In 2016, a lot of Americans—including your mild-mannered Commercial Observer editor—have gone poll crazy.
We’ve got a national election weeks away, so it’s only natural to check FiveThirtyEight, The Upshot and Real Clear Politics poll trackers six or seven times a day, right?
For a busy person, this is unquestionably a waste of time. If you check the polls in the morning, you pretty much know where the race stands in the evening. And even if there are some devastating new numbers, does finding out about them at 3 p.m. on Monday really help your side more than if you found out at 9 a.m. on Tuesday?
But more than just keeping us apprised of the horse race, I think there’s another reason polling has been such a big topic this year: America has something on its mind. The polling data is the best way to try to piece it together.
CO’s Owners Magazine can be viewed as its own kind of polling of the real estate industry—but in an extremely targeted and unscientific way.
We asked the same questions to 38 of the biggest owners in New York City (many of whom own property well beyond the Empire State) and compiled what they had to say in these pages.
For the most part, we asked questions we felt owners could have enough room to opine on: Is there a bubble in the hotel sector? What underdeveloped markets excited them? What do they think the Brexit vote will do for New York real estate? And (naturally) who are they supporting for president?
Some of our questions proved to be duds. We were hoping for a provocative answer to “Who’s to blame for the 421a debacle?” but almost nobody took our bait. Terence Cullen attempted his own answer in his story on page 8.
But we also got a strong sense of the shift that has occurred in the market over the last 12 months. We asked whether they were buying, selling or holding, and the most common answer by far was “Hold!” Readers from all sectors of real estate should take note of that.
Of course, we didn’t intend to just regurgitate whatever the owners fed us. We tried to include stories about ownership, too. Lauren Elkies Schram reported on New York’s owners like the city, or NYU—whose business is not primarily real estate—and how they manage their portfolios. Liam La Guerre took a hard look at the city’s Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) program and where they’re falling short. Danielle Balbi culled the data from some of the biggest owners who didn’t fill out our survey and asked who was financing their projects (page 100).
All in all, we view this magazine as a valuable trove of data. This is what is on the minds of the city’s developers and landlords. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t refreshed FiveThirtyEight in a good 20 minutes…
