It’s no secret what’s been happening in office real estate across the country since the pandemic. During COVID-19, as work-from-home became ingrained in the American economy, office values plummeted. Now, with $117B in US CRE office debt maturing in 2024 and a 20% vacancy rate (the highest in 40 years), investors with dry powder are preparing to capitalize.
And it’s not just Institutional investors who are ready to pounce. According to a recent piece in Commercial Observer, Chad Carpenter, founder of Reven Capital, and Ethan Penner, CEO of Mosaic Real Estate Investors, recently launched a $1 billion publicly traded real estate investment trust to raise capital for distressed office opportunity.
In this episode, Brian Pascus, the journalist who wrote the Commercial Observer piece, joins the Best Ever Show to discuss this trend and what it means for the future of office real estate, and investors.
You can read his full piece here.
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Transcript
Paul (00:04.22)
Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you?
Brian Pascus (00:07.386)
Hello Paul, how are you doing? Thank you very much for having me on here.
Paul (00:10.364)
Yeah, I'm doing well also. We've talked via email about a couple of pieces that you've written recently, and I think that, I think we ended up choosing the right one to key in on, because obviously office is a pretty hot topic with all the distress and everything that's going on in that space. So I'm excited that you were able to put this piece together and that you're here with us to talk about it.
Brian Pascus (00:28.786)
Absolutely, so looking forward to breaking down some of these complex topics in commercial real estate. I know we've been going back and forth for a while, and the holidays obviously got in the way with me coming on your show. But more than happy to come in here and talk about whatever you want to discuss to get to the heart of commercial real estate finance.
Paul (00:48.028)
Definitely. And I want to start, Brian, by I'm just going to read this one paragraph from the top of your piece and then we can get right into it. So, Chad Carpenter, the founder of Revin Capital and Ethan Penner, the CEO of Mosaic Real Estate Investors, announced their launch of Revin Office REIT, a $1 billion publicly traded real estate investment trust solely devoted to providing office owners and hungry investors with bespoke capital for distressed office assets on either the debt or equity side of the fence.
This is me speaking now. This is the latest in a small series of investors, either, either large investors coming to the table for these reads or smaller investors pooling capital to really just sit by and, and wait for this distress to hit the fan and the opportunity to come about. So real quick, just give me a, the CliffsNotes version of this piece, what it's about, why it was a topic that you guys chose to cover at this time.
Brian Pascus (01:47.186)
Well, I guess the short answer is this piece examines some of the money that's been raised and the ambitions for that money and that capital to go into office distress. And by that we mean there are billions of dollars worth of office properties across the United States that were financed at levels and under certain assumptions that are no longer applicable because of COVID-19 and the change in behavior that so many millions of Americans have exhibited, you know, now for four years in regards to using office space.
And because of that, that changing basis of the behavior of people and companies and firms and employees of how much they use office and where they want to use it and so on and so forth, the capital investments and the loans that were made to, these office sponsors, the developers or the owners of office buildings, those no longer hold.
So there's a ton of distress in that a lot of these loans that the sponsors have taken out to either develop or manage office properties, they can no longer afford them because they no longer have the same amount of tenant usage as they had previously. And because of that, the mortgages on these offices and the loans behind them, these need new capital injections, whether that's debt or equity. And you have opportunistic investment firms or individuals or REITs or whatnot.
They are fundraising to raise money at the tune, usually a billion dollars, if not more, to invest into these distressed capital stacks that make up the office loan in order to right the ship, so to speak, because the value of office is no longer, for example, if an office building was worth $100 million, and now it's only worth $60 million. Well, a lot of that equity on that loan was wiped out, and they need to come at a new basis in order to continue to service the loan.
And the lenders, of course, are involved in this, and there's a whole complex web of arrangements between the lenders, sponsors, the borrowers, and now the new equity or debt injections capital to make the office building itself and the loan behind it viable. I might have explained it in a little bit too technical terms, but that's the meat and potatoes here. And I guess I'll just use really plain English. You got people in office buildings, they need new money and they need fresh money in order to continue to operate their office buildings. That's what it comes down to.
Paul (04:36.756)
So it's interesting, right? Because you mentioned the amount of office debt maturing in 2024. It's around 117 billion is what I'm seeing. And there's also a 20% vacancy rate, which is the highest in 40 years. So it's very obvious of the distress in the office sector. I don't think anybody's debating that. I guess the question that I have for you is why is now the time that these sort of institutional investors are pooling this capital? Why now?
Brian Pascus (05:04.926)
Well, it's interesting. I think it goes back to how the article began. And when my editors had mentioned to me to examine some office distress, I had a conversation with Chad Carpenter and Ethan Penner, who have recently, early in the part of the year, formed a office REIT called Revin Capital, Revin Office REIT, that sole function is to raise money. And then they're gonna become a publicly traded company.
They're gonna get money from obviously investors, and mom and pops, for instance, as well, big, small, whatever you want to call it. And they're going to use that money to invest in land as well onto distressed office property. So they're going to be able to play all sorts of sides of the capital stack. And speaking with Chad Carpenter and Ethan Penner, you know, they had a very, the reason why, why is this happening now is because, you know, he brought it back to Carpenter, that is Chad Carpenter brought it back to his experience in the early 1990s when you had a similar resetting of basis with the value of office properties, a lot of offices were built in the mid to late 80s.
Money was very easy in the go-go Reagan era. And after the savings and loan crisis occurred, you had basically a slow burning financial crisis that took a few years to play itself out. But one of the things that was hit was the balance sheets of lenders who, and of course the people who borrowed the loans that lenders had made for a lot of this commercial real estate. So you had a whole lot of distressed office back then.
Penner had invested in it, so had Carpenter, and they both recognized as well after the 2008 financial crisis that something very similar had happened with residential housing, where you had people take out a lot of money to buy houses they couldn't afford. When the bubble popped, a lot of those distressed residential properties were then up for grabs at a much lower cost than they had previously been loaned down on. So that's called opportunistic investing. That's when you put your money in, when the value of something that was valuable at a certain point five years ago.
Now five years later, you're getting that for 50%, 60% off. That's how a lot of these people make a lot of money, is they buy low and they sell high. So this is the same type of phenomenon that investors like Penner and Carpenter are seeing today with office property. I think Chad Carpenter had said that he thinks 30% of office is just obsolete in terms of it's old, no one's gonna use it, it's in bad parts of these American cities.
And no matter what, because now you have 35% of the workforce that works from home or hybrid pretty regularly. I mean, here I'm having this interview from my own apartment today. Granted, it was a snowstorm in New York, but I go in maybe three or four days a week only. So you have a lot of Americans who are no longer going to the office like they used to. He recognizes this, but at the same time, the office is always going to be part of the American landscape. Not everyone wants to work from home five days a week. It drives you crazy. You want to get out there, you want to experience life, you want to see coworkers, you want to, you know collaborate and you want to get some you want to be able to concentrate, okay? You want to get away from your dog, your kids.
What do you want to call it? So? they're still used for office and He believes that Even when office loses some of its value The sponsors behind these loans are going to need new capital You know to come in and allow them to continue operating them because lenders do not want to operate an office building, and maybe I'm anticipating another question here, but when you're a bank, when you're JP Morgan Chase, and you've loaned out $200 million on a big office building, and that sponsor can no longer pay it because they've lost 40% of their tenancy.
JP Morgan Chase does not have a group of people who know how to operate an office building. They're bankers. They're not property managers. They're not experts at the capital intensive elements of office operation. So they don't want you to hand back the keys. They want to work out a deal with you in order to do so. And so what these opportunistic funds are doing is they're coming in, they're going to say, Hey, we can lend you money on your loan. We can invest with you in either the debt or the equity side, and we can try to help you pay your loan as you go along. But for in return, we want a very preferable part of the capital stack to make some nice return on this investment. And that's what's happening.
Paul (09:26.736)
Yeah, Brian, it's interesting. You mentioned in there the age old philosophy of buy low sell high. Obviously, that's a core tenet of investing, right? It's a little bit less so in commercial real estate because of the value add element and the fact that you can you can you can buy at the top of the market, continue to add value, repurpose your properties, whatever it is, and still have a worthwhile investment. So it's a little less common in terms of, you know, as being a core tenant in commercial real estate.
But I'm more interested, obviously, you're buying low right now if you're buying office, right? It's a lot of distress is coming if it's not here already. The question I have is about the future. You know, I agree with you that they're gonna, a lot of people are gonna want office to be a part of their life. No one's gonna wanna work full, not a lot of people are gonna wanna work from home full time. Office is always gonna be a part of the American experience, the American landscape. But the fact that it's gonna be so drastically different as we move forward, and I don't know that personally I've seen the, any indications of what that's really gonna look like and where that dust is gonna settle in terms of how prevalent that office space is gonna be in some of these major markets.
You're in New York City, obviously, that's a much different landscape than most of the rest of us are operating in, but it's still the same problem within these little silos across the country. So I guess my question for you is, when you talk to people like Chris and you talk to people like Ethan, what do they see the future office being in terms of the place that it's gonna, that it's gonna have in our lives as Americans and where we go to work and how often we go to work.
Brian Pascus (11:12.834)
Well, it's interesting. When I spoke with him about that, I think the question that comes up with that is risk. What type of risk are you taking when you decide to make this investment in an uncertain asset class? In an asset class where we don't necessarily know how many Americans are going to be using it going forward, especially as demographics change, baby boomers die out, Gen X gets older, millennials get older, and Gen Z who was raised with a cell phone glued to their eyes and a computer basically attached to their brains.
Are these people familiar with, you know, interacting in an office space and using it? And then you have, you know, millions of American graduates who came of age during COVID were for a four-year period. They were often, you know, told to work from home, don't come in, be virtual, be mobile, be hybrid.
So, you know, that's a type of risk that comes out of investing in the asset class right now, just because we don't know where it's going. And two things I think came up in response to that. The first one was that, you know, office is distressed right now, and people are saying, you know, you've had a lot of people be negative about office, and there's certainly good reason to. There is a ton of office that is no longer needed. You drive along a lot of American highways, the office space that's not in central business districts that's along the road, you know, the classic like six-story glass office building, no one's going to want to work there.
No one's going to want to go into those places. That's a bad investment. But at one Vanderbilt next to Grand Central Station, that's 100 stories tall, class A office space, very nice, very new, people want to go to work there. That's the type of office building where you're going to get up in the morning and look forward to doing that.
So it depends. It depends on neighborhoods. It depends on location. It depends on the underlying assumptions behind what the sponsors have done with the property.
But, you know, they also point out that offices a lot of times tie to politics, because offices, for better or worse, define the skylines of American cities and the downtowns. We talk about, you know, the skyline of Cincinnati or Austin, Texas. You know, these aren't like the biggest skylines, but when you look at them, the tallest buildings there are usually going to be office buildings, you know.
And the thing is, you don't know what's going to happen to a downtown, even in Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, a lot of class A office buildings were built that are not being used as much as they have been previously. Brookfield's had all sorts of issues with their office buildings there. You don't know what's going to happen, and this is a long way of saying it, in terms of the politics around the cities. That is something that came up with these developers in that they're kind of at the mercy of the local political choices made that impact public safety.
Because when public safety gets difficult, and it worries folks, you're not going to have anyone come to the office, no matter if you're in one Vanderbilt in central, in Midtown New York, if people are worried about crime. So that's the biggest concern that these developers and these sponsors and these investors have about future office usage. It's not so much whether people come back to work because it seems that we've kind of plateaued it around one third, about 33% of people are going to be hybrid and that's how it is.
But then everyone else is, you know, that 66% is pretty used to coming in a lot. If not, three or four days a week. No one comes in on Fridays, it seems. And that's fine. That's probably good for the country in the long run to have more time with your family. But the main thing that concerns these developers is what happens around central business districts with public safety, because nothing will impact the office investment worse than concerns about high crime.
Paul (14:58.944)
You're obviously in New York, Brian, and you just mentioned Los Angeles, obviously what's happening in San Francisco with the office space and really just with commercial real estate in general there. I think everybody's familiar with that landscape. I'm interested, when you talk to people like Chris and Ethan and maybe some of these others, did you get any indication of where they're looking to invest, are they looking to invest in these major LA, New York, San Francisco markets, or are they looking at these office spaces in Cincinnati, Tampa, some of those mid markets?
Brian Pascus (15:31.362)
You know, I think they're holding their cards close to their vest right now because they're in the process of fundraising. You know, SL Green recently announced its intention to invest one billion dollars in New York City specific office. Scout Reckless RXR announced its own one billion dollar fundraising venture for I think New York office space as well.
So New York's obviously a play because it is kind of like the top real estate environment in the United States, but I spoke with Wooking Cho who's an investor based in Florida And what West Palm Beach and also Washington DC and he's playing in the south they've spent he raised a 500 million dollar vehicle Last year for distressed office. He's so far only invested 60 million dollars into a property in Dallas And he told me he's taking a very conservative approach, you know that they're really gonna wait and see their, it seems that they're market agnostic.
You know, if there's a good deal out there, they'll jump on it. And the markets I think one should look at is where is there going to be the most distress? And obviously Los Angeles is going to have quite a bit, but it's unclear California, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, just the general culture of that state, it seems that it's been harder to get folks, especially in the tech sphere, especially with the weather, to come back to the office full time.
In comparison to, you know, New York living here, we are seeing a pretty good amount of people come back on three to four days a week. That said, Washington, D.C., I think, is going to be a prime target for distressed investing because so much of that office space is used by the federal government. And under President Biden, it's been a long time for federal employees to come back.
And that's something I think that's not fully appreciated right now in that, you know, the Biden administration did not force their employees to come back. They took office obviously in January, 2021 when the pandemic was still raging. It was at a bad point, obviously. The vaccines hadn't even been out yet. So I think that there might've been, if we look back on a consequential decision the administration will have made in its first term, that's going to be one of them.
Because DC is a ghost town. We have a reporter, Keith Lurie, who's stationed in DC, and he writes about it often. And I went to college in DC. I'd visit multiple times a year. You walk around and it's not the same city. No one is around downtown. And this is our nation's capital. It's a beautiful city. It's as pretty as Paris. And yet, no one's coming back in. So you're gonna have a lot of issues with those loans on these DC office buildings. And I think that's gonna be a prime target for distressed investing.
Paul (18:42.664)
I'm really interested especially since you mentioned what's happening in DC. A lot of commuters in DC, right? A lot of people who live in Alexandria, commute into DC. So those longer commute times, I'm sure, look at some place like New York City, you're a subway ride away usually. And that's kind of a part of the New York experience, right? Like getting on the subway, going to work every day, walking down the street, experiencing the culture, experiencing the people.
Less so in LA and San Francisco, like you mentioned. But when you talk about DC or some of these other places, I'm interested in so many, I mean, I'm looking at some stats here. There's been as much as 65% discounts off of the original values of some of the office spaces and some of these big cities that were purchased pre-pandemic.
So because the values have dropped so drastically, obviously the equity is gone, so the lenders have to take a mark down. We've been over that, we all understand that. But with the uncertainty in the office sector in general, what's the plan for a lot of these buildings? Are these investors targeting these for conversions in some cases, or are they gonna or is the plan to hold them as traditional office assets?
Brian Pascus (19:49.186)
Well, conversions are going to be part of the conversation, but that's going to be done on a case by case basis. Office conversion into residential is extremely difficult to do. And I'll tell you the reason why it's so hard. I've had conversations with developers. For any residential building, you're going to need to build a lot of apartments. And in every apartment, you're going to want to have one or two, sometimes three bathrooms. A bathroom is contingent on the plumbing system. An office building's plumbing system was set up, so that there's only a couple of bathrooms on every floor and they're situated usually in the center of the building.
Okay, so the piping runs all the way through and that's what people use for their bathrooms. It's the same floor plan on every building. That is incredibly difficult to change if you're trying to convert an office building into a residential building and move the piping system around to make these good looking apartments have certain layouts that people will actually rent at high levels in order to make back your money.
So it's extremely cost intensive and hard to do to convert an office building into a residential building, especially if it's older. Also, there's an issue with windows. A lot of these office buildings are glass towers that the windows don't open. So in most American cities, there's no zoning code in the world that will allow you to have a residential building that doesn't allow you to have open windows. It has to do with fire hazard stuff, it has to do with safety, and even just general quality of life.
So a lot of times it's impractical to convert an office building into a residential building. That being said, where there is a amount of value is on the land. So I think you'll see, I think Chad Carpenter said he thinks 15% of office buildings will be demolished. And that makes sense. And hopefully they'll be rebuilt as residential housing considering our country needs so much residential housing.
You know there's obviously demand for people to live granted most Americans would like to own their home but we don't live in a perfect world and we live in an economy that's been turned upside down by a variety of forces. So and I've written about this more people are going to be renting in the future and one of the ways we could alleviate the housing crisis is through construction of multi-family apartments either on the land that obsolete office used to use or in the case where it does pencil through conversions.
New York has shown an interesting path forward because after 9-11, the downtown, the financial district where the World Trade Centers were, that was the first part of Manhattan that was ever built up. It's the southern tip of the island, it's near the Statue of Liberty. So the earliest office buildings in America built in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, those classic Great Depression art deco structures like 70 Pine, 40 Wall Street, the Woolworth building at 233 Broadway. And there's many, many more.
These buildings were constructed as the original office towers. But when people moved out, when businesses moved out of the financial district after 9-11, that neighborhood was a ghost town. So there was no one who wanted to work there and companies did not wanna work there. So what they did do was they converted, all these old 1930s style office buildings into residences.
Now the reason that worked was because the floor plans back then in the mid 20th century were almost set up like apartments for offices. That's like how it was. And so it actually tended to work perfectly for conversions. But New York has shown that it's possible to re-invent a large central business district into what it is today. Much of the financial district is residences.
There's still a bunch of businesses down there. Obviously the stock exchange is down there. It's where Wall Street is. But there is a path forward. So some of them will be converted, some might not, some will be demolished. But that's kind of how they view it. And then also others will continue to chug along. And that's where this new capital infusions will come in handy.
Paul (24:02.596)
Yeah, in a past life when I worked in New York City for a small company, our office felt more like the apartment in Friends than it did any of the apartments that you see now with the floor to ceiling glass windows and the high rises. I could definitely see how especially on the southern side of the island, how that could be the case.
Brian Pascus (24:21.367)
There's a lot of weird apartments, or there's just a lot of weird buildings in New York. Trust me, I've been inside them. So that's one of the charms and the curses of the city.
Paul (24:30.364)
With all these institutional investors and these people who are raising capital to take advantage of this office distress, aside from getting involved as a part of these funds and a part of these REITs, what does this mean for the smaller investors who are interested in office space?
Brian Pascus (24:49.63)
Well, I think the way in for a small investor would be through a publicly traded REIT. You could buy in there. That's kind of your only option because all this other distressed fundraising for investment, this is done through the heavy hitters, private equity, debt funds, pension funds, family offices, billionaires.
It's an unfortunate element of capitalism. But there's a whole environment of private equity money and investment money that just multiplies on itself and invests in various asset classes throughout our country. And it basically regenerates on itself and regenerates its own returns for a very small group of Americans and businesses. There is a 1% that exists and that's where this fundraising comes in and that's what it does. It literally, this is private equity 101, this is debt funds 101.
It just consistently fund raises, invests, makes certain returns and does it all over again. So I don't really have a good answer in terms of how Mavenpops can get in besides the public spaces, you know, of the various indexes out there for them. And I think, you know, a REIT like Penner and Carpenter's, Reven Officer is one of them. You know, and of course, you could buy shares of other mortgage REITs, you know, that are publicly traded.
That's probably the best bet, but unfortunately a lot of the killings that are going to be made in office investment are going to go to those big dogs who already have control of the pot.
Paul (26:31.412)
Yeah, it sounds like it's a huge opportunity for passive investors, maybe less so for the active investors and the GPs who are trying to raise capital on their own.
Brian Pascus (26:38.398)
Yeah, it's gonna cost a lot to get in on any basis into an office property because the loans are normally so big. I mean, these are normally north of $100 million loans depending on the property.
Paul (26:53.736)
You know, Ash Patel, who is one of our hosts, he absolutely loves office real estate and he's been preaching about the opportunity ahead in office for some time now on this very show. So I'm sure wherever he is right now, he's really excited that we're having this conversation and even more excited about the opportunity that's ahead. But he invests in his company is called Beyond Multifamily. He invests in everything Beyond Multifamily.
And I'm really interested for your perspective on this, given the people that you've spoken to, with all the distress happening in office, it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows for multifamily in these last couple of years with the rising interest rates. So I'm wondering how much does the distress happening in multifamily, which has typically been commercial real estate's darling, where everybody wants to put their money, how is what's happening in multifamily impacting these decisions to get into office and to get into some of these other asset classes or are they not related at all?
Brian Pascus (27:55.046)
For my conversations, I don't know if they're entirely related. I know with multifamily, you had a growth of the syndication space during COVID, where you had a lot of passive investors enter in for the first time into the multifamily investment space, and a lot of them got burned.
A lot of this stuff turned out to be, I don't want to call it a Ponzi scheme, but it took advantage of hardworking Americans' best intentions to invest in an asset class that was very hot, and they might not have been given the full amount of information on what the properties they were investing into, where their money was going, because a lot of these multifamily syndicators have gone bust, and their names are pretty familiar to people in this space.
I'm not going to name any names, but if you just Google it, you'll see the articles written about some of these folks, these companies that don't necessarily appear to be the straightest shooters, so to speak.
In terms of multifamily, the asset class is going through an adjustment. I know cap rates are changing right now for it from what they've previously been for a long time, largely because of the interest rate movements that are finally settling down from all the fluctuations we've had in the last two years, really. But the asset class rents are still steadily climbing, and it's been good.
Folks need housing, so I don't think multifamily will experience any sort of demand shift. And I think the supply is relatively consistent and is forecasted to be so going forward. I don't know if there's any correlation between investments in multifamily and investments in office, simply because commercial real estate is such a unique business with its asset classes. Everything fluctuates.
What people mostly compare office to is not so much multifamily, but what happened to retail. So you had retail experience in the 2010s. A lot of capital moved away from retail. A lot of malls went out of business. You had a lot of vacancies and ghost malls appear. And you've had a lot of obsolete malls and destruction. So a lot of people lost money.
But then, it's been shown that the American public is still, they still like to shop in person. You know, online retail of course is a huge part, e-commerce is a huge part, but people do want to get out of their houses. They want to live life, they want to go shopping, they want to try on the clothes instead of buying it and returning it because it doesn't fit, and dealing with all that BS. So retail has rebounded. It's now an asset class that investors like.
It is what a top executive at CBRE told me. That's the best correlation to office right now is what happened with retail and even hospitality during COVID. Of course, everyone ran for the hills when hospitality, when the pandemic hit because no one would stay in a hotel for fear of getting sick. But once the pandemic subsided and people were no longer scared of the virus, everyone wanted to go to hotels and go on trips. People wanted to travel.
Hotels is a hugely popular investment category now. And you also saw certain hotels, like the ones near national parks. Those did very well during the pandemic because a lot of Americans weren't driving. And where did they stay? They stayed at hotels near parks. And those proved to be very popular.
So commercial real estate is such an interesting business because it actually is very reflective of human behavior and economic trends. So it's not just like numbers on a sheep. There's a huge human element to it. There's a huge behavioral element to it. So when looking at office, I think that's one of the things you just got to consider and keep in mind is just kind of how our behavior changes over time, what people want to do, if they have to go into work, where do they want to do it. That will kind of determine whether or not a lot of the stress and these investments in off distressed office properties will pay off down the line.
Paul (32:17.276)
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And Brian, I think the last thing here, before we get you out of here, is I love to ask this question anytime I have a journalist on who's out on the ground covering these topics and turning over stones, right? And is digging up this information, these muckrakers, right? What's the most interesting revelation that you had while researching this piece and while interviewing for this piece?
Brian Pascus (32:41.03)
Most interesting revelation. Let me think about that? That's a good question.
I liked hearing from, and I think I mentioned this earlier, I liked hearing from Chad Carpenter discussing the correlations between some of the down cycles that we experienced in the early 1990s with Office and then during the 08 financial crisis in terms of distressed investing. I think for me when I heard that I said to myself if I had 500 million dollars to my name, aside from giving a good portion of that away to charity I would probably want to invest in distressed real estate.
I think that would be a smart move to do because it can only go up. People always need to live places and when things go down, as economic cycles occur, there's always a value drop in these things. That is the time to buy low. So for me, hearing from some of these buccaneering entrepreneurs, these capitalists on how they made their money and what they did and getting the inside scoop, you learn some things.
And it made sense to me. And it makes sense to me now that office does seem to be a generational investment with some properties. Some people are gonna get burned. Some of these investments are gonna go north, are gonna go south because of factors that go beyond what they can plan, whether it's environmental or political. But others will go north. And I guess so the big revelation to me, the most interesting thing I learned, it might seem obvious to people, but, I'm only a journalist, I'm not an investor, is buying low is truly the smartest thing to do.
Paul (34:17.948)
Brian, I love it. Thank you so much for, A, your hard work on putting this piece together. As a quasi journalist myself, I understand what it takes to go out there and like I said, turn over those stones and contact these people and really put together a really thoughtful piece. So I'm appreciative that you did that. I really enjoy reading it. For those of you who are listening who wanna read this, the link will be in the show notes. We'll also be sharing it on social media along with this with this episode. Real quick before we jump off, Brian, tell people how they can find you and how they can follow your work.
Brian Pascus (34:48.806)
We could just Google my name and go to Commercial Observer. All my articles are archived and subscribe to Commercial Observer. We have a wonderful print magazine we put out once a week. It's truly phenomenal, the depth of our coverage and the length of our stories. You're not getting pitter-patter journalism that's only five of my words. You're getting really meaty pieces that explain how our economy works, how you can make money off of it, and how you can better understand the world of commercial real estate and commercial real estate finance. So subscribe to Commercial Observer and you can thank me later.
Paul (35:26.152)
Great Brian, I love that. Thank you again for joining us today and for all the work that you do and Hopefully we'll get the opportunity to connect again soon when you do another one of these great pieces.
Brian Pascus (35:35.014)
Absolutely, Paul. Thank you for having me on your podcast. I'm happy to come back. Thank you.
