Bookmarks: 5 Interesting Articles That May Help You This Week

Each week, I select a few articles that rise above the fray and hopefully help you on your journey in the CRE world. They pull from one of four "corners:" corporate real estate, technology, management science and anything positive. I welcome your comments on these articles.

1. Great Leaders Understand Why Small Gestures Matter

So much of the business culture remains fixated on strategic disruption, digital transformation, and the meteoric rise (and disastrous fall) of venture-backed unicorns. What if we took just a moment to think a little smaller, to act a lot more humbly, to elevate the person-to-person interactions that lead to more meaningful relationships?

Sure, successful companies and leaders think differently from everyone else. But they also care more than everyone else—about customers, about colleagues, about how the whole organization conducts itself when there are so many opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values.

In a world being utterly reshaped (and often disfigured) by technology, people are hungrier than ever for a deeper and more authentic sense of humanity.

2. She Almost Lost Her Home In California’s Wildfires. Instead She Built A $200 Million Business.

The Santa Rosa-based company was founded by tech executive Nikki Pechet and venture capital investor Jack Abraham, both of whom were impacted by the fires. Seeing opportunity in the ashes, they set out to reinvent home building with software designed to cut the delays and cost overruns that plague the industry.

Homebound takes a fee based on the cost of the project, but won’t say how much. (General contractors tend to charge in the range of 10% to 25% to manage construction.) First year revenue was an estimated $10 million.

“As we watched people try to navigate the process and the complexity of everything they had to do to build a home, we knew there were really simple technology tools that were used in other industries that could make the process simpler,” says Pechet, who serves as Homebound’s CEO.

Her software tracks 379 unique tasks that are common when building a home, allowing customers to track the progress as they would a Seamless food delivery or a ride with Uber. It was essential for Hicks, a former Hewlett-Packard IT manager. He could, for instance, ask questions about the color of bathroom tiles with messages that would be sent to a team of interior designers on staff and send information about any changes made to the rest of the team. The app would also notify subcontractors when and where the tiles were delivered.

3. The Dark Side of Self-Control

An ability to override short-term impulses that conflict with long-term goals is a hallmark of successful people. Research has shown that people with strong self-control have better health, relationships, finances, and careers. They are also less likely to have problems with overeating, overspending, smoking, alcohol or drug abuse, procrastination, and unethical behavior. Overcoming temptation also seems to be intrinsically rewarding — people with high self-control are also more satisfied with their lives and experience their lives as more meaningful.

But is resisting temptation always beneficial? A small but growing body of research has begun to illuminate a dark side of self-control, with important implications for organizational life.

Self-control can restrict emotional experiences. One of the reasons why people high in self-control resist temptations is that they experience less tempting desires. But this might also mean that these people have less intense emotional experiences; that is, they respond to situations in more neutral ways. For example, high self-control might prevent employees from fully enjoying positive career outcomes, such as promotions, raises, and outstanding performance appraisals.

4. It’s Time for the Commercial Real Estate Industry to Adopt a Tech Mindset

There is no such thing as a simple commercial real estate transaction. With dozens of stakeholders, layers of financing, regulatory concerns, and complicated, speculative valuation methods closing a transaction is inherently complex and time consuming.

Thankfully, technology has already started to help. Tools have emerged that eliminate the recurring manual entry of data, improve underwriting through analysis consolidation and permit the direct integration of systems across several key stakeholders.

Such developments have greatly expedited daily tasks like information collection, valuations and deal submission processes.

5. How One Investor Is Using Cell Phone Data to Underwrite Retail

Real estate companies are embracing technology across a range of areas. But these efforts are mainly in the customer-facing arena, such as providing better services to multifamily or office tenants.

But, save for the occasional exception, few companies are able to use tech to make investment decisions for various reasons, such as lack of experience and in some cases a lack of relevant technology.

One investor, though, has figured out a way to use established tech to provide insight into their purchasing decisions. That is Clarion Partners. Its managing director and head of acquisitions, Brian Watkins, recently spoke at a Transwestern Capital Market Symposium for institutional investors and described what the firm is doing.

For the past year to 18 months, he says, the company has been working with a third party provider to apply cell phone data to retail investing, taking advantage of geofencing—namely, to map around the end of a center or a store and understand what customers’ patterns are, where they’re living and where their cell phone ultimately sleeps at night. It can even glean data to help the company understand travel patterns and where people are moving, he says.

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

Ken Ashley