energy consumption in buildings was supplied by fossil fuels in 2015’ (source: UN Environment Global Status Report 2017 ).

And these statistics matter because by 2060, buildings sector floor area will double -this is an equivalent of building the current floor area of Japan every single year for 43 consecutive years-, adding more than 230 bn m2 to the planet in new building construction.

2020 must be the year – well and truly – for all commercial real estate players (owners, operators, occupiers and investors alike) to take up the plethora of IoT solutions and make full use of the variety of data platforms for smart buildings in order to monitor, manage and reduce their environmental impact. It is only through wide sector adoption of smart building technology that we can achieve critical mass and scale, enabling the sector to truly move the needle on the current building stock. While we have 7,000+ buildings on the platform and growing steadily, we still find the greatest barrier to adopting a smart building platform is …. the highly versatile, yet notoriously static, excel form. Which is not the format needed to scale.

My hope is that most of the visionary resolutions happen this decade while the ordinary revolutions happen this year! Our aim is to move the conversation from Why do we need data platforms for buildings to When do we implement one.

Once this shift happens, there is a solid foundation for visionary (re)solutions to emerge, grow and adapt.

Are you in? Let's do this and make 2020 truly count.