President’s Quarterly Report – April 2016

Dear Members,

It has been a whirlwind of a year so far and the feeling of buoyancy amongst our industry is palpable. Everyone I talk to says that they are as busy as they have ever been. I’m glad to hear that so many of our members are experiencing success after a long run of a down market.

On that note, NAIOP has achieved several successes already this year. We had a very successful and well attended Forecast event in January. We had a great group of speakers and the event helped us to continue to foster our relationship with UNLV and the Lied Institute.

 

In February we sent a contingent to Washington DC for the Chapter Leadership and Legislative Retreat. During this three day event, chapters from across the country send their leaders to participate in educational seminars and to share information with other chapter leaders for our mutual benefit. The goal for us to take away ideas and best practices for how best to serve our members. In addition, to the great education and collaboration NAIOP Corporate hosts a Chapter Merit Awards where individual chapters are recognized for excellence in different areas. This year we were nominated for several awards and one an award for our Government Affairs program. This is a great testament of the work that has been done by our GA leadership (John Ramous, Sallie Doebler, and Mike Montandon), our lobbyist Susan Fisher, as well as many volunteers that helped to plan events and work on behalf of our organization during the last legislative session. Thanks for all of your efforts! Finally, we spent a day on Capitol Hill meeting with our representatives in both the House and the Senate. These were constructive meetings where we had the opportunity to talk to them about the issues that are important to the commercial real estate industry in Southern Nevada. Our main topics of conversation were the availability of land for development and funding for transportation and infrastructure. With respect to the former, we specifically discussed the draft Resource Management Plan that has been proposed by the BLM and shared our position that it is not in the best interests of our industry or economic development for Southern Nevada. All of the representatives we spoke with were aware of the issues and are aligned with our position. The trip was a great experience for me personally but was also very productive. I am proud of what our contingent accomplished on behalf of our organization while we were there.

Finally, we had a very successful and well attended Spotlight Awards event in March. I know I had fun and it felt like everyone else did too. Thank you to Courtney Murphy Goffstein, Leroy Taylor, Chris Larsen, and the rest of the committee for a monumental effort in putting the event together. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees!

So 2016 is on to a great start and I hope that we can keep up the momentum we have going!

Sincerely,
Mike Shohet