« July 1, 2007 - July 7, 2007 | Main | July 15, 2007 - July 21, 2007 »

July 13, 2007

Dieulefit, France

Time for indie tenants to meet real estate investors halfway

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 they will), pretty much defining what is known today as 'Anywhere USA'.

How can local independent restaurants and stores compete with such a crippling disadvantage? They can use that same power of the brand, except instead of a national brand that brings in a loyal following on opening day, they need to focus on a community brand that brings in that loyal following on opening day, on what better way to do that than to establish a loyal following of several hundred loyal community customers before the business opens.

This is what a VIBE - beta community does, and here's a little press for a restaurant (Elements) in Washington DC by the Washington Business Journal. That party by the way, was last night, and the sense of community among the Element's future patrons was amazing, especially considering the restaurant doesn't even have a location yet. Let me know if you're a community resident and want to join up, or want to start your own.

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July 12, 2007

NYC Upper West Side

Time for real estate investment to catch up to the market

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 In the now outdated industrial economy, it didn't make any sense to build one customized widget when you could mass produce thousands for a lot less.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 invested somewhere. To those investment managers, if you have billions, the least you want to invest in at a time is $5 million, which translates to $20 million projects. That precludes most every single human-scaled building you'd find in the coolest neighborhoods, leaving only large-scale strip malls, subdivisions, office towers... what you see on www.globest.com.

The thing is, the emerging you-centric market is demanding customized, not mass-produced. So how in the world is the supply of investment capital going to accommodate this? First of all, it will. Second, it will focus on the long tail of real estate development - all the $500K-$1 million investments that none of today's major investors want (just like the 42 million video titles Blockbuster won't carry) and devise a system to rehab and develop several of them at a time, just like Netflix devised a system to rent any one of 42 million of those 'unwanted' videos.

In other words, next generation investors will work with certified developers to buy several smaller buildings at once, provide them with progressive tenants upfront via beta communities, and enjoy a much greater return (financially as well as socially and environmentally) than if they invested the same amount in one globest.com project.

CoolTown Investments has the portfolio of development opportunities, city leaders, tenant communities and developers to make it happen - which investors are going to step up first? Contact us if that's you.

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July 11, 2007

NYC bike sharing

NY follows France's lead with bike sharing

Good ideas spread fast. It's not official yet, but New York City is prepping to establish a city-wide bike sharing program like in France, started in Lyon and recently adopted by Paris with 10,000 bikes at 750 stations.

Today is the last day you can pilot the system during a test run of 20 bikes with a few stations. As described in our profile of the overwhelmingly successful French model, the first half an hour is free and you can leave the bike at any official station. Like car sharing, your access requires a credit card.

Read more in the NY Times article, In This Case, It’s O.K. to Take a Bike That’s Not Yours.

Image source: lorealmonroe

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July 10, 2007

Homes in Quebec

Using wikinomics to enliven your neighborhood

Yesterday we took a look at the rising need to capture a community's collective brilliance, which happens too randomly and ubiquitously to be of any use in today's rigid business processes. Enter Wikinomics, the wikipedia approach to business.

With collaborative tools like wikis, many progressive organizations will utilize much smaller, decentralized teams, whose primary role will be to monitor creative input rather than directly provide it. Their job will be to identify and solicit feedback from the people associated with exciting ideas and experiences, wherever they happen to be, rather than rely on closed door meetings. They will also establish the incentive systems that reward the collaborators with fair compensation for the value they create. The buzz in the industry is that “the ability to use wikis will be a required job skill in five years.”

So what do you need to pioneer a wiki to shape and energize your neighborhood? You'll need a sponsoring organization, like say, the Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals (YURP) in New Orleans, a group we're looking to invest in New Orleans with. You'll need a wiki tool like SocialText, and an accompanying social network like CollectiveX. Ideally, both would be one and the same. The key is to remember that the best tool in the world is useless without the sculptor.

Image source: mdroute5

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July 9, 2007

Wikinomics

Rise of the wiki community

Hundreds of people in your neighborhood have moments of brilliance on what would make it a better community economically, socially and environmentally (ie a coffeehouse having its very own socially-minded social network), but then those ideas are gone, usually for years if not forever, like that acclaimed research paper back in college. That will no longer be the case in the near future.

First a look at the problem, using this excerpt from the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott.

"We still, for example, think in industrial-age terms about work as a routine that repeats endlessly...

...Yet the vast majority of employees don’t do business processes anymore, at least not in the traditional sense. After years of optimizing supply chains, outsourcing, automation, and stripping costs and inefficiencies out of the back office, most employees spend very little of their day working on regularized activities....

...When new problems and exceptions arise, people in organizations will swarm around that exception to try to resolve it. Think about the last time something in your workplace went haywire. How many people were jumping up to help solve the problem? In most workplaces, the answer is “as many as possible,” because people genuinely enjoy the challenge of coming up with solutions to workplace exceptions in a truly spontaneous and collaborative fashion (it definitely beats the 9 a.m. meeting!)

The problem from an organizational and knowledge-management point of view, however, lies in the inability of firms to capture and codify those moments of inspired brilliance - the moments when someone does something spontaneous that could be the key to unlocking a whole new approach to getting things done.

Tomorrow, how to capture those ideas and apply them to the real world.

Download the entire Chapter 9 here.

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