There’s so little we agree on as a global society these days. Whether the divide is political, geographical, or cultural can vary, but that constant is that there is no constant. There are almost no meaningful issues where we can find nearly uniform alignment. Oh, wait, here’s one:

We need more housing. And we need a lot of it.

According to a National Association of Realtors report from 2021, the U.S. needs between 5.5 and 6.8 million new housing units to meet current demand, and that number grows by approximately 1.7 million units annually, the National Association of Home Builders estimates. In 2025, less than 1.5 million units were completed, which means we’re not keeping up with demand, let alone making progress on the backlog of units we require. Given this supply/demand imbalance, it’s not surprising that home prices in the U.S. have increased sharply. Peak growth, as most of you reading this are undoubtedly aware, came during the pandemic, when the perfect storm of stay-at-home work and life paradigms, cheap debt, and government stimulus led to home prices escalating by 41% during a 30-month period from 2020 to 2022.

And the news is the same all over. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics estimated that home prices rose 90% between 2010 and 2022; in Australia, the Bureau of Statistics said the Residential Property Price Index reflected an increase of approximately 130% between 2003 and 2022.

You get the idea. And there’s no need to belabor these points further, because, as noted at the outset, this is one area where there is almost universal agreement. The query isn’t: “is there a problem?” It’s “What do we do about it?”

There’s no single answer to that question, and any solutions will undoubtedly require contributions from politicians, developers, and many other constituencies. But when pondering a remedy, it’s unlikely that many of you found your thoughts gravitating towards the critical role engineers play in this process. And, until a recent conversation I had with a gentleman named Steven Cassells, my contemplations wouldn’t have trended in that direction either.

But that’s what “It’s Ingenious” is all about—new solutions to old problems.

Cassells is an engineer, and he’s also a Director at Neuron, a technology company that’s built a platform enabling the production of engineering reports at an accelerated pace, without sacrificing accuracy in the process. Neuron debuted in Sydney, Australia, expanded to London two years ago, and this year opened a location in New York.

Cassells told me that particular map of expansion was always the plan. By covering those three markets, the platform encompasses both the metric and imperial measurement systems, as well as the two major global bodies that govern engineering standards, ASHRAE and CIBSE.

The technology that Neuron has developed can be used for a wide array of applications, but the capability that Cassells is most passionate about is its capacity to alleviate the housing crisis. That potential has already been partially realized in the Australian market, where Cassells said Neuron’s platform has been used on approximately 600 projects totaling about $80 billion worth of primarily mixed-use and multifamily buildings; about 25% of that work has been for affordable housing.

While the geographic growth of Neuron’s business has been intentional, its expanding scope has largely been organic. Cassells said he and his colleagues were initially interested in merely automating or accelerating some of the more repetitive tasks associated with their roles. Their ambition has evolved a bit.

“What’s happened since we launched the business is we’ve ended up in this entirely new place that we didn’t believe we would end up in, which is this world of design optimization,” Cassells said. “It’s been organic, and it’s been largely driven by a terrible, terrible global cost crisis where the cost to deliver a home is probably twice what it was five, six years ago. But because we’re all constrained by mortgages and the cost of living generally has gone up, we can’t afford to pay double for our home.”

I talked to Cassells about how we can get smarter about building properties and, in the process, make homes more affordable. So, today, we’ll be building with blocks that include:

• Developments don’t go wrong, but start wrong

• The most impactful fixes aren’t sexy

• Unintended consequences of good intentions

• The developer is the good guy (How many of you are relieved to read that sentence? And in a piece about affordable housing no less!)

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In the Beginning…

Cassells and his colleagues at Neuron have a kind of motto they like to use about what they view as the most fundamental issue impacting property development.

“Projects don’t go wrong,” he told me. “They start wrong.”

He added that, sometimes, the best advice he can give as an engineer, or that someone can garner from Neuron’s platform is “just don’t buy that site.”

“Don’t build over there. It’s contaminated land that’s got floodplain issues. There’s no utilities.”

Unfortunately, Cassells explained that all too often developers don’t heed that kind of advice. He said he saw it in Sydney all the time. A developer decides to build a massive property four clicks from the nearest sewer, for instance, which means that now a truck has to go out there once a week to empty waste tanks, and that will continue to be the case for four years, maybe even longer, until someone can get the sewer hooked up. And that cost, of the truck, and of the sewer hook up, all of that’s getting passed, in one way or another, to the person buying a unit in that building.

But let’s say the site isn’t contaminated or lacking utilities. Even then, Cassells said that many developers “design from the inside.” They get bedazzled by an architect’s wondrous sketches, and then they force the engineering aspects of the development to conform to those designs, as opposed to the other way around. This approach almost always results in added costs and increased time.

And in a high-interest environment those two things, as is so often the case, are one and the same. Every month of additional time that it takes to design or build a property is an additional month of interest that, once again, is typically borne by the end user.

Cassells noted that this scenario is frequently compounded by well-meaning city and local officials. No one wants another drab, boring building in their neighborhood. They want something that captures attention, that makes people proud to be denizens of that municipality. The problem, though, is that such architectural flourishes create practical costs, and in the present moment those can be hard to justify.

Of course, Cassells acknowledged that all this depends on the market you’re building in and the customer you’re building for. And this is where things get particularly problematic for developers focused on affordable housing.

“There’s three parts to property development,” Cassells said. “Buy a piece of land, build a building, and sell it for 20% more than what it costs to buy the land and to build a building. So, in Manhattan, you can sell the building to billionaires and millionaires, which means you can sell it for so much money that it easily makes your 20% margin even if the building’s expensive and even if the land is expensive. That margin goes down as you go further and further away from desirable, high wealth areas, which means it gets harder and harder. And at the very bottom of that spectrum is social affordable housing, the type of housing that makes the least financial sense because it’s still expensive to build a building, but you’re selling or renting it for the lowest possible margin.”

Cassells’ solution to this problem isn’t necessarily radical. In fact, it might seem relatively obvious, but its conspicuousness doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being implemented as often as you might expect.

“Start with the feasibility first, and then design to that feasibility.”

Innovation Isn’t Always Dramatic

So, how do you enhance feasibility? If you were expecting answers that talked about AI or radical building materials (did you know asparagus can actually be used in place of concrete?) those aren’t the solutions Cassells is most interested in.

Neuron’s platform was built before LLMs rose to prominence, and the company still doesn’t use AI to conduct any aspect of its engineering assessments for one very simple reason: the tech just isn’t up to the task yet.

“We really like AI,” Cassells said. “We like the conversational nature of taking data and coming back with something bespoke to a client’s specific question. But there’s no way it’s reliable enough to design structures for building and engineering systems today. So, we like to put AI over Neuron, not under Neuron.” In other words, AI is leveraged for the platform’s user interface, but nothing else.

So, if this is one area where AI can’t save us—at least not yet—what are some of the fixes that Cassells has seen work effectively?

The most impactful, as well as obvious, one is building a property that maximizes the amount of space that can be used for units, thereby increasing the developer’s yield. It may seem counterintuitive that a developer would ever take another approach, but it goes back to the issue of the design leading the process, as opposed to the more practical elements coming first. Cassells said they often consider something he referred to as the facade-to- floor-space ratio. He explained that tall, skinny buildings, particularly those with units on just one side of a corridor, are “terrible” from a yield perspective.

“You build a whole building’s facade, which costs you a lot of money, but you only have half a building’s worth of apartment.” Building a more square-shaped property, with a corridor that can serve apartments on either side, is a more practical, albeit arguably less elegant, solution.

Another fix is building more sustainable properties. A building that is engineered to use less energy costs its end user less money, which means they’re willing to pay more to buy or lease the unit, because their all-in expenses are the same.

In more affordable properties, Cassells also advocated for making features such as outdoor space and amenities like laundry rooms part of common areas instead of housing them within individual units. This approach has the dual benefit of reducing costs for the developer, while also fostering a greater sense of community within the property. People are more likely to get to know their neighbors if they’re sharing a laundry room, roof deck, or garden, than if everyone is enjoying their own balcony and patronizing individual laundry facilities.

Perhaps the most important way that developers can make projects more feasible though, is by iterating different designs and scenarios until they find the one that allows them to build the most units with the greatest efficiency. And that’s where Neuron’s platform comes in. By making the engineering process faster and more accessible, Neuron enables developers to iterate designs in a manner that is both fast and affordable.

“We think that the last part of this puzzle is for everyone to be able to move faster and iterate faster until they find that variation of the design that maximizes their yield.”

Without a platform like Neuron, that’s just not a feasible approach (pun intended) for most developers. It takes too much money and too much time (which, as discussed earlier, also means more money).

Cassells also mentioned the viability of pre-fabricated housing units and construction components, which he said Neuron had worked with fairly extensively, but he agreed that one of the biggest issues in developing affordable housing isn’t the materials, but the political and cultural ecosystem in which the building resides.

How To Stop Worrying and Love Developers (and Deregulation)

So, full disclosure: I come from a developer family. My father and my uncles are developers, as was my grandfather. They created a business that I still derive economic benefit from, even if I’m not actively involved in it. In other words, I’m predisposed to be sympathetic towards their ilk.

Here’s the thing though: developers aren’t the enemy when it comes to making housing more affordable. In fact, as Cassells noted, they’re kind of the heroes of this story.

Imagine, he said, if developers just took their money out of development and put it into the stock market. They could do that and, if history is any indication, enjoy a comfortable 10% yield. But the rest of society would be poorer for it. We would lose offices, and retail buildings, warehouses, and, of course, houses. In order to make affordable housing viable, we need to accept that developers, even the not-for-profit organizations that often construct social housing, need to be able to generate a 20% return. If that doesn’t happen, a project doesn’t go forward.

“A bank will never fund the project unless it’s viable,” Cassells said. “So, a lot of people think, ‘oh, the greedy developers, they’ll just have to suck it up.’ That’s not how it works. They just don’t do the project.”

Similarly, and oh how it wounds my left-leaning heart to admit this, regulations and building codes need to be implemented more thoughtfully and stripped back in some instances. Cassells said that local municipalities should be more thoughtful about how new or revised codes will impact feasibility. He said that, recently, a developer told him that “If you have an affordable housing issue, whenever there’s a code change proposed, irrespective of its merits, the only question that should be asked is, will this make it more expensive to deliver housing?” While Cassells acknowledged that perspective was a bit blunt, he found it hard to argue with.

Cassells and I agreed that the situation is improving when it comes to how politicians and government officials regard development—nimby is giving way to yimby, thank your deity of choice. But more education is required to really help politicians and average citizens alike understand how development works and what the barriers are that actually constrain the housing supply.

For example, Cassells referenced the so-called “99-rule” in New York City, which requires developers that are constructing a building totaling 100 units or more to employ labor from unions that demand a higher rate. In theory, this seems like a potentially good regulation that encourages larger developers to pay higher wages. In practice, it means that most New York City developers stop at 99 apartments, which decreases the housing supply and drives costs up. “That’s a completely arbitrary rule that, if it was removed, you would immediately have more density,” Cassells said.

This disconnect, between intentions and outcomes, is part of what Cassells hopes Neuron can help ameliorate. By putting engineering at the forefront of the design and development process, and by making it easier and cheaper for developers to iterate designs until they find one that actually pencils, we can make housing more affordable for everyone—even developers themselves.

Britain has built six research stations on the Brunt Ice Shelf since 1956, and five of them have met a similar fate: buried by snowfall, or carried out to sea, entombed by ice.

Halley VI was the first station built with an intentional exit plan in mind. If you’re not familiar with it, the station resides upon the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a slab of ice that slowly creeps toward the ocean at a pace of several hundred meters a year. In 2012, a dormant crack started to grow on the shelf. While most stations facing that threat would have been evacuated and succumbed to their fate, Halley VI got towed, making it the first fully relocatable research station ever built.

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Cedar in the Dark

Disposability was the whole purpose behind the station’s design. Architect Hugh Broughton heard about the competition to design Halley VI on the radio in 2004 and entered on a whim. Antarctica has no planning department and no zoning board. Architects answer to the government commissioning the station, with a nod from the Antarctic Treaty nations at their annual meeting.

The design was informed as much by empathy as terrain. Paint colours chosen with marine biologists in the room; grey disorientates seabirds and red is invisible to penguins, whose eyes can’t register the colour at all. Inside, the cladding is Lebanese cedar, a smell used to combat extreme sensory deprivation—a small act of generosity toward the 16 people who winter there in total darkness.

In its attempts to connect and preserve the nature around it, Antarctic architecture can teach us something important about our own. Who do we build for: ourselves, now, or whoever inherits the ground after we’re gone?

In an interview with The Believer, Broughton reflected: “With increasing pressure on natural resources and an ever more unpredictable climate, the solutions which have been developed for buildings in Antarctica can have increasing relevance for buildings elsewhere in the world.”

While commercial properties hardly sit on sliding ice shelves, perhaps they rest on something just as unreliable and equally unstable. Leases with high turnover, tenants who disappear mid-cycle, and floor plans designed for a workforce that no longer exists. Halley VI was built on the premise that the ground underneath us would keep shifting, and commercial real estate is catching up to the same idea. It’s an idea known as Design for Disassembly (DfD).

A Kit of Parts

DfD borrows from Halley VI’s logic and applies it to all fixed architecture, although the impetus behind the adoption is often less philosophical and more financial. Carbon targets have made the old build-to-demolition cycle expensive in ways that used to be obscured. And property developers are starting to ask, “what happens to this when we’re finished?” as a core design question.

The Forge, which sits behind Tate Modern in London, is a clear example of DfD. Developed by Landsec with architecture by Bryden Wood, it’s the world’s first large-scale office development built from a “kit of parts.” Completed in early 2023, the building cut upfront embodied carbon by 39% compared to a standard build, used 40% less steel, and needed half the typical site labor to erect the frame and façade. UK structural steel prices rose by more than 50% over the course of 2021 alone, right as the Forge’s frame was going up, with costs still climbing into 2022. In an industry as unforgiving and fast as London, reversibility isn’t just an aesthetic flourish, it’s underwriting.

A few miles east in Shoreditch, The Black & White Building takes the same principle and applies it to the most basic aspect of construction—everything is screwed and bolted instead of welded. Designed by Waugh Thistleton Architects, it’s central London’s tallest mass-timber office building. Because nothing is permanently fixed, even the tulipwood louvres on the façade are designed to be removed and reused when the building eventually comes down.

Across the Atlantic, Google’s Bay View campus in Mountain View, completed in 2022, is a large-scale example of DfD. Its structural system uses bolted connections, enabling faster assembly and disassembly on site, and its interior walls are independent of the exterior structure so they can be adjusted or removed without touching the building envelope.

16 Days

In New York, Kieran Timberlake’s Cellophane House took this one step further by not only reflecting the philosophy of impermanence, but the possibility for architectural reincarnation.

Built for MoMA’s 2008 “Home Delivery” exhibition and assembled on-site in 16 days, the house itself was disassembled at ground level, using only basic handheld tools. In their book, Cellophane House, Timberlake and Kieran reflect on modern construction with a sense of existential anxiety.

“Conventional construction techniques, in striving for permanence, fix materials to one another in such a way that they lose the capacity to be reclaimed.” – Cellophane House, 2011.

The More Generous Thing

Building with the knowledge that your work will be taken down might seem a futile task, yet underneath that futility sits a harder, and more hopeful, question about belonging—seeing buildings less as headstones and more as living matter, capable of being broken down and reborn as something else entirely.

Because what these buildings share is an admission that most architecture has avoided making: permanence is, ironically, becoming obsolete. A steel frame bolted rather than welded, and a timber louvre designed to be unscrewed are both small decisions—but they assume that a building’s current form is temporary.

Frank Llyod Wright reflected that architecture “is life, or at least it is life taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.” A building’s record is about saying less about the people who use it, and more about how those people expect the future to treat them.

Halley VI wasn’t designed in this fashion because its architects expected it to fail, but because they knew that the ground underneath it—by which we mean its cultural context— wouldn’t stay still. Perhaps it can even be argued that the recent approach to Antarctic architecture was never really about the ice at all; it was about admitting that nothing there belonged to the people building on it, and no permanent trace of them should remain.

This idea is what DfD prompts commercial real estate owners to interrogate: whether the ground beneath a building is really for the developers to keep. Ostensibly, the most resilient commercial buildings of the next decade won’t be the ones that were built for permanence, but those erected around the conviction that impermanence is not only profitable, but the more generous thing to build towards.

Laurence Kemball-Cook believes in the power of people.

Not in a cringey, kumbaya-esque, “let’s all hold hands and change the world” kind of way—at least not only that. He believes in human beings’ literal power: the potential to harness kinetic energy from human movement to generate electricity.

That may sound like a vaguely wild notion; perhaps like something the AI overlords might use humans for once they’ve taken over. But, if that’s the case, you probably aren’t familiar with the company Kemball-Cook founded, and where he serves as CEO, Pavegen.

We’ll cover the intricacies of how Pavegen’s technology works and its diverse array of applications in a future installment of “It’s Ingenious,” our vertical devoted to such innovations. But to give our loyal readers a quick preview: Pavegen installs tiles connected to electromagnetic generators in building floors, sidewalks, and other locations. Each step on a Pavegen tile causes it to move downward by 10 millimetres; that vertical motion is converted into rotary motion and then transformed into electrical potential energy through electromagnetic induction.

Deep breath. Everyone got that? That’s a bit more technical than we generally like to get in an Essential Eight.

Now, that energy can then be used to power everything from LED lighting to phone chargers, among numerous other use cases. The environments in which Pavegen tiles are installed cover everything from office properties to running tracks. To date, they’ve completed more than 250 installations in 37 countries.

In his Essential Eight interview, Kemball-Cook explained the inspiration behind Pavegen and touched on numerous other topics, including how to gamify sustainability and the possibly illegal methods he employed to complete his inaugural installation.

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1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

I’m an industrial design engineer and I was asked to work at the largest energy company in Europe. When I was there, they said to me, “Laurence, find us a new form of sustainable power in cities.” So, I started the journey looking at solar in cities, looking at wind in cities, and it didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is that wind worked great in a field on top of a mountain or in the sea, but it doesn’t work well in dense urban environments. And solar worked particularly well in the desert on these huge flat areas and on huge rooftops, but not necessarily in dense urban areas.

So, I kept thinking about this problem. Then I got fired, and I still kept thinking. And I said, “Well, if I can’t use the sun, and I can’t use wind, what about I use an energy source that’s literally all around us right under our feet?” And that was how the idea that generating kinetic energy could make a difference on this planet was born. That’s when I started the company and started developing the technology.

I used to break into building sites in my evenings and illegally install the technology in the ground to show that human power could actually make a difference.

When everyone wouldn’t believe me, and said, “It’s not possible.” I was like, “Well, it’s working outside your office right now. Take a look.” And then they could see it. You probably would get in a bit more trouble in America than England for doing that. I was lucky I was in London because people don’t mind that kind of thing. But that’s how we got to the first proof point in our technology.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

Initially Pavegen was engineered as an energy product for cities, but then I realized after installing it in the city that people love walking on our product. I saw old ladies jumping up and down there with small children. I saw kids in schools running up and down the corridor having fun.

I realized that I created the gamification of energy. And that was a huge pivot for us. Because initially we were all about energy, and then we pivoted and we realized that the most important thing about sustainability in cities is people. People, people, people. We need to build for community, not for technology. And Pavegen is a key tool now at bringing people together around urban spaces— helping them have fun, helping them connect, helping them share emotions. And that’s been a big shift really from what I initially set out to do that was based on how people reacted to the product.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

I think the emphasis is on the word “today.” So, I think the world’s changed a lot and I think that people need to be really advanced users of AI on a professional level. I think that’s really vital, and it can really help you get ahead.

Never before has a building been like a piece of software. You can plug into a building and connect to it. And so I think using and understanding these technologies is really critical. And then, above all else, I think it’s never take no for an answer and keep hustling. Whatever you do, hustle to meet people, hustle to get to where you need to get to, because that’s what I had to do to start Pavegen.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

I think that cities used to be built by banks to make money, and it was about how many floors they could put in and how much yield they could generate. But that’s really changed.

Now people are more interested in creating places that people want to spend time in. They want to create these beautiful environments. Think about some of the Thomas Heatherwick structures in New York and the beautiful places that people want to come together in. And there’s this real emphasis on smart buildings, connected environments that are beautiful.

I think we’ve seen community projects really becoming more important because COVID proved that no one wants to live in cities if there’s nothing to do there. We all had this shock where everyone decided to leave the city. So, we need to make cities fun again and make cities places where people really want to spend time.

A good example is Canary Wharf, the financial capital of London. It was a whole lot of concrete. And a couple of years ago they redeveloped it to be like a green oasis because they realized people don’t want to be surrounded by concrete every minute of every day. Sometimes, they want to be surrounded by a rainforest, and effectively that’s what it is now. I think that’s a really insightful development where people are being put higher up the priority list. It’s not number 10 anymore. People are pretty much number one, I would say.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

I think of all the industries, real estate is one that has an impact on everyone’s life. No matter who you are, what you do, what part of an organization you’re in, everyone has an opinion about it and everyone experiences it. We all know what it feels like when a friend complains about being too cold because the AC was on all day, or being too hot in summer. It just touches everyone, whether or not they are directly involved, because everyone’s got a different experience that they want to share about what real estate means to them.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Sometimes it’s quite slow. Things take years and years—even decades. Obviously you can’t build a tower block in New York in a week—it’s a slow process. And with Pavegen, we are not the first thing to go in. You need a foundation to go in, you need flooring finishes to go in, and then you need Pavegen. It just takes a long time. That’s what frustrates me. But it is what it is.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

I think it comes back to my earlier point, that COVID showed that people don’t really want to live in cities. And so we are seeing a massive shift in the way people are consuming cities. A lot of people would prefer to live outside of a city and commute in. Not as many young people want to buy properties in cities anymore and have all that debt, especially with high interest rates.

I think there’s a reorganization of urban spaces going on. We’ve all heard stories of these tower blocks being sold for next to nothing because they don’t have a need anymore and being repurposed as we-live style solutions. I think there’s a complete reorganization of the urban stack as we know it. There’s been 30 years of work that is now being reprogrammed to work for how people want to live and work now.

Some of my friends in the UAE and America joke that everyone in the UK sits in a shed because everyone’s building these garden sheds. All these consultants are sitting there and he’s like, “All I do is speak to guys and they’re in sheds.”

That’s an example of how cities are changing: everyone sits in their gardens working rather than the tower block.

So, a reorganization of the fundamental DNA of what constitutes a city is happening.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

Sustainability is not going anywhere. Sustainability is still a critical aspect of our future cities. And we’ve created a really unique way to connect people to sustainability using the power of a footstep. One footstep can now power lights in the entrance of your building, and can now be stored in batteries to be used at a later date.

The effects of global warming are real.

I sit here right now in a heat wave in London. I’m sure there’s all sorts of examples in America right now of climate change issues affecting people, especially things like wildfires. So, I guess I’m optimistic that sustainability will be more baked in from a carbon perspective into new builds and new developments, despite maybe the tailwinds of our friend, Mr. Trump, not necessarily fully supporting it. CEOs still make their own decision, and I’m really optimistic about the sustainability investments being planned over the next five or 10 years.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

​In 1986, in the glow of his desk lamp inside a cramped Princeton dorm room, a young Andrew Florance sat hunched over a self-modified computer, unknowingly laying the groundwork for what would become a billion-dollar real estate empire. More specifically: he was creating a model for a new kind of financial real estate data service, an early version of an idea that would eventually become CoStar. If you’re reading this real estate-focused Substack and aren’t familiar with CoStar, it would be quite surprising, but just in case: it is the leading global provider of commercial and residential real estate data. And it was the first of its kind.

The concept was simple: take publicly available data, such as city records, and organize it, city by city, into something far more accessible than the scattered paper files real estate brokers and investors relied on for years. Simple, perhaps, but labor-intensive. Florance called brokers. He pulled public city filings by hand. Digitizing each piece of information, Florance built the first version of the database, aided only by an unreasonable volume of patience that most of us can’t even fathom. It was initially intended as just a fun project he expected to fill a year of his time before returning to grad school; it eventually snowballed into an S&P 500 company.

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A Nature and Nurture Story

Florance was trying to fix a problem many in the industry had learned to live with. Despite commercial real estate being a multi-trillion-dollar sector, literally the world’s largest asset class, it had one major flaw: the industry had little to no organized information behind it. While Wall Street could track a stock’s price down to the second, in part thanks to the relatively recent debut of the Bloomberg Terminal, billion-dollar deals in commercial real estate were often made using fragmented data, half-remembered conversations, and outdated paper records.

Florance was uniquely positioned to see the gap he set out to fill. The stereotype that, at some point, we all turn into our parents wasn’t far off in Florance’s case. He didn’t just happen to find his way into the built world; he was raised in it. His father, Coke Florance, was a notable architect who designed many buildings in the Washington, D.C. area, including Capital One Arena, home to the NBA’s Washington Wizards, while his mother was a realtor. He grew up sandwiched between two sides of the industry. His father designed buildings, and his mother sold them.

This early exposure to the built world followed him to Princeton, where he studied economics but soon found a second interest, computers. During his time in undergrad, Florance got his hands on his first-ever personal computer and became connected to a community of fellow enthusiasts he met through the computing committee. While in school, he also began working for a Washington, D.C.-based developer, which put him in contact with real estate finance. It was this position that made Florance realize how much of the data behind these models was essentially invented or loosely estimated. Reliable information for commercial real estate simply did not exist.

After graduating, Florance continued building the business, compiling listings and data. However, a year working as a team of one proved unsustainable, and he went broke. His company managed to stay afloat by a fortunate alignment of timing and circumstance. It was the height of the S&L crisis, and Michael Klein, a local D.C attorney, was tired of banks losing money on commercial real estate loans. He stumbled across Florance’s work and began assembling a pool of investors. This funding pulled Florance from the brink of debt and helped him launch The Realty Information Group from his parents’ basement. Yes, as cliché as it sounds, Florance would soon join the list of multi-billion dollar entrepreneurs who began their companies in less than romantic environments. For his physics lab partner, Jeff Bezos, it was a garage. For Florance, it was his parents’ basement.

With funding finally behind him, Florance turned to the next problem: the real estate brokers he sought to sell his software-based product to largely didn’t have computers. The industry he was looking to modernize was still entirely paper-based. So, he introduced a companion product that met the brokers where they were, and packaged his data into a phone book-sized monthly leasing guide called Cornerstone.

Thus began the slow, meticulous work of building a real estate database market by market and city by city.​ He cold-called brokers, surveyed buildings in person, and cross-referenced hundreds of public filings. After three years, he sold Cornerstone, despite its success, and used the proceeds to power Realty Information Group’s growth.

That money helped them grow from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and New York in 1994, and later expand to Los Angeles, Orange County, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This growth came primarily from acquisition and outperforming smaller rivals, buying data sets, and compiling them into their own platform.

Going Public and Buying the Competition

By 1998, Realty Information Group was thriving, generating revenue from two core products. CoStar, which provided office and industrial real estate professionals the tools to analyze market conditions and leasing options, and CrosTrac, which helped tenants find space and building owners fill vacancies. The following year, the company went public, raising $23 million in its IPO. A second stock offering not long after quadrupled that total, further supporting CoStar’s continued expansion and rising influence on the built world. That same year, in 1999, the company was renamed CoStar.

The funding they received completely altered the company’s growth, and from that point on, CoStar followed a consistent pattern. They used their capital to spot undervalued opportunities and acquire complementary or even rival businesses like LeaseTrends and ARES. This strategy enabled them to absorb more proprietary data and fold it into their existing system. The more data they accrued, the harder it became for any competitor to replicate their platform.

The company was also adept at finding clever methods to illustrate the value of its data. In 2009, CoStar purchased their headquarters from the Mortgage Bankers Association for $41.3 million; just two years earlier, the same building sold for $79 million. The story, which they broadcast quite publicly, was that they used their own data and analytics platform to identify the optimal time to buy, which was how they achieved such a phenomenal discount. If that sounds like a flex, well, that was the point.

Florance’s strategy to purchase the competition out of existence perhaps reached its apotheosis in 2011, with the $860 million acquisition of LoopNet. By this point, CoStar’s business had become as much about advertising available commercial space as aggregating data, so CoStar sought to acquire its largest and most direct competitor in commercial real estate listings. LoopNet built the largest free, ad-supported listing marketplace, where brokers and landlords listed commercial properties for sale or lease, making them both a threat and target. The merger of the two rival companies meant combining CoStar’s proprietary data and analytics, only accessible by subscription, with LoopNet’s open commercial property marketplace information. Merging the two companies achieved two strategic purposes in a single strike. One: CoStar neutralized their main competitor in commercial property marketing, further asserting its dominance in the commercial real estate sector. Two: CoStar repositioned itself as a funnel, using LoopNet’s reach to draw users in and convert that traffic into paying customers rather than shutting them down completely. Aggressive? Perhaps. Effective? Definitely. CoStar neutralized its most direct competitor in the space, turning its rival into a marketing tool.

In 2014, CoStar bought Apartments.com for $585 million, marking their first step in consumer-facing rentals. A decade later, they bought Matterport, an immersive spatial mapping tool, for $1.6 billion, and, to establish themselves in the Asia Pacific property market, Domain Holdings Australia for $1.92 billion.

However, not every bet has paid off cleanly; Homes.com has become CoStar’s most controversial acquisition yet. Activist investors like D.E Shaw and Third Point have argued CoStar has poured billions into a money-losing residential platform, losing sight of the commercial focus of their business. Yet CoStar and Florance have both pushed back, defending their investment as a long-term strategy. Even with this recent hiccup, in total, CoStar has made over 40 successful acquisitions since the company’s start. If you’re an aggressive real estate data startup, take this as a sign to watch your back (and your wallet).

Building a Moat

As CoStar continued to build, they also constructed walls around what they created. CoStar’s legal records show they take the protection of their intellectual property very seriously. Known for aggressive litigation, CoStar has filed dozens of lawsuits against competitors in the field. One of their biggest battles began in 2020 against Crexi, one of the most popular and quickly growing commercial real estate platforms. CoStar sued Crexi for copyright infringement after they wrongfully accessed the LoopNet site, copying listings and cropping out CoStar’s watermark from tens of thousands of CoStar-owned photos. History repeated itself in 2025, when CoStar also filed a lawsuit against Zillow for infringing 53,000 copyrighted images.

CoStar’s commitment to protecting what it has built demonstrates the same mindset Andrew Florance brought to his project since the very beginning. What makes CoStar’s foundation so remarkable isn’t just the scope of the complex data that needed to be organized to execute such a bold idea. It is the drive and determination that enabled the company’s growth and success. Florance had the persistence necessary to organize information, expand the market, and push the built world to adapt. What started as a dorm room experiment became the foundation of a publicly traded, multibillion-dollar company and proof that some of the world’s largest industries can be shaped by someone willing to do the work.

Not too bad for a guy who just wanted a year off grad school.

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Somewhere in the building where you work, there is a light that someone hates.

Not dislikes—hates. It sits above a desk that’s been assigned on a Tuesday, and for eight hours a day it makes concentration a physical effort for the person underneath it. That person has probably never mentioned it, because complaining about a light sounds ridiculous.

Here at Collision, we like the reminder that innovation isn’t always what you expect. Sometimes it’s a material, sometimes it’s a job title. And sometimes it’s a box you drop onto a floorplate—which is about as unglamorous as innovation gets, until you ask what the box is actually for.

Kathryn Nicholson-Brown is Specification Director at Bureau, a WELL Accredited Professional with more than 20 years specifying commercial interiors. And she is neurodivergent herself. Her argument is not that offices are too loud, bright, or exposed, however, but that they were built for a person who has never existed.

“There are many other people who really struggle to focus and struggle to do their best work while their senses are being bombarded with all of this different information,” she told me, as we squared ourselves away to speak in Bureau’s London showroom. Naturally, we’re sat in a booth. “That’s where sometimes the workplace goes wrong—designing around this idea of normal that really doesn’t exist.”

In today’s sletter, we’re building with Blox that include:

• Why focus doesn’t mean quiet

• A box for a building that can’t change

• Who gets to decide

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Why Focus Doesn’t Mean Quiet

The first thing to abandon is the assumption that neuroinclusive design means calm, muted, and beige.

Nicholson-Brown works best behind a closed door with classical music on. Others do their best thinking on a train, or need a certain amount of noise to tire the brain into concentration.

Same design brief, opposite outputs—which is why the standard fix of adding a quiet room serves one type of person and abandons the other. Sensory-seeking and sensory-avoiding do not represent two points on the line between good and bad design—they run in the complete opposite direction from another.

What that leaves you designing for is a state rather than a setting.

“Flow is probably the healthy version of hyperfocus,” Nicholson-Brown said, describing a state she enters often. “I’m just completely immersed in the activity. I can create and get work done so much easier than when you keep getting distracted by different things.”

That framing does something useful, as it takes a trait usually discussed as a condition to accommodate and turns it into a design target—something a building can either produce or prevent.

It also explains why this isn’t a minority concern, too. The British Standards Institution published PAS 6463, Design for the Mind, in 2022, organized around three ideas: clarity, control, and calm. HOK’s Kay Sargent, in her 2025 book Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces, describes neurodivergent occupants as the “canaries in the coal mine”—the people who register a building’s failures first.

Nicholson-Brown puts it more plainly. “Everyone can be impacted by sound. Everyone can be impacted by uncomfortable lights. But for someone who’s neurodivergent it could be debilitating, whereas for someone who is neurotypical it’s just an annoyance. But it’s the same principles.”

The annoyance still costs you. It just doesn’t get reported.

A Box for a Building That Can’t Change

Of PAS 6463’s three principles, the one doing the most work is ‘control’—and it’s the one almost nobody implements, because control is expensive to retrofit. Which is where Bureau comes in, via a coincidence worth a paragraph.

In 2019, two founders in Australia started Bureau Booths. In 2021, two friends in Canada launched Inbox Booths. Neither knew the other existed until late 2022, when competitive research and a shared manufacturer put them in the same room. They merged in 2024.

Two teams in opposite hemispheres independently built the same answer to the same problem, which is reasonable evidence the problem is real.

Now, a booth is a commodity. Bureau’s UK range runs from around £4,700 to £18,500 ($6,250 to $24,600). There are plenty of competitors, and nobody should call a soundproof box an invention. The interesting claim they make is about what the box is for.

The evidence sits within a small panel on the wall inside every Signature Series booth. Four functions: fan, light strength, light temperature, power. The color temperature runs from 3000K to 6000K—warm lamp light at one end, cool daylight at the other—and the ventilation is adjustable in the same way.

It’s a range the occupant can move through in the 30 seconds before they start working. Compare that with the light above the desk outside the booth, which somebody chose once, possibly before the current tenant signed the lease.

The second number that matters is installation: two to four hours, against eight to 14 weeks for a conventional build-out. The booths run off a standard 230V outlet, need no extension of the building’s HVAC, and can be relocated.

That’s what makes this a retrofit instrument rather than a build-out—a way of introducing control into stock that was specified for the fictional average and cannot be re-specified inside a lease cycle.

And here is where Nicholson-Brown says something you don’t often hear from someone whose job is specifying product.

“Designing for neurodiversity—and by which I mean designing for everyone—should be such an intrinsic part of design that it’s not othered,” she said. “We do not have a sustainability room, but we do have sensory rooms, we do have wellness rooms. Do you really need a separate place to go and sit in order to be well, or should that not just be an intrinsic part of the overall building?”

That is a booth company’s Specification Director describing the conditions under which her own product becomes unnecessary. She isn’t wrong, and she isn’t hedging.

This frames the pod as transitional—an instrument for introducing choice into buildings that can’t yet deliver it structurally.

Who Gets To Decide

Two things follow from taking control seriously as a design principle.

The first is that you specify a range rather than a setting, because the variation isn’t only between people. It’s within them.

“The same individual can change throughout the course of a day,” Nicholson-Brown said. “Have they had enough sleep? Have they eaten enough? If an individual could control that environment, or curate their journey through a working day, then they can put themselves into the environment that best suits them at that moment, on that day.”

The second is permission, which the industry keeps mis-filing as a design problem when it’s a management one. An adaptable floor is worth nothing if nobody has told people they’re allowed to move.

Then comes measurement, which is where this stops being a philosophy and starts being a procurement checklist. Sustainability and Accessibility have walked that block. Neither is now described as a special requirement.

“We can start to look at metrics around it,” Nicholson-Brown said. “How can people focus? What are the main areas we need to look at to make sure this environment is inclusive for everyone, and also helps promote that performance and focus people really need within their working lives?”

This leaves Bureau in an unusual position. They’re selling a product while making the case for the building that would render it obsolete. Most companies won’t tell you what would put them out of business.

Now that’s ingenious.

Welcome to Punch List, Collision’s shiny new vertical about trends impacting the built world.

FIFA took the car parks away first. To stage the World Cup final, organizers stripped the parking at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, then left the state to work out how to move 80,000 people per match to a venue built for season-ticket holders who mostly drive.

New Jersey Transit was handed a $48 million bill and floated a $98 fare to cover it, while FIFA booked an estimated $11 billion from the tournament. The stadium, FIFA could borrow; the region around it, not so much.

This cost equation is about to be applied again using the same model, but at roughly four times the scale. Welcome to the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles—hope you survive the experience.

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The First World Cup to Build Nothing—a Timeline

It’s perhaps hard to imagine there are any unturned stones among the potential World Cup storylines, but this seems to be one of them. It also may represent the event’s most significant legacy in terms of infrastructure and the built environment.

For the first time in World Cup history, nothing was built. CONCACAF’s 2018 bid promised zero new sporting or civic infrastructure—hosting games in existing NFL, MLS, and Liga MX venues with temporary seating and a month of branding.

It was a deliberate correction to the white-elephant arenas left behind in Brazil, South Africa, and Qatar. The brief for 2026—and LA2028 after it—was blunt: stop building monuments.

A policy of reuse, however, could create consequences wholly unintended, as the tournament’s carbon cost continues to be tallied and urban planners grapple with how they’ll solve their Olympic-sized problem in under 24 months.

The Anatomy of a Retrofit

The reuse-first logic behind both events is sound, and (almost) no built-world professional needs persuading that adaptive reuse beats a trophy build. But what 2026 established is narrower and more awkward: reuse solves the problems that sit inside the property line, and only those.

Capacity is one of them. Mexico City’s Azteca had already been rebuilt and renamed, with upgrades that will outlast the tournament by decades; Toronto’s BMO Field bolted on demountable stands it will unbolt now the crowds have gone. Both worked, because a stadium’s seat count is a building-level problem with a building-level fix.

The distance between that building and the people trying to reach it, however, is not. Neither is the surface they play on, or the heat they play in—the 2026 pitches and kick-off times were inherited from American football, and no amount of overlay changed what those venues were designed for.

In other words: you can retrofit a stadium but you cannot retrofit the assumptions it was built on, and the largest of those assumptions has been how everybody gets there.

The no-build model was also sold partly on sustainability, and on the embodied carbon it delivered. Nothing was poured, quarried, or manufactured, meaning nothing got abandoned afterwards.

Then the tournament moved teams and supporters across a continent for a month and became, by most estimates, one of the most travel-intensive World Cups on record. Because of that, the level of carbon emissions, even by conservative estimates, has not been avoided but rather transposed from the built structure over to the human journey.

The Connectivity Conundrum

These are lessons Los Angeles 2028 organizers will be keeping a close eye on. It’s also an endeavour that will be much harder to repeat at scale.

The upcoming Olympics will be the first summer games since 1948 to feature no new permanent venues—and, if organizers get their way, there will also be no cars.

Every ticketed spectator, at more than 40 venues, will arrive by public transport in a region where barely 2% of miles are traveled on transit today.

Olympic organizers saw the recent World Cup matches as a chance to reintroduce a car-dependent city to a transit network most of its residents never go near. Its transit authority stood up 15 shuttle lines and ran around 200 buses; a single match generated more than 30,000 shuttle journeys and close to 50,000 on the rail network.

Set that against the target for the Olympics, though, and it’s like putting a doberman adjacent to an elephant. For 2028, organizers expect to borrow roughly 3,000 buses—about 15 times the World Cup deployment—across a far wider venue map.

Viewed through this lens, WC2026 still represents a timely sortie in reconnaissance, despite covering a fraction of the ground 2028 will have to tread.

Reuse’s Transference Problem

A huge complicating factor for LA2028 organizers is that it’s attempting to accomplish all this without the budget. The city is carrying a billion-dollar budget deficit, and of the $3.3 billion it requested in federal funding it has so far received 5.2%. The venues, being borrowed, cost comparatively little.

The system that connects them is the expensive part, and also the part nobody can retrofit in 24 months. It is currently unfunded. It also highlights that for all the benefits of reuse, the costs—in both money and carbon—still land, albeit in a different place.

For anyone weighing a repurposing strategy—a stadium, a scheme, a portfolio — that is the transferable lesson, and it’s not a comfortable one.

Reuse is cheaper, greener on paper, and close to immune from the white-elephant trap that swallowed Brazil and Qatar. It also takes the hardest problem off the balance sheet—where it can be modelled and financed—and onto the street, where it cannot.

The stadiums were always going to be fine. They were fine before FIFA arrived and they are fine now it has left. What 2026 left unresolved is everything between them. Los Angeles has agreed to answer that question in public, at Olympic scale, on a deficit.

You can rent a stadium. Whether you can rent a city is an experiment that’s about to play out.

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When Charu Gandhi launched Elicyon in 2014, she set out to bridge a traditional industry divide: unifying the uncompromising rigor of an elite architectural career with a profound, artistic reverence for craftsmanship.

A RIBA and ARB qualified architect, Charu’s trajectory has been defined by an early, enduring fascination with how physical environments dictate the way we live, feel, and interact.

After completing her architectural studies in London, she joined the London office of Allies & Morrison in 2006, later returning to teach at her prestigious alma mater, the Architectural Association.

A pivotal move to the Candy & Candy group in 2011 allowed her to call upon her vibrant global upbringing, managing international commissions that expanded her creative footprint across South Asia, Africa, and the UK.

Today, Elicyon’s extraordinary portfolio traverses luxury residential, commercial, and hospitality spaces, all underpinned by historical mindfulness. Yet, for Charu, the real evolution of her career lies in the human element.

Moving past pure aesthetics, she champions design as a tool for connection and wellbeing, pushing back against real estate’s tendency to prioritize strict financial metrics over the actual end-user experience.

In this week’s edition of the Bloxspring Essential Eight, Charu talks with us about the industry’s massive pivot toward experience-led design, where modern homes are fast becoming destination environments complete with hospitality-inspired wellness and entertainment hubs.

She also delivers a dose of practical reality, outlining the operational hurdles of navigating complex planning and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) framework.

Read on for an essential masterclass in why the future of the built world belongs to spaces that are authentic, highly collaborative, and in her words, “deeply human.”

1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

My route into the industry was through architecture. From an early age, I was fascinated by how spaces can influence the way we live, feel and interact. After studying architecture in London, I worked on a range of residential and commercial projects before founding Elicyon.

What interested me most wasn’t simply the building itself, but the experience of inhabiting it.

That curiosity about the relationship between people and place ultimately led me into luxury residential, before expanding into commercial and hospitality projects as well.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

Probably how much of my role today revolves around people. When I founded Elicyon, I imagined spending most of my time designing spaces. In reality, building a design studio requires leadership, communication, and collaboration at every level.

The creative side remains central, but I’ve learned that the strongest projects are born from great relationships, whether that’s with clients, craftspeople, or, most importantly, within our own team.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

Stay curious and look beyond your own discipline.

Some of my greatest sources of inspiration have come from travel, art, fashion, culture, and craftsmanship.

The built environment touches every aspect of our lives, so understanding people is just as important as understanding buildings.

I would also encourage young professionals to value craftsmanship and quality. Trends come and go, but thoughtful design and attention to detail will always endure.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

The shift towards experience-led design. Today, people expect much more from the spaces they inhabit. They are looking for homes and environments that support wellbeing, reflect their values and enhance their daily lives. There is a growing appreciation that design is not simply about aesthetics; it has a profound impact on how people feel.

We’ve also seen a renewed emphasis on entertaining and connection within the home.

Increasingly, our clients want spaces that bring people together, whether that’s a beautifully designed kitchen, a flexible dining space, a bar, a wine room, or an outdoor entertaining area.

The home has become a destination for gathering, hosting, and creating meaningful experiences with family and friends.

I think that’s one of the most positive changes we’ve seen as an industry. People are placing greater value on how a space supports the way they want to live, rather than simply how it looks.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

I love that the spaces we design become part of people’s personal stories. They are where families gather, milestones are celebrated, and memories are made. Being entrusted with shaping those experiences is both a privilege and a responsibility.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

The tendency for projects to sometimes become overly focused on financial metrics at the expense of the people who will ultimately use the space. Commercial success is, of course, essential, but I believe the most successful projects are those that balance financial objectives with a genuine understanding of the human experience.

The places we create have a lasting impact on people’s lives, so it’s important that we approach them with care, thoughtfulness, and a long-term perspective. When design, wellbeing, and functionality are considered from the outset, the results are always stronger for everyone involved.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

One of the biggest challenges facing the industry [in the UK] today is navigating the increasingly complex planning and Building Safety Regulator (BSR) processes.

The intent behind these regulations is absolutely important, but the reality is that approval timelines can often be lengthy and unpredictable, creating challenges for clients, developers, and project teams alike. In some cases, projects can lose momentum or face significant delays before work has even begun.

I think there is an opportunity to make these processes more streamlined and efficient, while still maintaining the high standards that are essential for the industry. Greater clarity and agility would help unlock investment, encourage innovation, and ultimately allow more great projects to come to life.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

What excites me most is that, despite living in an increasingly digital world, people are placing greater value on experiences, craftsmanship, and human connection.

We’re seeing a fascinating crossover between hospitality and residential design.

Clients want their homes to offer the same sense of occasion, comfort, and thoughtful service that they experience in the world’s best hotels, whether that’s through spaces designed for entertaining, wellness, or simply spending quality time together.

At the same time, there is a renewed appreciation for craftsmanship, artisanal techniques, and the stories behind the objects and materials that surround us. While technology will continue to transform how we design and build, I believe the future will belong to places that feel authentic, personal, and deeply human.

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If, like us here at Collision, you begin to feel your eye twitch every time you stumble across a “SEO vs AI search” debate on a popular B2B networking site, we’d usually recommend you keep it moving.

But in an age where these marketing hot-takes have all the nutritional value of an undercooked overzapped TV meal, this time it might be worth sticking it out for something a little more filling.

The squabble, in essence, comes down to this: “how do I get my content to rank when AI is gobbling a growing share of clicks.” The comfortable answer doing the rounds has been to sprinkle “storytelling” over content and Google will reward you with rankings.

But as proponents of the importance of storytelling, we must stress this approach is a gross oversimplification. More content—longer form, maybe the kind generated using a model—is not the answer. Storytelling needs quality as much as it does qualification.

The click data says as much. Research shows ‘the algorithm’ (Google) continues to both drive a share of traffic towards AI Overviews (AIO) and LLMs, while actively dampening the ability of sites to index content it considers ‘replicable’ (see: AI slop)

This has created a conundrum around what to prioritize for those at the sharp end of content marketing and B2B communications, especially. Fortunately, as this sletter will adeptly illustrate, “storytelling” can ensure your brand continues to surface on SERPs, while AIO/GEO drive traffic via article citations.

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The State of Organic Search in the Big ‘26

In 2026, position one stopped being the prize. SparkToro’s latest clickstream study found that 68% of US Google searches now end without a click to the open web—only 276 of every 1,000 reach a website, which is the steepest acceleration the firm has recorded.

When an AI Overview is present, the top result’s click-through falls by around 58% (Ahrefs). SparkToro’s own Rand Fishkin put it bluntly, to paraphrase: “don’t think you can simply SEO your way out of this one, guys”.

If you think you can, you’ve probably been labouring under the misconception that traffic is being redistributed to competitors’ better-written pages—and likely the ones with Claude’s grubby lexicographical fingerprints over them. But, in reality, this traffic has already evaporated before any page was reached in the first place.

So, when you’re asked “how do we get stories to rank?” it’s now time to reframe the question entirely. Instead, we need to consider how content can be cited, remembered, and surfaced as much by traditional SEO methods, by name, and vice versa. Still with us?

What’s Actually Dying in Search

Let’s start with the obituary. Google’s 2025–26 core updates—March and May, both unusually violent—have culled what the industry calls “commodity content;” thin, templated, intent-matched pages built to rank, rather than be read. Think: “# ways to boost your SEO” or “the best xyz AI tools on the market”.

For years this was the great interceptor, catching people mid-search and monetizing the encounter via on-page advertising. Fulfilling a funnel strategy didn’t matter so much, as the product was content and the currency eyeballs on a page.

Those actually marketing a product via search have had to play the game and augment their own strategies with additional marketing layers, e.g., content marketing (blogs) with a heavy emphasis on keyword capture.

But that game is now being automated away, with the AI layer intercepting the intercept.

Where AI search Is in the Big ‘26

The May update landed alongside Google’s largest-ever AI overhaul: AI Mode is now the default for many queries, AI Overviews highlighting “preferred sources.” That last phrase tells you all you need to know.

Since late May 2026, ‘Preferred Sources’ extends into AI Overviews and AI Mode; readers themselves nominate the sites they want surfaced and badged inside AI answers, regardless of rank.

Google paired it with a “Highly Cited” label for original reporting others lean on. Both reward the same thing—being a source people deliberately seek and others quote. You can’t keyword your way into either; you earn the distinction by being a source someone chooses.

This is where storytelling stops being a garnish and becomes the strategy—not anecdote-before-the-recipe, but a distinct editorial voice charging a defensible point of view, where original reporting or proprietary data is the reason to choose you over the synthesized average.

Commodity content is too generic to manufacture that; a piece that marries strong SEO fundamentals with even better storytelling will pull it off.

Architecture Over Balance

So, back to where “SEO-meets-storytelling”, and where it takes a stumble: marketers believe there’s a balance to be struck. There isn’t. The friction begins because generative engines and good prose want opposite things at sentence level.

GEO rewards extractable, self-contained claims—the liftable sentence a machine can quote. Storytelling withholds, builds, pays off across paragraphs. Average the two, and you get copy too vague to cite and too flat to read.

Rather than being in the middle, the answer is in the architecture first—a machine-readable spine inside an editorial body, which leads with a clear answer—and then nail down claims with clear, precise writing, so they can be lifted out of context when quoted. Blending H Tags and contemporaneous statistics from a credible primary source do this best.

The voice and narrative are what keep a human reading past the line. The engine extracts your spine into AIO; the reader who clicks through gets the story. One piece, two audiences, no compromise on either.

Assessing the Mediums That Do Both

The floor for searchable content is shifting—or, more accurately, as the kids would say, the floor is lava.

A year ago, ranking page-one all but guaranteed AI citation; Ahrefs found 76% of cited pages also ranked in the top 10. By early 2026 that had fallen to 38%. Citation and ranking are decoupling, and the engines lean heavily on UGC and video—YouTube is now the most-cited domain in AI Overviews.

None of this exempts you from the fundamentals: technical SEO, clean structure, and topical authority are still the price of being in the pool at all.

They remain the floor rather than the strategy, however, as chasing citations on top of them is capricious, and quality doesn’t reliably always win. Instead, by using content as a calling card for your brand, citations will naturally follow, becoming a bonus rather than the entire goal.

From Interception to Demand

Today, this is what SEO’s doom harbingers get wrong, and where the AI evangelists’ who blow the horn for its rapture are off-key.

Again, this is because the issue is a framing one. Search’s collapse isn’t pure loss—it should be considered a filter. By Semrush’s measure, traffic arriving via AI assistants converts around 4.4 times better than standard organic, because those users have done their comparing before they land.

You’re trading volume for qualified demand—fewer, better arrivals with stronger purchasing intent. Which is, surely, exactly what a brand, as opposed to a content farm, has always wanted.

Branded search is the one query an AI Overview can’t disintermediate: the user has already chosen you before Google answers. When Amsive studied 700,000 keywords, branded queries that triggered an AI Overview saw click-through rise 18.68%, while non-branded queries fell 19.98%.

The person who knows your name clicks through to validate a choice already made; every unbranded query is now a coin toss the machine usually wins.

Warming Towards a Two-Tier Search System

What it all warms towards is a genuinely two-tier system. Tier one is the machine-readable layer: the ‘extractable’ spine that gets you surfaced inside the AI answer, where most search volume now resolves.

Tier two is the editorial layer—the voice and the story that make a human come back to you by name. One piece, both jobs at once: the first earns the citation, the second earns the customer.

So, here’s the hot take, tentatively offered: do not optimize your storytelling just to rank—optimize it so it’s worth citing and then returning to via any future search.

For those of us trained in newsrooms or traditional marketing pathways, then dragged through the digital publishing revolution, you may recognize where we’re going with this.

Once, we were told not to resist the SERP, nor forgo the fundamentals of spinning a good yarn. We were told to love the bomb. Today, we’re being told to not be slaves to the algorithm or look back in anger, but do both at the same time.

Funny that. We’re back here again.

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Andrew Robson grew up around property. Familial connections across every branch of the family tree meant a career in real estate was always going to happen by osmosis, though his route there was anything but direct.

After early stints negotiating residential sales in South London and a near-decade of brokering contracts in the newly deregulated energy sector, Robson returned to property via Hamptons International in the early noughties, taking on a leading role in its international department .

Within a year, he had co-founded Robson Barnes, a boutique sales and marketing outfit representing high-end overseas developments—and became the first agent ever to transact at Jumby Bay Island, Antigua.

That introduction proved pivotal. When Jumby Bay’s long-standing property sales manager retired in 2009, he passed the baton to Robson directly.

What followed was 12 years living and working on the private island, overseeing all real estate sales, and marketing through the resort’s reopening and beyond—personally handling transactions totaling over $750 million in the process.

Robson left in 2021 and founded Arawak Estates, a Caribbean-focused advisory practice drawing on more than two decades of on-the-ground market knowledge to guide UHNW buyers from initial search to completion.

Since early 2024, he has added the role of Sales Director at The Beach Club, Barbuda—the $250 million resort Robert De Niro has spent 30 years and a chance lunch from Antigua bringing to life—assembling the legal, design, and marketing infrastructure ahead of its 2025 market launch.

His career, as he tells it, is less a planned ascent than a series of well-executed pivots—each one enabled by doing what he said he would, admitting what he didn’t know, and outlasting the bureaucracy in between.

We sat down with Robson to discuss authenticity as a differentiator in a homogenized luxury market, what over a decade living and working on a private island teaches you about UHNW buyers, and why the Caribbean’s most exciting chapter may still be ahead of it.

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1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

My father was a property developer, my older brother is a property developer, two of my three sisters are married to estate agents, and my third sister is an interior decorator, so you could say I ended up in the real estate industry by osmosis.

After leaving school, I spent a couple of years working as an agent in South London before rebelling slightly in the early nineties and joining a start-up brokering contracts in the newly deregulated energy industry.

In the early 2000s, however, a great friend of mine left the army and joined the Hamptons International office in Walton-on-Thames [a suburban town on the capital’s outskirts].

He was soon spotted by Chris Palmer and appointed Head of International, overseeing offices in Nice, Marbella, the Algarve, Barbados, and a number of projects elsewhere. Until then, I hadn’t even realized a job like that existed, and I immediately started badgering them for a role.

I joined Hamptons in early 2003 and have never really looked back. By the spring of 2004, one of our developer clients hired us to set up an agency of our own, initially to sell their projects but also to work with other developers internationally.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

The most unexpected, unintended, and ultimately fortuitous turn in my career came in early 2009.

We had enjoyed a fabulous year in 2008, with most of our product priced in US dollars and an exchange rate of more than $2 to £1. Then, in September, the credit crunch hit. The music stopped almost overnight, the phones went dead, and the business was suddenly on life support.

From early 2008, I had been working with a London-based entrepreneur who had recently sold his business and was looking to buy in either Barbados or Antigua. I introduced him to numerous agents and developers and, although he viewed a great many properties, nothing quite fit the brief.

Eventually, I introduced him to Don Tate, who had been handling property sales on Jumby Bay Island since its inception in the late 1980s. Don showed him around and he fell in love with one particular house.

What followed were months of negotiations between buyer and seller, which I handled as though my life depended on it and, as it turned out, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

In January 2009, shortly after the sale completed, Don called me to say he had been looking to retire for some time but had never found the right successor. To my astonishment, he suggested I approach the Board and apply for the role.

It was the break of a lifetime, and from 2009 to 2021 we ended up living, working, and raising our young children on Jumby Bay.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

When we left Hamptons to set up on our own, many people told us it would never work. We had no brand and, according to some, no one would take us seriously.

What we did have was enormous enthusiasm and drive, a determination to do our very best for both our developer clients and our buyers, and a genuine commitment to exceeding expectations.

If you can consistently do what you say you are going to do, admit when you don’t know the answer, but commit to finding it out, you will already be ahead of much of the competition.

People remember professionalism, honesty, and reliability, and they come back to you again and again because of it.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

So much has changed over the last 20 years. Before the 2008 financial crisis, we relied heavily on enormous print advertising budgets.

That world has largely disappeared. Digital marketing and social media have transformed how properties are presented and sold.

I was also surprised by the relatively poor finishes and lack of attention to detail in many Caribbean luxury properties back then. Happily, that has changed dramatically, and today we see some of the most sophisticated homes anywhere in the world.

The Covid pandemic also had an indelible impact, too. People realised they could run their businesses from virtually anywhere, and so a property in the Caribbean was no longer simply somewhere to spend a couple of weeks each year, but somewhere to relocate to for months at a time.

That shift in mindset changed everything, from the scope, design and specification of new homes, to the demand for robust fiber connectivity, and the wider infrastructure needed to support these new ‘residents,’ including roads, restaurants, medical facilities, and schooling.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Without question, it’s the people.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to meet an extraordinary range of individuals from all over the world; entrepreneurs, families, creatives, business leaders, and lifelong friends I would never otherwise have encountered.

Property is ultimately a people business. You are often involved in hugely important moments in people’s lives, whether they are buying a family home, making a major investment, or fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Being trusted to guide them through that process is both a privilege and a responsibility.

No two days are ever the same, and the relationships you build along the way are what make the industry so rewarding.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Probably the lengthy legal process and the bureaucracy that can sometimes surround getting a sale across the line.

Real estate is an incredibly emotional and exciting business at the beginning. Clients fall in love with a property, deals are agreed, and everyone is enthusiastic about moving forward.

However, the reality is that transactions often involve a huge number of moving parts: lawyers, banks, tax planning, due diligence, surveys, licences, and cross-border considerations, particularly in the international markets we operate in.

At times, the process can feel unnecessarily slow and complicated, especially when both buyer and seller are fully committed and simply want to move ahead. One of the biggest challenges is keeping momentum and managing expectations while navigating all of that bureaucracy.

That said, it has also taught me the importance of patience, communication, and attention to detail. Very often, getting a complex transaction over the finish line is just as much about persistence and problem-solving as it is about selling the property in the first place.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

In the Caribbean, even at the highest end of the market, I think the biggest challenge is differentiation.

Working with The Beach Club, Barbuda, we are fortunate to represent something genuinely unique, but the reality is that almost every luxury development today describes itself in very similar terms—”toes in the sand”, “understated luxury,” “world-class amenities,” and so on.

Much of the language, branding, and even design philosophy across the sector has become remarkably homogenized.

The challenge is no longer simply building something beautiful in an exceptional location; it is finding an authentic identity and communicating that clearly in a crowded global marketplace.

Today’s buyers are incredibly sophisticated and well traveled. They have seen countless luxury resorts and developments around the world, so they are looking for something with real character, substance, and a genuine sense of place. They want authenticity, privacy, community, environmental sensitivity, and experiences that feel difficult to replicate elsewhere.

For us, the focus has to be on telling a truthful story about what makes a place special rather than relying on generic luxury marketing language.

The projects that will ultimately stand out are the ones that create an emotional connection and offer something genuinely distinctive, rather than simply another version of the same aspirational lifestyle narrative.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

What makes me most optimistic is the extraordinary level of innovation now taking place across both design and sustainability.

Particularly in the luxury sector, there has been a real shift in mindset over the last decade. Environmental considerations are no longer viewed as an optional extra or a marketing exercise, they are increasingly central to how projects are conceived, built, and operated.

The advances we are seeing in areas such as solar energy, water purification, waste management, food production, and sustainable building materials are incredibly encouraging, especially for island communities and remote destinations where resources have traditionally been more limited.

We are now seeing developments incorporate sophisticated solar infrastructure, grey water recycling, desalination and purification systems, organic farming initiatives, and far more intelligent approaches to waste disposal and energy efficiency.

At the same time, architects and designers are becoming much more thoughtful about how buildings interact with their natural surroundings, maximizing natural ventilation, reducing environmental impact, and using materials that are both sustainable and beautifully crafted.

What is equally exciting is the creativity of the architects themselves. I continue to be amazed by their ability to consistently surprise and astound with new ideas, new technologies, and entirely fresh ways of thinking about how people live.

The very best architects are no longer simply designing beautiful homes but creating environments and experiences that feel both inspiring and deeply connected to their location.

For all the challenges the industry faces, I think the combination of sustainability, technology, and genuinely visionary design gives enormous reason for optimism about the future of the built world.

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Editor’s Note: The original version of this article stated that the La Residencia multifamily complex in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico had survived five Category-5 hurricanes without any damage; this has been corrected to reflect that it has withstood “numerous severe storms.”

Anyone operating in the built world knows that every step of the development process—from land acquisition to occupancy—carries some degree of risk. And it’s perhaps even more obvious, especially recently, that one major source of that risk today is good old Mother Nature.

Whether it’s in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, or wildfires, the climate has a stubborn tendency to force its way into the conversation, whether we like it or not. And with 77% of the United States now falling within “extreme risk” zones for natural disasters, it’s no wonder that resilient building practices have become a major topic of discussion.

Enter RSG 3-D, a California-based firm that makes structural concrete insulated panel building systems designed to improve resistance to fire, severe weather, and seismic activity. The company bills itself as a next-generation construction company developing resilient building systems for an era defined by climate risk, rising insurance pressure, and growing demand for durable, disaster-resistant housing.

In a recent email exchange, RSG 3-D CEO Ken Calligar told me that the conversation about how buildings in high-risk environments are designed is one few people can afford to ignore anymore.

“Resilient construction has become a financial issue as much as an environmental one,” Calligar said, adding that insurance companies are reinforcing this shift by making it more expensive to remain exposed. He said the current context means it’s only natural that “people who experience natural disasters are increasingly motivated to change how they build and rebuild.”

By using a concrete and steel panel system like that designed by RSG 3-D, Calligar says clients can significantly extend the lifecycle of their buildings, while also reducing their energy, maintenance, and insurance costs by up to fifty percent.

“Ultimately, the building envelope is the single most important investment in any structure,” Calligar said. “Get it right, and everything else works better. Get it wrong, and the costs compound in every direction.”

In today’s newsletter, we’re building with Blox that include:

• Anticipating the costs of climate-related disasters

• Investing in long-term resilience and sustainability

• Imagining a “future-proof” built world

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Playing the Long Game

Calligar said that although interest in resilient construction has seen an uptick in recent years as natural disasters become more frequent, real adoption of new practices has been gradual—at times, frustratingly so.

“The first broad discussions of resilience within the building and development community emerged after Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” he said. He added that by the time Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012, early advocates for significantly higher resilience standards in the United States were just beginning to gain traction.

Calligar suggested that the U.S. construction sector has been slow to move away from established building methods due to a variety of factors. “Fear of change, concerns about cost increases, reliance on outdated codes, and general complacency have all slowed progress.”

And in a world rife with uncertainty—both economic and environmental—investing in resilient building systems still seems like an out-of-reach luxury to many. “Resilience is still too often viewed as aspirational rather than essential,” Calligar said, while noting that, contrary to popular belief, the upfront cost of building with RSG 3-D is on par with conventional U.S. construction methods.

However, recent events—particularly the increasingly regular wildfires in RSG 3-D’s home state of California—mean the case for a new approach to building standards is, perhaps unfortunately, becoming much more compelling.

Calligar pointed out that most clients he encounters now are underinsured, while contending with widening funding gaps and rising materials and construction costs. In some cases, he said, this leads people to choose cheaper materials, which ends up increasing long-term risk, along with future insurance and operating expenses due to growing climate instability.

“Today in California, three fundamental questions dominate: how much, how fast, and can I get insurance. These are economic questions, but they are increasingly shaped by climate risk and exposure to natural disasters,” Calligar said.

Yet in spite of rising economic pressure, he said that most consumers also now have a clearer understanding of their exposure to environmental risks and are actively seeking solutions.

“Decision-making is becoming more integrated,” he said. “Rather than treating resilience and sustainability as secondary considerations, buyers are evaluating them as core components of financial performance, with risk exposure and long-term cost stability driving project choices.”

Building a Resilient Reputation

After years spent working in investment banking and capital markets, Calligar acquired RSG 3-D’s predecessor operations from Mexico-based Insteel Panelmex and re-launched them under the new name in 2018. Despite not having a background in construction, Calligar’s previous experience in finance and a history of involvement in infrastructure operations meant he knew there were gaps in how the industry dealt with climate concerns.

“The United States still lacks a clear, consistent approach to building resilience,” he said. “Developers, builders, and even many architects remain rooted in legacy practices and materials that have already proven insufficient.”

Under Calligar’s leadership, RSG 3-D expanded its focus in the United States, particularly in regions dealing with wildfire exposure and rising insurance costs. The timing coincided with growing attention on how buildings perform during disasters, especially in areas where repeated fires or storms were beginning to affect rebuilding costs and insurability.

Calligar pointed to California’s 2015 Valley Fire as an early turning point in the company’s history. During that disaster, a home built with the RSG 3-D system survived the fire while surrounding structures were destroyed. Images showing the unharmed building surrounded by charred trees were widely circulated and helped spur conversations about fire-resistant construction.

“Clients became early adopters who learned directly from the Valley Fire outcome,” he said, describing how rebuilding efforts in Northern California introduced more homeowners to resilient construction systems after the fire.

In contrast, Calligar said a more recent project in Southern California signals a shift to planning for future disasters even before they strike. “Rather than rebuilding after disaster, this was a pre-build approach, proactively designing to protect the family and their assets,” he said. “It reflects a fundamental shift in mindset: anticipating risk based on recent events and preparing for a safer, more stable future.”

He said RSG 3-D is now engaged in the large-scale rebuilding of homes in the Los Angeles region. As the magnitude of losses has increased, the company says it has expanded its engineering, architectural, construction, and design-build capabilities to meet demand.

Calligar believes that trend is likely to continue. “The future will be defined by resilience for two reasons,” he said. “First, the cost of not being resilient has become too high to ignore. Second, the path to resilience is increasingly straightforward.”

The Proof Is in the Panels

RSG 3-D projects range from luxury leisure resorts to LEED-certified industrial buildings, universities, schools, custom homes, and multifamily residences across a wide variety of climates and geographies around the world.

“Every building, in every location, can benefit from our system,” Calligar said. “That represents a vast opportunity across commercial, industrial, infrastructure, multifamily, and single-family residential markets.”

Some notable examples of the system at work include the La Residencia multifamily complex in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico, which has survived numerous severe storms without any damage, and the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, which has been struck by two earthquakes measuring 6.9 and 6.5 Richter, with zero damage in either incident, despite designs including 24-foot walls and expansive glass.

RSG 3-D says its buildings are also remarkably energy efficient due to the system’s “monolithic” envelope that maximizes energy efficiency by providing zero air exchanges, minimal thermal bridging, and optimal thermal massing of interior walls.

“With energy, maintenance, and insurance costs reduced by up to half,” Calligar said, “and a lifecycle extended significantly, these buildings are stronger long-term investments by almost any measure.”

Another selling point of the RSG 3-D system is its suitability to unconventional design elements such as curves, domes, and cantilevers, which makes it appealing to architects who want to incorporate resilient building practices into an already-established aesthetic identity.

Calligar also described a growing interest in neighborhood-scale approaches to fire resistance, rather than focusing solely on individual homes. “In the case of urban fire events,” he said, “one resilient home is beneficial, a cluster is better, and a majority of resilient homes can form the foundation of a truly future-proof community.”

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If Moshe Sukenik’s answers lean more towards brevity than some of our other subjects, he has a good excuse: only moments before we spoke, he was notified that his son’s girlfriend had just gone into labor, and so our time together was perhaps briefer than it otherwise might have been.

Or maybe not, as Mr. Sukenik is pretty much always in demand. As Vice Chairman at Newmark, where he’s served for more than 35 years, Sukenik is one of the most respected and accomplished tenant representatives in the United States. While he’s focused on the New York City market and has developed a particularly notable niche among many of the world’s most prominent law firms, his career spans the country and a wide array of notable companies from a diverse set of industries.

Some of his most noteworthy transactions include EY’s lease for 650,000 square feet at 1 Manhattan West; Debevoise and Plimpton’s 530,000-square-foot lease in Hudson Yards; Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP’s 550,000-square-foot New York City lease renewal and expansion; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP’s 550,000-square-foot Manhattan lease; and the REBNY award-winning land swap that helped create the new Lincoln Square Synagogue, the first new synagogue in Manhattan in over 60 years.

As you might expect from a gentleman with this breadth of experience, our conversation was suffused with insight. From the transition in how tenant representation brokers have been viewed over the course of his career—both by their clients and the market—to why AI is actually good for the commercial real estate market, to the benefits of having a 90-plus year old broker on the team, Sukenik walked us through both where the industry is at and how its evolved over the course of his—if you’ll excuse the very-justified glazing—illustrious career.

1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

I was practicing law and doing some legal work. I practiced law for 22 months and I said to myself, “Self, why would I want to just do the legal work when the economics are already set before it gets to my desk?” It seemed like it would be a lot more impactful, and a lot more fun, to be able to sculpt the economics, rather than just execute someone else’s development of the economics.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

It’s that the school of hard knocks is the best teacher; there’s nothing to replace experience. The fact that you keep learning after so many years in the industry, that’s a little bit surprising. Eddie Gordon (or Edward S. Gordon, known by some as the “godfather of commercial real estate”) at his company, which is where I got my start, had a regular weekly meeting. And once every couple of months, he’d get up and tell the sort of stories that were meant to inspire all of us, stories about how deals come together. And that practical experience, even if its someone else’s experience, can really apply and just multiply over time.

On one occasion, Gordon must have told a story about getting an initial no and somehow pushing through and just keeping the conversation going. So, shortly after hearing that story, it’s early in my career, and I get the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Hasbro Toys on the phone. At first, it sounded like he was sort of interested, so I kept him on the phone. But after a while he said, “No, I’m not really interested.”

But at the beginning of the conversation he said to me, “We just signed a lease. I don’t need space.” And I said to him, “No problem. I’m sure, as Hasbro Toys, you had so much leverage, you probably signed a very, very favorable deal. And I’m sure you’d be able to dispose of it.”

So, after I got rejected on the initial phone call, but rejected with a sense of interest, I spent two days drafting a letter to the CEO. And four months later, the assistant to the CEO called me up and we turned it into my first big deal.

And it was because of the story Gordon told, because of that experience he shared, that I kept pushing. And, sure enough, I was right. They did dispose of the space very favorably. Actually, I think they made their advertising firm take it.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

In commercial brokerage, I think if you’re doing it for six months, you’re going to know if you do or don’t like it. If you don’t really like it after six months, the right thing is to move on.

If you do like it, even if you haven’t earned any money yet, stick with it. Eventually, you’ll be successful if you both like it and work hard.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

Early in my career, and it goes back a ways, tenants were not necessarily hiring exclusive brokers. And all I do is represent tenants. And then you hit a downturn in the economy where so many tenants got stuck with so many shitty deals, while at the same time the market was getting more and more complicated, that basically all of the tenants started to hire an exclusive representative so they could get impartial advice. That is probably the signal biggest change that I’ve witnessed in my career.

Also, owners pay commissions on signing now, by and large, rather than payouts. So, instead of fighting about when the payout is, which used to be the case four or five years ago, now it’s just assumed, by and large, that the owners will pay on signing.

Another Eddie Gordon anecdote: when I started at his company, he told me a story about how there was a broker, Henry Baker, who was 94 years old. And Eddie was negotiating the commission agreement after a deal had closed, and the owner wanted to give a three-year payout to the brokerage team. So Eddie says to the owner, “No problem. Let me just send the broker down to talk to you.” And he sent 94-year-old Henry from the brokerage team, and Henry came back with the full commission check.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

What I do is leasing, representing tenants. And what I love about it is that you get involved in so many different things in order to be effective.

You have to understand the finance, you have to understand the architecture, you have to understand the physical plant, you have to understand the psychology of both parties.

The fact that you have to deal with air conditioning system performance as well as finance, as well as making sure the egos are all intact—that’s what makes it fun.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Oh man, you’re a troublemaker (laughs). I guess I would say dishonesty.

I think that there are too many people in the industry who think it’s their job to say whatever they have to say, whether or not it’s truthful.

So many times a landlord’s leasing agent thinks their job is to say whatever they have to say in order to get the tenant engaged. And there are many, many, many brokers who act with integrity. There’s many owners who act with integrity, and, unfortunately, you’re going to meet some who don’t. My statement that I’ve made all the time is, “as long as the landlord’s broker and the landlord don’t lie to me, they’re doing a hundred percent of what I would want.” And, unfortunately, even that yardstick is not always satisfied.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

I think, like everywhere else, it’s kind of trying to wrap your mind around AI. What’s going to be the impact? And that uncertainty is less than optimal. And you have a situation where so many entry level jobs are no longer needed, so how do you train people who will be the experts towards the top of the heap, the senior people? You don’t need the junior people, but you do need the advisors whose judgment and experience is valuable.

How do you get to year 10 if you don’t go through years one through five?

But I do think, to a great extent, anytime a company has a long-term point of view, there’s no choice but to take in these younger people with no experience and give them the training so that you’ll end up with senior people. And that’s the way the bigger institutions are really developing the business model. Many of the bigger institutions on the tenant side that I deal with, they’re not really cutting back on the new hires. They more aggressively winnow out the people with two years experience who aren’t seen to be potential leaders, but not the number of initial hires. The big companies that understand what they need in the future are not necessarily cutting back.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

I think that COVID has kind of proven that face-to-face interaction, getting groups together in a room, having them all work together—whether it’s cultural, social capital, whatever you want to call it—COVID has proven that element of business is here to stay. It’s not changing, it’s not going away.

I think, in fact, it ties into why the better buildings are doing so much better right now. Because of AI, each employee is responsible for generating more revenue—by a lot. You see businesses that say, “we’re expecting revenue to be up by 10%,” and the workforce is down by 10%. That means each employee who still has a job and is showing up in the office is generating more revenue. So, if you have employees who are each individually responsible for generating a lot more revenue, the relationship between the rent expense relative to the revenue per employee changes—it becomes a lower percentage. So, in a sense, office space as a component of cost is going down. And that means that the quality of the building, and the ability to pay more dollars towards rent, arguably makes more sense.

And that’s a small component of the reasoning behind the flight to quality. Look at some of the numbers out there, how much revenue is generated per employee, you’ll see the data. It’s increasing, and the expectation is that the rate of increase is going to keep going up. That’s the impact of AI. But that impact means quality office space is going to be more in demand, and the pricing will be somewhat less of an obstacle.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for an important message from Bloxspring’s VP of Content.

I love EM dashes—there, I said it. I love semi-colons too; in fact, I’m outright mad for them. I have adored these bits of punctuation for a long time—I’m talking decades, not years, back when ChatGPT was just a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.

And, yet, recently, I have been made to feel shame for my usage of these style elements. I have been counseled that my fondness for them makes my writing seem too much like AI.

I have been a professional writer my entire adult life. I have a Masters in Creative Writing from one of the United States’ most storied writing programs; I wrote my first novel as an undergraduate while completing my BA in creative writing. I have taught composition to disinterested freshmen and instructed enthusiastic students in the art of fiction writing. I have written in a wide array of professional styles and genres, from music criticism to academic white papers to television pilots.

In other words, I am a writer. I don’t use AI to generate content. I do it the old-fashioned way—with my friggin mind and, even after all these years, two index fingers hunting and pecking across the keyboard with all the grace of a blind woodpecker going at a tree.

So, I’m not going to use AI to generate writing. But, by the same token, I’m not going to let AI take anything from me. It’s not going to dictate how I can and cannot write.

Nor should it. Because if those well-meaning comments from friends and colleagues are intended to ensure that my narratives come across as genuine, as authentically human, running from particular bits of punctuation because they scan as “too AI” means sacrificing the very subjectivity we’re all searching for.

Authenticity in Marketing or Whose Line Is It Anyway?

What does all this have to do with marketing and the built world? More than you might think. And, yes, I know asking a question and then answering it is a technique that the AI has also coopted. I don’t care.

And nor should any CMOs, marketing directors, or anyone else trying to market their product, property, or platform to the built world. In an era when authenticity is rapidly fading from view—becoming submerged in the ever-gathering aether of deep fake videos, AI generated photos of animals that are literally too cute to be real, and LLM-generated narrative slop—it’s also becoming our most precious commodity, as individuals and as businesses.

Now, if I had the AI editor turned on right now, it would come at me for the above sentence. It would suggest probably half a dozen ways that I could make it “more concise.” But that would drain all the personality from it. It would erase what makes it pleasurable to read, as well as write; it would kill its authenticity and replace it with something generic and safe.

The companies that make an impact in this ever-shifting environment are the ones that remain authentic and true to their own voice–regardless of whether it happens to align with what the LLMs are doing or not.

That means when the AI in my google doc begins to finish my sentence for me, I don’t accept its suggestion automatically; but I also don’t refrain from using it, if it happens to align with what I was already planning to say anyway.

I won’t let the AI tell me how to write, but I also won’t let it tell me how not to write.

A Few Rules for Writers (and Companies) To Live by in the Age of AI

• Write your own content.

• Don’t write a certain way because of AI

• Don’t avoid writing in a particular way because of AI

• Find a tone of voice and stick with it, or don’t

That last one is particularly relevant for brands seeking authenticity in the big ‘26. Marketing and writing professionals, like me, will often counsel brands about the importance of tone of voice. We will suggest that a tone of voice needs to be established and rigidly adhered to; that it’s part of what grants a brand a clear identity, and that identity is what humanizes the brand and helps people feel connected to it.

There’s truth to all of those notions, but if we adhere to them too rigidly, we risk sacrificing authenticity.

AI has made it easier than ever for brands to find a tone of voice and then generate content that slavishly reproduces that same tenor over and over again. But that kind of one-note conception of authorial style isn’t particularly human at all, and if brands (and people) want to appear authentic in this new paradigm, it may be time to adjust our approach.

Human beings, including writers, don’t just speak (or write) in a single tone of voice. We modulate our approach depending on our audience and situation. I don’t address my coworkers in the same tone I use with my wife; similarly, I don’t speak to my colleagues the same way in a meeting that I do during a social event. Brands should take the same approach.

Find a tone of voice and use it when it’s appropriate, but don’t be afraid to alter it when necessary or even just opportune. One day your brand might feel authoritative; on another, it could be playful. That kind of tonal diversity enhances your brand’s authenticity, because it’s clear the content has been created by and for human beings.

So, the next time you’re working on a sletter for your fledgling proptech brand and you’re hesitating over using an EM dash because it feels “a bit too AI,” or you’re considering pulling that parenthetical aside you made because it doesn’t conform to brand guidelines, quiet that judgemental voice and take the authentic path, the one that feels most true to you.

Or don’t. I mean, what do I know? I’m just a human being.

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When Michelle Mongeon Allen became a partner at JLG Architects in 2004, she knew the Grand Forks, North Dakota-based architecture firm was already on an upward trajectory. After all, Allen had opened JLG’s Minneapolis office two years earlier, and offices in Alexandria and Fargo were soon to follow.

But what she didn’t anticipate was just how much the firm would evolve over the coming decades, eventually becoming a 100% employee-owned company, a shift that marked the beginning of an exciting new chapter for a firm that started out as just “two guys in a garage.”

“People always joke that nobody moves from Fargo to Grand Forks,” Allen, now CEO, told me in a recent interview. “But I did, for this little firm up north that was starting to do big things and being recognized very early in their existence for design excellence.”

When it comes to innovation in the built world, ownership structure may not be the first thing that springs to mind. After all, the core financial structure of commercial real estate development hasn’t changed much over the past few hundred years. Sure, financial instruments and players have evolved, but the underlying model of leveraged investment in income-producing property is still essentially the same now as it was when common lands were first fenced off and consolidated into privately owned farms.

But since JLG shifted to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) model in 2014, the firm has grown to over 200 employee-owners across 9 offices and has been named one of the 50 best places to work in America by Inc. Magazine, a recognition that Allen attributes in large part to the company’s ownership model.

So, in today’s sletter, we’ll be building with blox that include:

• Attracting talent in the Midwest

• Fostering growth through communal ownership

• Cultivating an ownership mindset

Combating Midwest Brain Drain

Founded in 1989 by Gary Johnson and Lonnie Laffen, the firm became JLG after James Galloway joined in 2000, the same year Allen was first hired as a project architect.

“It was two guys in a garage in Grand Forks, North Dakota, who believed that they could raise the bar for design in the community that they served,” Allen said.

As the company began to grow and open more offices throughout the Upper Midwest, the partners set their sights on what seemed then like the wild dream of becoming a world-class design firm competing with big names at the national level. But to do that, they knew they had to attract and retain world-class talent.

“We knew that talent existed in the heartland, we didn’t have to go to New York or LA,” Allen told me. “I mean, we had really built our firm on small-town farm kids who found their way to an architecture degree and were doing really exceptional work.”

But to combat the brain drain that afflicts so many Midwest businesses, the partners needed to consider a relatively unique approach.

“We knew that to build this world-class design firm, we had to create really unlimited opportunity, and we knew that growth creates opportunity,” she said. “We already were committed to growing, but as an ESOP, it’s really a mandate to grow.”

A Mandate for Collective Success

In architecture, the traditional and most common ownership model is a partnership. In that structure, senior employees are invited to become partners by making a financial investment, thereby gaining a voice in directing the company’s development, along with a stake in its success.

“We started with that model,” Allen said. “Between the four majority partners, we owned 80%. But as we continued to grow, we realized that there were other models out there available to us that could help with this vision of being a legacy, world-class design firm with unlimited opportunity.”

That’s when the firm’s CFO brought up the idea of transitioning to an ESOP. An ESOP is a retirement plan, like a 401(k), that holds company stock in a trust for employees, who accumulate shares in the plan over time. Some ESOPs own only a small percentage of a company’s stock, while others—like JLG—boast 100% ownership.

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 6,609 plans identified as ESOPs in the United States, holding total assets of over $2 trillion. Some notable ESOPs in the built world include the multinational engineering and design firms HDR and Burns & McDonnell, the hospitality developer The Resorts Companies, and architects BNIM and Gensler. In many cases, ESOPs go on to acquire other firms as they continue to grow.

The plans are often used as a tax-friendly exit strategy for owners who want to protect the legacy of their business, because they offer an alternative to disruptive mergers or outside buyers and allow firms to maintain leadership and client continuity. But increasingly companies also use ESOPs to reward, attract, and engage employees even if there isn’t an exiting owner. That was the case for JLG.

“From a partner group perspective, I don’t think we had anyone even within 10 years of retirement when we made this decision,” Allen said. “But we felt that it’s so aligned with our vision of having everyone rowing in the same direction and of becoming a legacy design firm that made a stake in our collective success accessible to everyone in the organization.”

Cultivating an Ownership Mindset

Allen said the firm sees ownership not only as a way for employees to build wealth, but also as a way to offer them professional development within the organization and an opportunity to contribute creatively to the design language of the firm.

The result is an ownership mindset that leads employees to feel a meaningful connection between their individual roles and the company’s overall financial success.

As Allen put it: “An ownership mindset is ‘I know what I’m supposed to do, and I’m going to execute on that, and that execution is going to help all of us to be successful.’”

Allen added that for client-facing employees like principals and project managers, ownership helped them develop business acumen and allowed them to better understand the needs and concerns of the companies they work with.

“We were able to grow with our clients and take on larger, more complex projects without having to bring in a lot of other partners all the time,” she said. “So, we were able to build capacity and expertise in our organization that maybe our competition wasn’t able to do on their own as much.”

Fostering a Culture Shift

For businesses considering a transition to an ESOP model, Allen’s main words of advice are about aligning the decision with a specific vision for where your business is headed.

“You really have to understand what it is that you’re trying to accomplish,” she said. “It’s not that you can’t use ESOP just as a transition model, [but] the successful ones are the ones where it is much more cultural.”

Size is also a factor, she said. JLG first considered becoming an ESOP company when they hit approximately 30 employees, but found the financials didn’t work until their workforce was in the 80 to 100 range.

“You have to be at a certain size financially for it to make sense. If you’re not at that scale, then maybe an external sale is going to make more sense. Or you use internal transition to get you there.”

As far as the legal details are concerned, Allen said it’s important to surround yourself with the right advisers who can help you along and educate you on your journey. ESOPs fall under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), so proper compliance is essential.

“You need people representing you as the selling shareholder and then independently there are advisors on the ESOP side that are representing this new ownership entity to ensure that it’s fair from an ERISA standpoint,” she said.

In addition to legal and valuation services, many ESOP transactions are also leveraged, which means the buyers need to find a financial partner to provide a loan to cover the cost of the transaction.

And the final—and perhaps most important—element to consider is the trustee that will hold the funds for employees. Trustees can be internal to the organization or external, and the decision comes down to each company’s vision for how they want the ESOP to function.

In any case, Allen said there is a community of like-minded business owners out there who are more than willing to share their experiences and provide guidance to those considering taking the leap to employee ownership.

“I absolutely recommend engagement with the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) or ESOP Association, because it connects you with other ESOPs. Not only do they provide good resources, but the most valuable thing for me has been attending the conferences. When you are sitting side by side with other people who have been in your shoes, you find out what things are common and what things are unique.”

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There is a whiteboard on Peter Cole’s desk. A gift, he tells me, from his wife. On it are the things he should be focusing on such as capital raising or strategic priorities. It’s a gentle reminder for the moments when the day collapses into minutiae and he needs reminding of why he is doing any of this. It’s a long way from his time as CFO at Ritz Carlton, or the three and a half years he spent integrating Starwood into Marriott, one of the largest mergers in hospitality history. But Cole left that world because of where it was headed.

His view, stated plainly, is that high-end hospitality started confusing price with quality and never quite recovered. What made luxury what it was—the sense that someone is always thinking about elevating your experience—slowly got phased out. And what remained was expensive, but no longer luxurious.

Cole left to build something different. Today he is CEO of Collectio Group, which operates private member clubs and is organised around the idea that what people are really looking for — in hospitality, and increasingly in much else besides — is somewhere to belong.

I sat down with Peter to unpack his career and insider views on the world of hospitality and beyond.

How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

My undergraduate training is in real estate finance. After graduating I worked as a commercial appraiser — valuations, a lot of analytical groundwork, and then decided I wanted to move into general management so went back for an MBA. Marriott recruited me out of graduate school because they wanted people who could think like real estate, so I joined their development finance organisation.

From there I took off into hospitality proper. Operational roles running hotels, then worked up to CFO at Ritz Carlton, then back into the broader Marriott world and then the Starwood integration — merging two enormous companies over about three and a half years. After that I became CEO of Design Hotels. Still within the Marriott umbrella, but a completely different world. Different ethos, different ownership community, different everything.

What's the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

Staying at one company for 25 years, for a start. That was never the plan. The only reason it happened is that every so often a completely different role—some I’d worked toward, some arrived sideways. Development finance to corporate treasury to running hotels to international luxury brand to merging companies to Design Hotels.

The other thing is how much my relationship with the industry itself changed. I came in on the finance side. You either built cheaper or financed better. Those were the tools. Now our whole company is grounded in the idea that what makes something powerful is that it’s unique, and that it stands for something specific. That shift is probably the most significant thing that happened to me professionally.

I'd also say I've learned something specific about my own role. I'm not a creative. I wouldn't describe myself that way. What I can do is get creatives to move—work with them in a way that gets things pushed forward and brought to completion. At Design Hotels, we had an initiative where we'd bring creative people together, enable them to make something, and use that content to speak to other industry participants. The challenge is always the same moment: things are perpetually improving but never quite finished. Someone wants to shoot it one more time or rework the narrative. Someone has to guide the process to completion. It's not about saying perfect is the enemy of good. It's about moving to the next stage.

What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

I often speak with students and here’s what I tell them: look at me. I have a real estate finance degree and I run a company that operates private member clubs. You cannot draw a straight line between those two points. There is just no point.

The other thing I say is: just try it. And when you recognize you’ve stopped learning—when you’re getting better at what you already know rather than building something genuinely new—move faster than feels comfortable. If you’re asking whether now is the right time, you’ve already waited too long.

The built world is so much more than most people imagine when they’re starting out. There is so much more power in doing something counterpositioned, something genuinely unique, something that stands for something, than in squeezing another point off your financing costs. That takes time to understand. But it’s there to be found.

What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

When I started out, real estate was very slow to adopt anything. The model was build cheaper or finance better — and going hard on both levers is also why so many owners went into bankruptcy when markets turned. You had nothing to fall back on if conditions shifted.

Technology changed that substantially, and it has been a welcome addition. How things get created, how operators attract and retain users — coworking and the entirely digital face it relies on would have been unthinkable in this industry not long ago. There are now many more ways to build something defensible. That is almost entirely down to what technology opened up.

What keeps you motivated?

Finding something new to build skills around. The membership world is relatively new territory for me. I have only been in it five or seven years, and there is still a great deal to learn, people with more experience to surround myself with, and goals to pursue together. The moment I stop feeling that genuine newness is the moment I know it is time to move. That has been true at every stage of my career.

There is also something I had not anticipated about entrepreneurship after a long career inside a large institution. At Marriott there were always resources—teams, infrastructure, and budget. Now there are moments where I look up from my desk and realize I am the one writing the contract. Building from scratch has a satisfaction to it that I did not fully appreciate until I was doing it.

What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

The gap between what you want to do and what you currently have the resources to do. That is the honest answer. It closes over time. It is just not closed yet.

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

People. It has always been a people business, and staffing is the largest cost in any hotel. But the problem is not just headcount. It’s the attitude. So much of hospitality has gotten trapped in a mode of simply getting the job done because there isn’t enough staff, and that is how you end up asking guests at check-in whether they want housekeeping during their stay. That is a deeply limiting way to begin someone’s experience. It signals, before they have reached their room, that something has already been taken away.

What has been lost is the willingness to hire for taste and craft and the understanding that small touches are the product. That was always the core of real luxury, way before luxury became a price bracket.

The check-in and check-out problem is a related symptom. Those rigid times exist because of how rooms are turned—cleaning schedules, HR practices, all of it is built around a specific window. Changing it inside a major brand means navigating the entire loyalty program architecture. But at some point someone will break it, make their name for it, and the rest will follow almost immediately. Changes take a long time in hospitality. But when one moves, they all do.

What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

The consumer is shifting toward something hospitality is well-placed to serve. People are not just looking for experiences—that word has been used to the point where it means almost nothing. They are looking for something they can become part of. People are searching for belonging, not just in travel but across their lives. The ability to find a community and commit to it with genuine passion—that is what is driving a lot of consumer behaviour right now.

It’s precisely why we have focused Collectio within the membership world. We think there are significant businesses to be built from that shift. We think ours is one of them.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Here at Collision, one of our mottos is that innovation isn’t always what you expect. Sure, sometimes it’s about a cool piece of technology or a novel building material, but on other occasions it could center around a fresh perspective or a new way of tackling a longstanding problem.

Or maybe it involves introducing a whole new role to the real estate ecosystem in the wake of a global pandemic, and then watching that role evolve and shift in ensuing years.

Today’s sletter is about that kind of innovation.

A decade ago, ‘Tenant Engagement Manager’ wasn’t a job that existed. Okay, maybe that’s overstating the case, but it certainly wasn’t a position that could be found within the vast—and I mean that in the strongest sense of the word—majority of commercial real estate companies. It certainly wasn’t a full-time job for a mid-sized regional real estate owner with a largely suburban footprint.

And yet, here in the big ‘26, as my 11-year old would put it, it’s a very crucial role for one such company—specifically, Hobbs Brook Real Estate (HBRE). HBRE has a portfolio of nearly 5 million square feet of office space predominantly in New England, as well as Illinois and Georgia, with a particular focus on the life sciences segment.

Moreover, it’s a particularly important position for one individual, Faron Brazis, who currently serves in the role for HBRE across most of its portfolio.

And it’s not just important because it’s her livelihood. On the contrary, it’s clear from a recent interview that Brazis is quite passionate about her job, and the impact her role could have as commercial real estate evolves.

“Real estate is transferring over to this whole customer service focus and that’s great,” Brazis told me. “But how do you do that? Who’s the person that is bridging that gap between the way it used to be and the way that they want it to be? And I think that’s kind of where my role comes in.”

So, in this edition of “It’s Ingenious,” we’ll be building with blox that include:

1. What does a tenant engagement manager do all day?

2. How do you measure the value of events?

3. Bringing amenities to your doorstep

What Does a Tenant Engagement Manager Do All Day?

So, this was pretty much the first question I asked Brazis when we spoke. Tenant engagement manager sounds like a cool title, but what does her workload look like on a daily basis?

“It’s a lot of hats,” Brazis told me. “It’s data science, it’s art, it’s events, it’s consulting, it’s marketing.”

To illustrate those numerous pieces of headwear, Brazis walked me through just a few of the events she had organized that were occurring over the next 48 hours. There were about 50 tenants coming down to have their headshots taken with a professional photographer that afternoon; the next day, the photographer would vanish, and the room he utilized would become the location for a game night; the day after that, a tenant would be hosting its happy hour in the same premises.

“I do things that really get people happy to be here and engaged; get them talking to their neighbors; get them out and about seeing who else is around campus,” Brazis said.

Meanwhile, Brazis is analyzing the data. Not just from these events, but from HBRE’s properties more generally. What spaces are people utilizing the most? Which floor is consuming the most electricity? What amenities get the most attention?

Brazis believes that the data element will increasingly become the focus of her role. “That’s kind of where I see it really blowing up and adding a lot more value,” she said. It’s data that positions her as a liaison between the tenants and the rest of HBRE. She can communicate to their leasing team which amenities really add value and bring people into the office, or let the property managers know which floors aren’t populated on weekends and can have their lights turned off to help achieve sustainability objectives.

As commercial properties become more service-oriented, it seems logical to have someone dedicated to providing services and understanding how tenants are putting workplace strategy theories into practice. And that connective tissue is exactly what Brazis’ role represents.

How Do You Measure the Value of Events?

Brazis has been a tenant engagement manager with HBRE for about five years, and working in the real estate space more generally for eight. While her role at HBRE requires a diverse and evolving skill set, it’s perhaps not surprising that her professional career began in private events—everything from weddings to concerts.

For those kinds of events, the metrics for measuring value are relatively clear: Did people have a good time? Was attendance strong? Did the client consider the event successful?

When it comes to the world of commercial real estate, though, analyzing value is more complex.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we can do to prove value in tenant engagement,” Brazis said. “One of the things we haven’t been able to do is really prove ROI.”

As Brazis described it, it’s one thing to prove that her events are successful, but is there a clear link between the cost of those events and tenant renewals or rental rates? That’s a bit trickier.

And, of course, that also depends on the definition of “value,” which isn’t as consistent as one might expect. In the early days of Brazis’ position at HBRE, as the pandemic waxed and waned, the criteria for success was pretty simple: were people coming to the office? As long as her events increased headcount, they were considered to add value.

But if tenant engagement manager is going to be a viable role long-term, property owners want to see a more tangible relationship between spend and ROI. Fortunately, Brazis said they’re getting closer to being able to prove that link. While it’s not quite there yet, she told me there are a number of software programs that are seeking to establish more of a direct relationship between tenant engagement and property revenue.

“We’re right on the cusp of it,” Brazis said. “I don’t have a mathematics background, but I’ve definitely in the last two years taken as many statistics classes as I possibly could, because at the end of the day, this is my job and I want to prove this value.”

Until then, Brazis says there are some tangible figures she can point to when she’s trying to illustrate value to skeptical landlords (or journalists). She’s become adept at filtering out the noise and isolating if an increase in badge swipes is because of an event, or if there was an all hands for one of the tenants on the same day. She’s also noticed an interesting compounding effect: on a week where there are two events, the increase in workers on site is greater than double.

In other words, engagement fosters more engagement. That may not speak directly to ROI, but it certainly says something—in a more philosophical sense, perhaps—about value.

Bringing Amenities to Your Doorstep

You might expect to find someone in Brazis’ role at the kind of urban class A property with excessive amenities and even deeper pockets. And while such positions certainly exist in those buildings, the role is perhaps even more integral in suburban offices.

As Brazis explained, in suburban offices, you need to bring the amenities to the people. In an urban setting, people are almost overwhelmed by amenities and activities. And that creates its own challenge from a tenant engagement perspective—how to keep people in the building—but in the suburbs, it’s about making the office a microcosm of the urban environment.

In practice, that means hosting holiday markets, because people don’t have somewhere convenient to shop for their loved ones during their lunch hour. It means bringing in farmer’s markets, so people can do some grocery shopping during an afternoon break. It means a summer concert series that brings culture into the suburban office milieu.

It also involves doubling down on what the suburbs offer that the city doesn’t: green space. “We have garden sites, and a lot of our food from our cafe actually comes from the gardens on campus, so it’s a real farm to table kind of approach. It also provides an opportunity for tenants to garden as a form of cathartic outdoor therapy.”

Keeping with the outdoor theme, Brazis said her favorite event is the summer concert series, which she described as “a mini festival.”

“We’ll have vendors come in and audio production teams. We do that once a month and we get 500 people who come, and it’s a blast.”

It’s clear from our conversation that Brazis is similarly enthusiastic about much of the work she does, from hosting immersive murder mystery events to standardizing and streamlining tenant request systems.

And while, as we discussed, value can be a hard thing to fully ascertain, anecdotally, it sounds like there are some significant benefits.

“A tenant called it a destination office,” Brazis said. “It’s somewhere where they can gather all of their satellite offices because they know that something is going to be happening here, something that gets them out and talking and provides them with an opportunity that maybe that company can’t provide because they’re too small.”

She continued. “Maybe they don’t have an employee engagement department, but they can rely on us to provide some type of environment that is cool enough and fun enough that everyone who comes in is going to have a good time.”

A fun, cool, and good time at the office? Now that’s ingenious.

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In 1976, Dieter Rams published ten principles that would define industrial design for the next half-century. The tenth—“Good design is as little design as possible”—arrived at a moment when corporate aesthetics favored excess: chrome, curves, and outlandish ornaments. Rams went the other direction, not to merely be contrarian, but based on a keen observation about how we recognize quality. He understood that if you strip away everything non-essential, what remains becomes impossible to ignore.

This principle holds a particular weight in the built world today. In an increasingly crowded landscape, firms of all sorts are obsessed with the concept of “standing out,” yet they often attempt to achieve differentiation through addition. They lean into more content, more channels, and a dizzying array of brand adjectives, hoping that sheer volume will secure purchase in their client’s mind. But in an era of infinite scrolls, addition only yields more noise.

Consider the example of the furniture manufacturer Vitsœ, which has produced Rams’ designs since 1960. Its ethos is less about furniture and more about a refusal to participate in the embedded obsolescence of the modern market. When Mark Adams moved the company’s headquarters to Royal Leamington Spa, he wasn’t just shifting inventory and his staff; he was doubling down on a system of “living better, with less, that lasts longer.” Central to this is the 606 Universal Shelving System, a masterstroke of modularity. It is a product that treats the customer with a rare level of intellectual respect. Vitsœ doesn’t nudge you toward a seasonal refresh; they provide a kit of parts that can move with you from a studio in Berlin to a townhouse in New York, adapting to the architecture of a life rather than demanding the life adapt to the furniture.

This permanence is a quiet act of rebellion. By ensuring that a shelf bought in 1965 fits perfectly into a track installed in 2026, Vitsœ has achieved a state of “permanent relevance” that transcends the typical boom-and-bust cycle of the design world. It is the antithesis of the “disruptive” trend—a constant presence that gains value through use rather than novelty.

There is a lesson here for the broader built world, which often finds itself caught in a spiral of performative innovation. Consider the typical presence at MIPIM in Cannes (which coincidentally kicks off this week). The halls of the Palais des Festivals are a blur of high-gloss renders and interchangeable slogans. “Future-proofing,” “holistic ecosystems,” “work, eat, play”—it is a linguistic soup that tastes of nothing. When every developer and innovator claims to be a multi-disciplinary visionary, the branding ceases to make a difference, and suddenly, the firm that describes itself simply as “Bricklayers from Zurich” owns the room.

The Japanese shokunin tradition offers the most potent instruction for this kind of restraint. A master joiner at Takenaka Carpentry—a firm whose history stretches back to the 17th century—does not waste breath on a “forward-thinking approach.” Instead, he speaks of the moisture content of Hinoki cypress and the 35° angle of a kigumi joint. This is a connection designed to hold for three centuries without the assistance of a single nail, relying entirely on the physical integrity of the timber. The authority is found in the terrifying precision of the execution, not the copy on a website.

This ethos of implicit quality is what defines the most enduring brands. They do not announce themselves as “premium” or “curated.” They simply assume you are the type of person who understands why the tonal frequency of a Swiss SBB railway announcement matters, or why a well-designed kiosk in Helsinki is a vital piece of civic infrastructure. The positioning is never shouted; it is woven into the selection. You either recognize the value of the detail, or you don’t.

The contrast is stark. While the industry at large defaults to complexity to mask a lack of direction, the brands that endure rely on the precision of their constraints. Vitsœ and Takenaka understand that simplicity is more than a stylistic choice; it is a competitive advantage. Standing out is never about the volume of the announcement, but rather the integrity of the work itself.

The built world would do well to absorb this mantra. It requires the rare discipline to prioritize the enduring over the ephemeral and the specific over the universal. In an environment defined by interchangeable buzz words devoid of value or meaning, the most resonant position is the one backed by a clear, uncompromising purpose.

This approach demands a shift in perspective. It suggests that the most valuable asset a firm can possess is not a larger marketing budget, but a more refined sense of what they will refuse to do. In the end, standing out is not an act of shouting into the wind. It is the result of building something so structurally sound and intellectually honest that it requires no further explanation.

If it wasn’t for an injury, Daniel Daggers is sure he could’ve made it as a football (soccer for our US audience) player when he was a teenager.

It’s a neat narrative you’ve probably overhead in the office: some bright young thing rationalizing how they’ve ended up on a career path they wouldn’t have known even existed at 17.

Daggers, however, didn’t even know if he wanted to be a footballer. A bad collarbone break in his late teens gave Daggers pause for thought during his studies to become a surveyor. During his early days in the industry, he wasn’t sure it was the right fit, and he was prepared to eschew a career in real estate for something potentially more lucrative. As it turned out, though, real estate proved to be very lucrative indeed.

Little would Daggers know nearly 29 years later, he would be considered the industry’s “propfluencer” for integrating social media into the sharp end of the sales process. “People get the glory for the work they do,” as he puts it; over 150,000 social followers are a testament to that.

His entry into the industry and ascension through it has been to script. His first role in a local mom-and-pop agency would end in the hot seat of Knight Frank’s super-prime division (property sales of £10 million-plus), and make him the highest-selling agent in the firm’s history.

Highlights include setting a then-British record for a residential property sale—£95m for a mansion overlooking St James’s Park in 2019—and becoming Spear’s UK Property Advisor of the Year in recognition of the feat.

But that’s where his journey within the traditional estate agency model would end.

2020 was a watershed moment in Daggers’s career and signaled his metamorphosis from corporate figurehead to sector trailblazer. He set up DDRE Global—an advisory firm heavily influenced by American brokerage outfits—which advocates for individual advisors to put themselves at the heart of their sales proposition rather than the institution they’re affiliated with.

I sat down with Daggers to discuss the power-of-one in the sector, why digital tools like social media and AI have become critical for success in resi sales, and the contradictions that exist to stifle evolution in the most enduring asset class in the world.

1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

I fell into the real estate industry—literally. I broke my collarbone while studying surveying, which I really wasn’t enjoying. It happened while I was playing football. It was a relatively serious break and it really made me rethink everything I was doing. I realized what I wanted was financial independence and this led me back to property.

My first foray into real estate came shortly after. I was 17-and-a-half and had completed two weeks of work experience at an estate agency. Before that I had never sold a thing in my life. They told me to sit at a desk, pick up the phone and speak to strangers. I’d match people to property. Terrifying at the time, really.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

I never expected that social media or content creation would form a central part of my day-to-day life. I had never considered it would have such an impact on how I would build a brand and materially impact my bottom line.

But it’s become crucial to getting my name out there.

I wanted to show people exactly what I could do using it and showcase the skills I have.

Most importantly, I wanted to show people how passionate I was about what I do.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

Create content, up-skill yourself digitally, and stay close to people with talent and hunger—both will rub off on you.

Also, remember that everyone you meet is potentially a client in this digital age. This is a key consideration for when you interact online with others.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

That, as estate agents, you no longer need a retail space to conduct business. It’s not needed to create trust or paint a perception of credibility.

A property journey can now start on social media, and then be conducted over a coffee in-person, without having to ever set foot into a physical high-street store.

We’re so much more customer-centric today, and this mode of business is now out-performing the traditional model. You really have to put the customer’s needs at the center of everything that you do, even if this creates friction for you personally.

This creates opportunity now and in the future. Every contact can now be a client for life. These physical borders of our business have crumbled. The idea that you can only work in one neighbourhood and not be able to facilitate a sale or purchase for your client across multiple regions is outdated thanks to the level of information that exists online. Technology similarly powers this.

We can sell a property quicker than ever to somebody from the other side of the world. Valuations aren’t as opaque. We can create forward-looking sales strategies to a global network of agents and advisors who are not attached to a single or competitor brand.

I believe being an individual service provider has become the future of our industry. If you can build a sufficient level of trust with your clients, every line of service you can point them towards becomes a viable income stream.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

It’s hard to say what my one, single favorite thing is, but without a shadow of a doubt we get to meet fascinating people at a crucial time in their lives.

I still love looking at beautiful homes, nor am I tied to a desk. For me, it doesn’t really get better than that.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

The lack of efficiency that surrounds our industry is baffling. How can we be expected to do a job when there are so many intricacies, legally and bureaucratically, to navigate?

There should be licensing in our industry to not just benefit us as professionals, but more importantly, for the protection and safety of the customer.

In the UK, the legal system especially makes buying or selling a property a less enjoyable experience.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

Again, poor policy and governance for real estate as an asset class. Inconsistent, draconian taxation and ownership laws hinder people selling property in our city. We need clarity and we need it now.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

Things have been a bit bleak in the UK recently, but I’m the eternal optimist.

I think we live in the best city in the world. London is one of the most populated cities in the west, yet look how easy it is to navigate across it.

The fact it’s built on clay has enabled us to keep exploring subterranean transport options for over 170 years and this keeps us so connected. It’s impressive.

Our schooling is also the best in the world, and the level of investment into London’s entertainment industry and the arts continues to grow at an insane pace. The UK’s legal system remains a positive feature to global real estate investors, too.

The city has become more global than ever thanks to this connectivity and our [UTC 00:00] time zone, so being able to speak to our partners in every corner of the globe, on the same day, is a massive advantage. Despite the hype, living in Dubai doesn’t make doing business with the US easy…

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Did you feel that?

I think the Earth just shook a little bit.

It wasn’t an earthquake though; it was the force of our collaboration with Thesis Driven, “The World’s Most Innovative Developers, 2026,” landing in your inbox.

I jest, but only a bit. While the effect of this inaugural index of the world’s most ingenious real estate developers may not quite be seismic, it’s still critically important.

It’s a drum we bang on all the time around these parts, but the built world is slow to evolve. Real estate development, in particular, requires vast investments of time and finances—years of a developer’s life and millions of their dollars have often been invested before a single brick (or modular pre-fabricated beam of recycled timber) is laid. That paradigm means there are abundant incentives for developers to stick to the script and continue doing what works rather than endeavoring to innovate.

And, yet: the need for ingenuity has never been more critical. An office surplus, at least for anything save the most gilded of trophy properties, a (virtually) global residential deficit, shifts in both the retail and industrial landscape, and a variety of environmental pressures are coalescing to force a rethink of how buildings get built.

For all those reasons, it’s important to highlight the work of developers who are finding new solutions to old problems—whether the conundrum in question is how you appeal to underserved residential constituencies or how you leverage luxury branding to stand out in the saturated luxury market of Dubai and everything in between those two poles.

So head over to Thesis Driven to peruse the list in full, and then pop back over here to flood the comments section. Let us know what we got right, who we missed, and what you think innovation in real estate development really looks like.

We can’t wait to hear from you.

A few years ago I was in a museum cafe with my kids. As I ordered my flat white the barista looked to my daughter and asked: “Who’s your favourite Disney character?” Thinking nothing of it, she replied “Minnie Mouse,” and the barista smiled in acknowledgement. What came next is what separated this barista from the other 99%. After a few minutes had passed and he finished making my coffee, the cup slid across the counter: “the drink is for your dad, but the surprise is for you.”

My daughter was beaming.

It was a true work of art the way he’d shaped a perfect, floating, milky Minnie Mouse on top. He didn’t need to do that. The coffee would have tasted the same without it. But by taking the time to add this bit of visual flair, two things happened: first, that seemingly ordinary experience became almost extraordinary, and second: I’m here telling you about it.

I’ve had a lot of good flat whites in my life. This is the only one that ever inspired me to write an essay.

At Bloxspring, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about being memorable. Mostly because we’re so tired. Tired of reading contrived stories about fabricated events for engagement. Tired of scrolling our feeds of manicured posts designed to appease the algorithms. Tired of endless slop masquerading as “thought leadership.” This is especially true of LinkedIn, which arguably feels more like the Shein for content—mass-produced posts optimized for virality rather than value.

That’s the bar right now. And in this world where we compete for attention, what you say, how you say it, what you make and how you make it, matters more than ever.

In 2025, the masses came to tell their story—from the stiffest of CEOs to the stodgiest of marketing teams, all because we’ve been conditioned to “share more” and “be authentic.” 2026 has started much the same (if not marginally worse).

But something has shifted. Our filter for what we consume is much more precise. It means we know taste, class, and craft when we see it. Just like that barista who took the time to showcase his craft, to give my daughter a great experience, and to make something special; time, care, and passion is what separates us now. It’s no longer a volume game. It’s about quality, and we’re craving it again.

This doesn’t mean everything needs to be perfect. In fact, just the opposite. Sometimes we need to see the seams to know something is authentic. The slopification of content has made the gap between what’s really real, and what’s fake real much narrower. But something that will never go out of fashion is this: when companies stand for something. When they’re genuine about their values. When they build a strong point of view. When they find meaningful, varied ways to express their story and tell it over the long term.

With AI offering enormous opportunities in every facet of business, it’s tempting to shortcut your way to becoming memorable. But here’s where we’ve landed: AI favours speed and output, instead of care and craftsmanship. The former puts you in the ocean, but the latter places you on the cliff edge.

The built world has always been conservative, risk averse, and slow to change. But this has become an excuse for accepting mediocrity. And that mediocrity creates white space for those with the courage to do what others do not: be genuine and distinctive. That means you tell every story like it matters. You spend time on the details others skip. We’re returning to an era of editorial grade storytelling; the kind you would expect of a NYT or WSJ, designed to be shared, bookmarked, and consumed over and over again.

The ocean will keep rising. More content will flood in daily. The algorithms will keep changing. But somewhere in our sector, people, leaders, and companies are perfecting their craft. Finessing the details others avoid. Telling stories in novel ways. Becoming thought leaders by actually having thoughts worth sharing. The mechanism to greatness is great storytelling.

That’s what we’re building at Bloxspring today. It’s a non-negotiable, and it’s what will separate companies that are remembered from the ones who are scrolled past.

At Bloxspring, we know that there’s a time and a place for a good cliche.

In general, as the premier storytelling agency focused on the built world—the Faulkners of foundations, the Fitzgeralds of FAR—we strive to avoid cliches. But, every once in a while, a particular aphorism is so apt that it’s best not to resist it, but rather plunge straight in.

Such is the case here, in this moment, when we describe today’s fearless subject of the Bloxspring Essential Eight, one Abid Butt, as a “man of the world.”

These days, Butt resides not far from me, in the DC suburbs of Maryland. But over the course of his illustrious career in the hospitality and real estate industry, he’s worked and lived in Hawaii, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore. And he’s conducted business and led developments throughout Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

Most recently, he was based in Qatar, where he served as the Group CEO of the ASSETS Group, a diversified developer with a portfolio totaling more than $9 billion. Previously, he was the CEO of the Dream Hotel Group, and prior to that experience, he acted in the same role for Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts.

Now, as he’s returned to the United States to spend more time with his family and contemplate his next professional endeavor, Butt was kind enough to subject himself to the rigors of the “Essential Eight.” During our conversation, we touched on an array of topics including how one goes from a lab coat, to a chef’s coat, to a developer’s power suit; why aged regulations are hampering development; and how prefab construction could be a game changer (another cliche!) for development in remote areas.

1. How did you initially get involved with the real estate industry?

It was somewhat of a fluke. My background has largely been in hospitality and travel, though—if you can believe it—I originally wanted to go to medical school. I traded a white lab coat for a white chef’s coat and headed to culinary school instead. I loved it and worked in kitchens for a while before eventually moving into the hotel industry.

As I grew within that sector, I quickly learned how capital-intensive hotels are. Competition is fierce, and you constantly must outperform your neighbors. That means keeping up with upgrades, and hotels typically go through a major renovation cycle every seven to eight years. A large property can require $70–80 million in renovations, with nearly everything torn down and rebuilt. That was my first real introduction to the world of real estate.

Throughout my career, I had the opportunity to lead a variety of projects—from renovating existing assets in Hawaii to helping plan the development of nearly 700 acres of waterfront land with new hotels and residential units. I also worked across global markets, developing in different regions and learning the unique dynamics of each.

So, no—this path was not planned. But it has been an unexpected and incredibly rewarding journey.

2. What’s the most unexpected aspect of how your career has evolved?

In many ways, what initially drew me to the hotel business was the glamour. I would watch TV shows or visit someone in a hotel and think, “what a fabulous environment, everyone seems to be having fun and enjoying themselves.” I have to admit, I never thought I would eventually pivot into development. Ownership, perhaps, working with existing assets, doing adaptive reuse, or repositioning properties for their highest and best use. But 10, 15, even 20 years ago, if you had asked me, I never would have predicted becoming a developer.

That said, I have been very fortunate. Growing into this role has allowed me to bridge the gap between operations and development across different asset classes.

I understand firsthand how decisions made during construction can end up costing multiples once you start operating. That operational perspective has served me incredibly well and shaped how I approach every project.

3. What advice would you give to someone entering the industry today?

Find a mentor who can truly show you the ropes. The construction and development industries are full of complexities, and yesterday I was discussing this same topic with students from Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, entering the real estate world.

Development is a massive puzzle with many moving parts. You need to understand how each task and discipline supports the final goal, but no one can be an expert in all of them. That’s why having a mentor early on is invaluable. And when you eventually step into a leadership role, surround yourself with people who will meaningfully contribute and challenge your assumptions. That pushback and diversity of thought ensures the final product is as strong as it can be.

Because, in this industry, no one person can be master of all trades.

4. What has surprised you most about how the built world and the real estate industry have changed since your career began?

When I first entered the industry, there were only a couple of dominant asset classes, residential and office towers. But that landscape has completely changed.

Office buildings, for instance, have evolved dramatically. There’s now significant overlap between offices and hotels in terms of amenities and the overall user experience. It’s no longer about putting up a shell and core and squeezing 50 desks into 50 square meters. Employers have recognized the value of creating inviting, engaging work environments. Amenities that were never even considered when I started are now expected.

Residential has also become far more specialized. It used to be one-size-fits-all, but today multifamily alone includes everything from active-adult living to adults-only communities, urban developments, and resort-style destinations. Each segment has its own priorities and design requirements.

Industrial real estate has transformed as well. With Amazon’s rise and the explosion of logistics, warehousing is now a highly technical, infrastructure-heavy asset class. What used to be a grungy building in a part of town no one cared about has evolved into sophisticated, strategically located facilities driven by technology and efficiency.

Even healthcare properties have undergone a shift. At my last organization, we developed a hospital where we intentionally borrowed elements from hospitality, using natural light, warm materials, and thoughtful design to create a welcoming, uplifting environment for patients. Gone are the dull yellow walls and sterile laminate floors that used to be common in the space.

Seeing how all these asset types have evolved over the years has been truly remarkable.

5. What’s your favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Being able to start with nothing more than a piece of dirt and then plan, design, and ultimately bring a building to life, that is incredibly gratifying.

You begin with vacant land, and then the creative minds, the architects and engineers, transform the vision on paper. The operations teams ensure it will function efficiently, and ultimately the consumer determines what makes it successful. Every stakeholder contributes something essential.

And when the building is finally completed, activated, and begins to take on a life of its own, it’s a truly remarkable feeling. After all the collaboration, challenges, and collective effort, there is so much to celebrate once a project comes together.

6. What’s your least favorite aspect of working in the real estate industry?

Honestly, the industry is not evolving fast enough—whether it is technology adoption, new materials, sustainability practices, or even design elements.

I do understand why. Real estate is an expensive undertaking, not a hobby, and you need a well thought out plan before embarking on a project. But generally speaking, the industry is still slow to innovate. Construction is a good example. We’re largely doing things the same way we always have. Prefab housing emerged on the single-family side, but it hasn’t truly taken off. And when you look at large-scale development, the methods remain relatively archaic.

The encouraging part is that there is a tremendous amount of work being done around new sustainable materials, new construction techniques, and both construction tech and real estate tech.

But in terms of what happens on the ground today, I must confess, it often still feels like we are operating in the Flintstone days.

7. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?

There are two major challenges, in my view: regulations and labor. Internationally the picture varies, but in the U.S. market especially, labor is going to be a significant issue. We’re facing an acute shortage of skilled workers.

On the regulatory side, cities, counties, and states need to update their frameworks and make them more business friendly. They don’t have to give everything away, but they do need to create an environment where developers are willing to take development risks, create jobs, and build communities. Many building codes are outdated, and we need to reassess what’s relevant today, how processes can be streamlined, and how technology can be better deployed.

Labor is equally critical. Historically, the U.S. construction industry relied heavily on foreign labor, but that may not be sustainable going forward. Regardless, we need people who actually want to do this work. If the industry is perceived as a grind, young people won’t enter it. If the work isn’t attractive, financially, technologically, or professionally, there won’t be a pipeline of skilled labor to meet the demand.

That’s why vocational training is so important. Schools and training programs need to expose young people to the opportunities in construction and development. There are great careers to be built for those who are well educated, comfortable with technology, and open to new building methods. Whether the workforce is domestic or foreign, we must make the industry more appealing and efficient if we want to address the shortages ahead.

8. What makes you optimistic about the future of the built world?

I think technology will fundamentally change the industry. In many ways, it’s ripe for disruption.

For example, we may never move entirely to prefab construction but imagine embedding RFID chips into different components of a building, concrete slabs, structural panels, prefab sections. With that kind of embedded intelligence, assembling the “jigsaw puzzle” becomes far more efficient because you are not trying to build every single piece on site.

This isn’t as critical when you’re working near major metropolitan areas, but when you’re developing in remote locations or on small islands where every piece of material has to be shipped in, it becomes a massive challenge. Not just from a labor standpoint, but from a supply-chain perspective as well. Technology has the potential to meaningfully reduce those inefficiencies.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

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