Episode Summary

  1. Commercial real estate has been dispersed from the everyone meeting the in office to every one being at home. This means that people are investing more, and thinking differently about the spaces they occupy potentially leading to a wellness design boom.
  2. Related to wellness, biophilic design, the art of bringing nature inside with natural light, shades of green, and more natural shapes also points to the trend of the dispersion of commercial real estate
  3. Blockchain continues to be growing on the fringes of the real estate industry with companies now allowing you to buy .001% of buildings. Change happens gradually then suddenly. And this might be just one of the many impacts that blockchain has on the real estate world.

The next real estate frontier? (2 min read)

Biophilic design and its relation to wellness. Short (3 min read) Long (64 page pdf)
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If it's not about how we design the space, it's how the transactions will be different? (List of 21 real estate blockchain companies)

Transcript

Hey everybody it's Kyle. Where, on this podcast, I share, discuss, ponder, and try to connect some dots through the best content I've discovered each week related to urban planning, architecture, and cities.

We're looking to create pattern recognition in our thinking. What are the things that keep happening? How do they affect our city spaces and places? Can we build case studies? How can we reference these to make our work and thinking stronger?

We're here to ultimately learn what are the patterns of development?

The next frontier in real estate is wellness?

To quote the article from Melody Song,

"Globally, wellness real estate is a $134B industry, growing 6.4% per year since 2015. And while healthy living was a hot trend before 2020, post-COVID health concerns have made it a mainstay.

According to a national survey, over 50% of renters/homeowners would pay extra for touchless building entry or germ-resistant countertops.

Plus, as more employees go remote, network effects around work and capital will weaken, leaving real estate primed to step in as the new center of community and connection."

I think what we're seeing is that dispersion from commercial real estate to residential real estate due to COVID.

A pattern we've talked about here quite a bit.The Commercial real estate economy is leaking and that money's going to go somewhere. And maybe it's going right here. Wellness real estate.

I don't have that gym in the office. Or near my office. I need at home. Because I want it to be open 24/7.

Wellness real estate I think is closely related to the next design trend of biophilic design.

Biophilia literally means 'an innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world'.

Biophilic design plays on our evolutionary need to be close to the natural world, and is often described as 'architecture of life'. Incorporating biophilia into our public and private spaces by bringing elements of the natural world into them is said to improve both physical and mental health, as well as encouraging productivity.

We're talking lots of natural light, shades of green, and taking cues from natural forms. This isn't the stark contrast of highly modern design. The straight lines of glass steel and concrete, replaced by the more random, fractal patterns of nature.

This might be the frontier of how we design our spaces -- keep that in mind developers -- and this applies to our public spaces as well -- urban planners --

Another frontier, we just talked about how we'll be designing these spaces is how we'll be transacting the ownership of these spaces.

In my newsletter I shared an article that included 21 blockchain real estate companies. The article, dated in July of this year, already has a couple of dead end links or the companies no longer appear to exist. At the very least, the decided to no longer do anything on social media.

That said there are 3 that stood out as intriguing options:

  • Vairt
  • RealT
  • Meridio

All of which claim to allow for fractional ownership in real estate. So if you can't afford to buy the duplex on the corner, you could put $100 in and make 5% on your 100 dollars.

The details are still fuzzy to me on this. The property still needs a custodian to collect the rent, take care of the property, then the custodian can disburse the money that's left over. It's almost like creating a real estate investment trust per property. It's really interesting stuff, and you could see how this democratization of real estate could dramatically change community development. You could now in theory crowd fund a project (and each crowd funder could own 1%).

Last up, I found something called SALT Lending which allows you to use the crypto currency that you have in your portfolio as collateral for a loan.

None of this is financial advice. This is pushing the boundries of my financial understanding. So don't do any of this because I'm talking about it. Please talk to a financial professional.

I'm sharing it here because there might be something. This might be an emerging pattern.

That leaves us with our learning inventory of the week:

  1. Commercial real estate has been dispersed from the everyone meeting the in office to every one being at home. This means that people are investing more, and thinking differently about the spaces they occupy potentially leading to a wellness design boom.
  2. Related to wellness, biophilic design, the art of bringing nature inside with natural light, shades of green, and more natural shapes also points to the trend of the dispersion of commercial real estate
  3. Blockchain continues to be growing on the fringes of the real estate industry with companies now allowing you to buy .001% of buildings. Change happens gradually then suddenly. And this might be just one of the many impacts that blockchain has on the real estate world.

That's all for this week.

I'll talk to y'all soon.