Emerging Digitalization in Property/Facility Management: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Directions

Digitalization has become a driving force for significant advancements in property/facility management (PFM). It is necessary to identify the research gaps and future research directions, which could enable the effective development of digital technologies (DTs) in the context of PFM. This paper aims to review how DTs emerge to drive digitalization in PFM and identify gaps that need to be addressed in future research. The findings reveal that research on integrating BIM, IoT, AR, AI, and big data in sustainable transformations, real-time data, and energy optimization is limited, with challenges in data security, privacy, and system interoperability. Future research should focus on BIM for sustainability, real-time data, and AR applications, alongside IoT and blockchain integration for security. Investigating VR in maintenance, AI for energy optimization, improved prediction accuracy, and enhanced NLP for chatbots are also critical areas for exploration. This state-of-the-art review summarized the gaps from the existing literature of property management digitalization and provides an update on research gaps and directions for the digitalization in PFM.