Integrity: Always do the right thing regardless of sentiment and never compromise your core values. If you cannot build trust and engender confidence with your stakeholders you cannot succeed. No amount of talent can overcome illegal, immoral or otherwise ill-advised actions. A leader void of integrity will not survive over the long-haul.

Excellent Decision Making Skills: As a leader you will live or die by the quality of the decisions you make. When you’re the leader good decisioning is expected, poor decisioning won’t be tolerated, and great decisioning will set you apart from the masses.

Ability to Focus: If you cannot focus, you cannot perform at the level necessary to remain in leadership for very long. The ability to do nothing more than understand and lock-onto priorities will place you in the top 10% of all leaders.

Leveraging Experience: Inexperience, a lack of maturity, needing to be the center of attention, not recognizing limitations, a lack of judgment, an inferior knowledge base, or any number of other common mistakes made by rookie leaders can cause your house of cards to fall. If you don’t have the experience personally, hire it, contract it, but by all means acquire it. Great leaders surround themselves with tier-one talent and the best advisers money can buy. They don’t make uniformed or ill-advised decisions in a vacuum.

Command Presence: Great leaders possess a strong presence and bearing. They are unflappable individuals that never let you see them sweat (unless of course it serves a purpose). Everything from how they carry themselves to how they speak and dress, messages that they are in charge.

Embracing Change: Great leaders have a strong bias to action. They don’t rest upon past accomplishments, and are always seeking to improve through change and innovation. In today’s fast paced and competitive environment those leaders who don’t openly embrace change will often be shown the door prior to the expiration of their initial employment contract.

Brand Champions: Great leaders understand branding at every level. They seek to build not only a dominant corporate brand, but also a strong personal brand. leaders that are not well branded on a personal basis, or who let their corporate brand fall into decline will not survive.

Boundless Energy: Great leaders have a boundless amount of energy. They are positive in their outlook and their attitude is contagious. A low energy leader is not motivating, convincing, or credible.

Subject Matter Expertise: Great leaders have a deep understanding of their subject matter, and a strong orientation toward achievement. Great leaders possess what often appears to be a sixth sense or an almost instinctive feel for what the needs to occur leverage their knowledge into a competitive advantage.

People Acumen: Great leaders have a nose for talent…They understand how to recruit, develop and deploy talent focusing on applying the best talent to the best opportunities. They also know when it’s time to make changes and cut losses as needed.

Organizational Acumen: Great leaders know how to engender trust, when and how to share information, and are expert listeners. They develop strong and positive team/organizational cultures driven to performance by aligned motivations. They can quickly diagnose whether the team/organization is performing at full potential, delivering on commitments, and whether the team is changing and growing versus just operating.

Curiosity: Great leaders possess a powerful motivation to increase their knowledge base and to convert their learning into actionable initiatives. They question, challenge, confront and are never accepting of the status quo.

Intellectual Capacity: Great leaders are also great thinkers…both at the strategic and tactical levels. They are quick on their feet and know how to get to the root of an issue faster than anyone else. I’ve never met a great leader who wasn’t extremely discerning.

Big Thinkers: Regardless of the physical or geographical boundaries of their current role, great leaders think big and add a zero. Limited thinking results in limited results. Whether global thinking is applied to capital formation, supply-chain issues, business development, strategic partnering, distribution or any number of other areas, those leaders who don’t grasp the importance of thinking globally will not endure. Great leaders are externally oriented, hungry for knowledge of the world, and adept at connecting developments and spotting patterns.

Never Quit: Great leaders refuse to lose…They have an insatiable appetite for accomplishment and results. While they may reengineer or change direction, they will never lose sight of the end game.

*On average, homeowners have the least amount of equity in their homes on record

*21.9% of homeowners are underwater, 41% of all homeowners with a mortgage are underwater

*Housing prices are still projected to drop another 10%-20%

*Alt A mortgage resets are expected to peak in 2013, default rate today is already at 20%

As companies across the country shut their doors and/or looking to shed excess space, the market is being flooded with extra inventory. Refinancing options are scarce. These valuations will most assuredly continue to drop and make it extremely difficult for investors to deliver returns and maintain debt covenants.

The asset recovery business is looking to get busier and busier.  The next few quarters will continue to be interesting to watch.

Management Consulting 23%

Financial Services 14%

Marketing 12%

Consumer Goods 12%

Private Equity 9%

Investment Banking 9%

Healthcare 8%

Energy 7%

Investment Management 7%

Venture Capital 7%

Entertainment 6%

E-Commerce 5%

Non Profit 5%

Retail 5%

“Just because you are a bank…Just because you also hold the mortgage on the building…Just because you are the only tenant in the failed redevelopment….Does not mean you also don’t need a lease in place for your bank branch!”

Leases are needed to define possession between lessor and lessee for a set period of time and cost. Never let yourself be lulled in to thinking that a lease is not needed.

After reviewing the article I can’t help but agree with the assessment of the gap that exists between sell-side asking prices and buy-side offering prices. This pricing gap is currently affecting a number of projects I am involved with. Until there is a catalytic event, such as  debt expirations, Sellers are going to be extremely reluctant to recoginze the imputed value of their equity in their assets in the  new market.  Until the market re-calibrates itself, it is going to be a grating run.  Let the unwind begin.

In this economy, facing these credit markets, it is incredibly important to conduct the proper amount of due diligence on any new proposed Landlord before agreeing to any deal.   On my projects specifically, a few options were build to suit transactions. It would be disastrous for a time critical tenant to commit to a new build to suit deal, only to findthe developer unable to obtain the required credit to build the proposed project.