New Sim City coming

Although this might seem like a shameless plug for my brother Scott who is a programmer at Maxis working on the new Sim City game, I wanted to share that its an amazing piece of virtual real estate.


The Urban Land Institute recently featured the game in its magazine – the article can be found here.

My kiddos and I were fortunate enough to try a beta, and I’ve got to admit the realism is amazing and the game play is addictive.

Pre-orders are being taken for a March 2013 release date for $59 for Mac or PC.

Building a 30 story building in 15 days


Surpassing a previous record of building a 15 story hotel building in 6 days, the Chinese company, the Broad Group has constructed a 30 story building in only 15 days.

It would appear a majority of the building was built off site in panels that were lifted into place, a practice that is likely to become much more common in the near future. A 6 minute time lapsed video can be viewed here.

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for the original article.

Book review: Best read for 2011: Aerotropolis


Aerotropolis, the way we’ll live next
Authors: Greg Lindsay & John D. Kasarda,
Publishing Info: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nonfiction, First edition published March 1st, 2011

As an international instructor for the CCIM institute I discovered that the book, Aerotropolis: the way we’ll live next dovetails nicely with what the just-in-time delivery model as a primary driver of demand for industrial space that we teach in the CCIM 102 course, I would highly recommend it to anyone in commercial real estate.

As a rabid book consumer, I will easily digest about 100+ books a year, and without a doubt, Aerotroplis: the way we’ll live next has become not only my favorite book of this year, but one of my all time favorite business books. It is one of those rare books that I thoroughly enjoyed reading that I found myself moderating how much I could read daily so I can push the ending of the book out as long as possible.

My favorite magazine, The Economist recently offered a glowing review of Aereotroplis, stating “In Aerotropolis, John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina and his co-author, Greg Lindsay, convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life.”

The theme of the book is that successful cities of the future will be wrapped around successful airports and those cities that can’t adapt may be passed by. Its authors state the books hypothesis as an equation related to time “The aerotropolis is a time machine. Time is the ultimately finite commodity setting the exchange rates for all the choices we make.”

Author and reporter, Greg Lindsay, expands and expounds on the John Kasarda’s original idea that airports are the highways of the future. As a former Fast Company and Wired magazine reporter, Mr. Lindsay racks up the frequent flyer miles talking with civic leaders, CEO’s and company logicians as he interviews them on their home turf about the importance of air transit to their communities, companies or supply chains future.

As a fellow traveler, I reminisced about Mr. Lindsay’s travels to well-known airports like Chicago’s O’Hare, Atlanta’s Hartsfield, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, or even Hong Kong’s International, but I was green with envy over his trips to Dubai’s Al Maktoum International Airport or South Korea’s Incheon airport and adjoining master planned Songdo International Business District. One story of Mr. Lindsay tracking his gift of flowers from the Aalsmeer flower auction in Amsterdam to his mother’s front porch will endear Mr. Lindsay to the reader as an extremely diligent reporter and respectful son. Even more surprising than his few thousand mile journey for flowers was his mother’s reaction.

Some of the books concepts in the book are eye opening such as “The world’s urban population is poised to nearly double by 2050, adding another three billion people to places like Chongqing. We will build more cities (and slums) in the next forty years than we did in the first nine thousand years of civilized existence. The United Nations predicts the vast majority will flood cities in Africa and Asia, especially China.”

Or this quote about South Korea “South Korea’s capital is the archetypal twentieth-century megacity, doubling in size every decade or so since 1950 to twenty-four million inhabitants—the second most populous on earth after greater Tokyo.”

Or my favorite quote about a Chinese based manufacturer: “We had barely crossed the border before he opened his laptop and began walking me through the true costs of those shipments. He’d built a widget calculating every conceivable variable: the weight, volume, value, and quantity of the products in question; the lead times for sourcing and building them; time spent in transit; their shelf life; the spread between paying his vendors and being paid himself; the cost of money in the meantime; and the cost of returns. An entire calculus, in other words, underlies the pivotal question of our era: What is the price of speed? The widget’s answer: slow is more expensive. The only thing faster than a FedEx 777 Freighter out of Hong Kong is the velocity of money, and the last thing Casey wants to pay for are the days his parcels are stuck on a boat. Obsolescence sets in the moment they leave the factory. “Revenue evaporation,” he calls it. “Air freight is key,” he muttered while running the numbers. “We like to work with products that can go by air. We build them in Shenzhen, and they’re in New York two days later. Time is often our number one currency, and the dollar is second.” ”

And this quote summarized the breath taking feelings I experienced in my many visits to China for CCIM’s education program: “China is placing the single biggest bet on aviation of any country, ever. Even before the crisis and China’s subsequent stimulus, the central government announced as part of its Eleventh Five-Year Plan that it would build a hundred new airports by 2020, at a cost of $62 billion. The first forty were ready last year. The vast majority lie inland, hugging provincial capitals and secondary cities bigger than any in the States. Full-scale aerotropoli are planned for China’s western hubs, Chongqing and Chengdu, and its ancient capital. Besides airports, China laid as many miles of high-speed railroad track in the last five years as Europe did in the last two decades. The trains, in turn, are meant to keep people off the highways, to which China’s adding thirty thousand miles—enough to eclipse the American interstate highway system. China’s planners have internalized the lessons of America’s Eisenhower-era infrastructure boom, designing a world-class system for moving people and goods quickly, cheaply, and reliably across any distance, whether locally by highway, regionally by rail, or globally by air. The plan is to pick up and move large swaths of the Delta hundreds or even thousands of miles inland. There is nothing to stop them.

And this quote on where the future global cities will be “Finding another five hundred million passengers 7should be easy. China has anywhere between 125 and 150 cities with populations greater than a million. The United States has nine; Europe, thirty-six. When the first phase of China’s airport-building boom is complete, the number of hubs handling thirty million passengers annually—more than Boston’s Logan or Washington’s Dulles—will have risen from three to thirteen, all of which will be the host of aerotropoli. By the time they’re finished in 2020, 82 percent of the population—1.5 billion people—will live within a ninety-minute drive of an airport, nearly twice the number today.”

The book dovetails nicely with some of my other favorite business reads like Marc Levinson’s “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” and Sasha Issenberg’s “The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy” both of which deal with just in time delivery and creating new markets.

Additional topics addressed in Aerotroplis include Peak Oil vs. Peak Food, globalization as a tool to pull the poor into the middle class vs. the carbon footprint of globalization via air travel, and the true cost of air travel in both economic and environmental terms.

If you enjoy Aerotroplis as much as I did, you might also read the June edition of Southwest Airline’s Spirit magazine as Mr. Lindsay has recently penned an article titled “Corporate Latter”. In this article he builds on the concepts discussed in Aerotroplis and discusses how technology has allowed us to shift away from being tied to an office, setting up shop at any location (http://www.spiritmag.com/click_this/article/the_corporate_latter/) . One economic development guru and author, Mark Lautman, is pushing this idea as the next evolution of cutting edge business recruitment – to scale down the benefits big corporations receive so communities can chase the highly mobile, quality of life comes first businessperson/consultant who eventually expands their business and hires staff. According to “When the Boomers Bail: A Community Economic Survival Guide”, this segment of our economic businesses is one of the fastest growing.

Not only would I highly recommend you read Aerotroplis, I would encourage you to purchase copies to share with your family, friends and clients as the conversations started from the concepts in the book are engaging, enlightening and very relevant to anyone with commercial real estate.

Todd Clarke CCIM

Aerotropolis can be purchased at: http://www.amazon.com/Aerotropolis-Way-Well-Live-Next/dp/0374100195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306590616&sr=8-1

Apartment update/forecast – ULI Dec. 2010

% of inventory turn every year - Albuquerque Apartments

The New Mexico ULI chapter December meeting was a commercial real estate update that included Steve Maestas from NAI Maestas/Ward, John Ransom from Grubb & Ellis NM, Jim Folkman from the Home Builders of Central NM, and myself, Todd Clarke from NM Apartment Advisors Inc.

Our presentation can be viewed here.

How cars have shaped modern society…

vwgarage
A good friend, developer, proffesor and author friend of mine, Chris Lienberger, wrote a fabulous book titled “Option of Urbanism” a couple of years ago. One of the items I was stunned to learn is that GM designed and presented their vision of a future metropolis – centered around cars.

Some sixty years later, many of our cities resemble that comment.

It is interesting to see how some communities are dealing with this issue by designing parking structures that don’t resemble parking lots…

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for sharing with us this lot from VW and this automated lot in Russia complete with a photo gallery.

garagecar

Those of you interested in Chris’s book can purchase it here:

Film Channel relocates from MN to NM

A Copyrighted article from the NM Business Weekly indicates that Albuquerque has landed 100 new jobs and a corporate headquarters for the ReelzChannel.

Gov. Bill Richardson made the announcement today with Stan E. Hubbard, chairman and CEO of ReelzChannel – TV About Movies. ReelzChannel is owned by Hubbard Media Group, which also owns KOB-TV, Channel 4, in Albuquerque.

With this addition, maybe its time for the Hubbard Media group to look at relocating Channel 4 from the back end of the Albuquerque Country Club to the middle of downtown. Doing so would create more vibrancy (think of Good Morning America) around downtown and would free up some valuable land near the Bosque, Kit Carson Park, Zoo/Bio Park for additional residential development.

Suncal goes on the offensive and promotes TIDDs

Suncal, the recent buyer of Westland’s 64,000 acres, originally known as the Atrisco Land grant, has started promoting the benefits of Tax Increment Development Districts or TIDDS as it continues to seek the City’s approval of its development plan.

TIDDS are also in the works for the redevelopment of the Winrock shopping center (named for one of its original developers, Winthrop Rockfeller) and for the Quorum (ABQ Uptown Phase III).

Quorum (ABQ uptown Phase III)

In a copyrighted story by the Albuqueruque Journal Phase III of the very successful ABQ Uptown project is in the planning stages. Cantera Consultants & Advisors Inc. consulted on Phase II (ABQ Uptown apartments) and Phase III (Quorum).

Monday, May 5, 2008

3rd Phase of ABQ Uptown Includes Hotel, Offices, Shops, Condos and Parking Structures

By Richard Metcalf
Copyright © 2008 Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer
Quorum, the moniker of Hunt Development Group’s final and arguably most ambitious phase of its ABQ Uptown development, is designed to capture a densely developed and stylishly designed mix of uses.
Included in the $100 million project are a seven-story hotel, offices for both lease and purchase, shops, residential condos and extensive parking structures on the now-vacant 7.5 acres bounded by Louisiana, Indian School and Uptown Loop NE.
“It’s a one-of-a-kind piece of dirt,” said Trent Stafford, a Hunt vice president in charge of the project. “You can do things here you couldn’t pull off anywhere else in this market.”
The name of the third phase— Quorum— follows a “Q” theme established in the opening phase of ABQ Uptown, the lifestyle center with its chic stores and restaurants. The center has a tower with an illuminated Q on top. (Q also serves as a trendy slang abbreviation for Albuquerque.)
The second phase of the project, ABQ Uptown Village, has 198 apartments just west of the lifestyle center on the north side of Indian School.
Still under construction, the apartment project should be ready for tours by potential tenants in late May, said Terri Brown of Southwest Real Estate Advisors Inc.
The first tenants are expected to move in in June, said Brown, whose company will manage the apartment complex.

Almost a half-million square feet
Quorum, at a total of approximately 490,000 square feet on three blocks, would be the most dense use of land outside of Downtown, Stafford said.
Hunt Development’s goal is to begin construction late this year or early 2009. The roughly $100 million project would take about two years to build, Stafford said.
The first major component of the third phase would be a two-level underground parking structure that would take up roughly half of the site. The structure would have about 530 spaces.
The preliminary ground-level layout shows five buildings, a plaza and a park. One of the lifestyle center’s main thoroughfares, Q Street, would be extended south into the Quorum phase.
The highest-profile building would be a seven-story, 152,000-square-foot hotel near Louisiana and Uptown Loop.
A hotel that size would have about 200 rooms. Negotiations are under way with a hospitality company to own and operate it.
Two mixed-use buildings are also proposed:

A two- and three-story building with up to 80,000 square feet of offices. The ground floor of one wing in the L-shaped building would be used for retail.

A five-story building at the corner of Indian School and Uptown Loop would have some retail on the first floor and its own parking. The top three floors would have about 95,000 square feet of residential condos. Condo owners would have access to a rooftop swimming pool above a second-floor parking level.
The final phase would also have two restaurant buildings, both single story, along Louisiana.

Parking assistance
Hunt Development plans to seek approval of a Tax Increment Development District to cover the cost of the parking structures.
A TIDD is an incentive for private development of a designated area that meets a local government’s land-use goals and objectives.
A TIDD works by diverting a portion of the gross receipts and property taxes generated in the designated area from government coffers to a special fund to pay for infrastructure improvements.
Hunt will seek approval of its proposed TIDD from the city, county and state, Stafford said. Details are still being worked out.
City Councilor Sally Mayer, who represents Uptown, said she expected city approval of the TIDD because the Quorum project is urban infill— one of the goals of the TIDD program.
Vacant for just more than 20 years, the property currently generates no tax revenue, “but a lot of dust,” she said.
The southeast corner of Louisiana and Indian School NE was home to Monroe Junior High School from 1952 to 1974.
Albuquerque Public Schools closed the school due to commercial development and traffic congestion in Uptown, but continued to use the building until mid-1987.
The property was sold to a private development company, which tore down the building in 1988 and then defaulted on its purchase.
APS regained ownership of the land and, in early 2002, sold it to Hunt Development.
Hunt plans to submit its proposed development plan to the city Environmental Planning Commission in June.
Mayer said the proposal, with its residential condo component, conforms with the current Uptown Sector Plan.
Adopted in 1995, the sector plan says past ideas for developing the Monroe site included a 400-room hotel and 500,000 square feet of office space.