ICSC NYC

The ICSC (International Counsel of Shopping Centers) national trade show was held in New York Dec 7-8. Alex Markson and I attended the event on a mission to persuade real estate development company marketing and leasing execs to forgo paper property collateral and use digital presentation methods instead. No|inc has created the application and interface for this conversion and we were curious to see, if after 5 years of use by our clients, we had any competition.

We walked the show and stopped at every exhibit, meeting with marketing and leasing folks and incredibly not a single company other than our client, DLC Management Corp, were using database driven, digital property presentations…..in 2009?…all using paper? They all have websites with property listings and leasing interfaces but when it comes to making “deals” as it’s known in this business, they print out “flyers”, cute. Then throw 75% of them away after the shows. Don’t even get me started on the green thing.

Think about this, arguably the most critical industry responsible for our economic recovery is doing business at the speed of trees growing. One would think a faster pace might be in order when racing against extinction.