Some of my other observations include: At a typical ICSC show I feel old, at this show I felt ancient. I had dinner on the first night with five or six people and besides Steve Felix of Investment Property News, who is almost as old as me, the average age at the table was probably 25 (I have some underwear older than that and the overall show was attended by very young people, mostly in their 20’s). Also, I noticed that at the evening cocktail party, most of those in attendance had their plates filled to the top, making this their main meal of the day. Their expense account was in all probability very limited, so unlike a typical ICSC show, few were going out afterwards to wine and dine in style ( I guess making a profit makes a company more generous in allowing their employees to eat well). Also, there were few brokers in the group, mostly operations people (they came to learn or keep abreast of changing technology, this was NOT a deal making crowd) and if there were few brokers, there were even fewer involved in retail real estate. I guess our industry is the slowest aspect of real estate to embrace technology. The group that appeared to be most abundant was multi-family developers, then industrial, then office. On-line web sites for managing your property was the most common type of software exhibited, then came wireless and broadband exhibitors along with demographic and listing services. I personally have problems with "trusting" all my corporate information to an on-line site that is waiting to be hacked and I don’t want to hear about all the safeguards in place. Microsoft has been hacked and I personally had credit card info hacked from a site. And if Microsoft can’t stop ‘em, no one can.

I have to mention one "toy" being exhibited. It’s about 6 ft. high and 4 ft. wide, with a transparent screen that produces what could be described as a low end hologram, where a live person who was located hundreds of miles away could interact with you in real time. I’d say that it was 70% of the way to making those participating feel they were interacting with a live person present in the same room. It was really impressive. The only negative is it costs $3,000 a month to rent but I’m sure in a few years, the technology will be even better and the cost will be $300 a month, making a lot of out of office meetings passe.

There were numerous interesting conferences but the two I found most intriguing were: "Investment Brokerage" and " Listing Property & Market Data...Who will provide it?" The first was a discussion by three real estate brokers who needless to say are extremely Internet and hi-tech oriented (why else would they invited to speak). Most of what they said I agreed with (i.e. in the near future there will be less brokers but they will be making more money; a lot more of the average real estate deals will be done on-line or at least more of the transaction will be done that way and the Net & e-mail are both great equalizers for smaller brokerage companies to compete with the "big boys" and enable the local broker to be national in scope). Where I disagree is that they put too much emphasis on being on-line and too little on the need for human contact. Yes, you have to be "on-line" to do your job right but not everything requires hi-tech. I personally don’t have a Palm Pilot and use a yellow pad for note taking and I’ve had a computer on my desk for over 20 years and have been on-line for 16 or 17 years. Sometimes simplicity is best.

One broker from a major brokerage house claims he no longer mails any sales packages; just delivers ‘em by e-mail or their web site and if the buyer doesn’t use e-mail, tough, he won’t deal with him. Now we’ve been using e-mail to send packages for seven years or so but many people still want it mailed or Fedexed. We use any and all tools to make a deal and don’t consider any form of communication passe. (If it ain’t broke, why fix it.) This broker also complained that discount brokerage was evil and would destroy the world as we know it (in the 19th century, when retail discounting first started local retailers took out full page ads in newspapers claiming discounting was the work of the devil and anyone who bought from them would end up in hell; I guess we haven’t changed that much over the last 200 years).

Generalizing, I think anyone who has to ability to visualize the future will have to concede that the commission structure as we currently know it will be changing in the very near future. That doesn’t mean the broker who is currently earning $150,000 a year will in the future only earn $75,000. In all probability, he’ll (she) will be earning $200,000 a year BUT the technology will make us more productive, so we will have to be doing a lot more deals because each will pay less. But who cares, as long as we’re making more money.

In another discussion regarding on-line listing services, one of the speakers asked the audience of 125 how many use these services and about 65% raised their hand. Then they asked how many made a deal because of the services and about 15% voted yes, which I think is excellent. LoopNet was, of course, the most commonly referred to site. The bigger discussion was whether or not these services can survive if they don’t start charging for listings shortly. (The consensus was they couldn’t but once they did, the depth of listings would disappear, so it’s a double-edged sword.) Many in the audience and panel felt that the future of the listing services will be shifting to a virtual brokerage company, in some manner sharing the commission with the broker.

Changing the topic, I have to "rant" for a moment. Three weeks ago we ran the results of an email survey sent to 1,400 attendees of the ICSC show in Vegas, asking their thoughts on how the show went. Over 73% said they liked the new format (Monday all day through Wednesday) and while I believe the survey accurately reflected the overall position of the attendees; they are wrong. We (the industry) lose too much from not being able to network as much or having as much social contact. But, if our results are correct the ICSC is getting positive feedback on the format and therefore won’t change back to the right way. See what you did...you ruined my fun and great networking time in Vegas!!!