FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Building for a RAPIDLY CHANGING SOCIETY

Building for a RAPIDLY CHANGING SOCIETY

HOMEBUYERS are changing their purchase behaviour, demanding that residential buildings be designed with the facilities to serve people of multiple generations, especially innovations that meet the needs of younger people, workers and ageing people, property experts say.


 
“With my experience of over 20 years in the property sector, we are seeing more change in customers’ demands and that is the main reason that property firms have to change their business model and products to cater to all the different demands,” chief executive officer and managing director of LPN Development Plc, Opas Sripayak, said in a recent interview with The Nation.
Much has changed since 1997, with homebuyers today focusing on location and facilities that meet their demands. Today, the country has developed a mass-transit system, a major road network and a rail system nationwide. In Bangkok, the rail system allows people to quickly and easily move across large distances through the city, and has shifted many people’s choice of residence from low-rise, including detached homes and townhouses, to |condominiums.
With the country now moving to a digital economy, along with a sharing economy, and with the population rapidly becoming an ageing society, the large societal shifts also mean big changes are coming for developers of both residential and commercial |buildings.
“The young generation, who will be our customers in the next five to 10 years from now, are [likely to] change their lifestyle from owning residential or other assets by themselves to moving their residences [to live] nationwide or overseas. This means they do not need to buy to own a residence, but they will need a residence to rent rather than to buy their own residence,” he said.
Residences in the future will be developed to serve both investors who buy to rent out, and also for developers to directly rent to tenants, Opas said.
Meanwhile, office buildings and |hospitality buildings must also change to serve the changes in customers’ behaviour.
Currently, the younger generation and some other workers are changing their lifestyle to work from home or at co-working spaces rather than at an employer’s offices. 
The shift is strongest for those working in small and medium-sized enterprises and startup businesses, but multinational firms are also changing their business culture to open up the choice for their staff to work from outside the office. Most staff today can be in direct contact anytime and anywhere due to the digital shift in the country’s communication and markets and the way that business is done.
“Currently, the country is moving to a sharing economy where digital will disrupt everything in our previous way of life. This is also disruptive for property developers as they move from constructors of buildings to transforming into providers of living solutions through residential services to serve [the totality of] customer demand,” Sansiri Plc president Srettha Thavisin said in a recent interview with The Nation.
He added that the residential design for all new projects now and in the future must include more shared space for the customers along with more service solutions to meet customers’ demands.
“In my view, the future will not remain similar to today, but the current 
 trend shows us that it will move to offering more services to customers who buying residences. They will need not only the residence and its facilities, but also more services from developers such as services that match their lifestyle including information technology, security systems, logistics systems, etc,” said Srettha.
Today’s property developers and those in the near future must change their business model to develop residences and facilities to serve all people’s changing lifestyles, by using digital technology to satisfy everyone’s demands, he said.
Catering to ageing population

Meanwhile, the country is undergoing another major shift, to an ageing society, according to the latest research by the National Economic and Social Development Council. Thailand will become a full-fledged ageing society in 2021 when the number of its senior citizens is expected to reach 13.1 million or 20 per cent of the total population.
With the number of elderly people rapidly rising in the country, residential and other buildings must be developed to serve their needs.
“Our residential design is concerned with meeting the needs of all generations of the family – kids, teenagers, working members and senior members,” said Grand Bangkok Boulevard chief executive officer Nuttaphong Kunakornwong.
“Our residential property uses raw construction materials that can be used by senior members. For example, we built a ramp for moving a wheelchair between a parked car and the 90-centimetre-wide entrance to the bedroom on the ground floor of our residential project.” 
Nuttaphong said that this was the best approach to developing residential buildings, and other construction, nationwide at this time, and in the near future, in order to improve people’s quality of life.
Meanwhile, concern about the environment must be incorporated in the design concept of all existing buildings and for the construction of new buildings today and tomorrow, in order to ensure the well-being of people in society, Assoc Professor Dr Singh Intrachooto, head of Kasetsart University’s Creative Centre for Ecodesign and Scrap Lab, said.
Singh said the country has seeing an increase in raw construction designed under the “green” concept. This will support property firms choosing to develop buildings that are less harmful to the environment, and improve the well-being of people who live, work or use them.
Equally important is to create “green” and “healthy” designs in the project development to ensure a better quality of life for residents. 
To achieve a healthier living environment, an interior designer should observe people’s behaviours, then research and develop green and non-toxic construction materials for the safety of all residents in a building, regardless of their ages.
 “Wellness is not easy to achieve, but it is the way to improve the quality of life in this time and the near future,” Singh said. 
Developers of residential and commercial buildings need to increasingly be concerned about people’s quality of life, and also match the changes underway in people’s behaviour, by incorporating digital technology to serve customer demand, agreed all of the property gurus.
 

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