Commercial real estate moves too slowly. While AI rewrites reality at exponential speeds, we're still playing by rules that no longer exist. We keep things the old way, stay analog, decide slowly, and play silly information hide-and-seek games. This isn't just bad business. It's fighting reality.
We love the container ship metaphor - massive, powerful, unstoppable, yet slow to turn. Profitable machines, so why rush… But what if the ocean itself changed? What if mass no longer determines power?
In the new economy, a single line of code can be worth more than a city block.
As Dror Poleg noted, 50 years ago the S&P500 was physical - real estate, cars, materials. Today it's intangible: code, information, and content. We moved from predictable to volatile. Mass isn't irrelevant, it's dangerous.
Value is unpredictable. Constant adaptability is the only constant.
Commercial real estate faces the ultimate problem: managing physical assets with nonlinear rules, or to put it another way - managing atoms with the laws of bits.
"Don't like real estate, doesn't scale," said the tech billionaire in Succession. Lukas is right about our constraint - you can't pivot a 150k-ton skyscraper like a software company.
In any case, this doesn't mean we can drop out and stay with the old ways.
It only means the job is tougher.
We must innovate faster.
We must accelerate.
cre/acc.
The old metrics are dying. The new metrics are coming: growth, scalability, network effects, margins.
The future isn't mixed-use. It's everything-use.
People in the industry can't be ignorant. We must fight for the best talent. Digital natives with AI armies, thinking in exponentials instead of incrementals. The ones who'll turn buildings into platforms and cities into operating systems.
We're all becoming tech companies. The question is: will we be the ones writing the code?
This transformation requires a new alliance. Tech must build tools that matter. VCs must fund deep infrastructure, not flashy apps. Industry leaders must trade ego for evolution.
Reject linear thinking. Profits can scale.
Design for volatility, not control.
Choose radical transparency.
Accelerate or evaporate.
cre/acc.