Compliance Building went public on February 12, 2009. Since then, I have managed to publish a blog post almost every business day. Sometimes, more than one. I hope at least some of those 1500 posts were useful to you, whether you are a subscriber or one of the other 325,000 or so visitors to Compliance Building over the past three years.
Thanks for reading.
If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe and have my posts sent to you. It’s free, except on the Kindle. (I can’t convince Amazon to change the price.)
I started my first blog, KM Space, on this day in 2007. I set up Real Estate Space a few months later. Now I’m moving into my sixth year blogging. As I do every year, I take some time to think about why I publish a blog, whether I want to continue, and what I can do better.
Why do I do this?
Mostly, I publish because the information is useful to me. This blog is a personal knowledge management tool. It’s all about trying to capture information that interest me and has relevance to my day-to-day work. I find that writing my thoughts adds some clarity to my thinking. By putting all of that information into the blog, it’s in a place where it is easy to find.
Will I continue?
The real estate private equity industry is at a turning point. There is split between companies that are filing their Form ADVs, jumping into the world of SEC regulation and those, with good reason, are not registering. Regardless, it’s good for the industry to be focused on compliance and ethics. If it’s good for the industry then it’s good for my company and good for me personally. If a fellow private equity real estate company gets into compliance or ethical trouble that will reflect poorly on the industry as a whole. Inevitably, that will make my job harder. It will likely make it harder to raise capital and to get deals done. That’s bad. So I try to share information that will benefit the industry because that benefits me.
What Can I Do Better?
It’s hard to take a strong position on many issues. I certainly don’t want to be overly critical of the SEC and have them target my company. I realize that what I say here could be attributed back to my company. They don’t want splash back from me taking a strong position. Especially, if I turn out to be wrong.
I admit this blogging experiment is self-centered, but I’m happy to have you along for the ride. If you want more detail on this you can read my Why I Blog page.
For those of you who know me from KM Space, I will continue to publish a subset of my Compliance Building posts to the KMspace feed. No need to say goodbye. Unless I’m boring you.
Image is from Cake Wrecks: Are Anivery.