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– by Akash Pharande, managing Director – Pharande Spaces

Property prices increase even though buildings age. How come? In the case of most other manufactured products other than gold ornaments, prices decrease as the product ages, don’t they?

Most people prefer to buy new homes rather than used properties because older properties need more maintenance and repair and because new projects have better amenities and facilities. A TV, car or mobile phone rapidly lose value every month because of wear and tear, and newer models are constantly being churned out.

But while older properties do lose resale value to some extent, they retain much of their inherent value no matter how old they get – and, if one waits long enough, eventually become more valuable than before.

Properties in older buildings in one area cost more than properties in another, much newer buildings. How does this happen?

It’s a good question, and every existing or aspiring homebuyer should understand the dynamics involved. To get a grip on it, let’s return to the above example of gold ornaments. There are two primary factors involved:

The inherent value of the basic material: Gold is a precious metal whose value appreciates because of scarcity because there are finite gold reserves on the planet

The manufacturer’s brand: A gold ornament made by a famous jewellery brand is worth more than an ornament with the same amount of gold by an unknown manufacturer. This is because the well-known brand has invested much more in timeless design and quality workmanship. Therefore, it stands the test of time and commands more desirability.

What does this have to do with housing?

The inherent value of the basic material: In rapidly developing or fully-developed urban areas, available land is limited and gets costlier over time. Every apartment owner has a share of the land on which the project is built.

The constantly decreasing supply of land pushes up property prices, even if the buildings themselves are aging. Location plays a huge role because some areas provide a better lifestyle than others.

The manufacturer’s brand: As in the case of jewellery, the brand of a real estate developer matters. Today, most homebuyers prefer to buy properties by reputed developers, and not only because they know that their under-construction homes will be delivered on time. Branded players invest more into both the quality and location of their projects and also in the scope and quality of project maintenance. For this reason, their projects also see much more rental demand.

Don’t aging building depreciate?

Even with the most careful use, gold ornaments get tarnished over time. Decades after they were first made, they will have lost much of their sheen. Nevertheless, the base material – gold – not only retains its value but becomes even more valuable.

Old ornaments can be melted down to make new ones with a brand-new sheen. No value is lost in the process, and the ‘making charges’ are already recouped because gold has already become scarcer.

The cement, steel and other materials used in modern buildings – even those by branded builders – degrade over the decades. However, the basic input – land – appreciates, and every property owner’s share of the project’s land becomes more valuable. In high-quality such as integrated townships and gated communities, the developer has locked in the appreciating power of not only land but location, as well as reserved green open areas and amenity spaces that add further value over and above the base value of every apartment owner’s share of the plot.

Old buildings are demolished after 50-60 years, and new ones with superior amenities are built. At this point, the original property owners are in the driver’s seat, and their new properties are invariably bigger, better and more valuable than the first ones.

Macro factors

– Supply and Demand: The demand for property is influenced by population growth, economic conditions, and the desirability of the location. If the demand for property in a particular area outweighs the available supply, prices will rise, irrespective of the age of the buildings.

– Inflation: Property prices are influenced by overall inflation, which erodes currency’s purchasing power and causes products with in-built value to appreciate over time. Here again, gold and real estate share very similar attributes.

Final thoughts

All of the above revolves around monetary value, but an owned property is valuable in many other respects. You pay no rent on it, and it gives you a lifetime of safety and convenience – or income if it is rented out. Moreover, there is ‘social value’ to consider.

Property owners and tenants hardly share the same social status, nor do tenants have as many legal rights than owners when it comes to using the property. And finally, tenants have no share in the value of the property they occupy.

Interestingly, the age-old ‘buy or rent’ debate was finally put to rest during the Covid-19 pandemic – ‘buy’ has emerged as the way to go. Why did it take a global health cataclysm to cause even life-long renters to come to the market as property buyers? There are plenty of theories, but all the reasons are a combination of human psychology and fiscal prudence.

We like to own what we use, and we like to see our investments grow. And housing prices zooming anywhere between 5-15% in just the last two years, the investment sense behind owning residential real estate is far beyond dispute.

Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of To Find A Killer: The Homophobic Murders of Norma and Maria Hurtado and the LGBT Rights Movement by Doug Greco. The book is published by Gaudium Publishing, an imprint of Histria Books dedicated to outstanding works of non-fiction in a variety of fields.

Beginning with a gripping, firsthand account of the 2011 anti-gay murder of twenty-four-year-old Norma Hurtado, a student the author taught in an Austin high school ten years earlier, To Find A Killer is a series of interwoven essays that employs a mix of narrative nonfiction and political analysis to uncover the intersectional nature of the disparities impacting the LGBTQ community.

Despite monumental gains in legal equality over the past decade, including the landmark Obergefell ruling on same-sex marriage, the LGBTQ community still faces harsh disparities in physical and mental health, economic status, racial stratification, and hate crimes victimization. To Find A Killer discussed the next phase of the LGBT rights movement

Emmy-nominated filmmaker Tim Kirkman calls To Find A Killer, “A heartbreaking, infuriating, illuminating book. Greco traces a line connecting class, sexual orientation, gender and ethnicity that forces you to confront your own biases. This is essential reading for both the burgeoning and the seasoned activist, educator and political scientist.”

Purcell Carson, documentary filmmaker and lecturer at Princeton University says “This carefully wrought book harnesses Greco’s considerable experience as an organizer, storyteller, and scholar, weaving the specific lives of the victims and their murderer together, but setting them against a backdrop of national crisis in the LGBT community.”

To Find A Killer, by Doug Greco, 136 pp., ISBN 978-1-59211-298-2, is available at HistriaBooks.com and from all major book retailers. The book is also available in eBook. Titles published under the various imprints of Histria Books are distributed worldwide by the Independent Publishers Group (IPG). For information on publishing with Histria Books, please visit HistriaBooks.com or contact us at info@histriabooks.com

Histria Books
7181 N. Hualapai Way, Suite 130-86, Las Vegas, NV 89166 USA
HistriaBooks.com
(561) 299-0802

Three-day program focuses on effective leadership behaviors and successful business performance.

(St. Louis, Mo., June 7, 2023) Psychological Associates (PA), a consulting company that improves business performance through its leadership and talent development services, will hold its Q4 Leadership: The People Skills Advantage™ program. The three-day intensive workshop will take place Tues., Aug. 8 through Thurs., Aug. 10 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The program will be held at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education & Conference Center located at One Brookings Dr. on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The program’s individualized experience focuses on helping a company’s top talent improve team success through the people skills they need to engage and influence others. Q4 Leadership comprehensively identifies and adapts effective leadership behaviors with more intricate job-related feedback. The program combines the latest in instructional design along with PA’s six decades of pragmatic leadership development.

The workshop – which uses real-world issues and situations – is designed for C-level leaders, vice presidents, and general managers who will improve their interpersonal skills to break down silos and contribute to synergistic teams.

Psychological Associates’ facilitator Marianne Whelchel will lead the sessions. She brings more than 16 years of global leadership development, training, and human resources experience to the workshop. Whelchel has managed the design and delivery of leadership curriculum for over 6,000 leaders globally.

Psychological Associates helps clients select, develop, and retain their best leaders, enabling them to build exceptional organizations. Its exclusive Q4 Dimensional® Model of Behavior™ – an industry-renowned structure that categorizes observable actions into understandable groupings – inspires high performance while attaining comprehensive results. Consulting capabilities include talent assessment, leadership development, succession planning, people analytics, and executive coaching. Founded in 1958, Psychological Associates is headquartered at 8000 Maryland Ave. in Clayton, Mo. Reservations are required since space is limited. For more information, call (314) 725-7771 or visit www.q4solutions.com.

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CIARA V4.0 boosts compliance with security regulations and best practices while providing effective mitigation guidance. “CISOs are doing more with less, making it challenging to understand their current standing across the OT Cybersecurity landscape,” said Ilan Barda, Radiflow CEO, and Co-founder.

Tel Aviv, Israel, June 6, 2023 – Radiflow, creators of the award-winning OT cybersecurity platform, CIARA, announced the general availability of CIARA 4.0. This release introduces a leading benchmark tool as well as delivers actionable insights for managing and minimizing risk in large multi-site industrial facilities.

Today, CISOs and security teams are responsible for the cybersecurity of OT facilities. However, they lack the ability to evaluate the ever-changing cybersecurity risks to their operations. Unlike other sectors, they can not easily assess risk exposure or the effectiveness of specific security activities. To address this, Radiflow released CIARA 4.0, a data-driven platform that continuously monitors changes in the site topology as well as vulnerabilities and threats, always re-evaluating the risk posture of facilities and their digital components. This continuous monitoring enables the CISO to review the strategic and tactical OT security plans and adapt them if needed.

In order to further assist the CISO with the evaluation of their risk posture, Radiflow is introducing a  new free-to-use cloud benchmark tool. Utilizing collected industry-specific benchmark information based on Radiflow’s vast experience and enriched with CS2AI surveys, the new benchmark tool provides the user with a quick risk posture assessment compared to the industry status and best practices.

“CISOs are under enormous pressure to do more with less, making it challenging to understand their current standing across the OT Cybersecurity landscape,” said Ilan Barda, Radiflow CEO, and Co-founder. “Data-driven CIARA 4.0 automates the delivery of the necessary insights concerning the changes in the risk posture that actually direct users toward optimal security actions.”

At the same time that threat actors are getting more sophisticated and vulnerabilities are becoming more diverse, national and industrial regulatory bodies are tightening cybersecurity regulations. But these are often highly complicated and challenging. For example, while the widely accepted IEC62443 international series of standards provides a detailed map of security controls, it is often too complex for companies to understand and implement. For these situations, CIARA 4.0 delivers a view of Best Practices of Security Controls which are simpler to understand and map better to the planning of security projects in an individual factory or across a sprawling, geographically diverse complex of interlinked facilities.

“A centralized, highly intelligent solution that enables OT cybersecurity teams to identify vulnerabilities, and stay up to date with industry standards and/or best practices, while prioritizing and evaluating mitigation efforts, slashes the investment in time and effort required to conduct secure operations,” explained Michael Langer, Radiflow’s Chief Product Officer. “With the accelerating pace of so many new devices being interconnected via expanding OT networks alongside decades of legacy versions, CIARA 4.0’s ability to automate accurate risk analyses and furnish actionable insights becomes vital for ensuring zero downtime.”

Bengaluru, India, 06th, June 2023 – Verizon Business today released the results of its 16th annual Data Breach Investigations Report (2023 DBIR), which analyzed 16,312 security incidents and 5,199 breaches. Chief among its findings is the soaring cost of ransomware – malicious software (malware) that encrypts an organization’s data and then extorts large sums of money to restore access.

The median cost per ransomware incident doubled over the past two years, with 95% of ransomware incidents that experienced a loss costing between $1 million and $2.25 million. This rise in cost coincides with a dramatic rise in frequency. Last year, the number of ransomware attacks was greater than the previous five years combined. That prevalence held steady this year: Representing almost a quarter of all breaches (24%), ransomware remains one of the top cyberattack methods.

The human element still makes up the overwhelming majority of incidents, and is a factor in 74% of total breaches, even as enterprises continue to safeguard critical infrastructure and increase training on cybersecurity protocols. One of the most common ways to exploit human nature is social engineering, which refers to manipulating an organization’s sensitive information through tactics like phishing, in which a hacker convinces the user into clicking on a malicious link or attachment.

“Senior leadership represents a growing cybersecurity threat for many organizations,” said Chris Novak, Managing Director of Cybersecurity Consulting at Verizon Business. “Not only do they possess an organization’s most sensitive information, they are often among the least protected, as many organizations make security protocol exceptions for them. With the growth and increasing sophistication of social engineering, organizations must enhance the protection of their senior leadership now to avoid expensive system intrusions.”

Like ransomware, social engineering is a lucrative tactic for cybercriminals, especially given the rise of those techniques being used to impersonate enterprise employees for financial gain, an attack known as Business Email Compromise (BEC). The median amount stolen in BECs has increased over the last couple of years to $50,000 USD, based on Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) data, which might have contributed to pretexting nearly doubling this past year. With the growth of BEC, enterprises with distributed workforces face a challenge that takes on greater importance: creating and strictly enforcing human-centric security best practices.

“Globally, cyber threat actors continue their relentless efforts to acquire sensitive consumer and business data. The revenue generated from that information is staggering, and it’s not lost on business leaders, as it is front and center at the board level,” said Craig Robinson, Research Vice President at IDC. “Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report provides deep insights into the topics that are critical to the cybersecurity industry and has become a source of truth for the business community.”

In addition to the increase in social engineering, other key findings in the 2023 DBIR include:

While espionage garners substantial media attention, owing to the current geopolitical climate, only 3% of threat actors were motivated by espionage. The other 97% were motivated by financial gain.
32% of yearly Log4j vulnerability scanning occurred in the first 30 days after its release, demonstrating threat actors’ velocity when escalating from a proof of concept to mass exploitation.
External actors leveraged a variety of different techniques to gain entry to an organization, such as using stolen credentials (49%), phishing (12%) and exploiting vulnerabilities (5%).

One of the ways that enterprises can help safeguard their critical infrastructure is through the adoption and adherence of industry-leading protocols and practices. Verizon recently became the first nationwide telecom provider to become a participant of Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS): a global initiative that provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats that can be exploited by attackers. Participation in MANRS demonstrates Verizon’s commitment to implementing industry-best fixes to common routing threats and best practices geared at helping to prevent cyber incidents for customers on the network.