Brunch with Francine and the Scobles

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles
Originally uploaded by kristiewells.

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles
Originally uploaded by kristiewells.

left to right: Scoble, Mme. Scoble, Mlle. Wells

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles
Originally uploaded by kristiewells.

And this is Kristie Wells, his significant other, and the Diva of Details.

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles

Brunch with Francine and the Scobles
Originally uploaded by kristiewells.

This is Chris Heuer, one of the founders of the Social Media Club and a speaker at the "Revolution in Marketing" conference on March 1.

Planning an Unconference

I'm in Half Moon Bay for the weekend.  What a treat to meet up with the Scobles  and Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells,  co-founders of the Social Media Club and discuss what they all knew about user-generated content (much more than I do). Even more interesting -- everybody's views on the 2008 elections and whether Hillary can win (no) or Barack can be nominated (no).

It will be so much fun when they call come to Arizona.

Maybe I Don't want an IPhone

David Pogue has quite an interesting FAQ on the iPhone. It doesn't have most of the stuff I really like, not to mention that I hate Cingular. I guess I don't want one after all.

Maybe I Don't want an IPhone

David Pogue has quite an interesting FAQ on the iPhone. It doesn't have most of the stuff I really like, not to mention that I hate Cingular. I guess I don't want one after all.

The Other Really Big Show

Everyone else I know is either at MacWorld, where Jobs has announced the iPhone, or CES, where they’re looking at 108” LCD screens. But I'm sitting in a room full of 800+people in the Phoenix Convention Center listening to a presentation on Arizona's real estate outlook for 2007.

It’s a day long series of updates on the most vital industry in the fifth largest city in the country, and it alternates between global and local issues.

The first presentation, on global perspectives, tells us what we in technology already know --growth of China, the failure to educate our children, etc. White noise for those of us in tech.


But now the speaker is on to something not so familiar: from a real estate perspective, half the world is now urban. That's how we get our productivity up: take a farmer off his farm and develop it. That's a shocker.

That certainly has happened in Arizona. Arizona is now the most rapidly growing state, having edged out Nevada because of slightly greater housing affordability. Jobs and people are coming here, and that's keeps the state's economy growing.

77% of Arizona’s population and jobs are in Phoenix. That's another shocker. 1 out of every 20 jobs in the country has been created in Phoenix. Presently we grow 10x the national average in jobs. But that's because the US is not doing very well. Another shocker. (This is eight hours long. I'm only going to report the shockers.)

In Arizona, retiring baby boomers will mean more demand for second homes. We’re one of the only states where legitimate second homebuyers will come as people begin to retire.

Those retiring baby boomers will also bring changes to our capital markets: a shift away from equity to fixed income investments, defined benefit plans going away, and more capital going into commercial real estate and commercial mortgages. Money will flow into commercial real estate. That means more money available for more deals. Hmmm...wonder what the quality of some of those deals will be, as retiring baby boomers who know nothing about real estate try to invest in income properties. (Remember when doctors invested in real estate for tax shelters...?)

Even with all our built-in advantages, Arizona’s rate of growth is slowing, however, and we've passed the peak of growth for this cycle, heading for a recession. Next year, our growth will be about 3%, compared to 4.5% last year. In a recession, we still grow, albeit more slowly.

Housing prices are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. For the first time, we’re not the cheapest market in the West. We are no longer affordable compared to Austin, Dallas, or Denver.

Arizona has had two major historical blips in the price of housing: one in the 50's, when people wanted homes after World War II, and again in 2000-2005. Both were due to an imbalance of supply and demand. Prices go up when there is less than a two-month supply of available houses. Now the market is making an inventory correction. We have eight months of supply. We will grow our way out of it by 2008.Nationally, the last four downturns in the housing market lasted somewhere between 17-35 months, and we are 18 months in.

Here, the worst of the housing market, however, is yet to occur. It will happen when we begin to have fewer closings because we have fewer homes built, and this year we have half the permits we had last year. 2007 will be a bad year. The worse it is, the more quickly we will get through our issues.

This morning, all of these speakers in the housing market are trying to cheer each other up.

“We only have 45,000 finished lots on the market. That’s not an oversupply.”

However, there are about 200,000 lots that are not finished. Those might end up being sold for $.50 on the dollar.

“There will be a reduction in the price of land off the 2005 prices, but it’s just not happening --- yet. “

“ Once the land prices get more affordable again, housing prices can come down. This year, Phoenix will once again have homes from $130k-195K. Last year, there was nothing being built at that price.”

“The buyers are out there, but they all want a deal.”

The biggest new housing demand is for mixed use (housing, retain and hotel) within walking distance of amenities—the urban living pattern idea. And yet two panels tell us that these projects are hard to build, hard to finance, hard to locate properly.

After lunch, we listen to Daniel Pink, who tells us about the abilities we need now. No longer do societies value engineering, accounting, or legal skills, the left-brain skills, as much. The more important skills are design, symphony, story, empathy, and play- abilities more characteristic of entrepreneurs, inventors, designers. The economy is moving from logical linear thinking to more intuitive, simultaneous thinking, largely due to abundance, Asia and automation. That means high concept and high touch abilities matter more. You must do something that can’t be outsourced or automated, and that means feel and express!

We tech people, we already know all this. Sofware development and X-ray reading went to India a long time ago.

My Link Blog

When I read my Google Reader feeds, I like to share some of them, so I post them to my link blog. I don't read like Scoble , who reads 483 feeds and in the last 30 days has read 25,000 items using his Google reader. No, I'm a wuss. I have only read 5,777 items from 38 feeds :-(
I guess I have a day job...

2007

What will happen in 2007?

I'm a futurist, so I make predictions every day. It doesn't take New Year's to force me to think ahead. But since you asked...

1) We will move further, although slowly, toward electronic medical records. Both the Federal Government and a number of state governments, including Arizona, are trying to get there, and facing usability, privacy, and adoption issues. Everyone knows health care is along overdue for automation; I've written about it many times before. The technology exists to put your medical records on a smart card that you could carry in your wallet, which could be swiped in a doctor's office to help you check in, make appointments, or give your history to a new specialist. But the pieces don't (yet) fit together,and HIPAA makes that difficult. So do the providers of the EMR software, who seem to think that gray screens are all that doctors need.

2)Social media will become more mainstream.  It is actually a good marketing tool in the best sense of marketing. The best sense of marketing, of course, is finding out what your customers need and supplying that need. Social media will slowly force marketers to stop foisting the wrong solution on us -- like big cars when we need small ones. Go back a paragraph and you will understand that social media will also stop software developers from developing electronic health record software for doctors with lousy user interfaces. And it will stop doctors from refusing to change over. Social media, or use generated content, puts pressure on all product and service providers to provide WHAT THE MARKET ACTUALLY WANTS.

3)Mainstream media, (MSM) and especially TV will become more fragmented. If I look at what I am recording on my DVR, it's specials on the Sundance Channel ("One Punk Under God"), series on FX ("Nip/Tuck" and now "Dirt"), the Daily Show and the Colbert Report on comedy Central, and whatever series is currently on over at HBO. In between, what else do I watch? I flip back and forth between CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and Fox News. What's missing from this picture? Network TV. At best, I watch it for a half hour a day, at the evening news. And I'm not home in that time slot most days, and don't consider it worth recording.

And what do I read for news? Google Reader, and about a hundred blog feeds from Huffington Post to Scripting News (for technies only). This is all the more remarkable as I am a member of the generation that is still supposed to be a mainstay of MSM.

3)Bush will put more troops into Iraq and the Democrats won't have the guts to quit funding the war. More people will die, we will be more of a laughing stock, and nothing will change. Even the troops on the ground are no longer in favor of the war; a new Military Times poll says that only 13% of troops think we are doing the right thing.

4)The current frontrunners in the election races, Obama and Clinton, McCain, and Guiliani, will not be the frontrunners by the time of the conventions. No one can predict what issue will arise to unseat them, but something will. In marathons, there's a phenomenon called peaking too early, and all these folks have done that. A presidential race is a marathon until the nominating convention, at which time it becomes a sprint.

5)Comfort food and the pet industry will continue to grow. As you look at the gathering clouds of global warming, Islamist terrorists, shortages of air traffic controllers, epidemics of cancer, pharmaceuticals that are discovered to have unintended consequences,  confusion over what foods to eat to prevent heart disease or stroke, and new diseases you didn’t know you had (overactive bladder, ED, restless leg syndrome), it becomes much more compelling to climb into a bed with a golden retriever after a dinner of pork chops baked in sauerkraut and served with blackeyed peas.

technorati tags:francine+hardaway, predictions, 2007, New, Year's, EMR, Sundance, social+media, Iraq, war