> - What top 3 trends do you think would have the most impact on this
> group (1-3 years out)?
1 - there's a lot of kicking and fighting among online providers to
get real-estate products working right now.. within three years, i
expect the majority of the dust to have settled, and some level of
general solution dominating the market.
the two major contenders in the arena are local providers who are
strongly tied to whatever MLS system dominates the area, and large,
nonlocal service bureaus who can offer a much wider range of services.
from the small business point of view, that means having to deal
with the local newspaper versus having to deal with a Microsoft
800-line, or its equivalent.
2 - basic data connectivity is becoming as much a requirement as
electricity and water. there are a whole lot of properties out there
with lousy wiring and inadequate power, and those factors will start
to become an issue, both in closing a deal and in general maintenance.
connectivity will be an especially strong issue among younger,
technically savvy people, which is a market segment getting wealthier
all the time. they won't put up with a property that can't connect
to the net easily.
also, while i see this as being more than 3 years out, the growing
push for data appliances will also carry a demand for better in-home
wiring. the person who's just bought a VCR that can be programmed
through their PC won't be happy about having to string a cat-5 jumper
from the entertainment center to the office. this is even more true
for commercial properties.. no tech in their right mind would take
offices in a location that didn't have network jacks in every room,
and plenty of them.
probably the best basic investment a property owner can make today
will be hiring a competent electrician to run good-quality data points
to every room. for commercial properties and apartment buildings,
there will also be major issues involved with getting enough incoming
lines run the the demarc point outside the building. both will take
non-trivial investments of time and money. still, they'll be better
off if they start planning now, rather than waiting for the rush.
for the ones who really want to think ahead, there's the option of
wiring a dedicated connection into an office building or apartment
complex, then wiring all the units to that. much more work, and much
more costly, but imagine how good a selling point established
connectivity could be.
3 - it's my personal opinion that the net will quite literally change
the shape of society. properties along the edges of urban areas, and
in surrounding small towns, will become significantly more valuable
investments.
the shape of the cities we currently inhabit was determined by
combining two technologies: the telephone and the automobile.
150-story office buildings allow similar businesses to concentrate,
but they're worthless if the phones go out. but they're rotten
living spaces, so people commute from the 'burbs into and out of the
office zone every day. thus we have the shape of the conventional,
late-20th-century city:
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a core of high-density office space, surrounded by a band of
residential space, then a much larger band of suburbs which extends to
the limits of driving range. toss in some support services and
industries, vary the scale a bit, and overlap a few dozen, offset
versions of the same pattern, and you have any major urban center.
the net breaks down the most important reasons for concentrating
businesses into a central core: bandwidth. a voice conversation on
a POTS line is great for checking small facts, but lousy for carrying
the large volumes of information most businesses need to operate.
before the net, that all still had to be carried on paper. a large
office building is the most efficient shape for getting a large number
of people into the same general area as a large amount of paper, so
that's how businesses organized themselves.
the net breaks that model down, because it has a tremendously higher
bandwidth. the mechanical effort of generating and transporting a
paper document is now significantly less efficient than putting the
same information into a computer file and sending it electronically.
the determining factor in business communications is no longer
physical proximity, but connection speed. sitting on a T1, here in
Iowa, i can get information electronically from Australia faster (and
more reliably) than i can get a printout from an office upstairs.
over the long term, businesses will reshape themselves to match their
new environment, which will result in greater dispersion:
..............:::::::::+++::::::::::::::::::+++:::::::::..............
| |
-- data beltway --
high-bandwidth WANs are easiest to set up and maintain if you build a
large loop of fiber (FDDI, SONET, whatever), then connect people to
that. a small number of businesses which need extremely high
bandwidth will place themselves close to the cable itself, but
everyone else will just stay within the range where the
price/bandwidth ratio is reasonable. around that will be a
residential band from which people can connect with standard dialup
accounts, or drive into the office if they need higher bandwidth.
from the small property manager's point of view, the rent dollars that
currently go to large skyscrapers will be moving out into their
territory. knowing how to spot the trends will give them a better
idea of where to buy, and where to develop.
> - What one thing do they need to know about technology?
not to take it so damned seriously.
a lot of people are writing themselves off as technological have-nots,
because they're intmidated by the amount of stuff that has to be
absorbed. they're not really beyond hope, they're just just
approaching the problem from the wrong direction. they constipate
themselves with the attempt to jam 2-3 years' worth of experience into
a 2-day manual binge, "because it's important".
that's a major losing strategy, but people still seem to cling to it.
what they *need* to do is learn how to enjoy tinkering with
technology.. whatever kind it may happen to be. instead of putting
their necks on the block to "motivate" themselves, they should try
opening a little scrap file whenever they want to find out what a
given command does.
the latter route is a lot slower, but it's also a lot more effective.
if your audience spend 2-3 years just playing with computers and the
net, they'll still have a heck of a lot better background than they
would doing it 'seriously'.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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