Welcome MARKETWI.SE – Problem Solved (and my promise to you)

This is my first post here on MARKETWI.SE.  I am going to do my very best not to offend or alienate any of our early readers with the content of this post but I can’t promise anything.  I’m honored that John thought enough of my antics and limited knowledge of commercial real estate to invite me in as a regular contributor (with my very own user name and password! – very curious decision John….).  I’ll try to play nice.

John has done an amazing job of solving a problem many of us have.  We make our living in the commercial real estate market; therefore current and relevant news and information has real value to us.  Nobody has time to read or even skim every article that CoStar, Globe Street, WSJ, NYT, etc. push out day after day.  Have you tried chasing down Twitter links from even the people you most trust and respect on Twitter?  Total waste of time.  John has created MARKETWI.SE to streamline the process of finding and consuming the most important CRE news items.  Click the “CRE News from Twitter” link in the header of this site and see what I am talking about.  Presented in order of “relevance and resonance” you will find the snippets and links to the most actively discussed stories in commercial real estate, whether 5 minutes or 5 days old.  This feed allows me to consume my CRE news fix in a couple of 15 minute bursts a day rather than spending an hour or more scanning through thousands of posts in Google Reader (I’m looking at you Zero Hedge) and many times more posts in my Twitter feed.  I no longer need to curate my own news feed.  MARKETWI.SE does this for me.

John has promised me that I will be free to speak my mind here at MARKETWI.SE (getting tired of typing MARKETWI.SE already….).  I have never been afraid to write what I really think on my blog, Retail Chatr.  I can make one key promise that the readers can hold me to from here on out:  I will never write a post about something I don’t care about.  For example, the recent implosion of the Stuyvesant Town deal in NYC is meaningless to me as it relates to who lost what and and who is suing who.  To me this is not really real estate news, it is Wall Street news.  More importantly, you can read about it on about 2,000 other websites.  I have no interest in regurgitating content.  What is interesting to me about the Stuyvesant Town deal is the story within the story.  Specifically, the implications for investing in rent-controlled multi-family units.  That is a real estate story.

I like people to take a position and state their case.  That is how I try to write.  I welcome disagreement and encourage discussion.  Blogging involves professional risk.  Bloggers risk being wrong or having unpopular opinions or making a call that is proven wrong.  Being wrong sometimes is part of life.  Embrace it.  Learn from it.  Just don’t be neutral.

This is my promise to the readers of MARKETWI.SE: I will never be neutral and I will always put a stake in the ground so you know where I stand.  I hope you enjoy my contributions to the MARKETWI.SE community.  I’m excited to see where this can go.