Tom Dubel is a real estate consultant with Altus Group, where he leads companies to choose strategic locations for their business operations. He's credited with helping to bring two companies and hundreds of jobs to the Kansas City area. Recently, he sat down with the Kansas City Area Development Council to discuss what cities can do to attract business, the best incentives to offer, and site selection trends.
As the real estate industry consolidates, end users are continuing to standardize and centralize processes including their real estate transactions. While thirty years ago, there might be 50 brokers who knew the Kansas City market inventory, today it seems there are half a million brokers who know 90 percent of their market knowledge from CoStar. So how does the local broker bring value to the end user?
For many years after the exodus of residents and businesses to the suburbs, we lamented the deterioration of downtown. Downtown has made significant progress since, but in many ways we are playing catch up for not building infrastructure in downtown for at least a generation. A lot of good has come from us playing catch up, and in many ways the Streetcar is helping Kansas City to "right the ship" of downtown infrastructure by circulating people in a new way.
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Millennials have flooded the downtown housing stock in Kansas City in recent years, but that trend may have reached its expiration point - at least for the millennial generation. Millennials are now moving away from their entry-level jobs and entry-level housing options, according to new research from the University of South Carolina, which is warning the real estate market to brace for a major migration.
