Millennium Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles - Galleria

Millennium Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles Galleria, courtesy of millieniumbiltmore, CC BY 2.0.

Last week I attended the third annual RICS Summit of the Americas with my colleague Linda Tayntor from our Seattle office. You might recall that I attended last year’s event in Toronto; this year’s event was held at the historic Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California on April 22 through 24.

The Los Angeles Economic Development Commission (LAEDC) speakers kicked off the event by focusing on the role of the government in the local economy. Ferdinando Gueria, international economist at the LAEDC, focused on the size of the LA economy. He gave a few statistics, mentioned the strong foreign direct investment (FDI) ties with Canada and Japan, and described how China is LA County’s number one trading partner, with LA County handling nearly 45% of the trade between China and the United States.

Gueria also detailed how 48% of LA County’s population is Latino, which is why LA should be the gateway to Latin America for Asian companies that want to invest in Latin American markets.

Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles

Pershing Square and the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The next group of speakers provided an update on industry trends, with Sean Tompkins moderating the panel. I met Sean at MIPIM in March 2014. Here are a just a few of the topics covered during the industry trends panel:

  • Growing cities
  • Shifting economic power
  • Greater inequality
  • Big Data

The panel spent a fair amount of time on “Big Data.” In particular, the panel discussed where the value is added. The panelists generally agree that it’s not possible to automate everything; there is no good substitute for human judgment. The latter point was really hammered home in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article that showed the IBM Watson computer and three other artificial intelligence (AI) systems that could identify a cat but could not identify a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook. The AI systems did poorly when they had insufficient data, such as a lack of prior experience with a particular type of picture. In addition, they also sometimes had trouble distinguishing the most significant feature of a picture to focus on.

Jim Kruse of CBRE said a common CBRE saying is “information, intelligence, and wisdom.” CBRE has noted that workforce issues, such as young people arriving with few skills, have created challenges. Kruse said CBRE tries to match up younger employees with more senior personnel to help everyone improve.

I’ll have more on the RICS Summit of the Americas later this week.