Trifecta

Flashback Friday ! Repeat posts for all my fans          

Hello, World 

          You think you have it all with your concierge, gym, pool and even a tanning bed in your residential building? Well, you don't. At least not compared to the residents across the pond at One Hyde Park London. They have Minority Report status eye scans in their elevators, panic rooms, bomb-proof windows and each resident's mail is x-rayed before it reaches his or her mailbox. Have a look for yourself . Don't be jealous, you can have all that too if you're willing to pay $11,000 a square foot. Oh yeah, plus a $550,000 yearly service charge. You might want to purchase your apartment soon before someone else gets to have Kylie Minogue, Prince of Monaco, Arab Oil Sheikhs and Russian Oligarchs as their neighbors. And don't try to kidnap any of them for ransom either since they have air purifiers that counter against poison gas anyway, I already thought up that one, trust me. One Hyde Park is just one building with just eighty-six residences but there are so many more amazing properties like it throughout the world that I will be exploring with you through this blog. 
          Each week I will present a unique building that is special in some way with each structure representing a different country to help emphasize that luxury has no limits and no national boundaries. Buildings like One Hyde Park don’t have only a local impact but also have a global economic impact. When projects of this magnitude are constructed, global investors become excited and want to get themselves involved in a similar experiment hoping to gain some sort of return. I became involved by establishing a personal connection with these developments having witnessed their transformation from simple ideas to world recognized structures. Every development I will write about I have personally visited and diligently studied leaving me as the ideal person to present to you facts and information through my blog. Luxury developments are able to be constructed faster than ever with modern technology, but can building too fast too soon bring about some disadvantages? Something like what happened to Dubai during the financial crisis of 2008? It is with this subject of certain luxury developments of a diverse range of countries that I will analyze and demonstrate how luxury development projects have affected the local, national and global economies of a variety of nations. Nevertheless, More people are getting rich – emerging economies and rising middle classes in Russia, India, Brazil China. These BRIC nations all have large populations that lead to a greater demand and more people willing to compete at higher prices.
          It will be interesting to look at cool and exciting buildings outside of New York City as we are witnessing a shift in massive wealth from west to east in our generation. The Empire State Building is only half the size of the current tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa in Dubai for example. But don't you think another country will soon try to take that spot? I'm guessing it will probably be China, even if it's by next year I wouldn't be surprised. There is a clear parallel between construction developments and rising economies and it is with this blog that I will examine the global economy through this structural perspective lens. I'm really into crazy real estate projects, and my goal is to convert you with one blog post at a time.

Profile Post

I don't share friends. Every single time I introduce somebody to someone they end up dating or becoming best friends. Or worse. They fight and I'm caught in the crossfire. This is the last chance I'm giving you so don't mess it up. His name is Brett Siegel, tall, blond, and an expert on real estate mega developments and investments of the gulf countries. His blog http://uaemegaprojects.blogspot.com  is undoubtedly the best blog for anyone interested in the modern projects of the Middle East. Not only does he provide substantial knowledge on each project, but is so well connected that he is able to provide “over 50 mega project industry news feeds that is continuously updated giving you the most current and complete information available.” Talk about connections. Even if he posts only once a month on average, he still has been consistently posting to his blog since 2007. Five years of blogging illustrates not only his expertise but also his dedication and appreciation for the field of sovereign wealth funds and their direct investments into Middle East projects. Now that's commitment. Doesn't he sound like a catch already? Did I mention everyone loves him? Yes. Three million views. He's probably fun and this guy can clearly hold a conversation on a date. Nothing worse than talking to yourself at dinner. 

            I'll need to pick up a few tips from Mr. Siegel. Currently, my blog focuses solely on individual Sovereign Wealth Funds and projects that are of particular interest to me. If you’d like to see a bigger picture of statistical analysis and more lists of work, Brett’s blog would definitely be useful and more interesting. Pretty much I'm the Marriot and he's the Ritz Carlton. Although his blog is incredible, I feel its more geared towards investors, brokers, and developers who involve themselves in this line of work. I really can't blame the guy for having high expectations, I would too if I were him. Siegel is a professional, always wearing a suit and tie while my blog just wears a short sleeve button-up stolen from my brother's closet. 
          Siegel covers a wider range of topics such as Cityscape Global 2012 which is “one of the largest and most prestigious real estate events in the world.” Cityscape global is pretty much where the best and brightest real estate professionals gather in an attempt to increase business and influence in the region. Told you everybody loves him.“Cityscape Global is expected to grow by 25 per cent this year, as international developers from the world's emerging markets look to the region for potential investors.” As I have mentioned in my blog of the transfer of wealth from western to eastern civilizations, cityscape global takes advantage of this shift of wealth trend where “19 of the 30 largest economies will be from the emerging world, fuelled by improved economic governance, human capital resources, and growing income per capita.”

            My blog just focuses on the sovereign wealth funds of the middle east, however, there are a handful of nations outside the middle east that also have sovereign wealth funds that you could possibly ask Siegel about when you see him. Top 10 Sovereign Wealth Funds discusses the most significant SWFs of the world, four of which are in the middle east. Some of the other nations most notably include China, Russia, Singapore and Norway. “The SWFs are important to the Mega Project industry because many of them invest directly in the projects while others help to create an economic environment conducive to Mega Project development.” Wait, Siegel did tell me he has access to detailed descriptions and link to each official SWF and can give me a more comprehensive analysis of each SWFs position in the global market.  I remember him saying something about The Norway government pension fund and how it “invests in international equity and fixed-income markets and real estate. The aim is to have a diversified investment mix that will give the highest possible risk-adjusted return within the guidelines set by the ministry.”

           So, are you interested? Here's his number, he's expecting your call.

Voice Critique 

          Okay, forget my previous voice critique on Sven Behrendt because I found someone else I could criticize even more. His name is Oliver Wainwright and he’s a British lad if you couldn’t already guess by the name. In one of his blog posts he completely condemns every aspect of the massive redevelopment plan of Mecca, Saudi Arabia while in another post he blindly praises the colossal development of London's Olympic Park. Essentially, both projects involve gigantic structures that take away from its surroundings yet Wainwright takes opposing perspectives for each. I can’t help but think it’s solely because he’s British and has the ethnocentric bias that most people will never admit to.  I can’t exactly accuse him. It’s always easier to place blame on somebody else.

          Mecca's Mega Projects is undoubtedly geared toward a western audience determined by his religious explanations and architectural analogies. Probably even a European audience to be more specific. I had no clue WTF “La Defense Cube” or “MVRDV’s Serpentine Pavillion” was until I checked with my good friend Wikipedia. “Perhaps a giant artificial mountain like MVRDV’s Serpentine pavilion proposal, could help accommodate the influx” justifies his use of simile to establish a greater understanding by linking similar architectural structures in Mecca to Europe to persuade his audience to his criticisms. This is further demonstrated through his analogy of France’s La Defense Cube to a “100 residential towers arranged around a plaza with capacity for 65,000 worshipers, as well as a skyscraper the size of the La Defense cube” to help illustrate the magnitude of these new structures of Mecca. This is where he begins to annoy me. The Abraj al-Bait clock tower above the Grand Mosque is a 600m high structure which makes it the second tallest building in the world, yet Wainwright snobbishly refers to it as “a surreal inflated parody of Big Ben.” Mind I tell you Big Ben is only 96m high and really the only thing they share in common is a clock.

          His various attacks on the redevelopment plan in which “95 per cent of Mecca’s millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades alone” completely overlooks the necessity for expansion merely to accommodate the growing number of Muslim pilgrims. His use of language and phrasing sets a negative tone where he makes it seem that only the authoritarian king of Saudi Arabia will benefit from the construction and the public has fallen victim to the king’s ambitions.  He begins to refer to the city as “Las Vegas without the gambling” which many people would find provocative comparing Islam’s holiest site to a city of strippers, drugs and unlimited alcohol. Of course, Wainwright did not want you to forget that this redevelopment plan will be “run by Osama’s brothers.” Yes Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist. What he failed to mention is that the Bin Laden Family is a highly respected billionaire family from construction and real estate. Osama even had a supermodel sister Wafa.  None of them ever supported what Osama did but Wainwright’s wording and phrasing almost assumes that they did. The Bin Laden family will also be behind the Kingdom Tower project of Jeddah I covered in a previous blog post illuminating their success in projects of the Middle East.

          Now look how much his voice changes when he writes about London's Olympic Park. You would think a different person is writing. He illustrates the transformation of Olympic park from “layered with generations of service as London’s kitchen garden and workshop, the site of flour mills and shipyards, gunpowder mills, chemical plants and brick factories” to “a green ribbon that snakes 40km from Hertfordshire down to the Thames in a knotted tangle of rivers, reservoirs and marshland, woven between infrastructural arteries and fragments of industry.” All this descriptive language to describe some greenery outside the Olympic stadium? Seriously, has this guy even been to London? The only thing green is the doorman's suit at Harrods. I agree with Wainwright that East London was pretty ghetto since World War II and the Olympics brought about its transformation and renovation. However, isn’t that the same thing that’s happening with Mecca? They are also taking down all the old ghetto buildings in the middle of nowhere and constructing giant magnificent structures in their place just like the Olympic stadium. He conveys a sense of pride when he states “In places, it is hard to shake off the feeling of being on an overly managed stage set, an imported ideal of naturalised landscape completely alien to the tradition of London parks.” Interesting language usage like “raised spine, which is bowed north-south across the park like a hog’s back”, “hourglass shape of the site”, to an “abrasive edgeland” are all much more rich phrases than was used for his Mecca post. He seems to exaggerate his choice of words and sentence styles to help illustrate his love for London’s Olympic Park. The sense of character that I’ve come to realize is that he’s bipolar. If Wainwright doesn’t like something he will harshly condemn it, but if he likes it he will overly praise it as evidenced through his Mecca and Olympic post.