This has been quite the year – real estate insanity, industry consolidation (along with the continued rise of boutiques), political craziness, stagnant economy, record corporate profits (again), off-shoring/re-shoring/near-shoring. All in all this has definitely continued to drive structural changes to the CRE environments. Commercial real estate is a micro-cosm of the country as a whole….
A #CRE New Years Clean-up
Everyone makes personal New Year’s resolutions. But I can’t recall ever seeing departmental resolutions or organizational resolutions. Which is sad because the New Year is a great time to roll out new ways of thinking. From a process standpoint you have a large group of people coming back from almost two weeks off that are…
Christmas Eve #inbox cleanup and Miles Davis
I’m taking a day that feels strangely devoid of meetings and new emails to clean out my inbox. I have a policy of trying to keep it to less than 20 items at any given time which over the past few months has been nearly impossible. Most weekends I have been able to get back…
#Transition can be a difficult concept. But it is absolutely critical to success.
When a client moves from one provider to another there is a significant moment of risk. Both for the client and the new provider. You can’t screw up the blocking and tackling during this phase or the entire account will be setup and serviced wrong. But to do Transition right you have to have engagement….
Should you really still be in a #CRE career if you do these?
You should probably change careers out of CRE if you still do the following: Calculate total RSF by multiplying a number of people in the office by 250. Think that a 15% vacancy rate makes sense. Believe ANY headcount or growth forecast provided by a client. Don’t think that seat sharing is a real thing….
Open Source your thinking to improve yourself
Are you putting your ideas out there only for paying clients to see and hear? Or are you putting your ideas out there for everyone? If you aren’t putting your thoughts out into the public domain for external consumption and evaluation how do you know your ideas are superior? A critical part of the idea…
#Relationships are the lifeblood of #CRE. They can make you and break you.
Who you are matters. Are you a person of integrity? Do you do what you say you will? Always tell the hard truth? This is the foundation of solid relationships. CRE, more than most industries, is built on relationships. You can’t build that relationship over a single lunch or round of golf, but you can…
What do you see that no one else does? That’s your #value.
Duke Long had a great post yesterday that I’d like to take a bit further. He mentioned all the things he sees in real estate that a lot of others wouldn’t notice. I’d like to go so far as to say, if you don’t have a list like this you probably aren’t top of your…
Let’s play “Count the #121212 Posts”!
It may not be the end of the world, but humans are suckers for odometer effects. Whenever the clock or the calendar hits some round or repeating number we all love it (obviously myself included!). But as a behavioral mechanism it has positive side effects. Just like New Years causes everyone to think about what…
What’s the continuing value of #LEED ?
LEED by the USGBC has been an incredibly successful program. In fact, I would argue that the program’s success will be precisely what brings about it’s obsolescence. From the outside looking in, one of the goals that I saw for LEED was to change the way that businesses, developers, architects and communities thought about buildings…