On October 15th, over 1,300 real estate professionals from across North America converged at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live. Steve Wozniak, otherwise known as The Woz, kicked off the day to a packed house. His keynote was followed by a number of insightful sessions spread over several tracks.
In a session titled Designing Office Space for Intergenerational Collaboration, there was interesting dialogue about the importance of face-to-face interaction in the successful transfer of knowledge between senior and junior staff.
The panel, made up of Deanne Erpelding from Nelson and Shannon Woodcock from Savills and moderated by Rivka Altman from Invesco Real Estate, shared that this dynamic was found across a variety of industries. They went on to share that while engaging those who will be using the office can be highly beneficial that younger individuals are more likely to speak up and as a result can skew results on the importance of a given topic such as amenities, which includes parking.
During another session titled Global Investments Trends and Opportunities, the panel shared that global interest in investing in the US office sector remains high. The panel, made up of Ambrish Baisiwala from Portman Holdings, Laurence Bastien from PSP Investments and Audrey Koehn from DLR Group and moderated by Bahram Motamedian, discussed office trends such as the high demand for amenity rich space, its densification, changing parking ratios and shared parking as a best practice.
Mid-day, amidst a full day of sessions, Hessam Nadji, CEO of Marcus & Millichap and Richard Fry, Ph.D., senior economist at Pew Research Center, spoke on the economy. Nadji told the NAIOP audience that sounding the alarm for a near-term downturn is premature and basing forecasts on time-honored formulas is no longer the right approach. He shared that they look at a number of indicators and with both solid job numbers and ample capital in the marketplace looking for real estate opportunities he is not seeing cause for worry.
In sum, it was a great day with old and new friends. We look forward to seeing everyone in Las Vegas in 2020!
