Now Is the Time to Get Back in the Game

LOS ANGELES-Following the morning sessions at the annual Real Estate 2010 conference on Tuesday, where virtually all panelists said that although headwinds remain to be reckoned with, the evidence of recovery keeps piling up, John Strockis, executive managing director of Voit Real Estate Services, took a few minutes to discuss being competitive in today’s marketplace. “In order to be relevant in this marketplace, you have had to probably change your business model over the past few years,” he said. “The great fall has started and the markets have changed…It isn’t Niagara Falls, but it is a start.”

Strockis pointed out that if you aren’t getting back in the game and responding to RFPs, he would question your business model right now. He used Voit as an example, where it looked at its operating model, and ramped up its asset services platform to leverage its brokerage division’s capacity to handle and understand distressed assets through collaboration with the company’s other divisions to offer a full spectrum of asset services during the cycle. “The market is now thawing out and you should be busier than you were last year.”

Next up was a panel titled “A Look at the Investment Sales Crystal Ball,” led by moderator Tony Natsis, a partner at Allen Matkins. “The world’s greatest liquidation sale in the history of mankind isn’t going to happen again,” began David Doupe, international director of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., “but business is happening again…There is money out there, but how deep is the pond?” He pointed out that values are starting to recover and if you look at history, the first buyers back into the marketplace are the ones that don’t have the investment committees that they have to go to. “The buyers will be private clients, opportunity funds and foreign investors,” he said. “Traditional institutional investors in real estate have footing.”