Can An APP Make You An Investment Millionaire?

Of the Billions of devices in use globally, almost 95% are cell phones. The simple fact is mobile devices are now the primary access point to the Internet. Any comparison between the history of the PC and a mobile device is completely irrelevant. There is NO going back – there is no comparison.

Anything you can imagine in your mind, you can (or will) find in a mobile APP. New services are being created on the mobile platform that reach far beyond fun & entertainment. We are talking about heightened productivity and life-changing access to information.

The infrastructure supporting the mobile APPs is heading for a digital communication revolution that will result in an economic boom rivaling any of the past of the information age.

It was only a matter of time until the graph below, and its implications would hit. Welcome to the APP slap.

Robinhood is a no-frills stock broker with no minimum deposit – it simply allows anyone to make stock trades for free. Based on the targeted bread-and-butter stock trades it offers, Robinhood is obviously catering to the MIllennial Millions – with their smartphone being their primary computing device.

Millennials typically do not want any of the additional bells or whistles that come with a traditional discount broker – including the broker. The founders of Robinhood currently have $66 million in funding, and some well-known players such as Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Google Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Great Article in Fortune Mag from Daniel Roberts – Read Up!

There’s more here than just a nut – Acorns connects to a debit or credit card to “round up” the spare change to the next dollar on all purchases you make. Once the roundups reach $5, it withdraws the money and invests in a personalized stock portfolio.

Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harry Markowitz helped Acorns devise its system to personalize a portfolio composed of index funds like real estate stocks and corporate bonds.

The father-son team, who are based in California, created Acorns with the intention of removing any mental roadblocks, or anxiety about becoming a regular investor.

CNN Moneys’ Sara Ashley O’Brien offers a unique read here!

With help from the father of Modern day Portfolio Theorist Dr. Harry Markowitz, Acorns recommends optimized portfolios and keeps them on track with automatic re-balancing and dividend reinvestment. That’s a smarter nut.

The iPhone has made a fortune for Apple, and turned a handful of APP developers into instant millionaires, but a new app aims to help average investors be more like Warren Buffett.

iBillionaire promises to let investors follow moves of a roster of 10 billionaire investors, such as Buffett, Carl Icahn and hedge fund poobah’s like Paulson, Einhorn, and Ackman. The app compares a user’s portfolio to—at least in a small way—see what the billionaires are doing and offer advice accordingly.

Libby Kane offers up the insiders view of iBillionaire in this article from Business Insider:

Founders Raul Moreno and Alejandro Estrada created iBillionaire on a shoestring budget (just $100,000) to give individual investors easy access to strategies used by 10 of the most well-known billionaires in the world.

This is the essence of what the mobile APP revolution will bring to business in a few short years – so be prepared to go small, light, fast, and direct – the power is in your hands – literally!

Guess who is leading water conservation in California?

We are! 

This should NOT come as a surprise to you. Commercial Real Estate Managers are leading the water conservation efforts in one direction – from the bottom-line up!

While we might not look like the face of “environmentalism” our faces are almost always fixed on the bottom line proof in the numbers. The fact is, more commercial managers are supporting energy-efficiency measures because it is a mandatory financial operational practice. There is NO line item for “waste” in our income reports!

In a recent survey from Ecova, a leading commercial sustainability management firm, found more than 1/2 of all commercial managers plan to spend more money and time in 2015 on technologies that help them gain control over their energy costs.

If you’re in commercial business you should already be analyzing your future energy cost estimates, and you should take a quick read of this eye-opening report.

When it comes to water the math is simple: Gallons saved equals hundreds of dollars in savings. It’s easy to “show them the money” when presenting the savings to owners and tenants alike.

There is also a double-savings possible by tapping into government rebates, tax incentives, and federal initiatives, added to the utility savings. Being in business here in San Diego does give us a head start on conservative property management styles, we tend to put water-wise thinking and action on the front burner.

In June 2015 The City of San Diego, along with over 3,900 other cities took part in the  The Wyland Foundation’s Annual National Mayor’s Challenge for Water Conservation, with San Diego winning the Title of Most ‘Water Wise’ City in this Nationwide Challenge.

Commercial buildings are surprisingly “water-simple” to regulate from a property management perspective. We’re dealing with 3 primary water systems: Landscape, HVAC, and Tenant’s personal or business use (meaning toilet and tap).

Drought tolerant landscape offers commercial real estate a “double-savings” with the combining lowering water cost through use, and the added lower equipment cost (due to elimination of sprinklers and valves) including lower maintenance cost (due to near-elimination of labor intensive mowing.)

HVAC is where the real money savings is possible. HVAC is the largest user of water in commercial property, and newer high efficacy heating and cooling systems can increase the return on investment by up to 10% for retrofitting projects. Almost all larger commercial building systems use water to dissipate heat, and techniques to control water loss in the cooling process can significantly reduce a building’s water use during cooling season.

Our tenants do play a part in how water effects our commercial bottom lines, and there is a growing base of data to support a new trend that is developing. The greening of leasing covers not only the cost savings that tenants realize through higher efficiency, but also the savings that owners and managers can realize.

A green lease encourages collaboration between landlords and tenants to take action to improve efficiency. On average, green leasing saves tenants and building owners 10% to 20% each month on a building’s energy and water bills.

Another must read – a great article from the national real estate investor about the greening of leasing.

The spin-offs from higher energy efficiency is crating an emerging market that uses technology to help commercial business have more control of their energy cost and consumption.

Forbes brings us a list of the top 10 new companies in energy paralytics and how this field has revolutionized the concept of energy management.

 

3 big changes your business should be preparing for

1. Impulse Buying is Being Replaced:

The web has opened your clients eyes to the joy of selection, ease of comparison, and transparency.

Online retail continues to grow at double-digit rates. If you don’t have an established ON-LINE storefront (regardless of selling a service or a product!) you might be a dinosaur.

It is estimated that 10% to 15% of all retail centers are now functionally obsolete. The suburban mall in an automobile-driven landscape is rapidly disappearing and won’t be coming back.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are being forced to change their business models, incorporating e-commerce into their marketing, and re-create their physical space portfolios to adapt.

Even the leasing process is changing. While commercial brokers will always play a role in the leasing of commercial space, the end-tenant is quickly gaining new technology and methods to find space.

Imagine the concept of Air-BnB applied to smaller, flexible commercial spaces. Tenants pick and choose from anything between 3-months to 1-year and with a click your in!  The end-user tenant can pick, compare,  have access to maps, photos, contact, email, and all with NO subscription cost.

Checkout these fresh startups changing the future of leasing space, and shaking the foundation of the Commercial Real Estate Experience.

ARTICLE How the HiRise model will disrupt Commercial RE.

 

ARTICLE: How Carr Workplaces does it – the geographic niche. 

 

ARTICLE: Inside the phenomenal rise of WeWork:

2. The Rise of Crowdfunding:

Re-thinking commercial financing with a new wave of investors stepping in to replace the banking-void.

Fundrise is just 1 example of what’s going to hit the commercial markets in the very near future. Think you can’t afford to raise the capital for a commercial business venture? Now would be a good time to re-think the entire concept of lenders and borrowers. Get a glimpse of the near-future of what “Crowd-Thinking” has in store for disrupting the static markets.

According to the world bank report of 2013: The crowdfunding market will reach about $95 Billion in just 10 years. If the Venture capital world and big banks don’t evolve – we could witness the fall of both houses.  For example Kickstarter has helped 80,000 companies raise over $1.6 Billion – this in turn keeps them in control of their company. Viva the Crowd!

3. The U.S. Urban Population Boom:

Suburbia has not gone the way of the dinosaur. . .yet, but the urban trend continues and will accelerate.

More people of all ages—and a large part millennials now prefer to live in cities, particularly dense urban cores. Access, mixed-use, walk ability and multiple services with cultural resources all providing capital to startups and a new core of small tech businesses.

There is a new boom creating vertical/mixed-use retail formats and more collaborative and compact office buildings. The adaptive reuse of properties in urban locations results as developers take previously overlooked blighted properties and turn them into unique apartments, offices and mixed use commercial spaces.

The urbanization of America has given new life to cities that had been historically nine-to-five. Downtown transformations have combined the key ingredients of housing, retail, dining, and walk-to-work offices to generate urban cores, spurring investment and development and raising the quality of life for Americans.

Buyers, Owners, and Consumers are enjoying more markets to consider,  with more elements in place to ratchet up their investment capital, and more flexibility in creating business and leasing space.

1, 2, 3, Get Ready – there is a new and exciting economy emerging right before our eyes, it brings new challenges for us to change with it, rise to meet it, while all along re-asserting Real Estate as the primary core for wealth creation and the basis of financial security.

 

80 Million Millennials – Is your Business Ready?

Do you feel it yet, the Millennials influencing everything around you? A new generation is changing the way of business from coast to coast. If you don’t feel it yet, you must be living in a bubble.

2015 is the year the millennial generation (defined as ages 18 to 34 in 2015)  surpasses the boomers (ages 51 to 69 in 2015)  as the largest living segment of the U.S. population (that’s 80 million Millennials in the US alone – 2.5 Billion worldwide.)

The millennials approach to technology has ended the 9-to-5 workday, crushed global communication barriers and create transparent offices. They have forced companies to rethink flexibility, and killed-off the cubicle. They also believe that business should focus on a dual level: a societal purpose along with business to make a profit.

Thanks to millennials: Texting has become a standard business protocol, every tech platform now emphasizes pictures, Twitter had to adjust to this reality to remain relevant, Instagram and Snapchat put pictures front and center rather than any text. Even texts contain Emoticons and Emojis. (If you don’t know the difference between the Emoticons and Emojis you better start studying up!)

Think you might be more of a millennial than your years express? Take this quick test to see just how many millennial traits we have already assimilated.

Millennials have built new businesses out of the ruins of the 2009 recession, and in doing so, they’ve changed the career expectations for a whole generation.

Companies have also felt the pressure from millennials to evolve, change, become more social and socially available. 1 in every 3 employees in the U.S. will be a millennial by next year, and by 2025 they will become 75 percent of the global workforce. At many tech companies millennials already make up 60% of the workforce.

If you have time to read an amazing report – try this from Price-Waterhouse-Cooper (PWC.) A downloadable pdf: The global generational study. 

70% of millennials say they’d reject traditional business to work independently, and 1 in 5 say they want to quit their current jobs and start their own projects.

FORBES Magazine’s Micah Solomon has a great short read here outlining the traits of millennials that EVERY business should understand.

“Millennials are demonstrating they’re a new driving force,” says John Swanciger, CEO of Manta. “It’s no longer assumed that recent graduates will enter the traditional workforce. Companies will have to adjust as millennials become a bigger force in the small-business space.”

So, when a recent national showed that 78% of millennials are motivated by the concept of “charting their own course,” remember that this is a generation that has grown up having no other plan.

Growing Your Business: All Speed Is Relative

Just because something is fast, doesn’t mean it’s always better. There is a timeless saying: “If it hurts then you must be doing something wrong!” which has a multitude of appropriate comparisons to business in today’s hyper speed business climate.

Does growth have to be fast? Does it have to be painful?

Leigh Buchanan (INC. Magazine) offers several unique perspectives from the minds at Starbucks, In-N-Out, Intuit, Facebook, on the delicate art of scaling a business and keeping your roots in the ground that sustain you. A great article and a quick read (No pun!)

Remember that all speed is relative, and what worked to bring overnight stardom to another business-model could end up as a flash-in-the-pan for your enterprise.

Need to see visuals for a relative speed comparison? Here’s the hyper-construction in China  –  57-story building completed in 19-days with advanced construction techniques to reduce emissions, cost, manpower, and energy consumption during construction.

We might not all agree with the philosophy of Ricky Bobby (played by Will Ferrell) but growing is our ultimate business goal, and learning to control growth will keep you in the drivers seat longer.

Finding that sweet spot for your companies growth-rate might be trial and error, but don’t rush the process! Does 15% yearly growth sound LOW to you? REMEMBER that a company growing at just 15% per year will DOUBLE in size in only 5 years!

Somewhere Between “Baby Steps” and “Full-Speed-Ahead” are a full spectrum of variables that are appropriate for your business and your personal business style.

Final Question: What does it take to expand year after year, even through the Great Recession? Very few companies have ever done so. You can learn a lot from those that have. A final quick and insightful read, again from the minds at INC. MAG – Scott Leibs.

 

Remember: Just because something is fast, doesn’t mean it’s always better. From our perspective and advice to you: Don’t ever rush to sign a lease, and never rush the process of selecting a property to lease! let a good navigator guide you along the way!