Good morning, despite the hammering received from the second COVID wave, job demand recorded a sequential growth of 5% in the last six months.
As of August, online hiring demand witnessed a positive month-on-month growth in the garments, leather, gems and jewellery (24%), followed by production and manufacturing (8%), oil/gas/petroleum/power (6%), shipping/marine (4%), and BPO/ITES (3%) industries.
Today's Chai is fortified with tales of - the mysterious concrete, the white that can turn you blue and, proptech's quest to equally serve one and all.
Sounds interesting? Time to scroll and enjoy the brew then.
White Is The New Blue
Remember your mother's white-kurta-in-summers-only advice? Ditto.
Yes But How Does That Relate?
The whitest paint in the known universe has been created by researchers at the Purdue University and it has secured its rightful page in the Guinness Book of World Records recently.
This new blinding white paint reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight, which is a significant improvement over the 95.5% reflected by the paint the same team created last year. FYI, on an average, the mirrors we use everyday reflect about 92% of light.
While the previous paint was a formulation based on calcium carbonate, the new one employs very high levels of barium sulfate, which is also a key ingredient in photographic paper and cosmetics.
Does It Cool For Real?
Xiulin Ruan, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue, says this new paint might be most attractive for hot, poorer geographies where air conditioning isn’t widely available, for example, many regions of India and Africa.
He estimates that if a roof of about 90 square metres was coated with the new paint formulation, it would result in a cooling of 10kW. That is more powerful than typical home central air conditioners.
Yin and Yang
Smirking from the other end of the visual spectrum is Vantablack - the blackest surface coating in the world that absorbs 99.9% of visible light.
Bruce Wayne must be thrilled.
A Brief History Of Concrete
Often dismissed as boring, ugly and inert, the grey sludge oozing out of mixers is actually a surprising, dynamic and incredibly complex mixture, and we need to talk about it more often, feels Ed Conway.
What Is Concrete?
A building material made from a mixture of cement, broken stone or gravel, sand, and water, which can be spread or poured into moulds where it transforms into a mass resembling stone on hardening.
Even now, scientists don't fully understand what's going on inside concrete when it's setting. In chemistry labs this remains hotly-debated territory. Also surprisingly, it keeps on curing (concrete takes 28 days of curing to reach full strength) long after it's apparently set.
Many great dams around the world are still curing nearly a century after being built.
Since When Is Concrete In Use?
We are not the first folks to be building mega structures with concrete. The Romans had their own form of concrete and there's enough evidence to suggest that our ancestors used a form of cement 10,000 yrs ago.
After the Roman Empire bit the dust, the recipe for concrete was forgotten. Come 15th century, an old manuscript by Vitruvius reappeared with hints of this building recipe, fuelling a race to re-invent concrete anew.
How Much Do We Use Today?
A hell of a lot of it. Each minute, construction blokes around the world pour out the equivalent of more than 200,000 bathtubs of concrete and thus, every year we use enough concrete to cover the entire landmass of England.
Darn! What Lies Ahead?
Alarmingly, cement, the soul of concrete is responsible for roughly 7% of all global emissions, which is more than aviation and deforestation combined.
To reduce carbon footprint, there's a growing focus on cement tech these days, as it happens to be one of the trickiest obstacles on the path to getting carbon emissions down to net zero by the year 2050.
Tech Away Service
However, real estate is larger than all of those categories combined, meaning the revolution that real estate tech could bring to our lives is larger and more profound than our minds can currently gauge.
Tech To The Rescue
Today, nearly 8,000 proptech firms around the world are facilitating everything - from how people buy, sell and market properties to innovations in building materials and methods.
But proptech's most significant impact today is in the way it has created new streams for revenue, resulting in a ‘secular expansion’ of liquidity as this JLL and MIT report describes it.
Online transaction platforms have eased the fractional investment models with much lower thresholds for entry, resulting in an entire new population of individuals actively looking for ways to invest outside of the stock market. (Wait up, REITs are gaining ground in India.)
This inflow of cash is what saved the industry during the downturn, since it opened up a steady source of money that was too complicated to access earlier. Industry watchers feel that it is these millions aggregated from small amounts of money that brought proptech to centre stage.
Is It An Easy Run Now?
Not really. Right now, proptech’s biggest hurdle to profitability is figuring out a path to scale their products and services to serve a large enough audience, without having to divert precious resources to constantly customise products for various local markets.
The fact that there are 8000+ proptech startups only shows the endemic challenge of a diverse set of needs across the entire industry.
The second big challenge is developing a common set of industry standards—a problem that shows up in every aspect of real estate. With the variety of unique products and offerings within the real estate sector, standardising processes is a constant headache for proptech companies.
How Does The Future Look?
Here's a solid indicator. Mergers and acquisitions in the proptech space already scored a record high in 2020 with $21 billion in activity, and 2021 promises to top that with $18 billion of activity already recorded in the first half of the year.
This means that perhaps, merging multiple proptech startups of reasonable sizes under one roof is a way to address the challenges that come with real estate's broad array of needs.
Either way, proptech is having its day and we have our eyes peeled on this space.
- Evergrande, the Chinese real estate giant that is on the brink of collapse, has fuelled economy fears in the country as well as around the world, as large investors and thousands of common Chinese citizens are losing faith in the company alike.
- Reader's Digest recently concluded its ‘Most Honest Cities in the World’ research by purposely losing 12 wallets in public places across the world's top cities. With 9 out of 12 wallets returned safely, Mumbai is the world's second most honest metropolis.
- Government-owned Dubai Holding Real Estate plans to sell about 6,000 units this year and the next as the developer aims to capitalise on the continued recovery of the UAE property market.
- At least 86 government institutions have illegally made their way into the highly sensitive GO 111 zone, protected by law to preserve Hyderabad’s drinking water reservoirs – Osmansagar and Himayatsagar.
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We will emerge from the Vantablack again with a new edition tomorrow.
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai