This article is translated automatically.
Recently, MIPIM took place again in Cannes.
That this is the case can also be considered certain for those who were not there themselves. In the past, you actually had to travel to find out how this industry trade fair works. Today, a quick look at LinkedIn is enough. During the four days in Cannes, a digital live ticker of the trade fair and its numerous side events was created again this year.
Once again, photos of meetings, short market analyses, selfies in front of trade fair stands, restaurant visits – and an astonishing number of articles about the weather were on display.
Because especially this year, the weather apparently did not only play a minor role. Especially the first days seemed to have been rather unstable. According to the pictures, however, this did not noticeably detract from the mood. Was it real resilience of the trade fair participants or rather professionally cultivated defiance of the industry as a whole?
This question is not entirely distant from the real estate market at the moment. There, too, the industry is still wrestling with whether sustainable optimism will prevail again or whether the old problems will continue to dominate: refinancing issues, pricing, more cautious capital.
Just like the weather in Cannes, the market has been changeable recently. Sometimes friendlier, sometimes more gloomy – with occasional brightening on the horizon. However, a permanent high-pressure area does not yet seem to be moving through the industry.
So while it rained once, the digital live ticker of MIPIM continued undeterred on LinkedIn. The timeline showed who was meeting, what topics were discussed – and, as I said, what the weather was like at the time.
It fits very well into the zeitgeist that the real estate industry now observes its most important trade fair to a considerable extent via digital platforms. Thousands of posts, photos and comments are published and consumed in real time.
For all this to work, an infrastructure is needed, which was also intensively discussed at MIPIM: Data Center.
A glance at the conference programme of the trade fair was enough to see how present this topic has become. Data centers had their own panels and their own discussion rounds – almost as natural as offices or logistics used to be.
One gets the impression that the real estate industry has discovered a new favourite asset class.
And of course, this is not without reason. Last year alone, around 647 megawatts of new capacity were completed in the most important European data center markets – almost as much as was reabsorbed by the market at the same time (625 megawatts of demand) (CBRE Research).
This development is driven primarily by the large cloud and technology companies. Its own data center projects now reach dimensions of more than four gigawatts of capacity in Europe – an order of magnitude that would have been hardly imaginable just a few years ago (CBRE Research).
The epicentre of this development continues to be in the industry's well-known core markets: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin.
So you could say that while one part of the industry marched through the halls in Cannes and into the adjacent restaurants last week, another part of the industry is making sure that their LinkedIn posts could be stored, distributed and retrieved in the first place.
The real estate world is increasingly building buildings in which no people work or shop, but servers process data.
While the industry comments extensively on its most important trade fair – and the weather – via social networks, a real asset class is emerging in the background whose sole task is to keep these networks running.
