by Donald Davidoff | Mar 5, 2019 12:00:00 AM
In the past week, we released our much-anticipated white paper, 20for20: 20 Conversations with Senior Executives About the Outlook for 2020 and Beyond. In my last newsletter, I covered some of the highlights of what we found. Today, aside from making sure you know it’s now available for download, I thought I would share our motivation for putting in the many hours of research and investing in writing this white paper.
Simply put, we wanted to write something that wasn’t just an opinion. We aimed to find a structured way to collect expert opinions and develop a neutral, sober perspective on where the industry is heading. We wanted to understand broader themes and trends rather than just articulate a viewpoint to go with all the others.
Along with that, we very purposefully focused our research on conversations with the heads of operations and technology. We get that ultimately, multifamily is a Balance Sheet industry. At some level serving residents (operations) is what happens in between deals. As a result, much of the research in our sector is around development and transactions. Yet at a 5% cap rate, a dollar of operational (NOI) improvement creates $20 of value/wealth.
Given this high leverage point, we believe there should be more rigorous research on all things customer-facing. No offense to those who take their experiences and call them “best practices” (heck, we do the same at times—and there’s value to that); but this time we wanted to put our experience and our opinions to the side and do the hard academic and journalistic work to research what is really happening.
The approach we took both reflected the perspectives of senior executives and employed sufficient rigor to be reliable. We intentionally went in with no preconceived notions or hypotheses. We simply asked 20 executives the same set of questions and then did cluster analysis on the answers to let the trends (and contrasts) speak for themselves.
We feel that we accomplished our objectives, based on our conversations with the 20 interviewees and through subsequent preview discussions with executives we didn't get to interview. Hopefully, 20 for ‘20 will serve as a catalyst for many conversations within your operating team, and maybe even a few with us.
We look forward to continuing to share our findings and look forward to hearing any comments back from you!