Property Management
Multifamily & The Metaverse
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash
Multifamily & The Metaverse
Guest Post written by: Eric Brown
Times Are Good
It is undeniably a most excellent time to be in the apartment rental business. High occupancy, waiting lists, and solid collections are the norm now that most systems are operating in a more normalized manner. Yes indeed, we all look like geniuses after weathering the COVID Storm. My sense is that most apartment operators are focused on renting apartments, collecting rent, and maintaining the assets.
COVID hyper-accelerated certain technologies. Smart locks are smarter and opened the pathway to many changes in protocol such as self-guided tours. Smart home tech has dominated with gadgets that enhance our living experience. While multifamily has typically lagged behind on many technology trends, COVID brought many of these products to the broader multifamily market, enabling scale at warp speed. These new tools and platforms are now accepted by the masses who previously rejected them. That begs the question though –
What’s Next?
I am going out on a limb and exploring the Metaverse (which took me down a deep rabbit hole!) and the ways it may affect how people rent apartments. It is an unprecedented time to be in the apartment business and I feel like apartment operators, (not all, but many) are taking a breather and simply managing the properties. They are likely laughing at the whole idea of Metaverse IF they even know what it is. Yet, I strongly feel that in time, our prospects will be renting apartments from Bots, in a Virtual World, where AI (Artificial Intelligence) will control most if not the entire process. Property websites as we know them will be vintage and apartment operators will operate their business in this virtual landscape.
I stumbled onto something Paul Bergeron wrote recently. Paul has been writing about and studying multifamily for a long time and is a smart and seasoned guy. He is an Executive Editor, Influencer, and Content Producer for Thought Leadership today.
In a LinkedIn Post, Paul writes, “Crazy. Many attendees didn’t stick around, but those who did found out that their apartment community is already on the Metaverse, where it can be bought or sold. The audience at last week’s MF Social Media Summit was most “blown away” when speaker, tech reporter Jeremiah Owyang, explained this. He pointed to Earth 2, a futuristic concept for a second Earth; a metaverse, between virtual and physical reality in which real-world geolocations on a sectioned map correspond to user-generated digital virtual environments…These environments (including your apartment community) can be owned, bought, sold, and deeply customized.”
So – What If?
What if the Metaverse, which is map-based, became the place where our prospects rented? They can see everything around the apartments, just as in real-time, similar to Google Earth. Imagine that the digital space has evolved, every person has an Avatar, real estate developers have purchased property on Earth2, and the apartment community looks exactly the same in the digital metaverse as it does in real life. While this may feel like sci-fi to many, some of us were renting apartments before URLs and .coms. We used paper brochures. I can vouch that no one, or at least not many, had any idea how websites, as we know them today, would change the renter’s experience. So, every property management company in the land started building websites and scrambling to get the best URL. It was messy for quite some time.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (www) in 1989 while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world. And while perhaps not as exciting or immersive as some of the nearly 1.9 billion websites that exist today, it makes sense that the first web page launched on the good ol’ W3 was, well, instructions about how to use it.
Are We Blind to History?
One of my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley, quotes “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
Who would have dreamt that we would be buying Digital Art aka NFTs, with Cryptocurrency, aka Bitcoin that all lived on the Blockchain? But We Are.
Maybe The Metaverse is a real thing? You Decide.
Defining the Terms
NFT – A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital asset that represents ownership of real-world items like art, video clips, music, and more. NFTs use the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies, but they’re not a currency
Cryptocurrency – A cryptocurrency is an encrypted data string that denotes a unit of currency. It is monitored and organized by a peer-to-peer network called a blockchain, which also serves as a secure ledger of transactions, e.g., buying, selling, and transferring.
Bitcoin – Bitcoin is a digital currency that operates free of any central control or the oversight of banks or governments. Instead, it relies on peer-to-peer software and cryptography. A public ledger records all bitcoin transactions and copies are held on servers around the world.
Blockchain – Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding).
Metaverse – Digital Technology in a shared, realistic, and immersive computer simulation of the real world or other possible worlds, in which people participate as digital avatars.
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Intuitive Leadership
I am not a teacher.
I have great admiration for teachers. They have the ability to take complex concepts and break them down into small components. Using those skills, they bring learners with varying levels of native proficiency to a place of understanding and application.
I have made a valiant effort, studying, preparing, and over-preparing for those times when it fell to me to teach, but it is not my natural skill. And that’s okay. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Some of us are birds and others are fish.
I love the book The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty. In it there is a quote by fellow tracker Renias Mhlongo; “I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.” That statement comes much closer to describing my leadership style.
I fall into the category of the intuitive leader in that I may not be able to explain every step along the way but I am confident in how to get there. My belief does not lie in my own personal ability to execute every component of a goal because any business’s success is tied to the work of the many. My trust is in how I understand my personal true north and in the intentional practices and the pole-watchers that I keep in place.
Intuitive leadership starts with personal development. For me, that involves a host of personal practices, morning, and evening routines that center my thoughts, examine my emotions, and set my intentions. My personal faith grounds me. These practices help soften my heart, sharpen my sword and prepare me for the day ahead. The people closest to me hold me accountable.
Intuition without deep personal work can be catastrophic. Without constraints, intuition can easily devolve into ego. It can blur the lines and divert your focus. It is easy to get lost in understanding your authentic values – making money without making a difference, confusing pleasure with joy, and creating goals that aren’t tied to purpose.
Intuitive leadership is most effective when tied with personal values. People trust a leader who leads from the heart and the gut. One without the other misses the mark. Everyone finds their own path to connect their personal values to their leadership style but if you want to lead with intuition, start with deep, committed, personal work.
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Robert Turnbull | Collective Conversations
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Episode 1165 | Do This To Make Things Worse
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Raindrops Keep Falling
Every week, I publish a morning vlog series as part of the Multifamily Collective content. As always, this week’s daily videos were each published as a stand-alone commentary, but in hindsight, it seems these particular videos may just be parts of the same story and I decided to connect those thoughts in today’s post.
Short-Term
In Short Term Memory, I encouraged our listeners to develop a short-term memory as it relates to adversities in their lives and instead to focus on your purpose.
We all tend to sometimes hyper-focus on our short-comings or mistakes – worrying over them as though they have some value when actually no amount of constant self-flagellation will erase those events. On the contrary, constantly beating yourself up only serves to distract you from your true objectives. Ultimately, your goals are starved for want of your attention while your missteps live only in history and pay you no dividends at all.
If your hours in each day were translated to dollars and you put all your money into the backward-facing bucket, how much is left at the end of the day to invest in your future? None. Exactly. But, if forgetting our personal mistakes were easy, none of us would waste our time thinking about them.
Unhappy
In Unhappy, I recount the startling results of a survey that stated that one in four Americans (25%!) classify themselves as unhappy. Those numbers are hardly surprising given the extended impact of the pandemic, increasing political division, loss of traditional social support systems, and more. Indeed, a troubling sense of dissatisfaction seems to be commonplace.
Once again, there are no easy surefire solutions. If there were, I would encourage you to join me on the rooftop because that is the perch from whence I would be shouting. While not a cure-all, it doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that intentional acts of kindness go a long way towards alleviating some of the world’s pain even if by just one person at a time. Finding opportunities to curate encouragement, joy, acknowledgment, and celebration seem to offer a plus-one scenario wherein you make someone else’s day better and yours is improved in the process.
Like A Kid
Finally, in Like A Kid Again, I tell the story of a recent miserable rainy winter’s morning in Georgia. It had rained all night and the roads were wet, puddles abounded, and I had every plausible reason to forgo my morning run. Except, my morning run is important not just to my physical health but to my mood and psychological wellbeing.
Once I made up my mind to run in the rain, unsurprisingly, I was soon splashed by cars, and every footfall caused a splatter. When you are out in a pouring rain, there soon comes a point where you can’t get any wetter. Instead of shaking my fist at the skies, I felt something akin to childhood well up in me, a remembrance of a time when playing in puddles was a joy-filled experience. My mood was elevated, my shoes were drenched, my heart felt happy, and my energy was through the roof.
The #3 Combo
In the exercise of sharing these stories this week, the combination may have answered my own questions – at least somewhat. Maybe it is possible to release the hold my mistakes can have on me and to shake off that feeling of discouragement by simply letting the rain fall on my face wholly invited and appreciated. The problems we face are complex and, while there are no simple cures, it turns out that there are countless opportunities for simple joy.
When was the last time you felt the rain, danced in the puddles and breathed in the moment for all its bliss? Somehow it seems that we have bought into the idea that happiness is found in expensive vacations at rodent-themed parks. Those can be fun – but so can the rain.
Share your joyful stories with us here or on our social media pages.
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