Living in America: Could This Be the Future of Suburbia?

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Spencer Levy
I'm Spencer Levy and this is The Weekly Take. The future of cities is a hot topic in commercial real estate, and we're about to visit a place that's been described as exactly that. On this episode, we take a road trip to the forward-thinking community of Lake Nona in Orlando, Florida.

To borrow a word from a nearby theme park, it might just be a neighborhood of Tomorrowland.

Rasesh Thakkar
I call ourselves really the new urban environment. And we really call it the urban village.

Spencer Levy
That Rasesh Thakkar, Senior Managing Director of the Tavistock Group. He's one of the founders and development leaders of this planned community—a place Fortune magazine once called, yes, “The City of the Future.” It's a place with everything from business and residential features to a vision for vertical community. We'll talk, live-work-play, housing, transportation, innovation and Lake Nona’s mission to compete for the best known urban clusters in sectors such as tech and life sciences. Later on, we also welcome an unexpected drop in from Gloria Caulfield, Executive Director of the Lake Nona Institute, which includes a community-based incubator, impact forum and more.

Coming up: A city on the edge of tomorrow. That's right now on The Weekly Take.

Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take and we are here at the world famous Lake Nona complex owned by the Tavistock Group—one of the great developments in the country—with Rasesh Thakkar. Rasesh, thank you for joining us.

Rasesh Thakkar
Happy to be here. By the way, call me Sesh—might be a bit easier.

Spencer Levy
All right, Sesh, well thank you and I will do that. But, boy, as I mentioned, my first visit to Lake Nona was a couple of years ago. And this was two, three years ago, I said this is one of the most innovative places I've ever been—not just in terms of live-work-play, world-class golf, USTA, Veterans Hospital … it’s amazing. So I could ask you one question, you could take 40 minutes. But tell us how it started. Tell us about the vision for Lake Nona and how it's grown into what it is today.

Rasesh Thakkar
It's a great question, Spencer. I moved back from London in 2003, 2004 and was having a conversation with our chairman and founder—and for me, he's my mentor—is Joe Lewis. We were thinking, OK, what do we want to focus on? And we had bought the Lake Nona holding of land back in the mid ‘90s. It basically sat fallow for a few years.

And as I thought more about what we had here, I said to Joe, “Joe, where else in the country, anywhere up and down, say, the Eastern seaboard of America, can you find thousands of acres of land that is situated and located in a tax-haven state, in a great climate state in one of—and it is now the fastest growing—state in the country, in the fastest growing city within that state, in a city that's known throughout the world for good things, and next to one of the best airports in the world?”

So all of those things put together—you say to yourself—if we wanted to find land that satisfied that criteria and also land that's within a metropolitan zone … we are within the city limits of Orlando. Your address when you're in Lake Nona is Orlando, Florida. If we asked you to find land like that, you cannot find it with those characteristics. And that's when the light bulbs went on. And Joe said, “Fine, let's be dedicated to it and let's do something that's special and unique instead of typical old suburbia.”

That's simply how we got started. And when you have an owner and a founder and a visionary like Joe Lewis, who is so well resourced … look, most developers, when they develop communities they can't wait to when you're 80, 90 percent sold out, leave the keys on the table, go on to the next development, they tell they tell the homeowners or the property owners’ association, lose my number. We're the opposite. We're here to stay for generations and you're able to do some pretty neat things where financial resources basically are not a hindrance in any way.

Spencer Levy
So Sesh there's a lot to unpack there. And you talk about the resources of Joe and the fact that you own all this land, so you don't have to deal with a competing developer. But you also mentioned this is the suburbs. And I will tell you that most of the episodes that we've talked about on the show have been the CBD is coming back. The city is the place to be. This is the alternate answer. What's your point of view on that?

Rasesh Thakkar
Think about what the pandemic has caused. It's caused a flight basically from urban environments, right? I call ourselves really the new urban environment, and we really call it the urban village.

What we have is some of the characteristics that we want to have enough open space. I mean, we have 44 miles of trails. 40 percent of our land—and we own 17 square miles of land here—40 percent of our land is dedicated to green space. And yet in so many of the central development districts that we have, we're going, as you see, mid-rise, also high rise with the New Wave Hotel, 17 stories. We lead by example. Florida, particularly if you are in the quote unquote suburbs, has no shortage of land. Therefore, no one does structured parking. You see a sea of surface parking. We led by example. And everywhere you see, we've built structured parking garages. It also then caused a lot of the anchors that are located here—the VA.

By the way, I just got the news today. The Lake Nona VA Medical Center is now the busiest VA medical center in the nation, right? And it's one of the newest. So the VA has a structured parking garage. The new Nemours Dupont Children's Hospital … they also structured parking.

So we are leading by example. And the anchors are also participating and they're all in on this vision. And that's how we're able to create an environment that I think is a unique blend and mix between urban and what I call new urban or urban village.

Spencer Levy
I really like your parking garage comment because it brings up one word to me and that word is density. And density is what's missing in most suburban environments, in large part because there’s seas of parking. But was that in mind when you did the structured parking to create a denser urban environment?

Rasesh Thakkar
Absolutely, it was one of the considerations. But I'll tell you, when we got started—and I really call the godfather of this project Governor Jeb Bush, right, former Governor Jeb Bush. He wanted to diversify Florida's economy. And so we brought up the idea of a life sciences cluster, and that's where really Florida's expansion into the life sciences areas got born. So this would have been when Jeb Bush was governor.

And when you think about a cluster, right, think of some of the greatest clusters in this country. You've got the biotech cluster in San Diego, you know, in Torrey Pines on the Mesa. You've got Houston's medical city. You've got Silicon Valley. You've got Wall Street. You got Research Triangle Park. How did they come about?

There is a denseness to them, a richness of vibrancy that allows professionals in the creative class, inventors, to come together and where one plus one equals 11, right? This is why clusters are just magical.

So we dreamt about a cluster from day one. And you really should have density when you have a cluster, right? You go into a restaurant. What you should have is the geneticist is, you know, at a table next door to or at a table with the physicists, the chemist, you know, the business entrepreneur, et cetera … and the eureka moments, that's when they happen. They rarely happen poring over your test tube in the lab. They happen when these interactions come about and people's minds get expanded. They worked on problems together. So we are all about clusters and collaboration.

Spencer Levy
Well, there's a fancy word for that that we use sometimes. I sometimes call it serendipity, which is not luck. It's people's random encounters with different people. But the fancy folks call it the agglomeration effect, which is the confluence of capital, people, infrastructure, arts, restaurants, all of that. And it certainly seems that that was clearly part of your central vision.

Rasesh Thakkar
It really was Spencer. One of the things that we thought about when we first got started as we studied the best clusters in this country … those clusters took two or three generations to grow organically. Well, we don't have that kind of time. The turbo boost for getting it done in our lifetimes is collaboration.

So we've formed these leadership councils. Once a quarter—and for the last 10 plus years I've been doing this—I get together the CEOs of all our anchors. There's only one agenda item. How do we help each other? We have other councils that have now spun off from there. It then led flash forward a few years later—and one of our more recent announcements is that Verizon has declared us to be a 5G living lab. They thought it was the right environment to have and run this great experiment on 5G. We don't know how 5G is going to impact our lives, right? We just don't know what we don't know. I mean, 4G, who knew what it would spawn? Uber wouldn't be here without it. Waze wouldn't be here without it. A lot of the, you know, GPS, A.I. applications, et cetera. We didn't know this at the time.

What 5G is going to spawn—and they can test it here with our whole medical partners or the medical city component, the business element, the residents, the sports and human performance cluster, all of those kinds of things. So, look, I'm sorry. I know I'm rambling a bit, but I can't help but get excited. Another example of, let's say, the future at Lake Nona another three to five years out is our incubator and accelerator ecosystem. We now have four incubators and accelerators here, right? As an example, the university has a life sciences incubator. Another one is the leAD accelerator. leAD stands for Legend of Adi Dassler. You're going to see a thriving ecosystem of budding entrepreneurs and companies that are growing in an energetic environment, all helping each other. I think that's another aspect of Lake Nona that's going to be put on steroids as the years come on.

Spencer Levy
We're going to have people listening to this broadcast in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're going to have people on this broadcast near Stanford University in Silicon Valley. Do you want to compete with those guys?

Rasesh Thakkar
Well, let's just first talk about California. They have a brain drain happening there. I mean, are we going to compete with that entire state? I absolutely think so. Why is Florida the fastest growing state in the nation?

So the answer is yes. I absolutely think we will be competing. And, you know, I think as Lake Nona seasons more and more, you're going to see a better version of life and what life should mean. Again, our vision statement is creating the ideal place that inspires human potential, all of it through innovative collaboration. Those three elements of place inspiring human beings and collaboration is something that we are so obsessive about. We can't help but create an environment that I think will compete.

Spencer Levy
That’s really cool. And what’s also really cool is when I parked my car driving over here, I parked next to a car with no driver—self driving—and there were several of them lined up. And I understand I didn't see it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing your heliport for your flying cars. Those are the kind of things that can happen through innovation and 5G and other technology. Why don’t you tell us about a couple of those things.

Rasesh Thakkar
So we call it the vertiport and we announced it just a few weeks ago in partnership with a German company called Lilium. We've announced the first hub network for eVTOLs—electric vertical takeoff and landing, or really flying cars—the first hub network in the United States.

And Lilium picked like known to be the main hub of the Florida expansion or the Florida announcement because of where we're located and because of our living lab type of environment. So on one charge of a Lilium flying car or eVTOL, you can get to 90 percent of Florida's population. That's twenty million people—and growing.

If you just think of that, it just makes the mind dance, right? And now Lilium has teamed up after the partnership with us, but with our airport here, and I'll go in maybe later if we have the time on the aerotropolis theme that we have here or the Aerotropolis initiative. And we are now working with the airport and the FAA—the rules for highways in the sky aren't yet set. What does that mean? That's why this living lab environment, I think, is so well suited. And we're finding that more and more companies get enamored with it and join us in the journey.

Spencer Levy
How do you see the old school infrastructure benefiting the new school of new types of infrastructure that you're building today?

Rasesh Thakkar
I would say it's all about the mobility solutions that go on. I know you've used the term old school. I got to tell you, I don't think of this airport as being old school. If you think about aviation, just in general, I mean, I don't think airplanes are going away. In fact, they're going to play an even bigger impact in our lives. I think as an example, Orlando, being in the center of the state should be the high-value logistics capital of the state of Florida, right? So what I think you're going to see is to see more and more applications where this airport is going to diversify the set that it caters to. And it's going to be a part of this aerotropolis, of course. And the way Lake Nona and the airport will collaborate together, I think is going to form the aerotropolis in this country.

Spencer Levy
And that's before you even mentioned your proximity to Cape Canaveral. And yet another aspect of it.

Rasesh Thakkar
Hey, Gloria, come on in.

Spencer Levy
Come on in.

Rasesh Thakkar
Have a seat.

Spencer Levy
Delighted that you're here. Sesh, I'm delighted to now be joined by one of your terrific colleagues here, Gloria Caulfield, who is the executive director of Lake Nona’s Institute. And so, Gloria, thank you for jumping in. It is a great time to have you here because Sesh and I have been talking so much about innovation and how that ties to the real estate story here at Lake Nona. So welcome to the show.

Gloria Caulfield
Thank you. Great to be here.

Spencer Levy
So, Gloria, when we start from the very beginning, tell us exactly what is the Lake Nona Institute?

Gloria Caulfield
Well, the Lake Nona Institute was formed really to help to bring some of the innovation and the mission and vision to life for Lake Nona. So when you think about sort of our original mission statement was to create the ideal place to inspire human potential through innovative collaboration, we really needed to have a mechanism to make that happen. So when you think about the main job of the development company—master planning, site development, you know all of the things that make this place run. But the Institute really kind of became the heart and soul of bringing that mission statement to life.

Rasesh Thakkar
And I think if I if I interrupt or add to what Gloria just said, the middle part of our vision statement—inspiring human potential—and then the end of it all through innovative collaboration, that's where the Institute just helped us in leaps and bounds. How does a property developer inspire human potential? Right? I mean, we have spent years thinking about that and making it come to life.

Gloria Caulfield
And you know we kind of looked at each other one day and said, what if we brought in like 150 or 200 some of the best thought leaders in health innovation? Because there's really a couple of things we're trying to achieve here. One is sort of the economic engine, if you will. You kind of look at the core of what's created here is that, you know, health and life sciences cluster.

But the way we have designed this community through the whole community development focus is how do you bring a system of health into everyday living? So it was really important for us to think about it in both ways. What is the healthcare delivery of the future? What are the innovations that will make a difference in that domain? But also, you know, how do we think about health and wellbeing in a much more holistic way? How does the community play a role in that?

Spencer Levy
Is that what you're trying to achieve here? Holistic wellness from the standpoint of not just formal health care facilities like the VA hospital and the Children's Hospital, but also the entirety of the community?

Gloria Caulfield
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there is this area of expertise that Lake Nona has, that Tavistock has in wellness real estate. And that's really sort of the category that I think this project fits in. And so thinking about sort of the scope of what's being created here, if you have a person or people at the center of your development focus, that changes the way you think about how you would go about developing the community.

Spencer Levy
So it brings up ESG—sometimes people call it ESG plus R and then its ESG plus R plus W, right. And where do they all fit together? They seem to all have a strong element here. Sesh what's your point of view?

Rasesh Thakkar
For us, ESG is not new. It seems to have come into vogue as of late, but we pay a lot of attention to the environment and sustainability and governance and it manifests itself in different ways. I'll give you some examples. So first, with the environment I mentioned to you, 40 percent of our land is dedicated to open space. We, in fact, formed one a unique and novel—they call it a PCN, a personal conservation network, which was along with the city and the state of Florida, how should wetlands and all those kinds of things be managed in an overall master plan development?

Another example is the use of view glass in our buildings. It's billed as the most intelligent glass in the world. But in essence, the New Wave Hotel, which you just drove by—under construction, but it opens in October—it's all outfitted with view glass. And that means that every single window actually has sensors in it that is constantly communicating with satellites and changing the tint based upon a number of different variables that keep hitting it every nanosecond. And what that does is it actually helps the productivity of an employee base because we've also put it in our office buildings now. It also prevents the use of blinds. I mean, how many times have you seen that you have blinds sitting on windows and what does that mean? Right? I mean, you actually need to because it gets hot near the windows, you don't use the first few feet. So all around the border walls of an office, a lot of times, they're not using X amount of feet because it's just too hot right next to the window. With view glass, you don't have that issue anymore.

So, you know, mobility. I talked about the electric mobility solutions that we have. We started with the usual that most people have, which is your, you know, electric scooters or any of those kinds of things. But we were the first community in central Florida to have autonomous shuttles. It is now currently, I'm told, the largest autonomous shuttle fleet in the United States. Then from there, we graduated and we talked about earlier the vertiport, the announcement with Lilium for flying cars or eVTOLs. We pay a lot of attention to all of the different initiatives that can impact ESG types of—.

Spencer Levy
Let me barbell this a little bit, look at both ends of the spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you have your Children's Hospital and you have probably the most vulnerable people imaginable being helped here and that is a clear central part of ESG. Then you have the other end of the spectrum, this focus on world class—the USTA center, the golf course. But I don't think there are as different as you think, because I think that even though one end of the spectrum seems like it can stand separately from the other, do you think they come together?

Gloria Caulfield
Yeah, I absolutely think they come together. I mean, I think that, you know, something like the Children's Hospital is an example. Even the most vulnerable community members have access to the USTA.

So this is an example— the democratization of that sport is something that's core to the USTA vision and mission. A lot of what we do, I mean, in that specific example, is think about vulnerable populations like veterans. Veterans have, you know, some challenges that maybe the average population doesn't have. They may have mobility challenges, they may have PTSD, but that is an open campus for wheelchair athletes and others. So, I mean, I think that one of the things that we think about when you're bringing programs like this in is, you know, how do you provide a welcoming approach to all stakeholders in the community? And it's something that we're doing again at the Lake Nona Performance Club that will be opening in a month. So absolutely, I agree with that.

Rasesh Thakkar
What I would say is the following. You never know where the journey of life is going to take you, right? So we started here and the first anchors to land were what the press here started calling Medical City. And I thought when we had three hospitals, we were done. Boy, what I didn’t know at the time.

We've also now announced earlier this year that the Brooks Rehab Hospital is coming. So I think that whole palette of healthcare is going to continue.

But where does that take you? It naturally bridged over into a sports and human performance element. And if you think about medicine and sports and human performance, they impact each other, right? So that bridge has now led to a cluster of companies located here in Lake Nona that specialize in helping human beings perform at their peak. That's where the USTA is a wonderful example of that.

Now Orlando is one of the world's cap—it’s the world's capital of golf, right? Like Nona is one of the elite golf courses and clubs in Orlando. What already existed here when you host and they live there, some of the top golfers in the world, men and women, it means they're surrounded by a cadre of specialists in sports psychology, injury prevention … of course, you know the art and craft of golf itself … fit, physical fitness, training, all of those kinds of things. Now add the USTA, largest tennis center in the world. They moved their headquarters here. It's 100 courts. Over 36 touring tennis professionals now live in and around Lake Nona because of that national training center.

So I think it's a natural bridge when you talk about medicine and having any one of these sports entities that are around.

Spencer Levy
I want to put Lake Nona in the context of—I hesitate to say other live-work-play communities because this place is so different than so many others, so I'd love to hear your point of view on housing here at Lake Nona.

Rasesh Thakkar
So we have 17 square miles. We have a very meaningful residential component. We have been the fastest selling residential community in central Florida for several years running. It means that we are adding to the population of Lake Nona on a constant basis. We have housing product ranging with everything from apartments, student housing, we have micro apartments, town homes and single family homes that range in price range—everything from call $250,000 or $300,000 all the way and up to the multimillions, which are estates inside our golf and country club.

So if you are a company that wants to locate here, you have a whole host of choices that you can offer to your employees. And we thought that was important from day one, and that's why we've executed on the plan that we have.

Spencer Levy
I want to ask you two questions. I want you first to look back, because my father was a real estate developer, has done dozens of communities, and you always say I could have done this differently. So I'm going to ask you that question first. What could you have done differently if you could have looked back? And then I'll ask you the next question: Looking forward five years from now, what do you think we're going to see here that's different than today?

Rasesh Thakkar
The one thing that perhaps we could have done differently was to do more and to do it faster because people just really like it, right? Particularly on the commercial side. And so—and I think that's what you're now going to see. This will be a very different place every year, year to year.

Which brings me to the second question that you asked. Five years from now, what can we expect? If I were to name where I think the largest strides will be made it's going to be in the aerotropolis or the aerotropolis initiative that we have, which is working with our airport. I think you're going to see all kinds of applications in development come about that help human beings deal and cope with speed in a more efficient way. You know, it used to be the big will eat the small. It's now the fast will eat the slow. Right?

Speed is essential in life now if you want to really get ahead—it's so crucial. Look, if our Internet doesn't work for 20 seconds or is 20 seconds delayed right we go up the wall. Prior to that, I didn't know what a second was. So what Orlando and this aerotropolis and Lake Nona I think can do for the entire state of Florida being located in the center of the state with all kinds of things that can help human beings perform at their peak and faster and more efficiently. That's where you're going to see changes.

Spencer Levy
Mm hmm. Well, I guess the only thing that will stand in your way is I'm thinking Star Trek’s transporter, you know? But I think that's a long way off. But let me turn to you, Gloria, and ask you a question—same question. Five years from now, where do you hope to be?

Gloria Caulfield
I think I'm going to take it more from where does the health and healthcare industry want to go? And I think what you're going to see is that we are going to be a place that's important in answering the question, how do you keep people well?

So, you know, if you think about acute health care delivery that addresses very well what happens when people are sick and need to be mended. But I think the holy grail in medicine right now and what everybody's talking about in precision medicine and precision genomics and so on is how do you keep people well in the first place? How do you have enough data early so that, you know, the right … the right programs and the right protocols can be in place with people?

And I think that Lake Nona, with the things that we're adding now, we are poised to really be an early leader and excel and set the pace for the country in that area. That would be my hope. And, you know, I think we have unique things that are happening here, including a lot of the tech giants that are setting up shop 30 minutes down the street from here on the Space Coast. So going back to the comment that Sesh made about aerotropolis and—you know, this collision of, you know, medicine, human longevity, aerospace. You know, all of these things are really intersecting in a very interesting way, and I think that we're uniquely poised with this geography and sort of this particular location to, you know—we'll have our own identity and I think we'll be known and successful in different ways.

Rasesh Thakkar
Boston, Silicon Valley—they have special places in the history of this country, right? They're amazing places. But I think if you talk about clusters and you want a cluster in this new century Lake Nona’s right there. 

Spencer Levy
Well, I thought it was very interesting. And I loved your comment. I believe they call Cape Canaveral now or still Cape Kennedy? But nevertheless, aerotropolis, airport, self-driving cars and you have, I think, the number one space launch location in the United States 40 miles down the road.

Gloria Caulfield
Yeah. And I mean, I think if you look at it it's deeper than just the space travel. If you look at sort of the ethos of the personalities and the people behind it, you know, the Blue Origins and, you know, all of the great companies … those individuals really have an appetite for longevity, serious investments in how do we live healthy and a high quality way to 100, 120 … beyond. There's this intersection there that's quite interesting. So when I made the comment of this is a place we're going to learn how to keep people well and prevention and I also think extend quality of life in a healthy way. I just think we're uniquely positioned for that kind of thing.

Spencer Levy
Fantastic. On behalf of The Weekly Take Sesh, the Senior Managing Director of one of the visionaries around Lake Nona, senior managing director, thank you so much for joining us.

Rasesh Thakkar
Happy to be here. And look, we are big fans of CBRE. We really enjoy working with you and your team.

Spencer Levy
Thank you Sesh—and the feeling is absolutely mutual. And Gloria Caulfield, what a wonderful late addition to the show. And we're just so happy that you joined us. Gloria Caulfield, the executive director of Lake Nona Institute. Thank you for joining us.

Gloria Caulfield
You're certainly welcome.

Spencer Levy
Thanks for joining us in Lake Nona on The Weekly Take’s latest business trip. For more on this community, on our guests on our show, check out CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. You can also find CBRE’s latest research report, a deep dive into one of the sectors that Lake Nona’s leaders just told us they're setting their sights on life sciences. Look for CBRE’s U.S. Life Sciences report, coming soon. There are more in-depth reports from CBRE on the horizon, too, as well as more great conversations that we're already working on for the summer.

We'll check into the hotel sector, tech talent and our annual mid-year outlook coming up in July. So join us for all that. In the meantime, send us your feedback and subscribe, rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify for wherever you listen. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart, be safe, be well.