Publisher’s note: A confession of Noo Yawk hubris

It’s great to learn from others’ mistakes, but sometimes you have to make them yourself to truly get it.

We launched The Real Deal’s Los Angeles edition in 2016 with an ambitious mandate: to become the publication of record for the city’s real estate industry, delivering to our readers the smartest and most well-reported coverage on the market and the key players shaping it. We hired a talented editorial team and driven salespeople, and immediately made a dent: TRD became where an investor, developer, financier or broker could find insights on the real forces shaping their business, and our events became hives of dealmaking and knowledge-sharing.

But, in hindsight, we didn’t give the L.A. market the attention and resources it demands — and deserves. We tried to run the operation from our home base in New York, and didn’t invest nearly enough in developing the editorial and business-side infrastructure to consistently deliver to the standards of excellence we’ve always prided ourselves on.

That ends now. We are throwing ourselves full tilt into this market, making a big bet on our L.A. newsroom and putting together a first-class local sales and marketing team to grow our presence here. I’ve traded my pea coats in for a car, and made the move out here to be our new Associate Publisher, overseeing operations in L.A. and the California region. We’ve brought in two veterans of the Los Angeles Business Journal, Matthew Blake and Pat Maio, to anchor our coverage here, and will be hiring more talent in the coming months to broaden our reporting on the market. I hope you’ll notice more nuanced, insider stories, breaking news, more original research and signature rankings and a whole host of other platforms through which we will share our journalism, from intimate fireside chats with key players to flagship conferences.

I’d also like to inform readers and advertisers about the power and reach of our digital platform: Quantcast ranked TheRealDeal.com #1 among U.S. websites with the wealthiest audience, and we also made its list of the top 1,000 most-visited websites in the country. That’s a vast, plugged-in audience of professionals that is highly targeted and fiercely loyal.

Exhibit A of this new era is the magazine you’re reading now, helmed by editor Heidi Patalano, which dives deep into the most important issues shaping L.A.’s market today: the streaming giants’ obsessive quest for land that’s not theirs for the taking; a city beginning (just barely) to open its eyes to vertical living; and how the perils of billions of dollars in venture capital are jolting both the office space and brokerage landscapes.

I’d like to thank you for your support and guidance so far, and invite you to keep the dialogue going. L.A. is a challenge and a half to get right. But that’s what makes it so fun.

Write to Hiten at hs@therealdeal.com