THE BLOG
Commercial Property and NanoTech - A glimpse into the future, available today
June 2013
In the extraordinary video above you’ll see a demonstration of the amazing properties of Ultra Ever Dry.
“Ultra-Ever Dry is a superhydrophobic (water) and oleophobic (hydrocarbons) coating that will completely repel almost any liquid. Ultra-Ever Dry uses proprietary nanotechnology to coat an object and create a barrier of air on its surface. This barrier repels water, oil and other liquids unlike any coating seen before.”
The applications within the commercial property industry are practically endless. If you can make all manner of surfaces free from dirt, grime or other defacement you not only maintain a better looking product but save the cost of repeated and ongoing cleaning. Potentially these savings are huge.
Nanotechnology is one of the most significant areas of current scientific research and will impact on our lives in a major way over the next 10/20 years. Ultra Ever Dry represents a glimpse into the future but is available today for you to make the most off.
Antony
Retail Property & the Internet: Only the Paranoid will survive
June 2013
According to a report out this week from CBRE ‘Four in five shoppers ‘prefer the high street over the internet for clothes’. Well, all I can say is that if you are in clothes retailing, or a landlord to tenants in this market, you better take this with a pinch of salt. Only the paranoid will survive the internet.
As reported in The Telegraph ‘in the UK, less than half of consumers, 38pc, think they will shop online more in the future, suggesting that a change in customer habits may not be as radical as feared.
Of the customers who shopped online, 85pc said it was still important to visit stores to see and to try on clothes.
Peter Gold at CBRE said: “The essentials of a successful retail destination – value, convenience, cleanliness and security – remain uppermost in shoppers’ minds.
“While many retailers are adapting to technological advances, consumers are telling us that they do not intend to radically change their shopping habits in the immediate future.” ‘
For any of the above to be true the underlying trends seen in the last ten years vis a vis the growth of Internet shopping must have ground to a decisive end. The chart below suggests otherwise.
The Centre for Retail Research in May opined that ‘online retail continues to grow and is predicted to account for 21.5% of all retail sales by 2018’. In addition, there could be 316,000 job losses in the same period due to what the CRR describes as the “growing retail crisis”. Read more of this here.
So take your pick: No need to worry OR where are those beads?
I am firmly in the ‘where are those beads’ camp. There is absolutely no way that the internet is not going to become an ever more important factor in retail and those who blithely believe that consumer behavior is not going to change much are in great danger. In fact they are dead men walking; the only variable being their time on death row.
Why?
1. Bandwidth continues to increase and as it does it means the consumption of online services just gets smoother and smoother. Once you have access to super fast wifi (or 4g) your browsing behavior changes and you spend more time online. Simply because it is a more pleasurable experience.
2. And as bandwidth increases retailers and other service providers start to provide new services that take advantage of that speed. So you become aware of richer, more engrossing, more engaging online experiences. Ones that offer you more information, more tailored to your desires and wishes.
3. Hardware improves relentlessly. Your smartphone just gets better; faster, better screen, better camera, better maps. And every improvement just makes sharing easier and shoppers love sharing. It’s just that they don’t necessarily need to do it face to face anymore. Add in the iPad and other tablets and virtual shopping has genuinely started to become a major hobby. Multi screening from the sofa, TV on and wine in hand is the setting for many a happy hour ‘down the shops’.
4. It’s so damn easy. Amazon is of course the king in this area with their one click and prime options making ‘frictionless capitalism’ a wondrous reality. But many others make ordering super simple, such as John Lewis who have been repaid by seeing extraordinary growth in their online sales soaring 40% in the last year.
5. The online shopping experience is improving all the time. The heavily curated, personalised experience that the likes of Net-a-Porter or Rapha provide is frankly a pleasure to challenge most offline shopping trips. Only the best stores compete. Indeed if you listen to Burberry they make it clear that the purpose of their flagship stores is to replicate the web experience and not vice versa.
6. Online one has access to all available stock (in the better stores), whereas only the biggest and best physical stores do. Online one can also read reviews, watch videos, compare, contrast products and price match.
7. Delivery and returns. By making delivery fast (increasingly next day or in urban areas coming soon same day) and returns free and easy the online merchants have neutralised a major drawback of online, namely the lack of ‘instant gratification’ one gets in physical stores. Next day does it for many.
So there are seven reasons why online sales will only increase and the internet will become increasingly part and parcel of most peoples shopping habits. Unless you can compete with all these you really do need to start worrying. And frankly not that many retailers have the scale, clout and stores to do so. The whole market is bound to bifurcate between large, experiential flagship stores and smaller boutique type outlets that know their market intimately and can curate small collections for niche markets. In the middle will be a bad place to be, as they fail to excel in any area and even the most committed shopper will go elsewhere, even online.
From a property perspective one must either hope that CBRE are right and that not much is going to change and life will return to the nirvana of the pre 2007 financial meltdown or start to get paranoid and obsess about the transformational nature of modern technology.
Over to you. I’m happy in my choice. Are you?
Antony
Twitter for Business - a Primer
June 2013
We’ve put together a guide to using Twitter for Business.
It covers:
What is Twitter?
Who uses it?
Why use it?
Getting started
Anatomy of a tweet
Trending topics
Search
Who to follow
Lists
What to tweet about
Tools for pros
Do’s…
Don’ts…
How to lose followers
Innovation osmosis
We think it is a pretty good primer. Please feel free to use and share.
Commercial property: why is the most sociable of industries so anti-social?
June 2013
Given that property people love to chat, network and exchange gossip you’d have thought that they would be amongst the first to embrace social media. You would think that an industry that makes so much of being ‘a people business’ would flock to an outlet that was centered entirely around people.
Unfortunately not. In fact commercial property (office, retail but not residential) is maybe the least social sector out there. With a few exceptions the whole industry in social media terms is pretty much offline. Hardly anyone (in percentage terms) tweets, blogs, podcasts, produces videos, shares photos or otherwise engages with the ‘sharing economy’ at all.
Why is this? Frankly I’ve no idea. It’s not that the industry lacks brains, or personality, or bonhomie. The base ingredients for successful socialising. It’s not a stuffy world, in fact it is generally meritocratic and ‘go getter’. So why is it not, as an industry, knocking social out of the park like Angela Ahrendts of Burberry fame?
The answer surely is the perversely luddite take the industry has regarding technology. The times one comes across technological ignorance being worn as a badge of honour are legion. It’s almost like the aristocracy luxuriating in their scruffiness. The done thing is to not DO tech. I exaggerate perhaps, and an increasing minority are rebelling against this mindset but nevertheless the point is valid.
Does this matter? Well, I’ve certainly been challenged to explain exactly why ‘ I should bother’ many times. What’s in it for me?
SO, WHAT IS IN IT FOR YOU?
In summary the following; but it’s THE BIG POINT that counts (more on that later).
Personally you can meet a lot of very interesting people. It is unlikely where you work has a monopoly on brains so a shortcut to enquiring minds has to be a good thing.
Personally you can also demonstrate to all and sundry that you too are an interesting, skilled person with an enquiring mind. If you are not, try harder.
When interesting enquiring people, in the same line of business, collaborate and communicate then business gets done. It really does. You don’t sell on twitter, but it is a great sales tool.
Corporately you can do the same. With a twist. By showing you are a skilled outfit, employing enquiring interesting and engaging staff you will attract the best young talent. And without them, long term you are in trouble.
Corporately you can also turn yourselves into a real time, committed service provider. For example, why do annual tenant surveys when you could solicit the same information on an ongoing basis? Annual reports aren’t really actionable are they? Social media allows for a conversation with your customers. Both sides benefit. Do it. Your competitors will (sooner or later, even in property).
For individuals and corporately Twitter is an awesome ideas factory. Follow the right people, and you will come across a cornucopia of new ideas. And if you are familiar with The Wisdom of Crowds By James Surowiecki what could be better?
The above should be enough to answer ‘what’s in it for me’, though McKinsey in their report The social economy estimate that internal use of social media tools are three times more valuable. I’ll return to those internal tools in a later post. That value by the way is estimated by McKinsey at $900 billion to $1.3 trillion annually across just four business sectors.
However, all the above is to me missing THE BIG POINT;
Which is that if you do not interest yourself in these technologies the penalties will, given time, be huge. This is not a passing fad, something that is just for the kids or geeks. Sharing, social, collaborative and above all mobile technology is reshaping society and in turn will reshape all businesses. The glory days of 2002-2007 are not coming back. Most of the factors governing demand prior to ‘the great crash’ will not return. Demand will return, but it will be different quantitatively and qualitatively.
Servicing the new demand means understanding what users/customers want and how they want to be serviced. And emphatically you will not understand that staring at a Blackberry. You have to dive in and figure out the way things are now. Why has Facebook One Billion users? Or LinkedIn so powerful? Or mobile so pervasive? How will Cloud Computing make certain offices, businesses or people obsolete?
I have seen so much money wasted and opportunities lost by property related companies doing things the ‘old school’ way and completely failing to engage with their audience, their customers. Websites that cost a fortune to build but lack all interaction. New product/building launches that are just brochureware. Reports offered online that are unreadable on mobile devices. All because those commissioning these things do not use the technology and therefore have no idea how to do it right.
So THE BIG POINT is that all else is pointless unless you go with the flow and get social.
After all as @garyvee said just yesterday :
‘The best way to go out of business is to be romantic about how things used to be’
Antony
Tech for Commercial Property - Megatrend No 4: Connectivity
May 2013
Megatrends 1, 2 and 3 – Mobile, The Cloud and the Internet of Things – are dead in the water without Megatrend No 4: Connectivity.
Everything progressive, innovative, transformational about technology today is dependant on connectivity. It is the connective tissue that allows ‘The Modern World’ to function.
And we need more of it, at much higher speeds, available whenever and wherever.
Why?
Because every time bandwidth increases it enables a whole new cycle of technological innovation. Some things wished for years are suddenly possible and some things totally unexpected suddenly appear.
Go back to 2000. Early days of broadband. Lucky early adopters got access to 2mb broadband. Great BUT. Billions were wasted by media/web companies developing high spec sites and trying to roll out ‘video on demand’ type services. Nothing quite worked. The connectivity just wasn’t good enough. Today, with 100mb broadband at home, we think nothing off streaming live TV or movies. Hello Netflix, goodbye Blockbuster.
Or cast you mind back to 2007 and the launch of the iPhone. Yes, just 6 years ago. Transformational wasn’t it? The hot thing the day before was the clamshell Razr. Bang, game over. Then to now have been all about Apple and Android. The 1st iPhone didn’t even have 3G – now we have 20mb 4G. And how we use our phones has been revolutionised. Many of us hardly even use them as phones, or if we do we use Skype. No, these are portable computers with instant on and constant availability. Hell, we can even get fast wifi down the tube.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. None even ten years old. But central to our lives. Or most of us. All the product of a world that moved from Dial Up Internet access to Broadband.
The image below shows the same scene, from the Pope’s inauguration, in 2005 and 2013. Spot the difference? Everything is the same, but different. Extrapolate to 2020….
Now let’s speed things up.
Larry Page of Google was asked at their developer conference this week why they were connecting up whole cities with Gigabit fibre internet (Google Fiber). His answer amounted to saying it’s just silly to not connect all their data centres to people at the fastest speed possible. So much computing power is now available (via the Cloud) that if you give people access to that power they will think of amazing things to do with it. Such as driverless cars, real time language translation, real time satellite mapping, voice controlled search and on and on. We simply do not know what will emerge. The key though is that we need connectivity at a speed comparable to the computing grunt we have available.
One hears much talk today of information overload, but that is exactly the wrong way to see things. The problem is not too much information, it is filter failure. The inability of your software to filter out what information you actually need. Who would not want the perfect answer available on demand? That though requires great filters. And it is these that swarms of developers are now working on providing via the cloud. Think of Apple’s Siri software on the iPhone. You ask it a question, it goes off to a monster data center, parses all the information available and returns you an answer. All in seconds.
Which is of course where superfast connectivity comes in. Get that and the unimaginable will happen.
Ironically the best chance you have of getting this today is if you live in rural Yorkshire. Fed up with being unplugged the great people at Br4n decided to lay their their own ‘fiber to the house’. And this is what they offer:
The UK Government has a stated aim to have the whole country wired up at at least 2mb by 2015. That is almost beyond parody it is so laughable a goal. In South Korea the aim is 100% at 2 Gigabit.
For about £5 billion we could fibre wire up the whole UK, in a few years. Instead it looks like we’ll spend £32 billion on a shiny new train set ready for use decades hence.
Time to get real UK. Connectivity matters. More than almost anything else.
Antony
PS: Two specific requests to the commercial property industry. First, if you are wise enough to offer free wifi in your buildings (you are wise aren’t you?) please make it fast enough that it is usable. Sharing a couple of mb between many users is not good enough. And secondly, stop the practice of offering free wifi but for only a short period of time. That does not help anyone.