Buildings With Brains

Barbizon/63 is no ordinary condominium complex. It's luxurious, yes, and the design in some ways is extra rich: Several units feature spacious terraces surrounded by brick and sandstone arches. Others showcase 14-foot-high rosette windows. But even those tony decorative touches aren't exactly what sets this complex apart from others of its ilk.

Here's the kicker: Residents of this upscale property on the Upper East Side of Manhattan can use an IP telephone and touch screen to control lighting, play music and raise the temperature in their units. That's because the complex runs a single IP-based network for building-management systems and IT.

This is no sci-fi movie set. It's the future of real estate—and where VARs need to be if they want to avoid extinction and evolve into 21st-century technology providers.

While most "smart construction" hotspots bubble abroad, in such exotic locales as Singapore and Tokyo, the concept is merely simmering here in the United States. But a handful of organizations are trying to bring this domestic pot to a boil.

"Think about an office building. You've got networked computers, servers, printers," says Jim Young, co-founder and producer at Realcomm, a San Diego-based trade group for the commercial real-estate industry. "Now look around. Look at the lights, the doors, the locks, the [emergency] sprinklers. Imagine the opportunity that comes with networking all of that. Where you had 20 or so IP addresses before, you now have thousands of them."

Intelligent Buildings, a 3-year-old company in Charlotte, N.C., has been looking at things in just that way. Co-founder Tom Shircliff hails from the IT world, having spent 14 years as a VAR, but the company he's with now is a hybrid, something between an engineering/design firm and a solution provider.

"The fact I come from IT should send a very strong message to VARs. There's a huge and growing marketplace in multitenant, commercial real estate," Shircliff says. "There's 8 billion square feet of undeveloped space [in that market] and 300 million more square feet being developed every year. Nobody needs to panic about the door of opportunity being closed and bolted."

NEXT: What VARs do need to concern themselves with.

ALSO: Download our blueprint of a smart building (PDF).