The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invited Mr.Emre M. Çamlıbel, Ph.D., Soyak Holding CEO, to be a member of the jury at the Case Competition organized by the MIT Center for Real Estate. MBA students specializing in real estate at 42 universities in 3 continents participated in the competition taking place in London. Çamlıbel said that the concept of "green retrofit"reinforcing and modernizingstood out in the case analysis.
A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), holding a Master's Degree in Civil Engineering, Soyak Holding CEO Mr. M. Emre Çamlıbel, Ph.D. was invited by the Institute to be a jury member at the Case Competition organized at its Center for Real Estate. Soyak Holding CEO Dr. M. Çamlıbel, who flew to London last week for the competition, said, "Retrofit-reinforcing/remodeling stood out in this competition. In other words, shall we completely wreck old structures and put up green buildings or maintain and use the old ones as much as possible? Now, the trend appears to be more to use at least a portion of a building and to carry out a green remodeling. If the building, the user, the environment and the criteria of the law permit, the method of making use of existing buildings through improvements will be the natural preference."
The word "retrofit" is defined as "modernization" but there are different areas of implementation and methods of building. Retrofit also means increasing the capabilities of a system, renovating it mechanically, equipment-wise or in terms of software. The concept differs from revision in the sense that new adaptations are applied to an existing system.
Explaining that the MIT Case Competition, which follows global trends very closely, emphasizes the subject of retrofit applications to a great extent, Çamlıbel said, "We can say that in the case of buildings that have completed their economic lifetimes, where the materials used in these buildings are no longer available and the cost of repairs is too high, regulations can be set up so that retrofit applications, which can be carried out at low-cost, providing sustained and reliable management and usage opportunities, can be a solution for lengthening the life of a building, resulting in lesser cost, both in terms of money and with respect to carbon emissions, as opposed to totally demolishing a building and rebuilding."
At the competition to which Soyak Holding CEO Mr. Emre Çamlıbel, Ph.D. was invited, graduate students studying in the real estate departments of 42 universities in 3 continents were given an actual plot of land in London to use for their case analysis. The students were asked to calculate the optimum time-profit returns that the investment on the property would bring to the company purchasing the real estate. The number of universities competing in the case competition dropped to 12 at the first elimination. The jury that would determine the remaining 12 universities included Mr. Çamlıbel as well as other academics and professionals from the U.S., the Far East and Europe. The jury awarded the first prize in the Case Competition to Georgetown; Harvard was the runner-up while Columbia University came in third.