Construction trends of 2025
Authors

Andrew Parkin
View bioWe predict 2025 will be the Year of Data.
This time last year, the prediction for 2024 was to be the year of circularity, AI and energy. This ended up being the case, but what all this has highlighted is the need for good, accurate, well-curated data.
In the next few years, our hunger for data will grow exponentially. AI is fuelled by data and power. The more data we want to store, the more power we need to access, store and sort through it. As we know, ‘The Cloud’ is not as ephemeral as the name suggests, but lives in large server farms, otherwise known as data centres. This growing appetite for data will subsequently require a greater demand for data centres and of course, the energy to power them. We therefore need to think carefully about how much data we require, its quality and how accurate it is.
A lack of data is already acting as a barrier in making progress to decarbonise and optimise building efficiencies, and to adopt circular building practices. The team behind the recently published UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard’s Pilot Version is now inviting applications for pilot projects to apply the Standard to real projects. Obtaining data from design projects across several sectors will be essential for it to eventually be used as a workable Standard. Otherwise, the industry cannot establish what a net zero carbon building is without filling these gaps in building operation data.
The UK’s large stock of existing buildings could be better managed with a retrofit-first approach. However, the industry does not yet possess the data required to benchmark performance and fully understand how the various options for retrofitting will affect operational energy metrics. Hence, retrofit projects often require a leap of faith and are therefore difficult to justify for investors, owners, facilities management and occupants. Developers and funders do not generally like making leaps of faith!
For years now, we have been advocating for all stakeholders to be educated on the carbon produced when operating a building, because operating a building efficiently is as significant as building it. In 2025, FMs will need to upskill on collecting operational data and subsequently contractors will need to supply data relating to all the processes, people, materials, waste management regimes. When it comes to selecting building materials that have the potential to significantly reduce environmental impact in construction, again, data is lacking. While consultants and contractors have a good understanding of which materials are high and low in embodied carbon, there are several other emissions that are often not included. Material passports, which have grown in popularity, have great potential to help industry overcome this challenge. Like the Golden Thread principle embedded in the Building Safety Act, for contractors to have the faith to use non-standard materials (i.e. those made from new materials, those re-used from other buildings etc.) they will need to know everything there is to know about them. Where do materials come from? Where and how have they been used previously? Have they been tested and certified for re-use? What happens at the end of their use?
Finally, AI is already beginning to have a transformative influence and it could be the catalyst for more data-driven operational energy-use in buildings. Like many organisations, as we try to implement AI at Cundall to improve several of our processes, we have encountered challenges. So whilst we recognise its potential, we have found that a lack of good quality data limits AI to be used more than just as a novelty. AI is ultimately a tool for productivity – it cannot produce the creativity humans have and relies on good quality data to use for its processes.
So, as we said above, it looks very much like 2025 will be the Year of Data.