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.
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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.
Horizon Resources Inc 