Damon Hemmerdinger

Industry City has the best planters.*. #DamonsFavoriteDetails


* Remember, all planters should have vines spilling over the sides.

More #DamonsFavoriteDetails, this time from The Camp in Costa Mesa, CA. I particularly love the parking lot labels.

When your kids tattle on each other or someone else, your response should always be, “What happened just before that?”

#1 sign of a real, real estate developer?
Scuffed shoes.

We ask our main vendors to sign on to our Code of Conduct (the company and the individual working at our property). This establishes our expectations, and makes a future conversation about banning an employee easy.

If the hand bruises are from medication infusions, why wouldn’t they just use different veins that are out of sight?

6. Involve your team.

Share a rough draft of your reports with a few people on your team for input. You'll end up with a more complete and better written document with support from the team.
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5. Separate action items from regular reporting.

Send requests that require action from investors separately from your quarterly report. My action item emails start with the subject line “[ACTION REQUESTED]”, and I give a deadline by which I hope to receive a response.

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4. Include Photos

Many investors choose real estate because they want an investment they can touch and feel. High quality photos help bring them along for the ride and appreciate the progress that’s being made.

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3. Be on time

I send a report out like clockwork on the first day of every quarter. Period.
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2. Be transparent.

Write explicitly about the things that are going well and things you’re worried about. Being trustworthy is essential if you hope to turn a first-time investor into a long-time partner.



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1. Give context.

None of your investors are paying as much attention to your project as you are, so it’s important to put each point in context. The key is giving enough context that it makes sense without giving so much context that the report is no longer interesting.


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Communicating with investors is a required skill for anyone who wants a career in real estate. Five tips on writing good investor reports:

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Real estate is both a product and a service business.

Your product is the buildings you create.

Your service is delivering investor returns.

Being good at both is essential for real estate entrepreneurs.

Prism came back and cut big holes in the side.

(As I've mentioned before, we set aside a portion of our placemaking budget for post-completion additions - and fixing the mistakes that will inevitably happen.)
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But... the color and light are only visible when you're in front of the fireplace - that means it's not helping pull you up into that retail area, up at the dock-high building elevation.

What's the solution?
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Sometimes we make mistakes. We built a super cool fireplace as part of the Mount district at Camp North End. There's comfortable seating in front of it, and it is a source of color, light, and of course warmth. And it was built on site by our tenant, Prism Supply.

But ...
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Mind-Wandering Tends to Occur under Low Perceptual Demands during Driving Scientific Reports - Mind-Wandering Tends to Occur under Low Perceptual Demands during Driving

Closing comment: I'm a real estate developer, not a civil engineer or a cognitive specialist, but I promise this is based in science. Here's just one link to an article called "Mind-Wandering Tends to Occur under Low Perceptual Demands during Driving"
www.nature.com/artic...
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What about those concrete blocks?

They're big and heavy and people really don't want to scratch their cars. So they slow down!

First, they're blue because we were testing blue concrete for something else and had leftover.
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Coming the other way (red arrow), you are driving towards trees and big concrete blocks (more on those in a second). You're a little confused, and are led around a bend to a decision point - you can turn left or right onto Camp Road.
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you are going up onto a raised intersection. That means that the sidewalk and the street are at the same level - this is also called a speed table since it slows cars down. Once you're in the intersection, you have a choice of turning left or right (blue arrows).
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So what's going on here? If you're driving on Camp Road, your default move is to follow the road around the corner (orange arrow). If you want to get on one of the other streets, you turn off of the curve (green arrows).

When you drive from black asphalt to gray concrete,
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You might think to yourself, "That intersection is confusing as shit."
You'd be right.
Cars move slowly when drivers have to think.
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Let's zoom in and look at one intersection, the intersection of Camp Road, Keswick Ave, and Razades Way, right at the heart of Camp.
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.@CampNorthEnd's main street, Camp Road, "wiggles" through the property. Some of the wiggling is due to the large buildings, and other site constraints - some of the wiggling is to give as many buildings as possible a Camp Rd address - and some is to slow cars

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Cars move quickly when streets are engineered for speed, and cars move slowly when streets are designed to slow them down.

What the heck does that mean?!

It can look like this photo, but read on in the 🧵 to see how we've slowed cars at Camp North End.
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How do you approach curating your tenant mix?

Photo: Grow: A Plant Shop
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8. We collaborate on marketing.

From jointly announcing a lease signing, through grand opening, and beyond!

Photo: Hex Coffee
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7. We insist our tenants install great signage.

We push (and push and push) the tenant to go bigger, to be more creative, to illuminate the sign - because by then they are short on funding and underestimate the importance of the sign.

Photo: Hardy Boys Records
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6. All of our leases include percentage rent.

This is the best way to align the landlord and tenant.

We regularly walk from deals over this issue.

Photo: Halal Street Foods
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