Real Estate Innovation Lab (REIL)

The Real Estate Innovation Lab (REIL) is a research lab for innovation in the built environment that links design, innovation and economic impact back to its stakeholders. It grew out of the work of MIT’s Center for Real Estate, and remains within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

As the first lab of its kind, its primary objective is to create an intellectual community of multi-disciplinary researchers for developing academic work on innovation that impacts the development of the built environment.

The REIL was established in late 2015 by Research Scientist Dr. Andrea Chegut, who serves as its Director, and Professors Dennis Frenchman and David Geltner and developer and technologist Steve Weikal. Dr. Andrea Chegut was named director of the REI Lab in 2016 to work with the inter-disciplinary team of 12 researchers

The lab is a community for innovators in the built environment. The lab team is composed of pathbreakers uncovering the latest data design, computational techniques, and, methodologies to support our understanding of urban form and economics.

The team is a community of innovators within MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. A collection of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners from the wider real estate, financial economics, econometrics, urban planning and architecture domains.

The lab’s primary goal is aligned with the community, we want to build a better built environment. The principal contribution is in identifying innovations, products and processes that will transform buildings and cities, but we pair this with performance outcomes that can give agency to technology, design and financial investors for incentive alignment.