Miami After 90 Days Of COVID: 'The Distress Is Definitely Coming'

For decades, Miami officials have tangled over whether and how to connect downtown Miami, which is on the mainland, with Miami Beach, which is on a barrier island on the other side of Biscayne Bay, via mass transit.In recent years, officials have decided that the route should be a priority and that…

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Triple Five Group, the developer of the Mall of America outside Minneapolis and the American Dream mall in New Jersey, with another one planned for Miami, is facing acute financial troubles because of the coronavirus.Canadian Triple Five, owned by the Ghermezian family, has about $5B in debt on its properties and has…

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The phrase ”digital twin” sounds like something from science fiction, but it’s already here, and it has the potential to reshape building management.

Digital twins are appearing in all sorts of industries. The market was worth $3.8B worldwide in 2019 and is growing rapidly at 45% or more per year to potentially reach $35.8B by 2025, according to Markets and Markets.

Within commercial real estate, a digital twin is a virtual replica of a building. It is connected to real-time data flowing from sensors, meters and systems throughout the building, tracking metrics like air quality, temperature and electricity usage.

Advocates of digital twin technology say that by analyzing that data, building owners and operators can maintain their assets more easily, improve performance and save significant amounts of money through optimization. That’s in addition to boosting the health and wellness of the building’s occupants.

Digital twins are still in the early adoption stage, owing to their relatively new development and high price point. But as the technology improves and more competition enters the market, digital twin technology could soon become a standard part of building and managing a real estate asset.

“It's going to be huge,” said Michael Jansen, CEO of software company Cityzenith, which has a digital twin platform. “In five years, I think they will become the new normal for building industry technology.”

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This series aims to capture a moment in time, talking to men and women in commercial real estate about how their lives and businesses are being transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Evans Randall Investors chief executive Kent Gardner has one of the more extreme commutes in the real estate sector: He regularly travels between his home in Auckland, New Zealand, and London, where Evans Randall is based. That’s 11,407 miles. 

New Zealand’s isolated location means new cases of the coronavirus have been eliminated there, but that was a hard-won victory, and life is still not back to normal. Gardner explained how technology is making the world smaller, and how office leasing is changing due to the pandemic.

Read the full story here.

A traditional negotiating seminar aims to teach its participants how to negotiate. Rarely does it tackle the deeper questions, like why men tend to look at negotiating as a sports-like challenge, while women tend to approach it as they would going in for a root canal.

That was the obstacle for Quinn Texmo, a past chapter president of CREW who works in business development at Turner Construction Co. and her friend and mentor, Endicott Clay Products Architectural Representative Lisa Lackovic.

Gender is one of the most enduring topics of study in the field of negotiation, and one could wade through the findings for days. But the bottom line is a consensus that gender dynamics in negotiation are a major factor in the gender pay gap. In commercial real estate, as in many industries, various studies have found women make somewhere between 15% and 23% less than men on average.

Motivated by a desire to help close that gap, Texmo and Lackovic set out to help provide better salary negotiation resources — resources that might help improve comfort level, confidence and skill when it comes to broaching the ever-difficult salary conversation — to women in their local CREW chapter in Omaha.

Here are five points they teach.

Read the full story here.