Autodesk AEC workflow for real estate development

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone,

I'm posting this because of a question regarding workflows in the Autodesk AEC collection.

So let's start with a little bit of context. I don't know how this works in other countries, but in The Netherlands, I work for a company that does both real estate development and the construction of these building projects. My role lies in the real estate development part of this process.

My job: my colleague's (as I am still mostly junior) do the acquisition to gain new opportunities in our working area, which may consist of some land or an existing building. I develop a plan for that location, look for the building types that would fit in the environment and calculate the ROI for that plan.

So as a company, we are interested in implementing BIM in our real estate development. There are two main reasons:

• It takes a lot of time to calculate quantities to base my calculations on, especially if we have to make changes to our plans, which requires me to recalculate everything.

• All of our plans are currently in 2D, which simply isn't as beautiful to present to stakeholders.

So what is my question? Well, I'm currently struggling with implementing BIM in our workflow. Issues I'm facing:

• I've tried some workflows, but I'm not sure which one I should try. I'm mostly using masses to design a project plan, so I'm thinking of a combination of Formit + Infraworks + Revit.

• The problem is that I'm not sure if Infraworks and Formit is the way to go. Infraworks can't do things like creating parking spaces as individual units and when exporting masses from Formit to Revit, a lot of the times, Revit doesn't calculate volume/area, which makes my Formit masses useless and a waste of time.

• I'm not sure if I should use Civil3D for these project plans. I haven't had the chance to try it out, so I would like to hear your opinions.

In general, a lot of the times I can't really get an answer from Google. Architectural design is one of the most uses for AEC, so it has a lot of information and experience online. Whereas it seems that project development in the early stages doesn't have as much information on Google.

So it's kind of a broad question/story. Does anyone here have any experience with using AEC for my work and what kind of workflow should I invest my time in?

[RobDraw]

I don't see anything BIM related described in your workflow. How does it fit in such early stages of development? What does BIM mean to you?

[Anonymous]

How does it fit in such early stages of development?

For example, let's say I've got a project that consists of around 200-300 houses/apartments. It could bring a few great pro's for my work.

For one: if I design a mass model for apartments or houses, most of the time our technical department has to calculate a price for the buildings/houses. In The Netherlands at least, we calculate construction cost with prices per m³. The problem arises when the m³ I calculated is incorrect, because I didn't include certain parts of the building. With a BIM/3D model, the technical department could visually inspect the building and the quantities I've included, instead of them recalculating everything to check my work. Which saves time. With Revit I could then simply create schedules that gives me the quantities of each building type and the amount of m³ the technical department should use for their calculations. Besides that I could also use a 3D model to see how our plan affects the environment with a solar analysis.

Second: in this stage of development we also (globally) design how the infra should be in our plan. And based on these quantities (roads/pavement/parking) we can calculate (again, globally) the cost of our infra. But when we are still re-evaluating our plan, and making small changes to optimise our ROI, it means I have to do a lot of recalculation. Especially with large projects this could take hours, whereas changing model would simply give me a new schedule with quantities.

And third, but this doesn't really have much to do with BIM: I could render these models so that we could present them to our stakeholders, which is more beautiful than 2D drawings. I see this as an extra.

What does BIM mean to you?

BIM for me is mostly about the I (information). Whether I'm drawing in 2D or modelling shouldn't be the deciding factor for using BIM in our project development stages. What does make the difference for me however, is the possibility to have quantities in my model, instead of having to manually calculate everything. For me, it is about saving time and reducing errors in our calculations. But in this stage of development, it is not about clashing with other disciplines, because that's not the case at that point. Our technical department already does this however.

[Anonymous]

And so, OP, you're from the Netherlands? I want to buy something in the Netherlands. But I don't know what kind of real estate is more profitable. Not so long ago I sold my old house in Manchester to this thepropertybuyingcompany.co.uk company and earned £250K which I want to invest in something. I guess you know the local situation. Is it more profitable to lease commercial real estate or residential real estate? And yes, is there a possibility for me to buy something worthy with this money?

[RobDraw]

I've heard something like that before. 

[xdrecobali]

Hello buddy, did you made it?

I do almost the same job as you (acquisitions & development)

Hit me up!

[MachielAEC]

your workflows and software use makes sense.

The way I’ve approached it is:

- Formit for high-level massing to do unit count design and basic area calculations.

- Revit for further calculations (from Mass or furthered modelled)

- Infraworks to show the construction process/ development as a high level presentation. You can do bulk earthworks in Infra.

[hanif3PJ4S]

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