CSQ Virtual Events

THE FUTURE OF REAL ESTATE VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE REPORT The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way we work and live. That’s going to result in new opportunities — and new responsibilities.

CSQ convened some of the country’s top real estate experts for a comprehensive discussion on how to make the industry more inclusive and focused on social responsibility, and what the homes, shops and offices of the future might look like.

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Q2 2020

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// Expert Analysis THE FUTURE OF REAL ESTATE: ROUND TABLE PANEL

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ABOUT THE MODERATOR: DON PEEBLES

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Chairman & CEO, The Peebles Corporation HOW WORKING FROM HOME IS CHANGING THE WAY WE LIVE

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Meridith Baer, Founder & CEO, Meridith Baer Home WHAT THE FUTURE OF OFFICE AND RETAIL LOOKS LIKE

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Christopher Rising, CEO, Rising Realty Partners HOW TO MAKE DESIGN MORE INCLUSIVE

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Scott Hunter, Principal & Los Angeles Office Director, HKS

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PRESENTED BY

// The Future of Real Estate: Round Table Panel

MODERATOR Don Peebles Chairman & CEO The Peebles Corporation

Meridith Baer Founder & CEO Meridith Baer Home

Christopher Rising CEO Rising Realty Partners

Scott Hunter Principal & Los Angeles Office Director HKS

Meridith Baer Home is the premier home staging company in the nation. Celebrating over 20 years making properties more beautiful and more marketable, Meridith and her team treat every space like a unique vignette, telling its story through alluring, artful design. With offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Hamptons, and Miami, MBH offers staging, interior design, luxury furniture leasing, and Instant Home services.

Christopher Rising manages the day-to-day business activities of Rising, while also serving on its Investment Committee. Drawing on his experience as Senior Vice President, Asset Transactions at MPG Office Trust, Inc. (NYSE: MPG), Christopher is skilled at managing acquisitions and creative development. At MPG, he worked directly with the CEO to improve finances through debt reduction and restructuring.

Scott Hunter, FAIA, LEED AP is Principal and America West Regional Director for HKS Architects, an interdisciplinary global design firm. Scott has led a wide range of award-winning projects, including master planning, workplace environments, government, high-rise mixed-use, hospitality, multifamily, academic and professional sports facilities. His current projects include the new SoFi stadium, UCSD North Torrey Pines and Future College Living and Learning Neighborhoods, and Robertson Lane Hotel in West Hollywood. Scott currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles Business Council.

Meridith Baer Home has been widely featured in media, notably ABC, CBS, NBC, HGTV, and Bravo.

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PRESENTED BY

// About the Moderator Recognized as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the nation, Don Peebles is founder, chairman and CEO of The Peebles Corporation, one of the country’s few privately held national real estate investment and development companies.

Mr. Peebles engages in practices of Affirmative Development™ with a multi-billion dollar portfolio of projects in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Charlotte, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Mr. Peebles is also the author of top-selling books, “The Peebles Principles” and “The Peebles Path to Real Estate Wealth,” a regular guest host on CNN, CNBC and FOX and a highly sought-after speaker who has addressed educational, business and professional audiences across the United States.

Mr. Peebles is a passionate proponent of mentoring programs that expose youth to the value of entrepreneurship, as well as an active political supporter and fundraiser for local, state and federal campaigns of both major parties. He serves as Ambassador to the University of Southern California, on the Board of Directors of YMCA of Greater New York and on the Business Roundtable of Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

Don Peebles Chairman & CEO

Previously, he has served on the National Finance Committee of President Barack Obama, on the Board of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and is the former Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

“We are going to see that remote working is here to stay. It was here before the pandemic. It will continue and the technology continues to evolve and provide us the freedom.”

Don Peebles Chairman & CEO The Peebles Corporation

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// HOW WORKING FROM HOME IS CHANGING THE WAY WE LIVE Meridith Baer, Founder & CEO, Meridith Baer Home What can the real estate industry do to provide a better pathway for women and for minorities to get to the top levels of the business?

I know that when I started my business, I couldn’t get a loan. So I actually had to build my company without any financing. The good news is I grew it and I have no debt.

But I think you’re talking about really providing financing for women and minorities and making a point of wanting to be inclusive in your hiring and also, I think, dealing. I also think education is paramount—going into schools and teaching young people about things that they can do in life that maybe they’ve never thought about. To me, those are the important avenues.

How can people make their current homes more functional with this new environment?

I think the home office is more important than it ever was because I think we’re finding we’re spending a lot of time in our offices working at home. For builders, I think built-in desks are great in kitchens and other different rooms. Also, I’m wondering now if that whole idea of open space is going to be re-looked at. Maybe we need rooms where we can close the door and have privacy to conduct our business in different rooms.

I do think every room has to be thought of as one where someone can be conducting a meeting, especially in families where there are three or four people living in one home. Also the outdoor spaces, how those could be used to work in the nice weather that we have in certain parts of the country. But more than anything, home itself is more important than it ever was during this pandemic. We realize how important it is to really have an environment that we love and can enjoy.

I think going forward, more and more people will decide to work at home because they’re getting used to it and they’ve found that all that time they’ve spent driving could be spent with their families. So I think I really believe that the home industry is just going to take off like gangbusters.

I think we’re right now moving out of more homes than we

ever have. They’re selling so quickly we can hardly keep up.

Home matters more than ever.

What will restaurants in the future look like? And also what are we going to do with all this vacant retail space?

I’m not ready to give up on our finding an anecdote to this virus and going back to life as normal. I still hold out hope that we’re going to get past this, and going to go back to life, and appreciate everything that we’ve had much more profoundly. Otherwise, what do we do with all of that space?

Maybe it becomes more living space. Maybe it becomes schools. Maybe it becomes homeless shelters. I don’t know, but I still can’t give up the thought that this is going to pass.

What are new considerations and forces architects should be listening to so that they can design more inclusive and accessible cities and dwellings of the future?

I think what people want is they want a sense of community. And I think that builders should listen to that and think about when they do buildings, when they do come up with a plan, how can they help the community and create a sense of community in terms of what they build. So I think within each community, we need to think about education, exercise, and all of these things—what can we add to this community when we build what we’re going to build?

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// WHAT THE FUTURE OF OFFICE AND RETAIL LOOKS LIKE Christopher Rising, CEO, Rising Realty Partners How did you work to make your company more diverse?

I consciously, in our team below the senior level, have tried to push really hard to have diversity. You have to do it. Otherwise, you’re not going to get tenants. You’re not going to get your buildings full. But you also have to do it because it’s the right thing because it makes us better. It gets these different points of view.

It’s important to help these new team members create wealth by getting points on deals and stuff. It would be good for anybody to incentivize them. I don’t want to make it sound like anything other than we have the best people.

But we’re also very conscious of having diversity to reflect the people who are in our buildings.

What are your thoughts on the future of the office market?

I think the future is a hybrid. I think CEOs have been doing this and now are just going to bring it out to the whole workforce. You’re going to pick when you come in more.

You’re going to be held accountable by your activity—by your achievement, not just because you showed up at 7:30.

And I also think the densification that WeWork brought and others is out the window. These headquarters are going to more and more reflect the Los Angeles Lakers or a professional football team where you’re trying to meet a lot of needs to encourage people to come in to collaborate. The Googleization of it all.

I just would say to anybody, if a CEO is making a decision today, it’s out of triage, not out of long-term “this is what we’re going to do.” And they may not understand that.

What is work? I think a computer programmer or someone working at a tech company does a lot different work than my asset managers. So I think businesses are going to have to look at what that is and what takes collaboration and what doesn’t.

plies to the whole country. I think it’s very market specific.

That’s really a lot of what real estate is and I don’t think retail is any different. I think that there are certain types of retail we know are dead. Just like Amazon killed bookstores a long time ago and everyone was sort of, “oh a bookstore will always be there because it’s an experience.” That didn’t happen for the most part.

So I’m very pessimistic on most retail because I think most retailers have been lazy and haven’t really tried to meet the market and the market has got a very heavy hand.

Having said that, there are certain parts of real estate that is working today. I go to the grocery store. There are still things about buying fresh produce, about that experience that grocery stores play a role and will continue to play a role.

Now someone like my 10-year-old son, who I’m sure is getting a master’s in Fortnite through all this, views the world radically differently than I do. He has friends through Fortnite all across the country, all across the world. That is filtering into our retail experience and I think it’s going to be painful. It’s hard to look someone who built a business over 30 years in retail, some sort of small sundry shop and all that, and say, I’m sorry but there’s no place for you anymore. That’s a hard thing to do but it’s the reality. And so I think the next few years are going to be very tough in that regard as it relates to retail. But I’m an optimist. I think entrepreneurs will find opportunities to create experiential retail on a micro level and those shops will survive.

Do you think the big box retailers and brick and mortar retailers are coming back?

I think it’s hard to be general and say something that ap-

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// HOW TO MAKE DESIGN MORE INCLUSIVE Scott Hunter, Principal & Los Angeles Office Director, HKS

What do you think architecture can do better to diversify the business?

The broader question that I think about this whole question about inclusivity is really asking these questions about who are we designing for. Who are these cities for? If we’re only developing the high, high, high end of the market, because that’s where the money is, then that shapes the nature of our cities, right. And I think that we have had a really challenging time dealing with these major social issues that still exist.

We were in this right before the COVID pandemic. We were in a historic run up. Everyone is wondering, wow, how high can it go? It’s still going. Meanwhile you had people sleeping on the streets. So this disparity that the economy had generated and our industry was part and parcel to that. It’s unsustainable. And then the Black Lives Matter protests were the eruption that happened as a result of that. The whole COVID pandemic really highlighted the inequity.

room apartment, for example, or the two-bedroom apartment, and plan it with greater flexibility to allow for a live/ work kind of situation. Everybody on my staff and across the whole world here has had the issues of two adults trying to conduct business as the same space as kids on a computer trying to do online class. And the audio acoustical impacts of that and the visual privacy and the sense that you just can’t get away to have a private phone call.

We’re focused very keenly on this because we know the housing demand is there still in California and we just have to adapt our thinking about the planning for it. And the things that were the extras in the past, like the little study nook, are really going to be important moving forward.

And that needs to be baked into how we’re thinking about multifamily housing.

What are new considerations and forces architects should be listening to so that they can design more inclusive and accessible cities and dwellings of the future?

I think the professions, design professions and the development professions haven’t done a strong enough partnership with the cities. So I feel like the cities also have a role in shaping a vision of the future rather than our overworked planning departments reviewing one project after another, they’re just kind of reviewing projects.

What is the collective vision? What are we trying to do?

What kind of city do we want to have? I think that’s the bigger question. Because if people have some sense of engagement and ownership then they’re less likely to get the pitchforks and torches out and try to storm the barricades because they view every project as an encroachment on their liberty or on the way of life that they think that they deserve in Los Angeles.

I think for us, the question is being hyperconscious and vigilant about who we’re designing for, whose voices get heard, who is part of the conversation. And it comes from our profession. It comes from our clients. It comes from the whole process that we have to go through.

What are large residential buildings going to look like in the future?

We’ve been doing some studies internally about how do you take the paradigm of the multifamily unit, the one-bed

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