My name is John Reeder.  I am a commercial real estate professional focusing on the land development market.  I am Southern California based, but I am interested in anything related to any high volume development market.  I practice under the umbrella of Sperry Van Ness, which is a national commercial brokerage firm.  This blog does not reflect the views of anybody at Sperry Van Ness.

Why am I blogging?  Good question.  I don’t know for sure, but here is what I suspect:

30% because I am a shameless self promoter, but corporate websites are a poor venue for random thoughts about the market.  I see the power that having an online professional persona has had for my blogger heroes (Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) and it seems like leveraging an online presence is a no brainer for a CRE professional.

40% because I always end up creating a bunch of charts and graphs, and I figured I may as well post them on the internet so that 6 visitors a month can look at them.

15% because I wish there was a really good commercial real estate blog.  I’m skeptical as to whether this site will be the really good blog I am hoping for, but it never hurts to try.  Investment real estate gets very little good coverage in the mainstream press (as in journalists do not understand investment real estate, not that it gets bad press), so the internet seems like a natural place to be able to read thoughtful commentary on the market.  But I guess I don’t really see it online either.

25% because I believe that we are nearing the next sea change that will affect the way that we conduct business.  Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are only starting to influence the way we conduct business.  I see this trend accelerating as the tools become more useful.  So I want to have my boat in the water when this sea change happens.

What is Real Property Alpha?  Real Property is obviously easy.  It’s another term for real estate.  So what is “alpha” for?  In this case alpha alludes to both its meaning in the investment world, as well as its meaning in the software industry.  In the investment world, alpha is a test for risk adjusted returns.  In the software industry, alpha is a pre-beta version of the software.  So it is the first step in the incremental innovation cycle that eventually leads to a full blown software product.

Incremental Innovation.  Beyond my obvious interest in the business of investment real estate, I am also fascinated by the process of incremental innovation.  Small innovations that take place over time, but which eventually revolutionize the way we do something.  Think back to Zack Morris’ cell phone.  Now fast forward to the iPhone.  Somewhere in the middle we took about 18 years to make the cell phone smaller, able to send text messages, able to send emails, able to send pictures, able to play music, able to sync with contact databases, etc.  It didn’t all happen at once.

Innovation in the real estate industry has been fairly disappointing to date.  I’m trying to think of something that we have now, that fundamentally changes the way that we do business, but that also wasn’t available to previous practitioners.  I can’t really think of anything.  In fact, as an example of how little impact technology has had on our business, three of the top five most successful real estate investors that I know don’t even use email.

Part of the reason that real estate has been slow in evolving is no doubt due to the fact that a lot of real estate capital is controlled by a generation that does not rely on technology.  This will change, and the sooner the better if you ask me.  I want to see innovations in the way we practice real estate that equal the innovations we have seen in the phone.  So to tie it back to the title of this website, I believe that we are now in the pre-beta version of real estate business of the future.  The tools that we have at our disposal in the future will make the tools we use today seem as quaint as black and white tv.