Warren Buffett is a Great Read

The explosive developments within the American real estate industry over the past several years have produced remarkable opportunities, some significant threats, exciting new directions, astounding knowledge, and some really impressive insights. These developments have been brought into the industry by some remarkably competent minds that have, to our everlasting benefit, undertaken to share their experiences, inspirations and efforts through a number of especially impressive publications and presentations.

History is certainly one of the treasures that make life rewarding. However, being able to observe current events by accessing the thoughts of those who are actually creating them takes the power to observe to an even more exciting level. One of the things that makes being part of our industry during this "high impact" era so exciting is the opportunity to share the knowledge and experiences of key industry thought leaders while they are still engaged in their achievements. Over the past several week, three of these unique experiences have presented themselves and deserve special notice. They will be the subject of this and next month's column.

The industry leaders whose thoughts have contributed to the following observations are Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Mo Anderson of Keller Williams and Spencer Rascoff (along with Stan Humphries) of the Zillow Group.

Mr. Buffett is the subject of this month's observations and comments. His thoughts as reported here were not taken from a leather bound collector's volume, but rather from the very recently issued (last week) 2014 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., his iconic corporate masterpiece. Perhaps no greater compliment could be paid to any business leader than to recommend his annual report (such documents are famous for being mind numbing and irrelevant) as a source of knowledge, insight and, yes, entertainment.