In all seriousness, Q1b, 2005

A close friend of mine, someone who worked a number of years for a publicly-traded REIT, recently was giving me some advice about our new web site. She was concerned – rightly so – that we weren’t really conveying the right, professional image or tone. Not serious enough, she said. You have a very serious, committed staff, with some amazing aspirations and you need to convey that. Not surprisingly, our very talented marketing folks were also telling us the same thing. Got to take yourself seriously otherwise others won’t.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

You’ll have to be the judge of that.

Perhaps it’s growing up in the backyard of writers like Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, where a certain down-home simple style seems interwoven with something that has a certain profound kick to it. Reminds me of this peach moonshine the grandfather of another close friend of mine makes. Very smooth, almost non-alcoholic tasting on the surface with a mild hint of peach blossom.. But boy what a kick. It also reminds me of what my maternal grandmother use to say: “honey, you can catch a lot more flies with honey rather than with vinegar.”

So what has all of this philosophizin’ got to do with a commercial real estate company trying to develop and manage and broker in very different ways? A lot, actually.

A project we are currently developing, one that we hope will be one of the first all-retail LEED-certified developments in the US, is called Abercorn Common. We called it that for a number of reasons. For one, the notion of a common (like the Boston Common) comes from the old practice of creating a shared public space in the middle of a village or township, a space that belonged to all. We liked that concept very much. Moreover, and this is really the point of this little vignette, it was our feeling that what we were doing with this project, while unusual by typical real estate practices, really should be the way things are done everywhere. Rather than be unusual, we were aiming, we are still aiming, for practices that are or should be very common.

The common, the typical: somehow that fits with our group as a whole. With all due respect to our marketing folk and my very close REIT friend, it’s everyday speech about real estate practices that simply make common sense that will help create the changes we hope to see. Seriously.

Martin Melaver
CEO, Melaver, Inc.
Q1, 2005