Author: David Osborn
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Ten Best Practice Points for Property Team Preparedness
What embodies risk within your real estate portfolio? Is it the damage that could be caused by water, mold, wind, rain, or aging? Is it a slip, a trip, or a fall? Is it a prolonged elevator entrapment; a disgruntled tenant employee who acts out; a media blitz on your building, or a public demonstration? …
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Maintaining LEED Certification Requires Operations Support
The Green Movement in Real Estate is growing darker. All new certification schemes, like all new growth, have that light green tinge when they begin that denotes suppleness. While it makes them amendable to change, it provides little armor when the going gets tough. As a result, many rating systems mature to a darker shade.…
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Commercial Office Decline in a Winning Commercial Market
The best defense is a great defense – Or so it seems to The National Football League (NFL), the nation’s premier sports league, which announced last Tuesday that it is relocating its headquarters to 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan and 175,000-square-foot, down from its current 205,000-square-foot headquarters at 280 Park Ave. This maneuver is no…
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10 Ways to Avoid the Ravages of a Double Dip Recession
There are a lot of definitions for a double-dip recession – some of them disgusting and all of them dire. Generally, the following is the technical definition: The economy fails to generate positive Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two consecutive fiscal quarters, recovers with at least one positive quarter, and then drops into the negative…
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Team Building in a Down Economy
When the going gets rough, team cohesiveness can break down and productivity plummets. Declining conditions breed controversy and contempt among subordinates. Good teams respond well. Great teams excel. Exceptional teams turn the challenge into an opportunity and achieve greatness. The latter case requires exceptional leadership. Your actions under fire set the tone for your company,…
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Mark Pain – CRE Debt Grounded by Continuing Value Declines
Back when S.L. Clemens was piloting riverboats in the murky fog of the Mississippi night, his deckhand tossed a marked “sounding line” and stone overboard attempting to locate the river bottom and measure the depth for passage. A riverboatman would cry out the depth in marks for safe passage with “twain”, two fathoms, meaning sufficient…
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Lessons from British Petroleum on Preventive Maintenance
British Petroleum is dead – deader than a petroleum jellyfish. Old Ben Franklin had it right when he said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – in fact 95,000 barrels a day of cure. The BP Oil spill is a perfect example of the idiom at work. Plainly stated, to have…
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Leadership Tips For the Ups and Downs of Economic Recovery
Things looked pretty good there for a minute. Employment was up. Companies showed profits. The market rebounded. Summer was on its way. Things looked good…then, Bang. Torrential rain, flooding, tornados, Greece, Gulf Oil, Afghanistan, Obama debt, and, to top it all off, a fat-fingered fiduciary falters from figure fatigue and we’re all back in the…
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Reach for the Sun- Create a Building Identity
The economy’s health is returning and, like young leaves in springtime, new jobs are beginning to bud. Yet, the recovering economy is not in steady bloom. The detritus of a long and blustery economic winter litters the real estate topography, shadowing the sun of increased demand. The recovery has its good days and its bad…
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Revenue Wreck-ognition – How a Tax Rule Killed a SaaS Deal
In the arcane world of tax law, there is an ogre of a rule that has choked a few deals to death. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Statement of Position 97-2 (“SOP 97-2”) provides that a company cannot report revenue as realized (earned) until it delivers the product or service. In the SaaS…