This week’s interview is with Declan Keefe, Strategic Director of Placetailor in Boston.

Placetailor developed from a design/build company to a company that offers design, development and construction – or, as Declan calls it, a plug and play business model.

Declan has a lot of experience in finding land, getting projects off the ground and placemaking and is  happy to share his expertise step by step with you! His marketing strategies go beyond websites and business cards and could be rather called a philosophy than a strategy.

Keep on reading to get inspired by an architect who believes in sustainability, collaboration and the power of community.

Enjoy the interview!

Could you tell us about Placetailor and about your role in the company?

I’ve been working in the company from the beginning. I took it over a couple of years into the business. I’m not the initial founder; I am the Strategic Director.

Placetailor in its current form is an architecture, construction and real estate development company. And my role specifically is to link those three arms of the business. I make sure architecture speaks to construction and construction speaks to development and all the other permeations of that as well.

Further I am setting the course for the company as it relates to our mission and our business model. What are things we care about, what are things that we have to have in a project for it to be deemed quality Placetailor project.

What is Placetailor’s business model?

When Placetailor was first started, we were what is more commonly known as design-build company. The model came from the thinking that the architecture and the construction professions these days are always at odds with one another. And we think that it’s quite a detriment to the profession.

The origin of both professions came from the master builder. So we created Placetailor with the question in mind “How can we recreate today – when we’re pushing more and more towards specialization – a business that can still do specialized work but also is able to be the architect and the builder?”

Originally we were looking for people who work as a carpenter and a designer. Today we still have some people who work on both sides of the business but there are also some people, who just work in construction or just on design.

A few years into the business we made a major transitions: to become a developer as well. And we felt like it fit very much in the conversation related to master builder because typically that was the way it worked. The master builder would work directly with the equivalent of a developer. The term didn’t exist back then, but it was someone building a cathedral or his or her mansion.

So we thought, internally, we could have that model expanded so that the development entity itself, which technically is a separate business, hires the architecture company, which is really ourselves, to do the design work and then hires the construction company, which is really ourselves again, to do the project as we’ve envisioned it on the development side. To the outside world, they look like one business: Placetailor that does architecture, construction, and development. On the inside, it’s a little more complicated because things are broken up for legal reasons, security and insurance.

Today about 75% of our work comes from our own development.

This model allows for our business to operate as what I call plug and play. We can be just the architect, the builder or the developer, or in a sort of the ideal visualization of the business model, we’re all of them.

How do you find land?

There are two paths:

The first is really a very simple one and maybe it’s hard to imagine until you do this. But it’s literally just driving around and looking for land.

The hunt looks different every time. It could be we see a piece of land and call the owner and they say, “Sure. We’ll sell it.” It could be easy as that. It could be years and years of, ”Well, sure, we’ll sell it, but we have all these tax issues.” And we’ve got to help work out the entire back end for them.

The other way, which I think is maybe even more of a fruitful path to take because it’s not just helpful for finding land but it’s helpful for really operating a business in general, is getting out and meeting people and being willing to collaborate and being willing to have a sort of open-ended conversations about something that could happen in the future. It’s the long-term approach.

When you collaborate you’re working with clients again. It’s not just a speculative real estate development. You bring them into your team. And they can help finance the project. So they’re both client and collaborator.

For architects who know very little about real estate development, how would you break down the process of getting the first project off the ground?

I think there’s something before the land hunt, which is really determining what it is you’re trying to get out of the project. Why do you want to be a developer and not just an architect? What type of development are you trying to do? Is it a residential development? Are you trying to do commercial?

And then looking at the markets that are near you as what could it bear. Analyzing a market means being in the area, being in the neighborhood, spending time at a coffee shop next door to the place you want to build or develop something, and learn what the people are saying that are there and what they feel, and how you could fit into that story.

A piece of land is a useful starting point because it’s going to be a fixed number. You know this land is on the market at certain price, and you know that you want to put an offer in that’s 10% higher than that. And because that’s how you think given what you’ve found from your research that the market will bear and you may actually get your offer accepted.

Then there’s the obvious question of where does that money comes from, right? There are many different answers. One example I mentioned already which is you could have already built up relationships, found people to collaborate with. For example you’re looking at a piece of land that three specific families want to live in. Now you pitch it to them first. You say, “Would you want to live here? We think we can fit a house that’s this big.”

Some of the initial architecture work is doing your zoning analysis, looking at your code analysis, what could actually fit on this potential lot. And then pitching it to the people, who want to live there or to some investors. You have to have a network of people who might be interested in supporting you as an individual at that point.

And there are those people out there who have a strong enough vision that they’re willing to support you. And sometimes they’re willing to support you because they know that they’re probably going to get a deal, if it’s your first project. Just to be honest about it is that you’re going to have to give and take a bit on your first one to make something happen.

But now you imagine you have that money, you put your offer in and the offer is either accepted or denied. If it’s accepted, then the next stage is the purchase and sale agreement, which is where all the contingencies of the deal really get ironed out. So that’s going to be in communication usually between realtors. It could be a direct communication though often the realtors are the go-between. And then it’s usually realtors who are then talking to lawyers. And the lawyers are really the ones hashing it out. And then it filters back through to the realtors and then out to the buyer and seller.

We often operate without realtors because we like to be more directly connected to the process. And so in addition to architecture, construction and development, usually, we’re also doing our own sales for the scale that we’re at currently.

So then let’s assume that our purchase and sale gets approved. Now likely that means you’re putting in some additional money. So the offer had a small amount. The purchase and sale would mean you’re putting a deposit in. So, you’re going to put in some small percentage, by 15% of the total sale. At which point you’re scheduling for your closing that and which when you’d actually own the land.

And it would be at that point where the attorneys would do a final sweep of, “Is the lot salable?” And if it is and there’s not really that much more negotiation that happens between the purchase and sell in the closing. At the closing itself, it’s a whole series of paperwork and you have to get your insurance lined up, and all of those. There’s a lot of sort of back end to it there.

If you’re getting financing through a bank, it becomes a little more difficult for a first developer to prove that they should take that risk, but it’s feasible with the right bank and the right project. If you’re working with partners, such as homeowners who want to live there, they’re getting their finances together maybe through their banks or maybe just through capital that they have and putting it in place. You’re probably forming an LLC with the entities who will own it in the end. And even we do that. We have an LLC per project. So we start a new company every time.

And then let’s say that the closing is done and we now own the piece of land, at which point we go beyond that initial massing or zoning study to figure out what could go there. And for us, we just start the architecture. If you’re just a developer, you’re hiring an architect. And you do the design, you submit, l and if all goes well, you get your approvals.

Then we submit again for building permit. And then we have building permit, we build it because ideally, we will have already gotten approval for our financing from the beginning. You’ll have to finish that paperwork to get the second round of release for the construction lending. And then once you build the whole project, you’ll get construction lending throughout.

And then when it’s built, depending on the type of project you’re working on, either you sell it or you could rent it if that is your chosen development method.

And those processes look different whether it’s commercial or residential or whether it’s what we call condos here or co-op housing, or you know whatever the processes. It looks slightly different to sales. And then hopefully, at the end, you have some money left and that would be the profit of the project.

What marketing strategies have been most effective to find new clients, promote services or sell your products?

I think the thinking about marketing and the definition of it should be expanded beyond your web presence or your business card to whatever it is that people are left with after they’ve come in contact with your business in any way. So that contact could be through social media, through giving lectures at a local conference or through students at the school that I teach at. Or it could be me running into them in the coffee shop. And I think being really cognizant that all of this relates to marketing is very important.

And for us, we have a few things, which we think of as differentiators. And a differentiator works for us in our marketing, in our branding. And it works for us fairly well in the sales of our actual units because the project themselves become differentiated by the fact that we have these differentiators in our business.

So one is our business model, that we’re the architect, developer and contractor. That’s great for clients because they feel like they can trust one entity. They don’t have to worry about bringing in somebody else.

Another one is that transition we made, around the same time we started doing development: we became an employee on cooperative.

It’s a strong social mission of ours, that anyone that works within our company has the potential to become an owner, if they stay with the company for three years or more.

And so it gives a longer-term commitment to the business. And the cooperative model that we use is equal profit share, equal vote.

And so depending on who I’m talking to, this fact is useful to show we have the skill set internally for design, for architecture, development and construction. We care about our people.

The third differentiator that we have is related specifically to the way in which we do design and construction. And this one was really able to launch the business early on. And so we work exclusively on high performance, energy efficient and sustainable architecture. So we won’t take projects that aren’t that way. It is who we are. We believe that is the baseline and we need to be raising the bar even higher.

And then I believe that you need to have a basis of a solid branding as it’s typically thought of where they’re going to go to your website and it needs to feel the same way that your conversation just felt. And you need to hand them business card that feels the same way that you’re conversation just felt like because if you’re mixing your messages, they’re not going to believe that’s true.

Everybody is talking about placemaking these days. What’s your strategy on this?

I think it is all about being engaged with all the stakeholders and not just the client. And for us, we have a business model that allows us to do that a little more collaboratively even because we have the architect, the builder and developer in the room. So we can quickly do a lot of those conversations upfront.

But even if that’s not your business model, I think there needs to be a considered effort to get the builder and the developer in the room and have those conversations. And maybe they could all come to the community meeting so that they can all get it. So I think that’s the basis of what placemaking should be about.

In addition in our company we do the design very collaboratively. I fear the idea of a solo architect as developer who can get too caught up in their ego as an architect. Who then wants to design their masterpiece and try to put all of the things that they imagine they ever wanted to do in one project. I have seen this happening before.

And that actually doesn’t make good architecture in the sense of good placemaking. It makes good pieces of architecture that operate on their own. And it’s probably too expensive and you probably won’t make money on the development.

Whereas, if you are thinking about the design collaboratively, it’s not just one person’s vision that appeals to just that one person. And I think it’s fine if you’re building your own house. If the development is anything but your own house, I would urge you to get out of your own head and into the community and with other people.

I think that’s the process of placemaking: connection to the community and a collaboration internally.

Do you have any advice for archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

My biggest advice is: Have the right reason for doing this. Truthfully, it’s a lot of administrative work. The reality behind the romanticism of architect as developer is you do less of the fun stuff and more of the not fun stuff. But you do get a little bit more freedom.
And potentially, if you do it well, you can make more money. But if you do it just okay, you’ll loose a lot of money and time, and you could disrupt your whole career. So my advice is: Do not take it lightly.

The second piece of that advice is to not just know why you’re doing development, but know what you’re trying to achieve as a person in this world. What is the impact you want to make? We as a firm are looking at our total impact, our carbon footprint as a business, the carbon footprint of each building, the social footprints of the buildings. How is a building affecting the place? How are we affecting the people who we get to work with? And we want all of those impacts to be positive.

Because if we’re too caught up in the fact that we are making it just for the sake of making a building, we’re not looking at the potential positive impact we can have on the world. We’re setting in stone something for hundreds of years potentially that isn’t what we really want to represent as people.

The connection between architect and developer gives us the control to start making those decisions unlike you have in most other scenarios. If you’re just the architect, you can make some of those decisions. But the clients make most of those decisions. They won’t let you do energy efficiency. They won’t let you do those community meetings.

But when you start to have control, it really means you need to have your moral code in the right place so that you yourself make the decisions that are right for the future generations.

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

One of the things that will change how the industry works is the automatization of things in robotics. And I think that it is going to have a much greater impact on the architecture profession than it feels like to me. And I say that because the modular and prefab buildings have been of interest for a long time, but they’ve not been out major in market share. And it’s partly because the processes that have been for modularization of architecture have still actually been pretty inefficient.

And we’re getting to the place with automatization and robotics. But that’s not going to be the case for very much longer. And we’re going to have such automatization that the construction field is going to become a completely different thing.

And in some cases, I think the architectural profession will start to disappear, as we see it now, because it’s the case that most architecture work is done for just the top 1%. And this goes back to my advice about what is it you really want to be doing. If those are the people that you’re trying to support with your work, that’s total your prerogative.

If we’re trying to do design work for the rest of the world, then we will have to start thinking about different business models. One of them maybe to be working alongside this modularity and improvements in manufacturing such that the result of that is not just cheap, inefficient, uncomfortable houses, but quality, high-performance, healthy, light-filled, comfortable places for people to live. And that’s the work of architects.

And it would be too easy for us as we go down the path of automatization for that to go the wrong way. And so I think we shouldn’t leave that in the hands of just the roboticists and the engineers. Even though I’m sure that they’re wonderful people, they’re not thinking about what the architects are. So we need to be in those processes and thinking ahead.

About Declan Keefe

Declan is a founding member of Placetailor, and is a current owner as well.  As the strategic director, he keeps the company in order and oversees all of Placetailor’s projects.  If you are interested in Placetailor helping you with a project, Declan would be the guy to talk to.  Declan is LEED AP, a certified passive house consultant, and like everyone at Placetailor, he is a designer as well as a builder.

The post Placetailor – Combining Design, Development and Construction to Create Sustainable Housing appeared first on Archipreneur.

Slender – Bender is the first building of Deadline’s architects Matthew Griffin and Britta Jürgens. In embarking on this project they deliberately assumed the dual roles of architect and developer. As young architects and almost no experience in building it was impossible to find someone to trust them, so they became their own clients. By thus expanding their profession’s field of action, they maximized the creative potential of their project.

“We believe,” Matthew Griffin said in an interview with archipreneur, “that to have the chance to do groundbreaking architectural work, you have to have control of many of the aspects that traditionally lie with developers.”

After a two-year search, they purchased a narrow site on a busy street in Berlin-Mitte. The front half of the site was an overgrown bombsite. The slender four-storey building surviving at the rear contained eight small apartments and had seen little change in the previous 50 years.

Because of their subsidiary role as developers, the architects were able to give priority to architectural quality throughout negotiations with the banks, the bureaucracy and the builders.

The finished project is a complex interweave of new construction, and renovation. In the first phase the architects completely transformed the narrow original wing by renovating the apartments to create six “minilofts®” – apartments that can be rented as an alternative to hotel rooms. On top of these they constructed an award winning two-storey family “house” (Slender) with a roof garden.

The second phase (Bender) is rooted in the first. The two floors and the roof of the “house” are accessed from the addition. Three bent stainless steel ribbons embrace the existing rear wing behind and navigate between the buildings on either side. The resulting building presents a strong outward thrust, a striving towards the future that is grounded in the past.

Combined these buildings comprise the minilofts® – run as a family business –, Deadline’s office, a shop, car parking and a family “house” on top of the house.

Location:

Hessische Str. 5, Berlin, Germany

Project Data:

Bender 

• Architect: Deadline architects: Matthew Griffin and Britta Jürgens
• Client: Jürgens, Jürgens, Griffin GbR
• Construction: May 2003 – April 2004
• Gross floor area: 560 sqm (2,028 SF)
• 1 shop 30 sqm (322 SF)
• 8 miniloft units  each 45 sqm (484 SF)
• 1 office maisonette 100 sqm + 10 sqm terrace (1,076 + 107 SF)
• 4 parking spaces

Slender  

• Architect: Deadline architects: Matthew Griffin and Britta Jürgens
• Client: Jürgens, Jürgens, Griffin GbR
• Construction: August 2001 – May 2002
• Gross floor area: 130 sqm (1,400 SF)
• Balcony and Roof Garden: 70 sqm (750 SF)
• 6 miniloft units each 40 sqm (430 SF)

The post How the Architects at ‘Deadline’ Became Their Own Clients to Design Their First Building appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Ben Miller, the co-founder and CEO of fundrise.com, a real estate crowdfunding platform that gives you access to investment opportunities from real estate companies in the USA.

Ben and his brother Dan created fundrise.com with the vision to completely democratize real estate investment by removing the middlemen and the outdated regulations that restricted who and how people can invest in real estate.

I had the chance to talk to Ben over Skype and get to know how they came up with the crowdfunding idea, the launch of fundrise and his approach to real estate development. There is a ton of great advice and valuable content for the archipreneur nation straight out of Ben’s head in the following transcribed interview…

Enjoy!

What made you decide to create fundrise.com and democratize real estate investments? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

My background is real estate development. I was a real estate developer and, in 2010, I was developing a project in an emerging neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and there was a lot of growth, a lot of young people living there, millennials.

And all the traditional sources of capital didn’t understand it, didn’t know the neighborhood, and weren’t excited about it. And I thought, well, there’s got to be another way to raise money for real estate, local urban real estate that’s high growth and contextual.

Just one day, one guy said to me, “What about raising the money from the community?” And as I thought about it, and Groupon was very successful at the time, and there were people doing . . . I don’t think crowdfunding was really a big thing then. No one had ever raised money for a real estate deal on the Internet before. We were the first. So it was a new idea. So that was the genesis of the idea, was to try to create an alternative source of capital for local urban projects.

And I remember the day, I remember the moment when I was walking down the street. It was September 2010, so it was a long time ago. That’s almost five years ago, right? And I remember feeling, like, “Wow, what if?”

You mentioned the first project you and your team crowdfunded. It was a unique urban boutique project at 1351 H Street NE in Washington D.C. called Maketto – a hybrid concept, half-retail, half-restaurant. Could you tell us a bit about that creative project and your approach to it?

Yes, if you think about combining high-end fashion or retail with restaurants, how many people have done that well in the . . . I know that in the United States I can’t think of many. Maybe there are less than five. My background’s [in] retail development, so I built lots of retail projects, I built malls, urban infill, and outlet centers . . . and my father built retail, so I’ve been, most of my life, thinking about retail development.

And what’s really clear is the Internet has destroyed the retail industry as we know it. And I felt like . . . well, I know the only retail that makes sense today, in a physical context, is experiential.

And so how do you create experiential retail? It makes sense to combine it with other uses.

And so we were lucky. We had this Chef named Erik Bruner-Yang, he’s a James Beard Award nominee, and he’s a very creative operator. And so we backed him. We gave him not just the real estate money, but we gave him also a lot of money for the restaurant.

And so . . . what was good about the first crowdfunding deal in the country, or maybe in the world, but certainly in the United States, was everything about it was unique. Everything about it was cutting edge.

It’s retail, it’s also a restaurant, it’s also a bakery, it’s also a coffee house that’s a roaster . . . The landlord that owns the building also owns part of the restaurants, so it’s very mixed use from a legal point of view, too. We have both participation in the restaurant and in the building, which is not that common in real estate.

And then we crowdfunded it. So, if you think about it, we were writing everything from the software to the securities law – because this was basically a new securities law that we were pioneering – to the actual design of the catwalk. Totally, absolutely, vertically integrated.

So it let us produce something unique, to real estate and to tech!

Is the project a success for the neighborhood?

Absolutely. The H Street NE neighborhood is rapidly growing. Five years ago, it was much more cutting edge. Now, Whole Foods is going to open there next year, so the neighborhood’s on fire.

But Maketto is, I think it’s the number one destination for day traffic, which was something that people wanted. Because it has a café and a bakery and a restaurant, and fashion, and it’s a very large space, the architecture of it is very unusual, because it has . . . it’s kind of multi-level, and kind of nodal.

It has an indoor space, it has an outdoor space . . . there’s lots of nooks and crannies. There can be 100 people in the building and it can feel like there’s only 10 because it’s very broken up into different kinds of spaces.

So it lends itself to people, people wanting to be there all the time.

That’s really interesting! Are you planning to create more of those unique placemaking ideas like Maketto?

That was the good part of it. The bad part of the challenge we found was, it was so special that we couldn’t reproduce it.

It took us two or three years. From start to finish, it probably took us more than three years to do it, and it was extremely difficult to do. It’s handcrafted, everything about it is hand made.

And if you want to do something [on the] Internet, [the] Internet’s about repeating the same thing over and over again, it’s about scale.

And so we had to move away from that model. We were obsessed with the quality and the experience of the whole . . . from the picture on the website, all the way down to the lighting in the restaurant. And I’m not sure that people even appreciated it. We did so much to make it as close to perfect as we can, and in a lot of ways I think people don’t appreciate it as much as, essentially, we did.

So we’re probably not going to do that many of those . . . in the same time we did that one project, right, that one special project, we did 70 other projects around the country that we funded. And I think something like $70 million of other projects.

You also founded popularise.com – a platform to join together and build your city. Could you tell us how that works? What, exactly, is the difference to fundrise.com?

We created Popularise because we thought that [the] real estate industry needed ways to crowdsource input and ideas, and participation and opinions. And so you can have a real estate project and ask for people’s input, you ask for . . . “Here’s something we’re doing, we’d love to hear your feedback.” And maybe people have ideas for the restaurants that could be there, maybe people have ideas for the design, or for the amenities. That’s what Popularise is.

Fundrise is the capital behind it.

Does fundrise.com provide the opportunity to finance or crowdfund a development, if one had a property or an idea?

Well, one of the things we learned is that there are a lot of ideas, but there’s not as many good investments as good ideas. And a good idea doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good investment. The standard for a good investment is a lot higher.

Because, one . . . if you think about it, the crowd is the smallest investor and so you have to be the most careful with a small investor, ’cause they can’t afford to lose money.

The regulations are not designed to do things easily. The regulations are not designed to make investments easy. The regulations are made to make investments challenging.

They want it to be difficult, because they wanted to make sure that you’re real. So . . . one thing we’ve also seen is there’s people who have a lot of good ideas, but they’re often not good at making them happen.

The operational competence is different than the ability to come up with good ideas.

So you have to be a developer or a development firm to provide, and come to the business with real property and sites to provide a development project for your website, right?

Yes, we get 200 real estate developments submitted every week.

And we fund one to two. And what we’re looking for is a good investment that’s gonna have good outcomes for everybody involved. That’s a high standard. A lot of people feel like just because it’s on the Internet, it should be, and they should be able to get money without having to do work.

You see that a lot. People . . . get angry, where they’re like, “I just want the money, why are you making me do a lot of work?”

And you’re like, “Because that’s what makes a good investment.”

This selective process is carried out by fundrise to sort out the best investments for regular people who want to invest in real estate?

Yeah, we have come to have to . . . these are our investors. They come to us because they [are] interested in the idea, and we have to look out for them. We have to do right by them, and that means we have to be very selective.

What do you think is the most interesting project you crowdfunded on fundrise.com so far?

That’s a good question. Let me just look at the site for a second . . . let’s see here. One investment that we did that was very special was the World Trade Center.

That’s not . . . to think about the real estate industry, that that is crowdfunded is just remarkable.

I think that was a really good one, I’m trying to think of the other ones. We’ve done some . . . let’s see, what’s another one we did I think’s really fun? We do get to do some fun projects. There’s a project we did in New York that was on our site called New Lab.

It’s industrial co-working space. That was a really fun project, and I think that’s gonna be an example of the potential of doing a good investment, and also having a good impact, a creative impact.

But if you look at that deal . . . it’s very, very complicated. It’s one of the most complicated deals I’ve ever seen.

And so . . . I don’t know if you can see it on our website, but if you sign up you can see it. Just go look at the website, and go look at the deal. The capital stack—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There’s eight capital sources. Normally a real estate deal has two capital sources, a lender and an owner, right? An equity owner.

This has eight. There’s a lot of complexity in that deal, a lot. It took us a lot of effort to get our arms around it. But it’s a good one.

Are you planning on coming to Europe?

We have been looking at it. I used to live in Europe, I lived there for a couple years . . . did business in Europe, and I have a sense for the . . . it’s a very different business culture. It’s, in a lot of ways, much more conservative.

And our business is a combination of three different industries, right? You have to understand real estate, you have to understand technology, and you have to understand securities finance.

And so that means when we go to another country, we have to basically understand their real estate industry, we have to understand their technology, [we have to understand] a consumer . . . how does an investor consumer in Germany think about this? Do they think about it in a different way than an American investor? Probably, right?

And there might also be database . . . I’ve heard in some countries you have to look at where your information is stored, and what information you store of people, and the privacy policies are different. So there’s technology differences. And then the regulations are very different. And then the language is very different. So it’s something that we’d want to do, but it’s not something easy.

Do you have any advice for “Archipreneurs” who are interested in developing their own project?

Yeah, I’ve worked with a lot of architects, and the architect has a lot of knowledge in architecture, but often they have not a lot of experience outside architecture. They have, what I’d say, domain bias.

They think the architecture is the most important thing in a building, and my experience as a developer and a financier is, it is not the most important thing in a building. It’s important, but you have to understand the finance, you have to understand the construction, you have to understand the permitting and titlements.

So if you want to be an entrepreneur outside of architecture, as a developer, probably the first thing they should start doing is understanding finance. Cause the money in a deal, the economics, the business rationale that actually decides what the architecture will be.

And too often architects don’t understand the economic rationale behind a project, and get frustrated that they can’t design what they want. So a good way to do that is go look at the finance information on our projects on the Internet.

Most projects that architects are involved with, they probably don’t know what the economic projections are. They don’t know what the performance is, they don’t know what the cost, and the rent, and the yield, the return on cost is. That information is usually not public, but we make it public.

So if you want to get educated, just come on our site and just take the information and learn about it.

Architects usually do not learn business in school. In that sense there is a gap in the education of architects. What do you think about schools’ education and the difference to real world learning?

Well, the problem is that school, universities are horrible place[s] to learn how the world actually works.

And I don’t know if you’ve heard the saying . . . in America, in English, there’s a saying, that, “If you can’t do, consult. If you can’t consult, teach”.

There are exceptions to the rule, but that’s something that often the academics have a theory about how things work, and their theory comes from studying it, not by doing it.

How do you see the future of architecture? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming architects?

Probably the biggest potential is 3D printing.

It’s going to take a long time to get to reality, maybe 20 to 30 years. But the buildings, the way we build buildings today are medieval, and that’s going to be . . . what the Internet did to the retail business, 3D printing will do to architecture.

Yeah, it’s nowhere near coming to fruition, but all of a sudden the person who matters in designing a building is a software programmer.

It’s a different, it’s very different. And if you’re 55 years old, and that technology happens to you, you become very, very out-of-date.

About Ben

Ben is Co-Founder and CEO of Fundrise. Ben’s responsibilities involve strategic partnerships, deal underwriting, real estate development, PR as well as setting the long-term strategy and goals for the company.

Ben has 15 years of experience in real estate and finance, and he has acquired, developed, and financed more than $500 million of property in his time as Managing Partner of WestMill Capital Partners and President of Western Development Corporation.

Ben also started US Nordic Ventures, a cross-Atlantic private equity and operating company. Ben has worked as an analyst for Lubert-Adler, a private equity real estate fund. Ben was part of the founding staff of Democracy Alliance, a progressive investment collaborative.

Ben is also co-founder of Popularise, a real estate crowdsourcing website.

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