Career Path: Commercial Real Estate | Guest: David Genovese, CEO of Baywater Properties

Interested in commercial real estate, investment banking - or both? Check out my conversation with David Genovese, CEO of Baywater Properties. David's stellar career includes senior leadership roles with Credit Suisse First Boston and Bankers Trust Company.  Learn about David's career path and the early pivot he had to make. Plus, David shares an overview of the commercial real estate landscape, what the main entry points are, what skills are needed, and how to set yourself up for success. Enjoy the listen!

Hosted by Karen Elders of Launch Career Strategies

LAUNCH Career Strategies was founded by Karen Elders and Elyse Spalding. We help young professionals launch a successful career path with expert coaching services. Reach out today for an initial FREE coaching session.
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Transcript

Welcome back to Top of the Pile. My guest today is David Genovese. He is the founder of Baywater Properties, a full-service commercial real estate firm based in Connecticut. Prior to founding Baywater in 2001, David had a very successful career in New York City and in London in real estate investment banking, including senior real estate investment banking roles with Credit Suisse, First Boston and Bankers Trust. He is a graduate of Colby College. He attended the London School of Economics, and he received an MBA from the Wharton School at Penn. So clearly he's one smart cookie. David is incredibly involved in his local community in Darian, Connecticut, and is one of the best mentors a young person can find. Incredibly lucky to have him on as a guest today, and I think we're going to hear how he started out his career, get a sense of what a career in commercial real estate is all about, what skills do you need, what made him successful, and I think you're going to learn a lot from him. So welcome, David. Thanks, Karen. 

 U2 

 1:28 

 Awesome. So we'll jump in. So, in 2001, you founded Baywater Properties, which, as mentioned, is a full service commercial real estate firm working mostly in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York. And I live in that community where Baywater is, so I have to give it a little plug in that it has an amazing reputation of creating community through the beautiful spaces and all the wonderful tenants that you have. So I feel grateful to benefit from those. So we're going to hear about Baywater, but I think what's helpful for a lot of our audience is young professionals to understand kind of where you started out. So you were an economics major and psychology, but you didn't start out where you'd originally targeted as an undergrad. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about that?

 U1 

 2:16 

Sure. So I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My dad owned building materials and heating oil company. So I'd kind of grown up in Darien, Candidly, always thinking that that's where I would go after college, and I thought that was an interesting opportunity. I worked there all my life, every summer, every Saturday, literally from when I was like five or six years old. My dad would bring me to work on Saturdays or in the summers. I'd spend time there, and that was kind of the path I was on when I went to Colby. So I actually also thought maybe I would want to become a psychologist. I just found the field super interesting, and so I drifted slightly from economics for a bit. 1s Then I had an internship in a child psych clinic up in Waterville, Maine, and I realized it wasn't really what I wanted to do, but I knew there was value in the psychology, in the study of psychology, and so I stuck with it. But I ended up refocusing on economics. And then my junior year, I actually went to the London School of Economics for the entire year. Early on, when that was not, I would say, as popular a thing to do as maybe going away for a term abroad now is, but I would say that I know this is more about careers versus college, but that was a very impactful opportunity for me, or experience for me in that. First of all, I went to LSE, which was a really interesting school of people studying economics and finance from around the world. I was super intimidated because I thought I was the dumbest person in the room, and I had to kind of rally to kind of get into it and get through it. I was a totally different teaching style. You had one test at the end of the year, no textbooks. Everybody was reading something different. There were the seminars. It was small group chats. There were discussions about the study every week. But, I mean, it was a very different experience. And I always say to you, I felt, for the first time, I really had no safety net under me versus in an American college where it was so familiar, fully college. Didn't feel that different than Darian High School to me, but LSC felt totally different. Urban, no big support network. I only knew two people from Colby who were there or in Europe. It was a really life changing experience. Got me super dialed into economics and finance aunts, because that was a lot of the talk of what was going on, a lot of the talk in the school. 1s And that's when I decided to try to focus on career in finance. I got back to Colby, I interviewed with a bunch of places, although, truthfully, back then, not a lot of investment banks went to Colby. I got a job as a senior with Anderson Consulting, a company that was then called Anderson Consulting, which became Accenture, and I was supposed to start in this area doing kind of traditional management consulting like McKinsey Work. But between the time that I was given the job and when I actually started, they changed my position and they reassigned me to the Management Information Systems Group, which was basically the bulk of what Anderson Consulting did. And it basically was coding, learning to code and create information systems for companies or organizations to manage and use the information available to them. So this is kind of where the story gets a little weird. It was this great job. I was getting paid relative to my peers a lot. 1s The pay was the same as investment banking, travel, and great learning experience. But I got into it, and truthfully, I really didn't have interest in coding. This is way before we talked about the importance of the opportunities available to people who learned to code. So I got into it, I started and I probably did the hardest thing I've ever one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I went to my boss after three weeks and I said, I think I made a mistake, or at least this assignment, this change in my assignment is leading me to the view that this isn't the right place for me. And I think I would like to just step away. I don't want you to spend the money training me at the end of the day. I'm going to leave in a year or two. This doesn't feel right. Wow. My parents were a little freaked out. I didn't have a job, 1s but I didn't know how to interview for another job while I was in that intense training program. But I really felt morally obligated to kind of speak up and not take the training back then. It's so funny how to think. I literally got out this newspaper and was looking in the Wan ads and I found an opportunity at a Japanese bank called San Juan Bank to, you know, basically be what they call the corporate training. So I was one of the first non Japanese hires to the New York office. Most of the people that worked there were expatriates sent over from Japan. This is back in the day when the Japanese were buying Pebble Beach and Japanese investors were buying Rockefeller Center and all kinds of American real estate. And so I was kind of hoping to find my way into the real estate group, but I had to go through this group called General Affairs, the Department of General Affairs. I took the job making half the pay. I got in there. And they made no assurances to me that I could get into the real estate group. But they said, look, come here. Try this, and we'll see what happens. It was very ambiguous. So what I would do is that in the daytime I'd be doing my job and going around but I made a point, candidly, of meeting the real estate people. I spent a bunch of time talking to them about my interest in the field, and I offered to help them at night or when I could, like when I had downtime if they wanted me to help, look at different things. They basically didn't really take me up on that in the beginning, to be candid. And then I would go there at night at like 05:00 when my day would end in the General Affairs Department, and they would let me read deal proposals for real estate financing in the New York market and around the East Coast. We covered from Boston to Washington, DC. 2s I just read on my own. I studied these different financing proposals. And then I would talk to one of the guys there. He thought I was an okay guy. His name was Derek Vlander. And he would talk to me about these deals. 1s And then at some point, I think it was like six or eight months into the job, they called me and said, hey, we have an opportunity. We need to hire an analyst. Would you be interested in coming? And so I got to transition into that real estate group. Then unfortunately, the market was getting kind of we were going into a real estate recession in the sort of early 90s. They were cutting back on their investments in the United States. And I met a group of people from Bankers Trust Company one day who were pitching us a deal. And I sat in the meeting with my boss, and I didn't really say very much, but I listened and talked to him, and I might have made a comment or two. At the end of the meeting, the vice president from Bankers Trust gave me his card and he said, you should call me when you have a chance. Give me a call. So I called him and it turned out and you're going to laugh because I don't know if you know this part of the story, but it turned out he worked for this group and in that group also worked one of our friends from Darien High School, Alastair bank. 

 U2 

 9:34 

 Yes, that's right. 

 U1 

 9:35 

 And he basically said, look, we need an analyst. We don't normally hire in this way, but you seem like a good guy and we need someone. And he said, I'm telling you, they're not going to be doing much business in that bank. We'd love you to come work with us. So I joined a financial analyst in the investment bank. 

 U2 

 9:50 

 And that's an example of internal networking, which people forget to do, that they're working in their department or whatever it is, and they put their head down and they don't make time the way you did proactively to go and seek people out. And just even if you like the department you're in, It's good to meet other people in the company. And maybe you do want to move departments. You're not an exact place, so I love that proactive sort of effort. And you spent ten years at Bankers Trust, right? I mean, that was a long stint. Yeah, I was there from 1990 until. 2s 2000 1s and it was an incredible experience. I was there as an analyst. At one point I was working on a project as an analyst supporting my bosses on a project in Prague, Czechoslovakia at the time, now the Czech Republic. And my boss said, all right, who wants to move to Prague? And no one said, he sort of sat on their hands and I said, Well, I could do that. I'm sing Goal and that could be kind of interesting. It was right after the wall had come down. It was fascinating 

 U1 

 10:57 

 to be there. So I got shipped to Pro 

 U2 

 10:59 

 on that note. So why don't you talk a little bit about I think will be helpful is so we talked before, maybe talk a little bit about the different kind of main, high level kind of macro look at commercial real estate, maybe even like a little bit of the skill set. So talk a little bit to that. So 

 U1 

 11:15 

 yeah, there are so many different ways to be involved in this business. 1s And what I love about it is like in the place I'm in now in a development company and an investment company, you really can be involved in all aspects at any different any given time. So for example, there's leasing. You can be a real estate leasing advisor where you're helping people who need space, find space, find the right place to run their business, 1s to determine what the right rent to pay is. It's more transactional, but it's also relationship oriented. What you're hoping to do if you're a good real estate broker is you need to really know your market. You need to know all the spaces in the market, the market rents that are out there at any given time. You need to know what's going on with different buildings and are they good places to from or not. And you're trying to build relationships and you're trying to build a reputation because if you do a good job for a client. You know he or she's going to recommend you to other people. And if you do a good job it's kind of like a residential broker in a way. Like maybe you help someone lease their first space and they only need 1000ft. But guess what? They build a successful company and ten years later they remember the good job you did for them when they were small and now they need 100,000ft or 10,000ft. 1s It's an interesting that leasing has got sort of financial analysis elements to it. It's got marketing and presentational elements to it. Negotiation, negotiating the leases on behalf of the tenants or the landlords. And by the way, you can represent as a leasing advisor, a tenant or a landlord the person who owns the building or the person who needs the space. And those are kind of different fields in a way as well. There are people who kind of specialize in each of those two alternatives. So that's leasing, financing, debt financing, lending money against buildings. You're figuring out what buildings to lend on and who to lend to. You're doing financial analysis. You're studying markets to figure out which markets are better to lend into and which ones might be less interesting or riskier where you wouldn't want to rent or lend against them. You're trying to figure out how much to lend against a building. So you're valuing buildings. There's a big financial analysis element to the lending space. 1s That's probably an area that has the most opportunity 2s for learning initially. Also in the brokerage side of the business, there's also the people who sell buildings just like people sell houses. And they're doing financial analysis, advising clients on what they think buildings are worth and what they think they could sell for. And then they create the package, the marketing materials and the financial analysis that gets shared with the buyers out there that are interested in buying buildings in a particular place. And you have to help market and present and present optimally, right? There's a way to present things in a way that feels me. 1s Look, you always have to be credible, but there's a way to present in a way that's credible and optimistic. Or you could present non credibly and make a lot of mistakes in your analysis, and then no one trusts you and they think you don't know what you're doing, and you're just trying to foist upon some building at a price that doesn't make sense. Ultimately, the market decides what things are worth, but how you present the opportunity can have an impact act and can make a difference. So there's brokerage lending brokerage for asset sales, which I'll call investment sales. There's equity investment in real estate. So there are companies like mine you could work for a company like mine that is buying buildings, renovating them, holding them, selling them. We do the same financial analysis. When you're in development, you have to understand all of the leasing and the financing. So you do the financial analysis, like, what do I think I can rent these spaces for, and how long do I think it will take, and what kinds of people do I think will rent them? So you do all kinds of market studies around a particular building or an area and try to figure out 1s what would something be worth to the tenants you might be presenting it to. Then what do I have to pay to buy the land? What's the land worth based upon what I think the revenue will be and what I think it will cost me to build the building? So I personally think that our side of this is like the most multifaceted. It involves all of it. And Karen, you probably see, too. Like there's even a marketing element to what we do, especially in Darien with the retail, where we created this whole social media network, our social media platform, to support our tenants and support the businesses that we're bringing to Darien to kind of differentiate ourselves and show tenants that help them make their businesses stronger. Because if their businesses are stronger and if they're doing better, our business is better. I try to help a lot of young people find their way into this field. I love this. I think the most important thing that I share with people, younger people, who are trying to get into this field, is to get to a place where you're going to do a lot of reps. Position yourself in a place where you're going to see a lot you're going to see a lot of different transactions and opportunities, whether they're leases or investment opportunities or lending opportunities. I don't think a good place to start in real estate, to be candid. And look, sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Sometimes you have quit your job and take a pay cut of 50% to find your way to the right place. But 1s for me, the right place, the ideal place, in my opinion. Is a place where you get to see a lot of different things and you work with a lot of different people because you learn so much in a shorter period of time than if you came to work for, like, say, now my company, and you were just doing one project with me for the next three years. I don't know that that's the greatest foundational experience to set yourself up for long term success and flexibility and optionality in terms of, like, how do I get to where I want to go? 1s And that's just one key thing for me. Is 

 U2 

 17:33 

 there a larger version of what you do that might be more of a larger name? 

 U1 

 17:39 

 You're trying to get into the field. Whether you're transitioning into the field or you're graduating from college and trying to get into the field. I think that the advice I would give is go into leasing or go into lending or go into a real estate investment company. But I do think it's very hard to get a job as an undergraduate. There aren't as many opportunities in real estate investment companies or private equity companies for recent undergrads. I mean, the big guys, yes, I think a lot of people are looking more for people with a little bit of experience and a little bit of perspective. There are jobs, don't get me wrong. There are jobs, just not as many. But I think if you can start as a lender or start with a bigger investment company, look ideally like a Blackstone, that would be an incredible platform. 1s You would learn so much. But it is fiercely competitive. They probably have 100,000 applications. I'm making up numbers, but it's relatively right, like 100,000 applications for 50 jobs or 75 

 U2 

 18:45 

 jobs. I know someone that is working at JPMorgan in their mortgage. 1s I think it's commercial mortgage department or whatever that would be. And so I think there are a lot of other ways to touch real estate. And like you said, get I think you're right on the reps, and that's true for anything as much of variety and start to see what goes on in the market and understand the markets and then get a little bit more idea of what interests you. 

 U1 

 19:12 

 Right? Definitely. And I think if you also work in a bigger organization, you're going to get to work with all kinds of different people and all kinds of different clients. And what I always say to young people, like I talk to you about this stuff, is there are people you learn a lot about how to mimic and how to follow them and kind of model your own professional behavior on theirs. And then there's also a lot of people you realize you should do the opposite of what they're doing. And those are equally valuable lessons. We've all had good managers and bad managers. And I feel like I learned as much from the good ones. And sometimes what I learned from the bad ones was more important, like what not to do and how not to kind of manage other people's time or approach things. And when you're in a bigger organization, you're just going to have greater opportunity for more interactions with people both among your peers, your managers and your clients. That's going to position you to just have a better perspective more quickly. When I left banking after twelve years, honestly, I felt like I had 20 or 30 years of experience. Because first of all, we worked like 100 hours a week. So it's kind of ridiculous. Like the early days of investment banking when I was involved. And to this day it's still the same in a lot of places. You just see more, you do more, you're working harder, and you learn a lot over a relatively short period of time 1s and really feel like those experiences were for me invaluable an investment bank. There are definitely a lot of real estate investment banking positions out there around the country. They're a great place to start. 1s There's accounting firms that have real estate valuation departments. Um, the accounting firms have real estate consulting groups that are phenomenal places for training and growth and learning KPMG, Price, Waterhouse, Coopers, and the like. So I would say leasing firms, investment firms, private equity firms, accounting firms, financial services like advisory firms. There's so many different ways to get in and learn a lot. And I always come back to reps, like positioning yourself to see as much as you can, and ideally, like in as many markets as you can. 

 U2 

 21:30 

 Is it that let's say you were in leasing, for example, and it was office space or mixed use or whatever it is industrial, is that something that usually you go into and you get kind of pigeonholed into that area, or does that not matter? That's sort of transferable that 

 U1 

 21:48 

 will happen over time. So I think that, especially with leasing, with leasing, people definitely specialize. There are retail specialists and office specialists. There aren't a lot of people who do both. 1s So you will, over time, get pigeonholed or become expert in the area. And also, candidly, 2s it's relatively rare to meet a real estate leasing broker or advisor who just travels all markets and figures it out. I mean, there are people who usually tend to kind of learn the trade in a particular market. They might be an office leasing broker in Fairfield County, and they learn the market, and they learn the process, and then they get called on to help clients who trust them figure out how to deal with leasing opportunities or requirements in other markets. And so they'll ride with that client. But they might partner then with someone from their office in San Francisco. Like, I have friends who are real estate leasing people. A great friend at Newmark, James Ribbon. He's an awesome guy. He's actually, like, the only person I know who's done office and retail. He helped Vineyard Vines grow nationally. He helped design Within Reach, do a bunch of leases around the country, but he's really an office specialist. He'll go to another market with Vineyard Vines, and then he'll work with the local partner, his local partner in Chicago, let's say, to make sure that Vineyard Vines is getting the best advice on where they should open in that market. And 1s that's a pretty interesting place to get to if you get into it and you like it, it and people who like leasing and who find success in it, they can find enormous success in that field. 2s But it definitely, over time, you will tend to specialize and then be pigeonholed. In reality, actually, Karen, as I think about it, even if you're doing development, there are apartment developers and there are office developers. There aren't a lot of people who've done both. 1s Among small to mid sized firms because they're different and everything. It's like everything in life, you can't be good at everything. 2s And these businesses are changing so rapidly now in the world that we live in, the needs of office tenants, the needs of apartment tenants are changing. It's really hard to stay on top of all the latest trends if you're trying to do everything at once. And I'm you work for a company like Related who has significant staff, and they have hotel people and retail people and office people and apartment people. 

 U2 

 24:22 

 Do you see commercial real estate as still a viable career option given the changes in ecommerce and the need for commercial space? 

 U1 

 24:32 

 Yeah. So again, it's going to change by product type. But let's take retail first. Ten years ago, eight years ago, retail was dead. Retail was really scary. We were talking about the retail apocalypse. Amazon was growing with leaps and bounds. All these Internet retailers were shipping for free. 1s There were companies starting up who had no intention of ever opening a store. Like warby. Parker, my eyeglasses. Here. 1s Many stores, all birds, no intentions of opening a store. Roan never. No, that was not the plan. They were going to advertise on Instagram, sell to you via the online platform, and that was it. Um, 1s weirdly COVID turned. Like, for a moment, it was like you couldn't go to store, so the only choice you had was to shop on Amazon and basically get stuff delivered by Amazon. There was, like, that COVID moment where Amazon was it, but literally weirdly after that. And I felt this in Darien. I don't know if you saw it or felt it, but suddenly all these people who used to work New York had no choice but to be here. And they were staying home. They were in their community. And I felt on a local level, this massive increase in interest in what was happening locally and what was happening in our downtown. 1s Meaning, like, the dairy and downtown, for everyone, all the residents, there was, like a civic pride that started to build around what was happening and what we were doing with Baywater and our project and bringing new stores and new restaurants to town. And that is nationally also the case. Like bricks and mortar, retail is actually on the rise. It's actually stronger now than it's been probably in 15 years. 4s In the last few, Greenwich Avenue and Greenwich, Connecticut, has had some of the highest rents ever achieved on retail leases on ground. Chapman someone signed a lease a few months ago for $200 per square foot. 1s And yeah, so. 1s Street retail 2s in these pedestrian friendly environments is definitely back. I think that people have gotten a little bored of pointing and clicking. Look, from a value point of view, sometimes it's great, but the truth is too, I think, and much smarter people would have a more educated view of this. But I think that at the end of the day, also all the of free shipping and just click here, it's free shipping. And Amazon, all the best prices. If you really look today, some of the pricing on Amazon, it's not that great. They're gently increasing the prices. Look, I think that was probably part of the evil plan of Jeff Bezos, like, crush street retail, dominate the market, close all the have all the stores closed. And then when everyone becomes super dependent upon Amazon, you know, raise, you know, get them on Amazon Prime, and now gently start to raise the prices just to the point where, like, they don't notice it. But like, you start to really pay attention. It's so frictionless. You don't pay attention. Shipping can't be free. Nothing is free. I mean, eventually the stock market isn't going to or the venture capitalists aren't going to give all birds the money to ship for free forever. And eventually, something has to give. You're going to either pay for shipping or you're going to pay a higher price for the product. We're seeing a lot of strength in retail in office. 2s Um, the office market. This is an interesting place right now, given COVID impacts, 1s how many people are working from home, how many people had to work from home for a period of time, and how many people are now given the opportunity to work hybrid. Two days in the office, three days in the office, two days home, or maybe full remote. 2s There is a big question mark over off buildings right now. Office is probably the most challenged sector of the real estate market today because there's just so much uncertainty around 1s where it's headed and what demand is and how much space people are really going to need. 

 U2 

 28:51 

 There was someone I was speaking to the other day. It's a media technology company. And what they do is they're fully remote, but what they do is they once a quarter and sometimes more than this, but every quarter they gather in a new city. And it's like a sales meeting where you're away for, like, three or four days, but you're not jammed into a conference room the whole time. Whereas normally, if you go away to something like that, once a year, they're jamming you in a conference room and you could be in Florida, you could be in Alaska. You wouldn't even know the difference. But what they're doing is really mostly 1s team building, you know, dinners and maybe it's golfing or tennis or scavenger hunt, whatever it might be. Going out at night for a social activity 2s and then having time with your group and with your bigger and doing all that. And they said it's working, so. 2s That's kind of fun. That would solve the problems created by remote work or a portion of the problems created by remote work. Right. That would create camaraderie and help create culture and create personal relationships and strengthen them. But at the same time, it's kind of like being on vacation. 1s Being on vacation isn't really life. Being out with your team at a golf resort for three days is great, but it's not really like doing the job. 1s You don't have the stressful moments. You don't have the deadlines where you're in the trench with your peers. I think about this a lot because I actually think the death of the office building is sort of overstated. I think office work is being together important? I think about my own career. I think about this guy. Jeff Mortera. I don't know if he would ever be listening to this, but it would be funny if he did. He was one of the smartest people I've ever met. I would say the smartest person I ever met, but I don't want it to go to his head. He was literally a rocket scientist. The guy worked Harvard, went to Cornell, undergrad for engineering, went to Harvard for business school, and went to Cornell back again for a master's in mechanical engineering or electrical engineering and literally worked for NASA, but then decided he wanted to go into investment banking. And he and I used to I was his analyst, and he was an associate, and he would literally train me like, he would we would do spreadsheets. We would build spreadsheets. We would print them out. We would sit in the conference room, and we would literally check the spreadsheets with our calculators to make sure we didn't make any mistakes. 1s Jeff was amazing, but sitting in that conference room with him, you know, poring over the numbers and, like, literally sweating it out, making sure we didn't make any mistakes, like, that was invaluable for me. And there is no way you can replicate that experience on zoom, I personally think. And by the way, Greenwich, Connecticut, right now, going back to Fairfield County for a SEC, Greenwich, Connecticut, has probably the strongest office market in the United States. Really? 

 U1 

 31:54 

 Wow. Right? That's incredible. There is literally, like. The market is like 3% vacant because why? A lot of firms basically decided that due to COVID and kind of what was happening in Manhattan, they wanted to build bigger presences in Connecticut, nearer to where some of their people lived. And Greenwich is a place that's easy to get to from a lot of Westchester County and Fairfield County. A lot of senior people tend to live there. I think the way we work has changed. Yeah, but it's just would you be the professional you are? Would you have the perspective you have if you didn't have all those days, months, years in the office with the people that inspired you? 

 U2 

 32:34 

 Never. It's invaluable and I still keep in touch with so many of them, and I think that's the piece it's professional and personal. You really develop the two sides of your life, your professional life and personal. And they both kind of support each other. 2s I'm going to jump over to 1s you have an internship program, but a lot of the times you can even call these people up and say they'll say, oh, well, we're small. We don't have an internship program. Well, would you take me as a shadow for a week? Or I will work I'll be an administrative assistant or I'll do something and maybe they could you might want to be paid. I mean, I get it, people it's hard to work for free when you need to save money for college, et cetera. So if it doesn't work to get one of those more formal opportunities and this is true for any career, I mean, you could go work for a local organization in advertising or media as opposed to a big agency, but so for your let's just talk a minute about your interns that you work with. How does that give me a little sense of what they do when they're with you? 

 U1 

 33:42 

 Basically what they'll do in the summer, the high school senior program is not too different. They kind of become the same program in a way. The high school seniors come in for the month of May ish June, middle of May, the middle of June. And then the college kids come in afterwards. And basically what we do is we have them. 2s Do studies of mixed use. For the last few years, it's been about what we're doing in Darian. So we'll have them study mixed use places around the country, and they'll do, like, an analysis and study of the architecture and the tenancy and the demographics of the area and how those are changing. And they try to give us kind of a sense of what's happening and what's changing year to year with these different mixed use places like the Palisades Village in Pacific Palisades, La, California, or the Van Aiken district in Cleveland, Ohio, 1s royal Point, Sienna Plaza and Palm Beach. We have a list of places that we kind of track and study, and they do that in their downtime. When they're not in meetings with us, then they'll come to meetings with us. So we try to give them exposure to the meetings, like whether it's a tenant meeting, meeting with a tenant that we're pitching to come to our project. They'll come to meetings with our bank when we're talking about financing. They'll come to meetings with our construction people or the town of Darian. Once, when we were working on the Shake Shack, we built that Shake Shack in Darian, and we had the high school interns actually present to the Darian zoning board the signage request that we wanted for Shake Shack. So we actually had them present some of the material to the town. That was extreme, 

 U2 

 35:25 

 just even sitting in on meetings and kind of seeing, like, to your point you made a while ago, you learn as much from people who are great and people who aren't so great, and it's like, in a career, knowing what you do want to do and knowing what you don't want to do helps. There are some people who say, I know don't want to do this. Like, okay. That's actually helpful. But to see how people interact professionally, what are the little things that's also back to being in person? Just little things about seeing how people. 2s Speak to each other, the hand gestures, all the things that they do, 1s the small talk at the beginning of a meeting, what happens, 1s I think that's all. How to follow up and see the community. There's so much value to that. It's awesome. It's important. Yeah. And I mean, the one thing we did, I think last year might have been the first year, or maybe it was two years ago, we also added this little module to the internship, which I loved. We had lunch with a different person like once every couple of weeks. And I picked people who were in different facets of this work. So I picked restaurant entrepreneurs like Julian Dana from the granola bar hosted us for lunch one day at the Granola bar and took the interns through their story on how they built their business and what they do. It was almost like, have you ever, you know, guy razz? Like how I built this podcast? I love it. Yeah. So we did like a how I built this kind of module. We did a lunch with an architect, we did a lunch with a lawyer, we did a lunch with a banker. So they get a real perspective on different elements of what we do, but it gives them this unbelievable perspective on what's going on. And it is a lot of work, honestly, for me, it's a lot of work to organize and really kind of do it year in and year out. And we're a small company, so sometimes I'm like, oh, this is a little too much. But honestly, last week one of the kids who was a high school intern with us called me. He's in the hunt for a job, full time job with a great firm in San Francisco. And he called me and said, hey, can you be a reference for me? I'm in the hunt, I'm close on this job. And I said, absolutely. And actually, one of my former clients is now a very senior guy there, happy to help you with that. When they go back into the business 1s and they get it and they love it, that's extremely satisfying for me. 1s I kind of generically put that in the bucket of things I call like, psychic income. It's just really cool 1s what I realized in my career, and I'm sure you would agree, Karen, it's like the world is so small, and when you help people in any way, big or small, somehow, some way, it's not why I do it, but it just comes back to you. It's so satisfying to hear of some kid ending up with some great job and God only knows one day you end up doing business with them and it hasn’t. 

 U1 

 38:25 

 happened yet, but I know it's going to happen and it's just cool, right? I love learning. I wasn't in commercial real estate professionally, but that's what this podcast is about. It's about having like, your module, having people listen in and get to kind of be a little fly on the wall to listen to what your background is, how you built yourself up professionally, what worked, how you are helping and giving back. So that's really you kind of just summed it up. That's really the purpose of this. There's one thing that. 1s and maybe we'll end on this. But you said something to me when we were talking back and forth about preparing for the podcast. You said the line that I love, which was, your career will have chapters. 

 U2 

 39:08 

 And I don't know if you remember saying that, but it's really true. And I think to sum it up for everybody, 2s as you didn't end up where you first started it, I think that it's okay to have a mulligan along the way, and that's not really what I wanted to do. And if you are in that position, go to HR, be honest, say, this is what I want to do. If it's a big company, maybe it's switching departments. 3s I don't know. I just think that that's something to embrace 

 U1 

 39:42 

 or if a chapter doesn't play out. Like when I went to Credit Suisse, I got hired. I was at Bankers Trust. I had the most unbelievable career there. I loved the people. I could have seen myself working there forever, and I didn't want to leave. But they got bought by Deutsche Bank. And the guy that I loved, who I worked for, who was my mentor, kind of redirected to a different area of the group within real estate and was no longer going to be directly connected to me. And I just said, if he's not with me, I'm not really that interested in doing it. Actually. This is kind of crazy when I think about it. I had been getting these calls from Credit Suisse to start a new real estate group, and I blew them off. And then actually, I went and met with them once, got a call from them, again, a second call from them, and I said, you know what, I'll come in and talk again about it. Turns out they shuffled the deck. They'd gotten rid of some of the people that I'd met the first time. 1s and they offered me this job to start a new real estate investment banking group. And to be honest, I was like, am I really capable of doing that? I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I don't know if I'm really ready for that. But I took the job, and I was building this business with a partner. It was amazing. 1s It was amazing. We had resources. We were in a great firm. We were building the group, and then they merged with DLG. J. And instead of being the co-head of the group, I ended up working for the head of the real estate group at DLJ. It was a very different program than what I'd signed up for, and 1s it wasn't what I signed up for. And I left after 911. It was a chapter, right? And 3s I knew there was a moment where I knew that it was time for a change. And I had learned a ton. And I talked to Julie about it, my wife, and I said, I think now might be the time, but maybe I should stick around one more year, do get one more bonus and put away some more money. We're going to start having a family. And Julie was the one who pushed me to quit and said, you said you wanted to do this. There's never going to be a great time. You're never going to stop saying, like, one more year, one more year, one more year. Just do it. 

 U2 

 41:48 

 The big thing that I think I hear through all of this sounds like commercial real estate in many ways is it's very relationship based. Financial analysis, 1s evaluating markets. And I love the whole piece that like when you went to Prague, boots on the ground, going to actually I don't know if this is always involved in your job at the early stage, but you're really going and looking at a bill building. You have to physically evaluate these places. And I think it really has a finger on the pulse of where the economy is and where people are and where things are trending. It's a very interesting space, a very interesting career space. 

 U1 

 42:27 

 Totally. And technology is changing things, like the information that's available to us, by the way. This is also the opportunity for young people in the space. Technology is having enormous impact. 1s Some of it, I think is nonsense or a little bit overstated or overvalued, but some of it is pretty amazing. We used to basically go and walk the streets and try to talk to people about how different, especially in retail, how do different markets perform? Where are the customers coming from when they come to this Whole Foods market? Where are they coming from with technology? For example, we use this new software service called Placer AI, and it basically scrapes the data off your cell phone. So when you're on Facebook or Instagram and it's tracking your location and you've agreed to that, maybe not thinking about it, but you agreed to allow them to do that, they're then selling that data to Placer. So I can tell you with 95% confidence how many customers go to Whole Foods and Dairy in every day. Where they live, where they sleep in their neighborhood? Not exactly. I can't tell you exactly what house you're in, but I know roughly where they live. Or like Equinox Gym and Darian versus Equinox Gym and southbound, what the difference in the customers is, what the difference in traffic is, and then using that data to make better decisions around who we leave space to. That's an opportunity or an ability we didn't have five years 

 U2 

 43:59 

 ago. Yeah, location based data is amazing. 

 U1 

 44:02 

 It's incredible. And like, younger people who are more into dialing into that, or maybe they just grew up around it more, and so they're more in tune. Old school people, I don't think. I try to stay fresh and current, and I try to stay on top of technological trends and what people are doing and tools they're using. But I'm not in the top 20% of my space in my industry, but I'm probably the top 30% of my industry. But there are a lot of older people in this business who don't stay current on what is available and what technology is available now to help make better decisions. And so I do think there's going to be this new wave of opportunity using the data to make better decisions. I think young people want to get into the space who are maybe more technologically savvy, but interested in real estate, in the built environment. That's going to be an interesting opportunity or 

 U2 

 44:56 

 play for them. I love it. You've been so good. This is 

 U1 

 44:59 

 want me to give you one more thing? Yeah. Love it. Two things from my years with interns. One, these are statements of the obvious, but never. 1s You put your phone out on a table, keep your phone in your pocket. When you're meeting with someone like me or Karen, 1s don't be distracted in the meeting. Be present. It's so important in every meeting because people are kind of expecting you to be looking at your phone and fidgeting and checking your phone and looking at your text or whatever. Don't do it because older people are used to direct conversation and less of that, even though all of us have become a little more distracted and a little bit more prone to looking at our phone or whatever, don't do that. And two, I think one of the most important things that I see in people that makes me the most excited when I meet a young candidate or a candidate for a position is intellectual curiosity, 1s being curious, not just accepting things that face value, but like being willing to and digging deeper into something. So if someone asks you to do a task, dig deeper. Come up with something that they might not have thought of. Don't just do what you're asked to do. And now I've seen this with so many interns and good ones and bad ones and the best ones, and I think the people who. When I think back to my whole career and different people who've achieved a lot of success in a field or those that just kind of got by, I think one of the defining characteristics of the people that really achieved more was just having intellectual curiosity and being willing to dig a little deeper. Go beneath the surface. Don't just do what's expected of you. It makes your job more interesting because you might find something that no one else really thought up, and it distinguishes you. If 

 U2 

 46:47 

 you think about it. You can try to push yourself to say, well, wait a minute, let me not be just check the box, let me go a little deeper and make do the extra steps. So you're 

 U1 

 46:55 

 going to an interview, right? Maybe do more than just having read the company's website or looked at the company's website. If you're looking at a real estate company, go to one of their buildings and show up at the meeting having been to one of their buildings and having walked around and share an opinion. Be careful, but share an opinion. And I'm not saying fake it, but just check it out. You should be doing your due diligence anyway on any of these kinds of opportunities. And there's so many easy ways to just dig a little deeper. And I think you'll really distinguish yourself when you do that. If you just show up having done nothing or maybe having just talked to a friend about a company or looked online, okay, great. Be like 95% of the people that send it a resume. But if you want to distinguish yourself, just dig a little deeper and see what you find and you're going to have a more interesting conversation in the 

 U2 

 47:47 

 interview. Exactly. Well, it's the thing I'm always preaching, which is the quality over quantity and with everything, because often people are looking for jobs and they're spending 80% of their time on job boards, and then a little bit of time networking and having informational calls where it should be flipped. A solid 80% of your time should be informational calls, learning, getting data points about a company, and a shorter company list, but deeper. This is amazing. Well, this was really fun. David, thank you so much. This is amazing to have you on today. Really, really appreciate it. You're welcome, Karen. It's my pleasure, honestl