We’re reaching the tipping point where our investment and tax dollars are going to start benefitting our local economies rather than private investors, with the ‘Long Tail‘ leading the way. Crowdfunding, a natural extension of crowdsourcing, emerges from the Long Tail and is coming to small businesses. It’s about time!

Cities are wising up in prioritize investing in independent businesses districts over chains. According to a BusinessWeek article, subsidies for chains are not effective. Big

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Many of us know that the triple bottom line means “people, planet and profit”, being economically, socially and environmentally beneficial. That is, expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance (Wikipedia).

So what does this mean for real estate development? What would triple bottom line real estate development look like? Keep in mind this is about the real estate development industry, not about the

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Why is it that the vast majority of new development is at an institutional scale, and we don’t see human-scaled fine-grained urban fabric, the kind that makes historic neighborhoods so desirable? Well, it’s mainly because the vast majority of real estate development investment dollars come from institutional investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies, Wall Street…

As you can see in the long tail diagram above, institutional investors aren’t interested in development projects

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Thanks to Chris Leinberger, author of the The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream, we know what the rather uninspired, industrial age 19 standard product types“ are that institutional investors put their money in:
Office: Build to suit; Mixed-use urban; Medical
Industrial: Build to suit; Warehouse
Retail: Neighborhood center; Lifestyle center; Big-box anchored
Apartment: Suburban garden; Urban high density
Housing: Entry level; Move-up; Luxury; Assisted living/retirement;

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The current financial model for real estate investment is pretty depressing for the creative-minded, where an overwhelming majority of real estate investment capital is reserved for object-oriented buildings at least a block in scale (ie office parks, strip malls, towers, subdivisions…)

However, just as YouTube is slowly redefining television and wikipedia has rendered encyclopedias obsolete via crowdsourcing, just wait until $ are applied to this customer-driven phenomenon then used in real

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As they say, if you want something done right, do it yourself, and that’s just what the neighbors of historic Curtis Park (just outside of downtown Denver) did.

It started with one progressive-minded resident (and architect), Cathy Bellem, who realized an empty lot in their ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood was being bid on to build a project to maximize profit at the expense of the local character. She took it upon herself to rally her neighbors to raise the money to buy the

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While it’s time for real estate investment to catch up to the market”, it’s also time for local independent tenants to make it easier for developers to lease to them. The simple reason why an overwhelming majority of new developments prefer leasing out to national chains rather than local independent businesses is because chains can pay more rent, and that’s because they have an established patronage once they open. This is why chains dominate our communities (and if not now, down the road

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Where are the majority of our country’s real estate development investment dollars? Take a look at any of the highlighted projects GlobeSt.com, the de factor real estate investors website, and you’ll see the problem. In the now outdated industrial economy, it didn’t make any sense to build one customized widget when you could mass produce thousands for a lot less.

With investment it’s the same - all your pension and insurance payments are sourcing a tremendous pool of capital that has to be

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Understanding , the way it’s evolving our economy, and its applications to real estate, what would be the real estate developer/investor equivalent of an Amazon, Google/YouTube, eBay, Netflix?  What’s the big deal?  Millions of people don’t just use these companies’ services, they’re passionate about them. When’s the last time anyone said that about Kodak, GM or Kmart?

As you know, all of these companies invest in ‘a full line of products’ that appeal to what individuals really

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“For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.“ Wired Magazine, The Long Tail, Oct. 2004.

Sound familiar when it comes to strip malls, subdivisions and office parks, which make up a vast majority of new real estate

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