Where To Find Opportunity in this Pandemic Protest Environment

It is exactly these types cataclysmic events that are not just disruptive but, potentially apocalyptic for how some industries conduct business and what types of information becomes transparent. These sorts of changes that are immediate and require a 180 degree shift in outlook are both phenomenally destructive to legacy infrastructure and ways of conducting business. Let me give you my rundown for this pandemic protest economic timeline---in the future ill refer to this as PPE moving forward. OK---let me try and briefly summarize the events and then get into how you can look at these changes to make a bunch of money. Here in San diego we have been fully quarantined since February 14. This first started as a virus and we as a nation reacted to this as a serious threat to human life. One by one large metro markets started to shut down business operations to curtail unnecessary human death. I cant help but, think that the stance on whether to shut down or not to shut down had more to do with politics than with the actual infection or death rates of the virus. On this note: I should probably note that China was only seeing something like a 4% death rate which is terrible but, a 4% death rate doesn't sound very bad when sars and mers the last two pandemics had death rates of 10 and 30% Either way---- we were all looking at daily death rates and staying home to be on the safe side for a lot of people it started to feel like we were on summer vacation in high school. While everyone is napping and getting their unemployment checks ---that extra 600 bucks a week and a forebearance on your mortgage started to feel pretty good. That is until we started to see massive numbers in the unemployed ranks and for a lot of people when they see unemployment numbers like that its very easy to recall the financial crisis of 2008 Im recording this June 9 2020---the question on everyones mind right now is Are these changes to the employed rolls permanent When will these jobs come back Wheres the opportunity for me? How can I win in this environment? If your like me you want to talk about C. Where is the new opportunity? That's what Im tyring to figure out. I would love to heqr your ideas –send me an email. On A) The massive and immediate unemployment numbers are due to two basic factors. The first is that it was mandated that non-essential workers stay home. Simple cause and effect. The 2 trillion dollar Cares act in principal was ideally a way to fund businesses to stay open by helping them pay their employees while juicing the actual enemployment payments 600 dollars a week. A lot of lower paid workers were making more than if they were actually working. Theres lots of money running through the veins of our economy so far so good---whats the problem? The problem that we all kinda forgot over the last few weeks is that the virus is going to be a problem until we get a vaccine and a typical vaccine can take a decade or more. The fastest vaccine ever produced is 4 years for the mumps. The good news is that there are 42 clinical trials underway so we could optimistically see something be developed within a year and we then need to mass produce it and mass distribute it. For the US government a year sounds ambitious-----Bill Gates and Jeff bezos are throwing in a billion trying to crack this problem. I have no doubt that private citizens can do this better than our federal government. If we assume the best case 1 year scenario---that means that we need to develop new ways of working within the bounds of covid 19 and social distancing. There will be markets like Texas that find themselves inclined to go completely open with no social distancing or a California that will open with timidly. Before last week I would have been watching the open markets to see if we get outbreaks like we saw in NYC, now im going to be watching the large metro markets with massive and prolonged protesting like Minneapolis , nyc, Miami and los angeles. If we see large swaths of new covid cases due to either the opening up of markets or recent large population events like protests. I want to note one quick but, crucial thing and that is that one of the main reasons that we went into lockdown and social distancing is that we knew that covid was airborne but, what we didn't know is the disease Rnaught number. If you want to look this up just google r not but, the actual spelling is naught like naughty. An Rnaught number is a diseases infection rates----it can get complicated but, and R0 of 18 says that on average 1 sick person would infect 18 and that 18 would infect another 18 and so on. With an Rnaught of 18 it would only take 1 sick person to infect roughly 105,000 people on the 4 th row meaning . 1 infects 18 that 18 turn into 324 turns into 5800 which then turns into 105000 people. This can get pretty scary pretty quick and even now Im not aware that we know the non-social distancing Rvalue of this disease. As I was writing this Dr fauci was just reported in the new York times as saying that "we are at just the beginning of this". I wanted to summarize where we have been and where we are mainly because I feel like a lot of people think this virus is nothing but, a different flu. Whether it is or it is not----I know the world is not going completely back to normal in the near future And that gap between our old reality and the new reality is where opportunity lies. If we try and see between those gaps we can find ways in which we can be of maximum service and create a maximum amount of wealth. Who was the famous hockey player that said---"I skate to where the puck is going instead of where it is" This is where we find the winners and losers in the game of getting ahead in life because the margin for error is very small. In order to make boatloads of cash we need to not only find the right lever to pull but, be able to pull that lever at the right time. So—I know we this is a podcast about real estate and we can certainly look at the gap between the old way of selling houses---very high touch and the possible new ways of llisting and selling houses. We can do that but, sometimes its easier to spot opportunities if we can get a little more elevated viewpoint. What I mean by that is that if we are going to talk about opportunities and where they lie we must first remove all the contstraints that you normally have. A lot of people will miss opportunities right in front of them because they often tell themselves why they cant do something. Most often people will say they cant do something –cant take advantage of an opportunity because they don't have the resources specifically money What I will tell you is that if you want to actually see opportunity---you must find a way to remove those constraints in your mindset. OK—lets look at a somewhat obvious example of looking at something at a macro view and then trying to extrapolate where opportunity intersects that viewpoint. Lets look at education in this pandemic protest environment PPE Education—specifically higher education; lets take a Harvard or Stanford as an example. If classes cant resume on campus in fall----they must start educating online. If all classes are online---how can Harvard or Stanford charge 100K a year? If all classes are online why would entry into Harvard have such a high entry to barrier? You shouldn't need a 4.3 gpa and a eillingness to get 300K in debt. Everybody should be able to access an online class for little to no money These institutions used to say that being on Stanford campus and having access to other really bright and connected people was worth the inflated tuition cost. With online classes that argument collapses on itself. One other thing is that if we have harvards library of content online why isnt higher education free or almost free? That's for a different discussion but, those questions can give us a glimmer of how we can up our game. Im not sure exactly how they are going to justify charging 100K a year but, I know that they will It would be worthwhile to look at how these institutions will change their model. What can we implement in our businesses to follow these brands. If we are on this vein it would be instructive to look at fashion. In what way will the fashion industry cater to the high end and how will they change in addressing the midrange market. What are they doing that we can implement to make improve our value proposition in the market? The reality is that most of you listening right now will not have a clear and present value proposition. If I honestly asked you what is the real difference between you and the next guy down the block---most of you will make something up on the fly-----and more often than not its something like "Ill work harder than the next guy" The problem is that you cant exactly quantify that. I can guarantee that institutions like Harvard will have a very clear and concise answer to what is their value proposition. So—what is your value proposition? Don't be afraid to change and this environment might be demanding we radically change right now. One thing I have seen in this pandemic is that being locked down has accelerated things that were already coming but, we have been very slow to implement. This lockdown has amplified the signals that were already in play and we see the world responding to them---we don't have to look farther than the protests that then turned into riots. I literally witnessed the san diego la mesa riot------my house is literally 7 minutes away from the little town of la mesa----this is the san diego riot where we saw a chase bank and union bank and a few other businesses literally burnt to the ground. Again—Im not going to take a political stand here---all im going to say is that the market wanted something different than they were getting. How can you be a leader in your market or industry to effect some change even if its only in how you operate? One thing I have witnessed in this pandemic is that our technology is allowing us to work in a very different way than we ever have in history. Never in our history we us humans capable of earning a living and not having to live our homes. Our legacy systems demanded that we get in our car—go to the office and run our businesses onsite. It is at this juncture we might be able to look at human behavior and take a more granular look at where we can use this information and find opportunity. If we just look at the environment from a current pandemic viewpoint. A few things pop out at us---if we just consider pandemic and real estate its almost self evident that in the near term commercial or large spaces are going to have to find a new way to exist. Have you been inside a home depot during this pandemic? The lines are ridiculously long for a store with a giant footprint. Just to give you an idea---did you know that the average home depot store is 105K square feet? To put that in persepective a football field is only 57500 sq feet. If this covid situation persists large footprint stores will almost definitely need to find a more efficient way of serving its customers. Is there a giant opportunity here? Absolutely So if we now zero in on residential real estate where might we find an angle? Wheres the opportunity? If working at home becomes the new standard which I think it will just from a profit and loss viewpoint we will see properties in dense areas become less attractive and larger home spaces with office space will begin to be much more desirable. In many markets this alone could create hot zones within established municipal areas. We will also see cities begin to change zoning overlays to match consumer desires—here in California all residential properties could add a 1200 or 1250 granny flat regardless of the size of the primary home. We will see more of this ---- this will undoubtedly result in the need for underground fiber and super fast internet access. OK---so lot of opportunistic areas to think about just in the real estate vertical. How else m ight we look at this time in the environment and look for opportunity? We started off dealing with a virus and it has since grown into a protest movement. Again---I am in no way getting political or social. Im simply relaying what I see happening in the world and trying to extrapolate that into zones of economic opportunity. I feel its important to talk about all the factors that are changing the fabric of our economy and social life as we know it. We locked down because of the virus and as pointed out earlier that gave way to an unintended and unforeseen economic hit to the global economy. This economic punch to the gut hit the more unfortunate in our social system. People like me and hopefully you listening rolled with the punches of this lockdown…I stopped going out as much but, I continued to make money and working. That is not the case for a lot of people and the second unforeseen and unintended consequence is that people that were being marginalized in our social and economic system started standing up and calling for reform. The black lives matter movement has been aroud since 2013 when OK---hold up here---this whole time I promised not to get political and man I really don't want to but, I absolutely hate people in authority abuse that authority. I hated it in teachers, I hated it in the kid that always told the teacher on me and I really dislike cops. As an adult----Ive never really had any runins with the cops but, when I was a kid growing up in my small town---ive been billy clubbed by cops as a 16 year old—I was maced as a 17 year old and ive wanted to get even ever since. So when I see a fat cop doing fat cop stuff like hassling people for the fun of it and only doing because they are wearing a badge I detest those type of people. I could go on and on about this but, I wont. I will say that theres no doubt that cops and teachers do bad things and they will get away with it because they can and if they do get caught their unions will protect them. Im angry about what happened to me as a white boy in central California---I cant imagine being a black guy in Detroit or LA and have to live with this kind of anger their whole life. I totally understand why people want these legacy systems defunded and rebuilt. I think we should---I say break the unions----rip away their pensions and start over. And to bring this back around to looking for opportunity----I t