‘Twas a week before Christmas and on the same day a storm was congesting cities across the country, Inman News held a virtual Town Hall entitled “Road Map to Recovery: Reinventing The Real Estate Industry.“ Brad Inman, Publisher of Inman News, moderated a tele-connected panel of four real estate experts.
As I listened to the conversation and looked out the window, I watched as my street in the San Bernardino mountains west of Los Angeles disappeared under two feet of snow. It was a reminder of how hard finding our way can be while the crisis continues.
The four participants – Kris Berg, broker-owner with her husband of San Diego Castles Realty; Marty Frame, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cyberhomes; Pam O’Connor, President/CEO of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World; and Pat Stone, chairman of The Stone Group – addressed our industry’s future with insight and as much optimism as they could justify.
Like the storm, the discussion covered a lot of ground and upturned a few comfortable assumptions. Berg said 2009 would be “more of the same” and Stone, who wrote “A Call for Expertise: De-Cruiting in Real Estate,” warned that an oversupply of commercial real estate under construction for 2009 and ‘10 will be the “other shoe to drop” and push the recovery well into 2011.
