November 2012
1 post
4 tags
Fort Worth’s Renaissance Square Launches on...
By John Flint, Lockard Companies
Lockard Companies got involved in Renaissance Square City of Forth Worth in 2009. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years. But when you factor economic downturn and the pullback in retail development, we’re actually quite blessed to be as far along as we are today: Walmart will open this spring, and a host of other stores will open in the summer....
July 2012
1 post
Popularising the Coin Laundry: Part 2
By Kristen Vails, Executive Director, Plaza District Association
When posting this project on Popularise, we weren’t sure what we were going to get. We had a hunch we’d get lots of input from the community, but we weren’t sure if it would garner actual interest from potential businesses. Either way, we were hoping to get an idea of what the community wanted, and if a viable operator happened to...
June 2012
3 posts
Popularising the Coin Laundry: Part 1
Why did OKC’s Plaza District decide to “popularise” the Coin Laundry?
By Kristen Vails, Executive Director, Plaza District Association
For the last four years in my role as the Executive Director of the Plaza District, not a week has gone by without someone telling me what needs to go into the district next.
Moreover, not a day has gone by without me daydreaming about that as well. I’ve built an...
Instagram + Popularise = Maketto Mood Board
We rolled out the Maketto Mood Board on Monday as our first Instagram-driven Drawing Board. It’s being used by Maketto’s two owner-operators, Erik Bruner-Yang and Will Sharp, to document the bits of creative inspiration that they run into everyday.
We’re thrilled with the photos thus far of Erik’s trip through Taiwan and Cambodia. He’s using our our new Instagram feature to capture...
1351 H Street: A look inside the process
“What we learned and where we go from here”
When we launched our first project, 1351 H Street, we did not know what to expect. Crowdsourcing real estate development is a relatively new idea and although we believe in the process, we knew it would take some experimentation on our part to learn how to best engage with and involve the wider community.
Real estate by nature is not transparent;...
May 2012
1 post
Popularise Launches in Seattle, WA
It’s always exciting when someone embraces one of your ideas. It’s even more exciting when that person wants to build on it (literally!) and apply it in a new context. So we were thrilled when Tom Bartholomew from Skanska contacted us about using Popularise to change the way urban mixed-use development takes place. Today we launch our first new city, Seattle, with Skanska’s...
March 2012
1 post
Popularise 2.0
It has been three months since the launch of Popularise and we’re excited by the amount of activity that has been going on thus far. Like any project, Popularise is going to evolve as we learn how the community uses the website. So, one of our top priorities over that past 90 days has been to gather feedback and comments from our early users. Based on what we’ve learned, we are making five big...
February 2012
1 post
What makes a Popularise user?
Popularise passed the 1,000 user mark a few weeks ago (hooray!) so we thought it would be an appropriate time to take a first stab at digging through the data and figure out who are users really are.
Well, in a nutshell, the typical Popularise user is a DC resident aged 25-34 who lives near the H Street corridor and likes to drink a few pints of DC Brau at Little Miss Whiskey’s and The Pug....
January 2012
1 post
Hard Hat Tours!
Last week, we invited a dozen users to join us for our first round of Hard Hat Tours at 1351 H Street. Here are some of our users taking a tour of the property:
Having Popularise users see the property spurred some great discussion about potential use, and gave them the opportunity to give us very helpful feedback. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of the best questions...
December 2011
3 posts
Amazing Discussion of a Community Building Their...
Shout out to Frozen Tropics who recently covered us in a blog post about what to build at 1351 H Street NE. The best part, other than the obviously insightful article, was the 60+ comments that followed. We thought the discussion was so positive and constructive that we decided to use our blog to highlight a few ideas that we saw repeated in the thread:
A lot of people mentioned wanting a...
Popularise Launch Party
500 people showed up for our launch event on Friday. For those who have not driven down H Street NE recently, here are some photos of the “What would you build here?” sign we put across the entire two-story facade. One of our missions is to drive the connection between the real and the virtual, so we put up the sign in real life and on the 1351 H Street webpage.
We had...
How the real estate industry works (or doesn’t),...
Have you ever wondered why D.C.’s Baseball District is so characterless but 14th Street is so vibrant? Why H Street NE is so cool and funky while NOMA* is impersonal and corporate? Why Georgetown has the same bland stores as Michigan Ave in Chicago?
You probably have some sense of why this is. But let me tell you—you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
After working in real estate for...
