In an interesting development, IT provider MIS Group has branched out and bought a number of residential properties with a view to using them as a test-bed to trial innovations in housing management technology.
The newly-created Mirca Properties will provide rental accommodation to tenants, managed through MIS’s ActiveH Web housing management system and IT services provisioned by MIS Group subsidiary Incline IT.
In common with most other IT providers to the housing sector, MIS Group has found that most IT transformations require a leap of faith, particularly when it comes to the very newest technologies because they usually lack customer references, proofs of concept, RoI metrics and other evidence-based approaches needed to support housing providers’ underlying business plans.
In order to remove some of these barriers to change, MIS Group will use Mirca Properties to test and refine new technologies and managed IT services in a truly live environment.
Andrew McLaughlin, managing director, MIS Group, said, “Across the entire MIS Group, we love to solve problems and look for better ways to do things. Through our Mirca Properties venture, we hope to empower the sector to extract maximum value from technology innovations. By demonstrating and evidencing these technologies, we are realising the ‘art of the possible’ and creating a blueprint to de-risk similar projects for housing customers.”
While some of the more ambitious projects on the horizon include using autonomous cloud and full housing process automation, the company’s first goal is, “to take the internet of things in housing from theory to reality.”
Trialling IoT devices within its housing assets, Mirca Properties will use the sensor data to fully automate decision-making and trigger activities within ActiveH Web, based around advanced analytics capabilities through Incline IT’s partnership with Amazon Web Services.
