Editor’s note

The shrinking distance from New York to Beijing

Stuart Elliott
Stuart Elliott

It’s not a breaking news flash that the world has become a smaller and more interconnected place. But in no place is the evidence of this global shrinking more on display than at the World Cup.

During the last World Cup, which was played in South Africa in 2010, the social media giant Facebook had just 500 million users.

Now it has 1.2 billion users globally and 500 million soccer “fans” — or users who have “liked” a team or a player — alone.

And, the United States is increasingly joining the rest of the world in its obsessiveness over the planet’s most popular sporting event. Ratings in the U.S. (on both TV and streaming apps) for some early World Cup games surpassed those for the NBA Finals and the World Series.

Interconnectedness, of course, extends beyond the digital world into the brick-and-mortar world of real estate, too.

In many ways, the distance between New York and Beijing these days is less than the distance between New York and Buffalo. (The fact that Chinese developers are now building condo projects in New York City specifically for Chinese buyers highlights that fact — see page 18.) It’s no doubt reassuring to all of the city’s big real estate players that New York holds a place at the nexus of the so-called “world cities,” which ensures that the city will continue to grow — and will require development to support that growth.

Our cover package on the next innovative ideas in New York City real estate brings together a lot of these threads. Not surprisingly, a lot have to do with technology and foreign markets.

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For example, the crowdfunding craze — which democratizes real estate investment by allowing ordinary people from anywhere in the world to contribute and invest in development projects online — will be a major source of capital for the industry going forward. So will tapping into foreign bond markets, as New York City developers have started to do in Israel to get access to cheaper financing for their projects back home. Google Glass and the next iteration of so-called big data (which partly has to do with the Internet of Things, connecting everything in the physical world to the web and making it quantifiable) will also have transformative effects. See page 42.

Being connected extends to our own personal lives as well. Researchers who are smarter than me say the strongest predictors of happiness are by far our relationships with family, friends and other people. So much so that the being connected and being happy can be practically equated.

That fact is not lost on Bjarke Ingels, the wunderkind architect who says he’s trying to create the “love child” of the master planner Robert Moses and urban activist Jane Jacobs in some of his projects. (Jacobs, of course, was all about connecting people to each other and to the urban environment around them.)

Ingels — who is best known in New York for a massive under-construction pyramid-shaped residential building he designed for the Durst Organization on West 57th Street — also recently won a $300 million federal commission to design an eight-mile buttress to protect Lower Manhattan from another Hurricane Sandy-like storm. Check out our profile on page 28.

We also have our highly anticipated annual ranking of Manhattan’s top residential agents inside (see page 32). The surprise top finisher this year is Fredrik Eklund — who rose to stardom on Bravo’s reality real estate TV show “Million Dollar Listing New York” — and partner John Gomes. Eklund has parlayed his connection to a massive TV audience — 1.3 million viewers for the season finale last month — into the lucrative business of marketing new condos for developers around the city. He and Gomes currently have $500 million-plus in listings and in-contracts deals. If that doesn’t prove that being connected (and marketing yourself to that wide an audience) pays, I don’t know what does.

Enjoy the issue and the final days of the World Cup!