An Open Letter to Commercial Real Estate
DEAR COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
Woof. You are enough to say “woof”, and for that, babe I am sorry.
You’ve gotten a bad rap, Commercial Real Estate, and upon learning more about you, I couldn’t help but wonder: how can we help?
People see you all the time, everywhere. You are what makes our cities into cities- you’re our entire neighborhoods. Our vibe, really. You’re like 90% of the reason we ever use Waze, Uber, Yelp (if you even use that please don’t), LinkedIn, and the word “events”. You’re everywhere, Commercial Real Estate, but as far as the humans go who appreciate you for just existing, the people don’t really know you.
To most of us, you’re kind of a scary place, unattainable it seems, your access cut off to so many. Your dealings are done behind closed doors in conference rooms and attorney’s offices, on golf courses and entirely via Docusign. And here’s the thing- it’s not this, sort of, hidden industry out of nefarious intentions, it’s just that it’s always been done that way, leaving a LOT of opportunity for fresh eyes to make fresh connections between space and its users.
With physical property being such a visible commodity, your goings-on seem to work in the shadows. So the people want to know- how do you even work, CommercialRealEstate?
Since the hit of the pandemic, there are areas that have seen a sort of cool rebirth. We’ve all been WFH, solving the interesting new problems for the awesome opportunities born from the past few years. There’s been an awakening of entrepreneurialism and a shift in how existing companies do business. With new, hopefully good, problems to have- from where to sell and manufacture the growing demand for amazing products coming out of Insta-businesses, to what now to do with logistical problems as a result of organic, hard-earned growth, to needing a place to just say hi to your coworkers on a regular-ish basis, CommercialRealEstate, your star is rising and at Fancy, we are here for it.
We’d been told in our early careers as Realtors that CRE is like a very distant second or third cousin to the much more public, more palatable Residential sector, but with our “Always Learning” bit of annoyance, we wanted to know who we were too, following our genealogy and finding that hey, maybe Residential and Commercial actually aren’t all that dissimilar. In fact, there are so many similarities!
For example- Residential and Commercial Real Estate look and act a lot alike. Both sectors like to hide the fact that we really are just so much fun. Both serve the purpose of guiding folks through the transactions regarding physical property for the humans who want to use it in many different ways. After looking deeper, taking some coursework, figuring out the weird acronyms and getting our hands dirty, we’ve realized that both areas are so closely related really, it’s just that we speak two different languages.
Fortunately for the humans that we’re lucky enough to call clients, we’re big believers in guidance and translation, and we’ve realized that this really isn’t such a scary place!
We’re here to bring more of West Michigan to you, CommercialRealEstate, to bring you out of the shadows and into the beautiful and everlasting friendships you’ve been waiting for.
You, too, are Fancy now.
holler@fancyrealestate.org