Innovation Nation

Posted on January 1, 2010

I was watching the CNBC Warren Buffett Bill Gates interview on New Year’s day in between Bowl games when one of the students asked an interesting question. The general gist of the question was what industry the two savants expected would generate the next Microsoft. The answer, not surprisingly, was not Real Estate. And that answer made me feel like a little bit of a looser since I’ve devoted my professional life to a practice that many people would find quite boring.

Then Buffett went on to talk about his investment in Coke and how he loves it because it’s consumed almost as ubiquitously as water, and the world’s population is rapidly growing which means demand for Coke is bound to increase. Alright, there are several other much more sophisticated reasons why Buffett invests in Coke, but this primary reason got me feeling a little better about my commitment to Real Estate.

I’m involved in an industry that’s more necessary than Coke – in that everyone needs a place to live. My industry may not innovate at alarmingly fast rates, but thanks to technology, land rights, and increasing land-ownership, there are more uses today for real estate than there ever have been. Real Estate may not hold the cure to Cancer or Alzheimer’s – two things that Buffett said would surely change the world – but through land ownership, real estate holds the key to the greatest creator of wealth that has ever existed.

Every day, my colleagues at Home Encounter plum the depths of their knowledge and experience to find better, faster, and fairer ways of implementing their practice. Every month our Tampa Property Managers seem to improvise something new to help them maximize owner profitability while increase the availability of quality real estate to renters. With every new transaction our residential real estate agents bring another person one step closer to living the American Dream. And one client after another, our Real Estate Consultants show people how to make better – wiser – more efficient user of their real estate.

It may not be earth-shattering, but Real Estate is an industry I believe in, not because it’s going to produce a Google-esque innovation over the next years, but because it has the power to change the world of so many deserving people.

So real estate practitioners around the world, keep your chin up! You may not make Warren Buffett’s list of most exciting industries, but every time you provide a renter with a comfortable home or help someone realize the dream of home ownership, you become a hero to that person, and you do what we’ve made our Mission here at Home Encounter: You Enrich Lives, One Home at a Time.

***

The author, Peter Murphy, is Co-Founder and Head Broker at Home Encounter, a Tampa-based real estate Consultancy with specialties in Residential & Rental Properties, Investment Real Estate, Property Management and Land & Commercial Properties. Murphy’s analysis of the Tampa Bay housing market is featured extensively in local media and in trade publications, including the St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Business Journal, the Lakeland Ledger, and the Orlando Sentinel. He has appeared on ABC Action News and Bay News 9 for his reporting on significant local developments in the real estate market. He is a regular contributor to Fox’s 970 WFLA news broadcasts and is a guest panelist on Fox 13s “Your Turn”, where he consults on local and national real estate market issues. Murphy has a B.S. in Economics from the University of South Florida and an MBA with an emphasis in Finance, Economics and Marketing from the University of South Florida School of Business. He resides in Tampa with his wife and child

Filed Under Invesment Real Estate, Local Marketplace, National Marketplace, Residential Real Estate, Trends and Statistics | Leave a Comment