“Build it, and they will come.” That famous line, inspired by the movie Field of Dreams was a source of inspiration for builders everywhere. An Iowa farmer turns a cornfield into a ballpark that attracts the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and other players banned in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. The 1989 movie uses the [...]

 
High Rise, published in the early 90s, is a fascinating read about the development and unfortunate timing of the delivery of a Manhattan office building into the incredibly weak early 1990s market. The central character is New York developer Bruce Eichner, and the building in question is the now Bertelsmann Building, located at 1540 Broadway, [...]

Want a ready-to-bake project? The American Institute of Architects has done a great job executing on their vision of assembling a listing of what it calls “stalled” projects. They currently have over 30 projects nationwide, and the AIA serves as matchmaker if you want to inquire about a project. Accessing the database requires that you [...]

Resources are limited. When you are ready to build, you need to find a team that offers hands-on expertise, experience, credentials and a full staff of experts from pre-construction through final punch list. Whether it’s a design-build delivery or construction management, you don’t want to leave your schedule, cost or quality to chance.
Collaboration starts early [...]

There was a survey done by SmartPulse where nearly 50 percent of respondents said “poorly defined scopes and objectives” were the main reasons for project failures. Compare that to about 20 percent claiming projects fail, because of lack of proper resources or poor execution, and you can see that inferior planning is hampering much of [...]

Disclosure: REFM consults to Renaissance Downtowns on financial modeling.
There was a recent NYT article about something new and progressive that is going on in the world of Master Development - allowing a community to vote online for which real estate uses it desires to see developed. This crowdsourcing of the proposed mix of uses that could [...]

When I was progressing through business school in the early 2000′s, I was dead-set on working in real estate development. In particular, I wanted to work for someone developing hip, urban, infill lofts. I was lucky enough to land a job doing land acquisition for a company that was developing that very product in Washington, [...]

There is some more good news for city housing prices, as reported by The Real Estate Board of New York. Sales prices increased 2 percent from last quarter and three from the same period a year ago. The Upper East Side led all city neighborhoods with 587 sales. 
The Wall Street Journal also says that the [...]

In the fall of 2007, I was six months into my first full-time, entrepreneurial venture as a residential real estate developer. I had worked up the nerve to quit my well-paying job as the Director of Acquisitions at a Washington, DC condominium developer, and had teamed up with a partner.
While I was visiting my parents at [...]

As an architect and designer, I’m very interested in cultivating my knowledge of choices or strategies I can call upon in projects of various scales and types. As we are collectively aging in place, so are our commercial buildings, our schools, homes and service buildings. In 2011 we face yet another spiking and upward trending [...]