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5 for Friday with Ben Alder from Sperry Van Ness Miller Commercial Real Estate

Posted on by SVN
Ben Alder, Land Product Council Chair, SVN/Miller Commercial Real Estate
Ben Alder, Land Product Council Chair, SVN/Miller Commercial Real Estate

This week, our 5 for Friday features Ben Alder, Land Product Council Chair and Senior Advisor with Sperry Van Ness Miller Commercial Real Estate based out of Salisbury, MD.

1. What is your geographic market and product specialty?
My product specialty is land. My market area is the Delmarva Peninsula – Maryland, Delaware, Virginia.

2. What’s your latest best practice tip that you can share?
I recommend setting aside time for monthly business planning. It helps me stay focused on the big goals while working each day to make business happen. This is equivalent to working ON your business and not IN your business –

3. What’s been the biggest change over on how you run your business in the past decade?
My biggest challenge was committing to focus on one product type which for me is land.

4. What business book do you like to recommend to your colleagues?
I highly recommend, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” by Stephen R. Covey

5. What’s a fun fact that not everyone knows about you?
Not a lot of people know that I am a wetland and waterfowl biologist by training.

*All Sperry Van Ness offices are independently owned and operated.

5 for Friday with Bob Lovelace of SVN Florida

Posted on by Diane Danielson

Five for Friday this week turns its sights on  Bob Lovelace, CCIM, MAI, Senior Advisor at Sperry Van Ness Florida, at the New Smyrna Beach, FL location.

Bob Lovelace
Bob Lovelace, MAI, CCIM, Senior Advisor, SVN Florida

 1.       What is your geographic market and product specialty?

I have specialized in East Central Florida commercial real estate for 30 years with a particular focus on the Interstate 4 corridor between Orlando and Daytona Beach.  I have worked with a broad variety of property classes and client types.  Over the past five years, I have worked primarily with distressed assets and lender REO including large land tracts, office, and retail properties.

 

2.      What’s your latest best practice tip that you can share?

Jerry Anderson, CCIM, recently noted that SVN Advisors’ access to Real Capital Analytics data is one of our organization’s most powerful tools to identify opportunities.  I was guilty of overlooking it.

 

3.      What’s been the biggest change over on how you run your business in the past decade?

Ten years ago I set a goal to transition my full-time appraisal practice to one of a full- time brokerage.  I completed the CCIM program, affiliated with some good brokerages along the way, and feel as though the transformation has culminated in my association with Sperry Van Ness Florida.

 

4.      What business book do you like to recommend to your colleagues?

Because of a recommendation by Bo Barron, CCIM, I just finished Michael Hyatt’s “Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World”.  As promised, the book delivers great guidance on how to better structure and leverage one’s marketing in the social media universe.

 

5.      What’s a fun fact that not everyone knows about you?

I was drawn to New Smyrna Beach and Ponce Inlet many years ago because of surfing, and I haven’t left yet.  Through surfing, I met and married a local girl in a ceremony at the top of the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse.  This little beach town has been good to me.

 

*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.

 

Looking Below the Surface of Farmland Values by Ben Alder

Posted on by SVN
Ben_Alder
Ben Alder, Advisor with Sperry Van Ness | Miller Commercial Real Estate

Ben Alder, an advisor from Sperry Van Ness/Miller Commercial Real Estate out of Salisbury, Maryland, is a contributing author for LandThink. By bring together various components of the land industry, LandThink is able to provide knowledge, ideas and networking opportunities to land professionals and investors to create a stronger land marketplace.

In a recent article, Ben takes a closer look at farmland values and the economic principles driving the value.

The last serious decline to farmland value occurred in the 1980s. Since then, annual growth in some states has risen in the double digit range, while between 1994 and 2004, the national average farm real estate value increased between 2 and 4 percent. Contrasting this to 2005 and 2006 they increased by 16 and 10 percent, respectively. The recession of 2008 to 2009 did bring some modest dip in farmland value, the hardest hit states were those with greater levels of suburban development and urbanization, a factor very well understood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and other Mid Atlantic States. In 2010 to 2011 states in the Corn Belt and Great Plains experienced significant growth in cropland values including a 31 percent spike in Iowa. While prices sky rocketed in these bread basket States, areas of the Southeast and Northeast experience declines in value as transitional influences changing land use in these more urbanized markets continued to trail off. Greater detail on this research can be garnered from the September 2012 edition of the Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources and Rural America Journal produced by USDA’s Economic Research Service.

To view Ben’s article in its entirety, click here.

Ben Alder

Sperry Van Ness/Miller Commercial Real Estate

Salisbury, MD

 

*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.