What Do Real Estate Students Learn About IT Infrastructure?

Anyone reading through the study guides of Dutch real estate programs sees a broad and solid picture. Real Estate Studies, Real Estate, Built Environment, Facility Management, Real Estate Management & Development and related courses offer subjects on valuation, financing, development, construction, tenancy law, asset management, area development and investments. Sustainability and ESG have firmly settled in over recent years, with attention to energy labels, CO2, BREEAM and stranded assets. That is justified and well substantiated.

And yet, when reading course descriptions and final qualifications, a pattern stands out. Where is it described that future brokers, asset managers, property managers, developers and investors learn what a building can digitally handle? Not how to work with real estate data, but how the digital infrastructure of an office actually functions. And one step further: where do they learn to translate that technical information for a tenant or user?

This article is an exploration, not an accusation. It highlights a question that returns remarkably rarely, explicitly, in the curricula of universities of applied sciences and research universities, while the market around it is changing rapidly.

Two things that easily get mixed up

There is an important distinction that often remains implicit in education. On one side is the digitalization of real estate processes: working with BIM, PropTech, digital twins, dashboards and AI to develop, manage and analyze. On the other side is the digital infrastructure of the real estate itself: the fiber optics, the cabling, the patch rooms, the WiFi coverage, the redundancy and the building systems that physically connect the property.

Those are two different matters. A student who learns to work with a digital twin or with AI-driven real estate data does not automatically learn how the digital chain runs through a building. You can explain excellently what a smart building is conceptually, without understanding how that building is connected, where the data flows, or what happens when the internet goes down.

So the question is not whether education pays attention to technology. It increasingly does. The question is whether students learn to understand which physical digital infrastructure is needed to actually make that technology work in the building.

The questions underneath

Behind that distinction lies a series of concrete questions. How is a building connected to the outside world? What does redundancy mean and why is one connection sometimes not enough? Where does the demarcation lie between building and tenant? Who owns the infrastructure and what does the user still need to install themselves? These are not exotic issues. They are the questions that determine the usability of a property.

The real estate professional does not need to become an IT expert

Let one thing be clear. IT-Label does not advocate training network engineers within a real estate program. A broker does not need to know how to splice fiber optic cable. An asset manager does not need to configure a switch. A valuer does not need to design a WiFi network, and a developer does not need to become a cybersecurity specialist.

But they do need to be able to ask the right questions. And they need to be able to translate the answers. A future real estate professional should at minimum understand what fiber optics is, what redundancy means, and what the difference is between internet reaching the building and good connectivity at the actual workplace. Also what data cabling means for a tenant, what a server or patch room is, and why it needs to be secured.

In addition: what a smart building means in digital terms, who is responsible (tenant or landlord), what digital continuity means, and when digital obsolescence looms. And above all, what all of this means for the user. That is not a technical education. That is functional understanding.

We teach students excellently how technology changes the real estate process, but hardly at all how the building must support that technology.

Today's student will advise the AI economy tomorrow

There is a time dimension here that is easily overlooked. A student starting a real estate program today may work in the sector well into the second half of this century. The buildings they develop, buy or advise on may stand for decades. But the digital usage of organizations does not change over decades, it changes in months and years.

AI is accelerating this. The cloud is growing, IoT is growing, smart buildings are growing, and cybersecurity is becoming more important. Buildings are becoming increasingly dependent on digital systems. The question that follows is sharp: are we training students for the real estate they see today, or for the real estate they will have to manage tomorrow?

The translation from technology to the building is more concrete than it sounds. AI runs somewhere. Ultimately, an employee uses that application on a laptop, via WiFi, via the company network, via fiber optics, via cloud infrastructure, from within a building. The chain runs from AI to cloud, to connectivity, to the building, to the internal infrastructure, and only then to the workplace. If real estate professionals must soon facilitate buildings for an AI-driven economy, should they not at minimum understand how that chain runs through their real estate? The question of whether buildings are AI-proof plays a prominent role here.

A broker will soon face different questions

Consider a recognizable scene. A recently graduated broker gives an entrepreneur a tour of an office. How many parking spaces? The broker knows. What is the energy label? Known. What are the service charges? No problem. Which climate installation is in place? Probably in the brochure.

Then comes the question the brochure does not cover: what can this office handle digitally? Which fiber providers are present? Is there redundancy? What cabling is in place and how is WiFi arranged? What does the landlord provide and what must the tenant install themselves? Can an organization with two hundred employees and growing AI use continue to grow here? It is no coincidence that the question about the internet connection increasingly comes up first.

Can the real estate professional answer those questions? And if not, why do we teach them almost everything about the physical delivery of a building, but hardly anything about the digital delivery?

The same applies to asset management and valuation

An asset manager learns to create a long-term maintenance plan for roof, facade, elevators, HVAC, sustainability improvements and fire safety. But what about fiber optic infrastructure, cabling, WiFi, server rooms, digital security, connectivity and digital scalability? If digital quality becomes increasingly relevant to users, should a future asset manager not learn how digital investments become part of a real estate strategy? Call it digital capex if you like.

A cautious, forward-looking question also applies to valuation programs. We are explicitly not claiming that a better IT-Label automatically leads to a higher property value. But as tenants increasingly select buildings partly based on digital quality, this could over time affect lettability, vacancy risk, tenant retention and functional obsolescence. And so the question follows: if users start to value digital quality, should a valuer not at minimum understand what that quality entails?

From Technical to Digital Due Diligence

Students learn about due diligence in transactions. Legal DD, financial DD, technical DD and increasingly ESG DD. But what about digital due diligence? Who investigates, prior to purchase or lease, what the building can handle digitally, which infrastructure is present, which investments are needed, where dependencies lie and who is responsible for what?

Perhaps it is not only practice that is missing a D in due diligence. Perhaps that D is also still missing in real estate education. Investigating digital quality before a deal is no longer a luxury, it has become part of careful and diligent conduct.

The biggest blind spot may be communication

Even where technical knowledge is available, a problem remains: the translation. An IT specialist speaks IT. An installer speaks installation technology. A property owner speaks real estate, a broker speaks commerce and an entrepreneur speaks business operations. Who makes sure all these parties understand each other?

That is why real estate education should focus not only on IT knowledge, but especially on IT communication. The core skill is the translation from technical specification to digital delivery level to user functionality. That is probably more valuable than teaching students to build a network themselves. It is exactly the gap that a shared language in real estate aims to close.

Real estate education has faced this before

The pattern is not new. Twenty years ago, sustainability was a peripheral topic within real estate programs. Today, a real estate professional can hardly be trained without knowledge of energy labels, ESG, BREEAM, CO2, Paris Proof and stranded assets. The market changed and education changed along with it. That makes sense.

Is IT infrastructure the next piece of missing basic knowledge? We may be roughly where we stood with sustainability fifteen years ago in terms of digital building quality. Everyone sees that it is becoming more important. But the translation into daily real estate practice, and thereby into the curriculum, still needs to take place. The parallel between the energy label and the IT-Label is illuminating here.

IT-Label as a possible educational language

IT-Label does not want to tell universities and colleges how to organize their education. That is not up to us. What we do offer is a simple framework that helps students learn to look at digital real estate, without needing to become IT professionals.

• Connectivity: how is the building connected to the outside world?
• Infrastructure: what internal cabling and provisions are in place?
• Smart: which digital building systems are present?
• Security: how is the building-related infrastructure secured?
• Continuity: what happens in case of an outage?
• Scalability: can it grow along with usage?
• Demarcation: who is responsible for what?
• User: what does this ultimately mean for the tenant?

With this framework, a student does not learn to build networks. They learn to look at real estate through a digital lens. The classification from PREMIUM to SHELL then makes it concrete that a building with extensive infrastructure (for example IT1 HIGH PERFORMANCE) and a building deliberately delivered as shell (IT5 SHELL) can both have their place, as long as this is made transparent.

Let students audit a building

A more concrete proposal. Let students, during their studies, not only produce a valuation, analyze an area, or write an ESG strategy. Let them also walk through an office with a single assignment: investigate what this building can digitally handle.

1. Where does internet enter the building and which connections are available?
2. Where is the patch panel located and who has access to it?
3. What cabling is in place and which smart systems are present?
4. What does the landlord provide and what must the tenant arrange themselves?
5. What happens in case of an outage?

And then the most important exercise of all: explain it in one minute to a tenant. That is the translation. Not technical depth, but the ability to make that depth understandable to someone looking for real estate to work in.

Real estate is ultimately about use

Bring it back to the core. A real estate professional does not need to understand everything technically, but must understand what makes a building functional. And that functionality is becoming increasingly digital. Without internet, without cloud, without data, without cybersecurity and without digital continuity, more and more organizations can barely function.

That is why IT infrastructure is no longer solely the domain of the IT department. It is becoming part of real estate knowledge. And therefore, sooner or later, part of real estate education.

An invitation to education, and a concrete next step

This exploration is an invitation, not a reproach. To universities of applied sciences, research universities, trade associations, lecturers and guest lecturers, and to real estate companies and IT specialists. The question we would like to answer together: what should a real estate professional in 2030 minimally know about IT, and who is going to teach them?

We are happy to think along about a compact module, not a semester of network management, but a practical introduction: how the digital infrastructure of real estate works, which questions to ask, how to read an IT audit, how to communicate digital quality, how the tenant-landlord demarcation works, and what AI means for the future workplace. Educational institutions, lecturers and professionals who want to discuss this further can get in touch or explore the methodology behind the IT-Label.

Because perhaps the first question during a viewing will soon not be how many square meters a property has, but whether a company can grow digitally there over the next ten years. The answer should then not be that the client should just call our IT supplier, but that we can make it transparent. A real estate student does not need to build the technology themselves. But they do need to understand the translation.