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After spending 3 days at the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)’s 2nd largest show in the world in New York City last week and having a week to dig out from the hundreds of emails, process the potential for new business, and follow up on last week’s meetings, I thought I would share some insight from the show and overall where the industry seems to be today.

There were many bright spots curating throughout the show, at a formal dinner I hosted, and all around the cocktail parties. These include the seemingly inevitable passage of some portion of the first tax reform in 30 years in the US, the early results of Black Friday and the overall optimism in the market. As I write this blog, I’m reading an article about retail sales jumping in the month of November…this is good news. I think something near a “settling in” is occurring in the industry, an understanding that the way people shop and how people live has changed, not ‘is changing’. No longer is news of a regional mall anchor’s closure triggering unnecessary panic or downward speculation, nor is the news about a 10-year-old lifestyle center going through a redevelopment and repurposing surprising…To me it’s more exciting and here is why; in a free market industry such as real estate no developer, broker, or tenant dictates how the market trades…only the market can. And the “market” is the consumer. The ‘changes” that are occurring are being responded to by the market with intuitive thinking and outside-the-box ideas. For the first time in the internet era, we are starting to ‘catch up’ on technology and instead of chasing the change are now building on this expectation in all aspects of our industry.

I hosted a dinner, had dozens of meetings, hopped around cocktail parties, shook a lot of hands, reconnected with old friends, and spent time with current ones….This show has always been a tremendous opportunity to reach the masses in a few short days, as long as you can handle the 18 hour days!

Welcome to the Bennett Blog…

This is why you should listen….

I formed Bennett Realty just over a year ago after spending the past 12+ years slugging through the commercial real estate industry, including working at small and big companies as a broker, starting a brokerage company with partners most recently, and developing properties during this time. While I achieved much success, I wasn’t happy. Not only did I no longer want to be in an operating partnership, I wanted a platform where I can do both brokerage and development in a boutique setting with a hands-on-approach, a model not commonly seen and perhaps doing the complete opposite of what is perceived as the “norm”….for these same reasons, we are launching the Bennett Blog.

I am not a big “poster” on social media and I don’t provide minute by minute updates of what I am doing throughout the day on Facebook or LinkedIn like the rest of the world but I have accepted that it is a big part of how people communicate and ultimately arrive at decisions about many things. The scary thing is that most of the things that are posted are not only baseless with bottomless thoughts, they are irrelevant to what I want to read so I’m here to express some thoughts about the real estate industry from a brokerage and development perspective with the main purpose to challenge the norm and candidly expose many of these inaccurate posting or news stories. If you would have asked me just a couple months ago if I would ever write a blog I would have laughed and said “who has time for that?”….but, I’m tired of reading about topics by “experts” who have not spent a day in the trenches of this business like I have. They haven’t seen the bottom and clawed their way up or become self-made in an industry that is perhaps the last frontier in the white-collar side of business. My intention for this blog to challenge much of what people say about the commercial real estate industry, get some things off my chest, and, as my SEO guy tells me, perhaps get my company greater exposure on the web…Being Normal Sucks!

Hope you enjoy this

Tyler Bennett
President/Founder
Bennett Realty Group, LLC