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New York is quietly reshaping how buildings are regulated, and most owners don’t realize it yet. A state rule known as Part 494 is moving refrigerants out of the shadows, forcing HVAC and refrigeration systems into a new era of registration, tracking, and accountability.

What began as a technical environmental rule is now expanding rapidly, pulling far more commercial and multifamily buildings into compliance than many operators expect. As escalation deadlines approach, owners are discovering that equipment long considered routine may suddenly fall under state oversight.

Beyond paperwork, the rule could mark a turning point for how the industry thinks about building systems altogether. By formalizing refrigerant data at scale, New York may be laying the groundwork for the next phase of climate regulation — one that reaches far deeper into buildings than energy use alone.

A significant cyber attack on UK property transaction systems this week has created a messy bottleneck in London’s housing market, threatening to delay thousands of home sales as the systems that undergird conveyancing, title searches, and transaction tracking remain offline. The breach has affected key digital platforms used by solicitors, agents, and lenders to process contracts. With many closings now reliant on connected data flows rather than paper records, the outage has illuminated how deeply real estate relies on technology that can be disrupted by cyber threats.

Conveyancing in England and Wales has become increasingly digital in recent years. But that reliance on digital tools for property convenience can become a weakness when a system goes dark. Agents report stalls in closing schedules, inability to verify title information, and general uncertainty about when normal operations will resume. Buyers and sellers, already navigating timing and financing challenges, now face an added layer of logistical risk that sits entirely outside the normal mechanics of price, inspection, and financing.

Cyber attacks on real estate infrastructure are not new, but this incident highlights how quickly the effects can ripple. Ransomware and system outages have hit real estate firms in recent years, occasionally freezing access to records and forcing emergency response. What sets the London disruption apart is that the attack has been aimed at the government agency not just an individual organization.

As digital systems become more central to property transactions around the world, this episode serves as a stark reminder that cyber resilience is now a core part of operational risk in real estate. Whether the disruption resolves in days or weeks, the experience is likely to reinforce that technology reliability, data backup strategies, and cybersecurity planning are not optional extras but essential infrastructure for a market built on top of digital infrastructure.

Construction is underway on Gilroy’s first data center, an Amazon Web Services campus approved last year through an administrative planning process. Gilroy, located about 30 miles south of San Jose at the southern edge of Silicon Valley, cleared the project without hearings before the Planning Commission or City Council because the 56-acre site has been zoned for industrial use since 1981. The development includes two data center buildings and a security facility totaling roughly 438,500 square feet, and city officials say it completed the required environmental review and public comment period before approvals were finalized.

Public opposition has surged only as construction has ramped up. A petition calling for the project’s approvals to be revoked had collected more than 1,600 signatures by late January, with residents saying they did not fully understand the size, timeline, or implications of the data center until work began. Petition organizer Britt Smith said concerns intensified as residents learned more about how data centers operate, prompting calls for greater transparency and a halt to construction. City officials have pushed back, arguing that approvals are already in place and that stopping the project now would expose the city to legal risk unless Amazon fails to comply with the conditions attached to those approvals.

The clash in Gilroy mirrors a broader national reckoning as data center development accelerates across the U.S. Driven by cloud computing, AI workloads, and surging digital infrastructure demand, data centers are increasingly moving into suburban and secondary markets, often on industrial land that allows projects to advance with limited public visibility. While local governments are attracted by long-term tax revenue and economic development, communities are raising questions around energy use, water consumption, noise, and land-use compatibility. As data center growth continues at scale, cities are facing mounting pressure to revisit zoning frameworks, approval processes, and community engagement standards to better align digital infrastructure expansion with local quality-of-life concerns.

Propmodo Daily is written and edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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