Like most publications, Summit works on a schedule with a long lead time, and when we started soliciting content for this issue at the end of 2019, we did not expect that within a few short months, the world would face a once-in-a-century health pandemic and an economic subsidence unprecedented in the modern age.
However fortuitously, many of the submissions we received for this issue focused on a singular issue more suited to our situation right now than any of us could have planned: Innovation.
Since the burst of the .com bubble, the idea of innovation has been dissected, deconstructed, and disambiguated by entrepreneurs, business leaders, and academics, but it’s rarely applied with any measurable success. And for the world of real estate in particular, historically slower to adapt than other industries, many of the pathways towards innovation have been appreciated more in theory than in practice—at least until today.
As we’ve learned from other large-scale crises in history, disruption has its own way of accelerating the changes sought by the otherwise familiar theses of innovation. This idea forms of the focus of our introductory article in this issue, from AFIRE’s CEO, Gunnar Branson, while the articles from contributors at MetaProp, Ferguson Partners, and KPMG each speak in more detail about what innovation means in practice. And with change and innovation as backdrop, the call to ethics from AFIRE member Profimex is especially pertinent.
Aegon provides an outlook for CRE prospects in the year ahead, while Yardi visualizes a new way to understand and quantify risk at the city-level, in what could be an increasingly useful rubric for the economic challenges ahead. Our summaries of the AFIRE Data & Technology and Tax & Regulatory events from the end of 2019 also reveal the prescience of our members in planning for the future.
Finally, the issue concludes with a historical case study of Hudson Square in New York, mapping out how neighborhoods change over time, and the intentions that make those changes happen.
Some of the submissions we initially received and greenlighted for this issue had to be tabled due to the current crisis (though will likely reappear later on afire.org or in a future edition), but we are happy with this final result and the snapshot it provides of where we are now, and where our industry is going next.
Benjamin van Loon
Communications Director
bvanloon@afire.org
+1 202 312 1405
