Commercial Real Estate

At times I wonder if I am a broken record. Of course there are those who don’t know that term – broken record. For the young among us, used to be records were vinyl discs with groves that contained music (and other voice recordings, too). The music was sounded by way of a flexible stylus with a diamond tip following in the grove of the disc. The vibrations of the tiny bumps in the groove were amplified and the music was reproduced. In surprising clarity and resonance. Unless, of course the record was broken, a groove erupted into another groove, usually by way of a scratch or other damage. In such situations, the music played over and over again in the same phrase, never advancing any farther.

So, sounding like a broken record is the same as iterating the same message over and over again.

Sometimes I feel like that. As a parent you also feel the pain! The lessons we teach our kids are often done so through repetition. Even then we rarely know if the lessons were learned!

Well, writing a blog is a lot like that. Very little feedback from the readers, but one doesn’t expect that anyway. Still, I write my messages daily, publish them, and in time I no doubt repeat enough of the same messages to seem like a word for word repeat. But I don’t do that.

What I do do is revisit the same topic, or encounter the same topics via other routes of discussion and discovery. Such are the entangled natures of current events. They are often overlapping. Take pollution and corporate greed. They are related. Uncomfortably so. Also, real estate issues are stubbornly entwined in many economic issues which compound still other issues.

The fact that these intertwined issues remain with us for repeated correction and suffering, is what I mean when I think I must sound like a broken record, repeating myself over and over again.

An example, the current recession may be abating but continuing problems persist. A few of those problems:

• Housing patterns have shifted from normal; the shift is not only prolonged, but might not get back to normal; a NEW normal is most likely taking shape
• Commercial real estate is shifting in major ways: shopping malls are falling out of favor; store vacancies are profound, enough so that owners are reprogramming the space for other purposes – law offices, small convenience banking branches, service outlets, etc.
• Internet shopping patterns are decimating retail store traffic. Malls may actually become home to high rise apartments and condo complexes, both of which will draw restaurants, services (laundry and dry cleaning for example) as well as medical clinics, and other personal services to adjacent mall spaces
• Office spaces will become less large single employers and more small office tenants; that trend will offer the opportunity to mix and match specialty services the other tenants would find convenient in their own building 

The message here is direct: problems or threats to our way of life are opportunities when turned on their heads; the opportunities provide exciting new possibilities to reward our lives.

I suspect the automatic reaction to a problem is fear and trembling. Even avoidance! Heads stuck in sand is an image to ponder. And then to run from!

Flip the threat or the problem. View it as a challenge. Find the fresh idea embedded deep within it. Now work that idea as a fresh proposition, a business proposition?

That’s what entrepreneurs do best. But each of us is an entrepreneur of some sort. Most housewives have to be. That’s what makes them adaptive and productive small business owners. Men are more used to organizational life and find it more difficult to adapt to life on their own, as an entrepreneur.

I have found, however, that a simple trick of flipping our thinking apparatus 180 degrees often proves helpful in developing solutions.  From that point it is a short distance to a new route to success.

Try it. You’ll like it!

August 6, 2015

PS: Sears and K-Mart are a huge example here. Once successful retailers, they discovered that the land the stores were standing upon were more valuable than the retail trade they were home to. Unfortunately, that observation worked in a heated real estate market environment. They thought they could sell or leverage the land. With the heavy decline of retail trade and patterns for future retail trade, Sears and K-Mart are stuck with vast acreages and empty stores with no one interested in them. They are now stuck and will likely disappear completely, hoisted on their own petard, don’t you see?