The Voyage Brief | December 2020 | Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Grosvenor, Marker, Smart Cities Dive, Curbed, Robb Report

Required Reading

Dec 16

As we think about planning for 2021, we are proud of how the real estate development industry has risen to the challenges and opportunities created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With a vaccine on the horizon, the pandemic isn’t the primary driver of our strategic conversations, resilience is. We are encouraged and excited about what the coming year will bring.

01 | Fast Company

➤ American suburbs are about to look more like European cities

What makes European cities so special and vibrant? They offer highly-desirable opportunities to live, work, and play in the same vicinity. Many companies are evaluating what their corporate real estate footprint (and tax base) will look like for 2021 and beyond; in some cases, this means moving; which means their employees may be moving too.
As a result, many urban dwellers will find themselves looking at places with larger, more spread out housing, yet they will acutely miss what made cities so special. Nate Berg takes us through successful case studies to prove that this model has worked - Orenco Station (Oregon), Pasadena (California), and Milton (in-progress, Toronto).
We believe that Transit-Oriented Developments (TOD) will be a part of ensuring that real estate development answers the business case for triple-bottom-line success. A TOD development may feature narrow streets, authentic (to the locale) architecture, and a variety of building types with plentiful ground-floor retail, along with shared public spaces for people to engage with for a myriad of uses, and finally - innovative public transport options.

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02 | The Wall Street Journal

➤ The Future of Everything | What’s Next for the Home

In The Future of Everything, the WSJ takes an in-depth approach to directly addressing the effect that the events of 2020, including (but not limited to) COVID-19, will have on residential real estate development for years to come. There are so many great pieces; we recommend bookmarking this link.
Katy McLaughlin takes us through Clean Air: The Next Luxury Apartment Perk. Michelle Ma, Kevin Hand, and Yan Wu discuss in The House of Tomorrow how sustainability and technology are the things that buyers and renters will not only be asking about but will be prioritizing in their decision-making. Beth DeCarbo makes the case that Drones are Poised to Reshape Home Design, and discusses how that could happen.
Nicole Friedman addresses Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in How to Make the Housing Market More Equitable with strong insight about how racism contributes to the devaluation of assets, from Andre M. Perry of The Brookings Institution. We must understand our past to build a better future for all people.

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03 | Grosvenor

➤ Efficient Portfolio Diversification in Real Estate

Grosvenor Group is one of the most insightful real estate development teams in the world. The firm (and the people behind it) exemplify how to take a legacy company into the future while building some of the highest quality development product that we have ever seen (our founder has worked with their San Francisco team in the past).
Brian Biggs, the Director of Research for Grosvenor Americas discusses portfolio diversification and why it is necessary for successful risk management. What we love most about this piece is that it doesn’t use complicated terms, it simply breaks down risk profiles, city composition, and outlines several hypotheses for analysis.
If you are on the developer or equity side, you will read this and appreciate its clarity, and clean analysis. If you want to learn more about how capital works, or maybe become a developer one day, this will put you ahead by helping you understand how real estate investments can be allocated across potential levels of risk, the importance of an asset’s locale, and thought-starters about how to diversify across a portfolio.

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04 | Marker

➤ How Compass Became the Bane of Real Estate

One of our favorite writers to follow, Patrick Sisson describes in detail the path that Compass has taken, and particularly how their resale arm has thrived in the pandemic. When people are moving around the country (or just moving), you have the opportunity to generate revenue on both sides of a transaction.
Sisson also takes us through the journey of our cultural obsession with real estate and our frustrations over time with the processes associated with it. We have admired the growth streak that Compass has accomplished, and how they have enabled their resale agents to have access to consistent marketing materials and client service technologies. Consistency is a key brand hallmark of a thoughtful user or customer journey.
Arguably a tremendous amount of capital can open many doors, and bring down barriers to entry with minimal resistance. Yet, if we look at the fray that forced WeWork into a correction, having a board with sound leadership to ensure that the vision is executed is also a pivotal part of the success algorithm. Even if you don’t love the story of big technology firms with a large footprint, this is a must-read to understand how and why.

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05 | Smart Cities Dive

➤ Shopping to shelter: Abandoned mall sites welcome senior housing

In July 2020, we wrote about Future Opportunities for Real Estate Development; adaptive-reuse of malls was one of those opportunities. According to the U.S. Census, older adults will outnumber children by 2034, and they provide some highly visual explanations of the statistics. Hospital Oriented Development is also now being discussed as a future opportunity.
The Grande Dame department stores and malls that are no longer financially viable need a new vision to bring them into the coming decades. One of those utilizations is adaptive-reuse as senior housing, we also use a recent New York Times piece, Once Meccas of Retail Therapy, Now Homes to Elder Americans to support the case. From a business case standpoint - increased “everyday” activity during the day propels people, businesses, and places to triple-bottom-line success.
There are currently few options that offer an “urban village” lifestyle. Quality senior housing that benefits both physical and mental health will be a strong sector in the market, whether in urban or suburban locales. Don’t take our word for it - we were quoted in Forbes by Jennifer Castenson in Vacant Real Estate Is The Golden Ticket To The Housing Crisis, and we truly believe that it is the Golden Ticket for select mall conversions to senior housing.

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06 | Curbed

➤ This Artist Posed As a Hungarian Billionaire Buyer to Get Into 25 New York Penthouses

A young artist doing her residency in DUMBO wondered what the views were like from the ubiquitous residential skyscrapers that have become a prominent part of NYC's skyline over the past decade. Andi Schmied, an artist from Brooklyn would not be welcomed but “Gabriella Schmied,” an ultra-wealthy Hungarian buyer, with an “artistic personality” would be. Rule #1: A bit of “eccentricity” is often more acceptable if the perception is that you have a lot of money.
We struggled a bit thinking about whether to share this piece - would we be condoning lying? There’s no question that Andi deceived people and manipulated who she was to gain access. Our founder has extensive experience in ultra-expensive real estate development; some of the people that she conned are people we know, and sometimes closely worked with.
On a personal level - coming from an underprivileged background we know that there is an "exclusive" world of the wealthy that others are discouraged from entering, or even seeing that it exists. Thank you Christopher Bonanos for sharing Andi’s story and adventure with the world; we are better for it. You will soon be able to see the vistas yourself in Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan.

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07 | Robb Report

➤ How David Adjaye Became the World’s Most Beguiling Public Architect—and Its Most Subversive

We know the Sir David Adjaye of today; the global starchitect that leads one of the most recognized architecture practices in the world, and one of the most celebrated Black visionaries in design. Yet we do not know enough about him as a person, or his journey to his successes.
Lucy Alexander takes us through the early days of his childhood, schooling, his early career (which even included designing movie sets to pay the bills), and later to the dark days of the Great Recession where his practice hovered on the edge of bankruptcy. Only a year later, he won the competition to design the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C..
Adjaye has designed some of the most beautiful spaces in the world - we love Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi (a mosque, a synagogue, and a church, all of which will sit upon a secular visitor pavilion), and The Webster in Los Angeles (the kind of shopping that we miss terribly). 2020 has been a challenging year for young design practices, and we hope that this piece serves as a reminder that even the best in the world have once struggled too.