GlobeSt.com’s 10-year anniversary is a special date for me,since I was one of the first reporters for the site at its launch.I covered Detroit for the fledgling start-up, at a time when theWeb was new frontier to commercial real estate firms. Only thelarge companies had a basic Web presence. I remember manyconversations instructing people in the industry how to type in aWeb page address and advising them that email would be muchpreferred to faxed information—a very counter-intuitive concept in2000.

Just a two years before GlobeSt.com was formed, while at anotherpublication, I had interviewed LoopNet founder Dennis DeAndre whenhe was pushing his fledgling site at a real estate conference. Wetalked glowingly about how the Internet would change real estateforever. Little did we know that, while technology has made a largeimpact on the industry, the combined knock-out punch of the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the later crash of the uncheckedmortgage industry would be much more important over the decade.

The bellwether Midwest event for commercial real estate, it canbe agreed, was Chicago-based Sam Zell’s $36-billion exit and saleof Equity Office Properties to New York City-based Blackstone.(This was proven out by our 10^th Anniversary ReaderSurvey in which you voted that deal as the biggest of the decade.)In early 2007, the sale raised eyebrows for its size, but mostthought it was a sign of the continued success of the commercialreal estate market. Few realized it was one smart man’s exit beforethe fall; Zell saw the cycle’s turn, and soon the plethora ofcranes building new offices would vanish as lost jobs andconsolidations dried up cubicle demand.