In Beirut, one of the most prestigious places to spend a summer afternoon, enjoy an apéro at sunset or take a yoga class, looks like it’s been frozen in time since the 1950s - and that’s largely true.
In a country with a sophisticated beach culture and myriad options, Sporting Club doesn't offer the glitz and glamour of its more ostentatious counterparts. No infinity pools. No immaculate landscaping. No luxurious beach beds.
Yet it remains one of Beirut's ultimate status symbols. I've paid more to enter Sporting Club than some of Lebanon's considerably more luxurious beach resorts.
And people are all too happy to pay.
Competitive Advantage Isn't Necessarily a Function of Specification
Over generations, Sporting Club has accrued cultural capital through its history, social associations and clientele.
Being seen there signals belonging to a particular social world. The place becomes an expression of identity, while familiarity, memory and social networks sustain its desirability across generations.
What might elsewhere be dismissed as dated becomes evidence of authenticity, continuity and institutional confidence. Perhaps its apparent resistance to modernisation even reinforces its prestige. The club is seemingly too confident to care about keeping up with the Joneses.
But there’s far more to Sporting Club than what it has simply inherited. It appears to recognise what makes it desirable, so it puts its accumulated cultural capital to work.
Rather than entering an amenity arms race with its more luxurious competitors, Sporting Club competes on its own terms. What another operator might regard as ageing facilities or an outdated aesthetic becomes part of the club's most valuable asset: its identity.
Pricing Power Is Partly Psychological
And that distinction has commercial consequences. Sporting Club charges admission fees comparable to, and sometimes higher than, considerably more luxurious resorts.
The price itself becomes part of the proposition. Beyond paying for access to the facilities, visitors are paying for association with the club's social world. Desirability is a powerful pricing lever, but pricing can also manufacture desirability.
Whilst Sporting Club's premium pricing can be justified by its cultural capital, that pricing strategy, in turn, may reinforce the social distinction on which its prestige depends.
Specifications Can Buy Parity, Not Necessarily Premium
In commercial property development, we invest heavily in improving an asset's credentials: Grade-A specifications, double-height receptions, roof terraces and increasingly elaborate amenities. It's a defensible strategy: investments can be costed, compared and justified.
Specifications are effectively entry requirements. Without them, a building might be excluded from occupier searches altogether. They may qualify you for the race, but do they carry you all the way to win?
But when competing developments optimise around the same benchmarks, the temptation is to offer more of the same. It becomes an arms race to parity, not differentiation.
If everyone is spending to achieve the same standards, we're collectively raising the cost of competition without necessarily raising what the market is willing to pay. And when rental growth is such a powerful driver of asset value, shouldn't we be investing in what influences willingness to pay?
Appraisals Can Overlook What Drives Market Preference
Meanwhile, sources of value that are harder to quantify can be overlooked. What cannot be neatly captured by a spreadsheet is too easily mistaken for something that has no value. And what cannot be justified in the appraisal is often dispensable. The problem isn't that appraisals cannot recognise desirability. It's that the market assumptions feeding those appraisals may not adequately account for how desirability can be shaped.
Positioning deserves investment, not merely a marketing budget
We invest heavily in what an asset has to offer. Perhaps we should invest just as deliberately in shaping what it means to the market.
Consumer brands have long understood this relationship. They don't simply manufacture products. They manufacture meaning. Meaning shapes perception. Perception shapes desire. Desire shapes market preference, and market preference is where economic value is created.
Specification helps establish what an asset can reasonably charge. Positioning can influence what the market is willing to pay.
Positioning isn't simply how an asset is presented to the market. It can determine what the asset becomes, which attributes are worth investing in, and how it is perceived, valued and chosen by the market.
Sometimes, creating competitive advantage means changing what an asset competes on, rather than spending more just to compete.