WS1863 Leverage Technology to Navigate a Changing Market | Highlights Rob Finlay

In this highlight episode,  Whitney Sewell, interviews Rob Finlay from Thirty Capital. Thirty Capital is a company that specializes in asset optimization, debt optimization, and equity optimization in the real estate industry. They combine their experience in capital markets, asset management, and technology to provide value to their clients.

During the interview, Rob explains that Thirty Capital focuses on asset optimization, debt optimization, and equity optimization. They believe that these three factors are crucial in creating value in a property. They use their expertise in the capital markets, asset management, and technology to provide actionable insights and help clients make informed decisions.

Rob highlights the importance of debt management and debt optimization. He explains that debt is a specialized product with various factors to consider, such as forward rates, forward curves, and different types of products associated with debt. Thirty Capital helps clients find the best debt structure for their assets, whether it's keeping existing debt, restructuring existing debt, or finding new debt.

When it comes to technology, Rob emphasizes the importance of using consumable technology that provides immediate value. They utilize technology to distill large data sets and complex analytics into actionable items. By using technology, they can make better decisions and remove room for error.

To listen to the full episodes and gain valuable insights from industry experts like Rob Finlay, click on the links below. Don't miss out on the opportunity to learn more about real estate syndication and how to navigate the current market challenges.


https://lifebridgecapital.com/2023/08/28/generate-market-beating-returns-using-technology-and-innovation-rob-finlay/


https://lifebridgecapital.com/2023/08/29/navigating-a-change-in-the-market-rob-finlay/

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Transcript

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I'm your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, we've packed a number of shows together to give you some highlights. I know you're going to enjoy the show. Thank you for being with us today. You know, let's focus a little bit on, you know, maybe Thirty capital at the moment. I want to dive into the tech piece. I know you all have such a strong, you know, focus on the tech side of the business and asset management side, debt management, those things. And I want to get to some of that. Or actually, I want to back up a little bit more. And I'd mentioned this ahead of time, you know, your website. mentions, you know, you all create strategy for risk, debt management, I know you're on capital side as well now, but, but you're helping, you know, operators with with that the risk and death, debt management, what does that mean? Exactly? I want the listeners know, there's probably a number of them who may be a good client for you, or how you could add a ton of value to them? What does that mean? And how do you all help help clients in that way?

Rob Finlay: Sure. So I think the way I think I have to step back almost and answer your first question, which is, you know, we believe in a Thirty capital, and I believe that that a proper investment manager, such as a real estate sponsor or a real estate investor who's syndicating in their equity positions. There's three ways that you really have to create value in a property, right? There's asset optimization, but there's also debt optimization and equity optimization. And if you think about Thirty Capital as a company, that's what we focus on. We focus on asset optimization, debt optimization and equity optimization. And by doing that, we do this through a combination of experience in the capital markets. We do it as experienced asset managers. We do it as well as technologists. And we use technology and innovation to help basically provide that alpha or that special sauce that takes very complex theories and very complex things and boils them down to actionable items. So when we talk about debt management, for example, right now there's a lot of people and everybody's talked about what's going on in the debt markets and this impending tsunami of maturing debts. And that's going to require a lot of sort of creativity and thought. And while I think a lot of people in the real estate space are very good at asset optimization, really if I increase rents and lower expenses, I create more value for the property, whereas debt, because it's a very specialized structure or product where you have things like forward rates, forward curves, you have LIBOR going to SOFR, it's already gone to SOFR, but you have different term SOFR and all these other types of products associated with debt. Debt becomes a vehicle and a structure on its own. And so the debt management and debt optimization really comes in and tying into what we believe is the best case for the asset. How is the asset going to perform and matching with the way that the asset is going to perform with the best debt structure possible? And that could be keeping your existing debt. restructuring your existing debt, finding new debt, finding new equity, whatever it is. And that's basically what we spend probably most of our time right now is with real estate sponsors who have a certainty of something happening within the next period of time. Either they're about to refinance or their asset is maybe struggling a little bit, whatever it is, that's where we come in.

Whitney Sewell: Is there a specific size of operator or property that kind of fits your all's bucket, you know, or does it matter?

Rob Finlay: It typically doesn't matter for us, but I think for the most part, we typically focus on the mid market, right? So these are gonna be people who have several assets, 300 million of assets under management and up, right? So they have five to 10 assets. That's our sweet spot, our bread and butter. We have large institutional customers that have 150 assets, and we have customers that have two or three, but our sweet spot is sort of in that middle market range.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Okay. Well, speak to how technology is helping you all to do that, right? Or maybe even how the listener can use technology to better their assets as well.

Rob Finlay: Right. So I think what's important is it's It's a combination of technology, but also knowing what questions to ask, right? I think technology and innovation sort of get looped in together and not necessarily correct, right? Just because you think of innovation doesn't mean that you have to use technology. We use technology, and I've used this word. I don't think I've coined it, but I use this word a lot, which is consumable. And we believe in consumable technology. And that means I'm at an age where, yeah, I'm very fortunate. In the past 15 years, I've been involved in technology and I've had multiple startups in the software space that I've sold off and all that. But for the most part, I need to be able, I put my real estate hat on. And if I cannot use the technology and find immediate value for it, it has no purpose for me, right? There's no need to do it because I don't have the time or skills to try to learn some special advanced AI language and programming in order to try to figure something out. So we utilize technology to help make our lives better, and I think we use technology to help distill a large data set and a lot of advanced analytics to make better decisions.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah, any time we can just remove the room for error, right? We're way ahead and tech seems to be helping us with that, obviously, in massive ways. Is there any tech specifically that you know that like the user could use to help with that at all?

Rob Finlay: Well, yeah, I think, look, there's it's All of this stuff is available. It's just a matter of how much you want to do. Right. And that's that's what sort of it's really nice with other industries. Commercial real estate starting to get better. Right. Where where, you know, five years ago, marketing automation didn't really exist in commercial real estate. you know, bots didn't exist in commercial real estate. Now that's sort of a standard practice. I think there are things like the data and analytics that you get from CoStar, data and analytics that you get from Moody's and Yardy, all these big systems are data in itself. It's just how do you utilize them, right? And that's, so it's about opening up your eyes as well as actually being active to go after and understand what is relevant and what's trending in your market in terms of new technology, new products that people can use.

Whitney Sewell: It can be hard to adopt new technology, right? I mean, it's hard to learn. Like you mentioned, sometimes you don't have time to invest in some technologies or figure it all out or learn it if it's not adding value immediately. How do you assess that, even knowing how much time it's going to take to learn something or if it's going to be worthwhile or not?

Rob Finlay: It all comes down to ROI, right? And that's really the key thing is you have to, as a professional, right? Your job as a real estate professional, a real estate investor is to analyze a lot of things and make a common sense decision, but it's based upon data and fact. And then ultimately being able to take that data and facts that you're getting from asking yourself questions adding on to that, making sure that you have a feedback loop to make sure that that's actually accurate, right? Are you really saving time with this? Are you really making money with this? Are you really doing whatever with this? And so I think we utilize that sort of that same common sense goal that we have is when we create it, which is, can I use this quickly? And can I receive value quickly? a huge install, a huge implementation, a huge change of work. And we just, I mean, we've been through this as our own organization, as we changed CRM systems. We also changed, we changed property managers for part of our Southeast portfolio, and we changed a whole different system. So now we have all these different systems and we created one of our companies called Lobby CRE, which is a data and analytics asset management platform, because we had different property management systems generating different information and we needed to put them in and compare apples to apples. And so we created a system to do that.

Whitney Sewell: That's incredible. We could all use some of that. That's for sure. We're working with different management companies and different information that's provided in different places or, you know, yeah, it would be great to have one place to look at all that and be able to compare. Speak to the asset management piece of technology as well. And you mentioned, you know, Excel as an example earlier. How's that helping on the asset management side as well?

Rob Finlay: Yeah. So I'll tell you, it's, you know, you, you have to be living under a rock, um, or in the most amazing markets in the world. If you don't realize that, you know, especially in the multifamily space or any real estate space, this is now about operations. This is the time for, for asset managers to unite everywhere because yeah, the acquisitions people were, were the stars before because they were buying deals and, you know, and the past market deals were going up left to right now. It's up to the asset manager. It's all about cash management, cash flow management, and preserving cash. Technology does an amazing job, once again, by taking a large segment of data and identifying to the user what is critical, what needs their attention. And that's really where we've been focused as an asset manager, if you think about this. If you're an individual asset manager probably has 15,000 pieces of information thrown at them every month, if you will, right? You've got rents, you've got comp rents, you've got benchmarks. How's my property comparing to this property? If you're in Florida or Texas or one of these other markets, your insurance bill just went up 300%. You've got this, you've got that, you've got all these different things. It's impossible for a human. to basically take that kind of information in and look at it from a black and white P&L or a rent rule or a delinquency report, right? You just cannot do it. And so the technology is out there in order to take that information in and deliver it back to the user so that they can consume it, that they can understand. I personally, I'm an old trader, so I like having sort of red, green and normal color, right? And I like using triage reports. So part of my view every morning that I look, I have a probably 25 or 30 KPIs. These are key performance indicators. These are things that are really matter to me, like week over week occupancy or delinquency, change in delinquency, change in AP, whatever it is. And I basically put thresholds around them. So if it's, hey, if my occupancy is just dipped below 95%, I want to see a big red. If my, whatever my accounts payable has gone up. You know, I want to see a big red and by being able to play that all out, I can actually basically triage. Which properties I need to focus my attention on. That's the way I like to look at it. Other asset managers like to look at line charts and bar charts and graphs. Basically it's, it's taking this information and being able to do once again, distill it. I mean, it's, I sound like a broken record as I sit here and say this, but basically making the information available so that you can distill it and make good decisions off of it.

Whitney Sewell: And that's part of the service you all provide to people, right, for other operators, right? Correct.

Rob Finlay: Yeah, correct. Correct. We test, we basically ingest all of their financials and rent information, all that stuff. We standardize it. So if you do have that thing where you have RealPage, Yardi and Trata and all that stuff, we consolidate it, match it to your chart of accounts. and then allow you basically unlimited visualizations on that. And in fact, we spend a lot of our time with our data science team, our data team, and our real estate team talking with owners and customers, helping them get the most important visualizations and data out in front of them and to their key stakeholders or their key people.

Whitney Sewell: Do most of the clients that you all are doing that for have say, you know, in-house management or third party? When does that typically work best?

Rob Finlay: It's both. It's, it's both. It's, I mean, I think, you know, I think it's a, it's a easier use case when you have different property managers, right? Cause you have different systems, different accounting trees, whatever it is. That's, that's a, that's a no brainer. But what's important is when you have your own property management team, It almost is good in many regards, but in some regards, you're not relying on the data that's available to you. You know it exists, but you're not relying on it in the way that I think you would if it was front and center. So, for example, we self-manage a handful of our properties. I know if I need something, I walk down to the accounting office and I say, hey, I need this. you know, can you show me what my, yeah, show me what our current delinquency is, right? As opposed to being able to look at it immediately, you know, I'm at home and I'm thinking, geez, I wonder what delinquency is. Oh, I can go take a look at it right now. Hey, you know what, how does that, how does that match with the rest of my portfolio? Oh, and how does this match with the benchmark of the neighboring properties, right? Because we compare your properties to the market. And so you can actually see, hey, are we actually performing better or is it the market, right? Is it me or the market? What's going on is that if rents are going straight up and mine are going flat, well, maybe that's me, not the market. If everybody's flat, then it's the market.

Whitney Sewell: And it is something you hope your team or yourself or asset managers looking at on a daily basis, right? Those things you're talking about. And I do find as well, it's exactly what you just said. It's nice you talk about, you know, having that in front of you in a simple place, even color code. It's like it draws your eye to it. Right. And like I said, whether it's you or your asset manager, somebody's attention needs to be drawn to it. Right. And it sounds like you have created a technology that helps kind of simplify the data accumulation process so we can get to that decision faster, right?

Rob Finlay: And hopefully more accurately. Right. And it comes down to the same thing, right? We believe, as I said, a 30 capital or high level thought is that there's there's three levers here in real estate. Really, there's there's asset optimization, there's debt optimization and there's equity optimization. Right. So there's and it's just it's just math. Right. Which one are you trying to solve for? Ultimately, you're typically and you should be solving for equity optimization, right? What creates the highest return for me and my investors? And that's what we're solving for because that's really, that's what you're in business for, right? You go out, you use money to go make good investments or investments and maximize return, really trying to show alpha. And in order to show alpha, you have to basically optimize the asset, you have to perform the asset above the market, and you have to perform an optimized debt. So it's not as simple as anybody who's had a floating rate deal who's coming due right now, and maybe they weren't hedged sufficiently or whatever it was, they're sort of feeling that pain of not optimizing your debt.

Whitney Sewell: For sure. Is there maybe an example or a specific asset that you could highlight where they've done specific things because of the information or where they've optimized the equity in ways that maybe we wouldn't have thought of?

Rob Finlay: It was a situation where the property and surprisingly, not every time you go and underwrite a property and you do your performance, is it all golden and rosy? And we went with our operation team and our asset managers, and we said, listen, we've had a good ride on this property. What is it going to look like for the next few years? And because we were looking, we said, boy, we could sell it, we could refinance it, or maybe we just go get a supplement on it and pay a lot of money for the supplement. But which one is the best deal? And by being able to match what the projected horizon was of the property, where we thought the property operations were going to be, basically NOI or net cash flow. We were able to match the appropriate term debt, as well as the size and the structure in order to maximize our equity yields. And that's the kind of analysis that I think people need to do. And I think the people who optimize debt, they're If they did it correctly, they're heroes now. There's articles about them all the time in these real estate publications where one group out of Chicago, I won't name names, but they were out of Chicago. They did a great job. They optimized their debt because they realized that that's just this critical component of an investment. They optimized it. They've made $25 million off of their debt portfolio just by being appropriately hedged. That's outside of asset appreciation. This was appreciation and value in the debt. So that's why we look at debt as debt as its own sort of vehicle as well. It's an important asset. It's an important consideration, especially when you think about how much debt you typically have on a property. Right. You know, if you're if you're if you're one is, you know, pensions and you don't do anything more than 40 percent, well, then, OK, maybe that that might not be true. But if you're trying to get 50, 60, 70% leverage, you need to, it's a big number.

Whitney Sewell: It is a big number. It's such an important part of the whole process, right? I love how you just break those three things down and are thinking through, you know, the tech side to help optimize. Ultimately, like you said, each of those things, because they do all matter in such a big way. Is there, before we have to end this segment, is there a few KPIs, though, that you would say, hey, Whitney, you know, our listeners, these are the top four or five things that every asset manager needs to be focused on right now.

Rob Finlay: You know, I, that's sort of a loaded question. I, I think it comes down to who you are and what you're looking for. Right. I think there's, there are a handful of KPIs and I think, and I think it's who you're asking. Right. Because I look at it the way that I look at real estate and real estate companies is maybe a little bit different. Right. So I look at a real estate company as. a company who's in the business of providing basically investment for real estate. And I look at the way that they operate. as a business as opposed to the underlying sort of individual assets. Does that make sense? What I'm saying is that it's just like, to me, there's a way to, I monitor, like my KPIs are monitoring the business. How quickly do we return capital? How efficient are we with capital? How quickly do we roll over? How long are our investors with us? How long is this? How long is that? And those are things that, how do we compare as a whole to the market? Whereas if I was an asset manager and I had a property, my KPIs might be completely focused on how it's payable, you know, delinquency, you know, basically leading indicators, right? Traffic, delinquency, and looking at debt forward curves.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah, no, that's helpful. I just want anybody, any operators that are listening to be thinking through what are just the fact that you're so focused on the KPIs on a daily basis and you have 25, whatever it is, you know, I just hope that, like you said, this is the time for asset managers to unite. No doubt about it. It's so crucial operations now than it probably has been in the last 10 years. Right.

Rob Finlay: I just want to I want to make sure I spoke correctly. I look at property like a specific property level as about 25 core KPIs. In total, I probably look at about 150 KPIs of what I'm tracking. I'm a big believer in OKRs, setting goals and tying to making sure that the KPIs, the data is correct.

Whitney Sewell: No doubt. Rob, unfortunately, we're going to end this segment. I want the listeners to know that Rob's been very generous with his time. We're going to have another segment with Rob. We're going to dive into some other things and draw some expertise from him. But Rob, how can the listeners get in touch with you and learn more about you and 30 Capital?

Rob Finlay: So, yeah, so they can go directly to 30Capital.com. They can also reach me at www.RobFinlay.com.

Whitney Sewell: You want to tell them about your book and and about that so that where they can find that?

Rob Finlay: Sure, sure. So. So, yeah, thank you. We we released my latest book is called Beyond the Building and how innovation plays a part into commercial real estate. And in this book was. really came from my background in commercial real estate, not only as my own insight, but also I was very fortunate to get a lot of real estate sponsors and real leaders in the industry to help give me insight and information sort of on how they do things. And being in this business for so long, it's always nice when you get to see somebody who's been, who's done something a little different that matters and makes a difference. And Whitney, as you know, you're actually, I mentioned you in my book because of what you've done actually with this podcast, I think is incredibly innovative and quite frankly, genius on how you built your brand and differentiated yourself. And I think that's that's sort of the goal of innovation. And that's what the goal of the book is, is to help real estate owners realize that they need to innovate or else they're going to be the way of the K-marts and the blockbusters.

Whitney Sewell: Rob, with your experience, and I hope the listeners will go back and listen to yesterday's episode and learn more about Rob and 30 Capital and the book that he wrote as well. But he's been in commercial real estate since he was in diapers, it sounds like. So I just love that level or depth of experience, and especially with a few things we're going to discuss in this segment. Because I get asked all the time, and I know Rob does as well, you know, what's going to happen, what do you think is going to happen and, you know, and I love gathering just, you know, what people are looking for watching or what's important to you and I say well nobody has a crystal ball. what you believe is going to happen affects what you're doing today, right? Whether you're buying or selling or, you know, how you're handling yourself and your business is affected by what you believe. Right. And and and so I love it when when somebody has experience like Rob to think through, hey, what is their vision for the future? You know, in the trends they see happening, Rob, let's just jump right in there. I would love to hear, you know, just sharing your your thoughts, your vision for what's happening in the future for commercial real estate or in our industry. And and just, you know, let's dive into some current trends you see happening.

Rob Finlay: Sure, sure. Well, I think, look, it's just on your crystal ball thing. I think, you know, people can make assumptions on what's going to happen. I think there's there's a difference between making sort of a gut assumption versus one that's filled with fact and data and or data and information. and making an educated decision. And so I think that, you know, we like to believe that we make educated decisions, but then you definitely have to look at this gut feel, right? There's stuff going on. So, you know, in terms of the broader commercial real estate market, I have been around enough to know, and I've seen the markets adjust and correct. And I've seen them adjust either because, you know, back in the 80s when everybody was cross collateralized and personally guaranteed loans, you know, good loans went out with bad loans and, you know, there was a huge transfer of wealth and in 2007, where you had, you know, the great crisis. In my opinion, here's where this is an exciting time. I don't think anybody will doubt that commercial real estate is going into some serious headwinds. I think we have two factors that have really prompted a big, big problem. One is increased interest rates. So now it costs a lot of money to borrow money, whereas in the past it didn't. And second, you had this work from home phenomenon that because of COVID has really change the dynamics of things. I think when you look at the data going back to interest rates, you can look at forward curves. I can't guarantee what the Fed's going to do tomorrow or next month or whenever, but I can tell you if I look out at a chart, I can see where the market is predicting where interest rates are going to be. And just knowing us as a country, interest rates will go down in the next few years. But for the next foreseeable future, expect this rate or higher. The question comes down to the things like the work from home phenomenon. The people are, you know, hey, we just want to, you know, I want to work from home. I don't want to see the headlines. What happens to suburban office. What happens to these offices? And yes, people talk about, oh, well, I can, you know, I can reuse them. Well, you can, but it costs a lot of money. Not to mention, if you're going to buy an office building, and it's existing, you still have to maintain the thing, you still have to pay taxes, you still have to pay. So it's all of a sudden, you're in a rut. Not to mention, I think there are some exceptions in these markets, but if you really peel back the multifamily market, you're going to find a lot of headwinds there as well. And so it's going to be really hard to go forward and develop a brand new class A multifamily when you know that there's a handful of properties in your market that are going to be going back to the lender and are going to be sold. And so that's where we start to see that to me is where there is some headwinds and some struggles. Flipside, the opportunity is that there will be great opportunity. There has always been in these changes in the markets have been such a tremendous transfer of wealth in these big market adjustments, where in the past, as I said, I mentioned in the 80s, It was real estate investors basically went out and anybody who had dollars in liquidity, doctors and lawyers, ended up getting a huge portfolio. The second time around, people with money, these big investment shops were able to. So I think that this is a time for people to look and think differently as they look at opportunities in these markets. Also can't stress enough, cash is king, liquidity is king, and please, for heaven's sake, focus on cash and cash management. That's a tough thing for people to hear right now because people came in with an initial investment thesis. I'm going to buy this property. I'm going to put this much money into it. I'm going to improve it. Rents are going to go up and we're going to be able to sell it and it's going to be great. Well, that might have happened a few years ago. That's not happening as much right now. So it comes down to really thinking a long term approach, looking at the asset. looking at realistically, what are my cash projections going to be? Do I really want to improve it? Or maybe I should just hoard cash right now and be protective. Should I talk to my investors and say, hey, listen, I have two choices, I might have to make a capital call down the road, or maybe I'm not giving you your full distribution right now, which one, which one's more palatable. So open conversations, open communications, but once again, it is, it's about operations right now, finding operations.

Whitney Sewell: I love how you are even took it all the way to communicating with investors, you know, you know, because it is it's like when you're in trouble like that, there's a chance, hey, if we just pause distributions, we may be able to survive. Right. We may be able to get through the storm. Right. So we don't have to do a capital call. It's like most of our you know, that's just like a word we hate even saying around here. Right. But I just don't want to ever have to do that. But I know, I believe, Rob, that probably within the next at least 12, if not at least 18 to 24 months, it's going to be a very common thing, I'm afraid.

Rob Finlay: Yep. And I forgot to mention that, you know, I talk about interest rates and I talk about work from home. Yeah, I forgot about the third thing, which is, you know, expense inflation, right? You've got, yeah, you've got insurance, which is out of this roof. You've got, you know, taxes that are that are going up, you got finding people, you know, so you have this incredible expense. And that's, you're right, this this conversation, and we actually at 30 Capital, we spend a lot of time helping people with the facts and plan so that they can have those conversations with the investors. And we can say, hey, listen, I talked in the last episode, we talked about, is it the market or is it me? And one of the things that we have, we bought a company last year, that aggregates operational data and gives us the ability to determine where our property is, basically in terms of revenue and line-by-line expenses, where our property is relative to a benchmark. And we can say, okay, well, you know what, hey, revenue, we're all flat. Expenses, we're all up, right? And we can say, hey, you know what, this is actually the market. We can also see before we have this conversation, hey, wait a second, everybody else's revenue has gone up, my revenue is actually flat. Oh, my expenses are going way up and everybody else's are sort of flat, holding still. So maybe it's me. So the first thing we often suggest is take a deep dive into your asset and your operations. Focus on asset optimization first. Once you've got the asset and once you have the strategy for asset optimization, then you have to come back and basically tie it into debt optimization. Based upon the asset today and where I'm going to see it over the next few years, What's the appropriate debt? Where is my outstanding debt? How does this work? Right. And that will solve two very important questions for you, right? It's, am I optimized my asset? Yep. I can get there. Cause I'll have a plan debt. This is what I need to do. Now we take the two and that will basically determine your conversations. Your equity optimization will determine your conversations with your investors.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. And the sooner, the better that you know those things, right? If you don't already, to optimize your operations. That's similar to what we talked about in the last episode. Like you said, man, it is a time for asset managers to shine like never before. And, you know, anytime, even highlighting yesterday too, it's like anytime tech can help you to lessen errors, you know, or potential errors and even the speed of the data. Right. That's one thing I love too. It's like the data is immediately, you know, on your dashboard every morning versus having to go collect it every day, right, or go to 12 different places and pull it together. I think that just helps you to make decisions so much faster and more accurately, to say the least. You know, one thing you mentioned was You know, it's going to be a major opportunity, right? Cash is going to be king, those things. Any suggestions, just even for our operators, even our past investors, to be prepared for that, right? I think it could be a scary time too, right? We got all this cash, maybe they have cash, you know, right? And it's like, when do I jump in? But I don't know, just any thoughts on how I'm helping those prepare.

Rob Finlay: I think it comes down to when to jump in is always a question. I think I mentioned on the first one, we bought the majority of our portfolio in 2010. That was a pretty good time to jump in. And I kept on buying, but I kicked myself. I pretty much stopped buying and probably around 2018 was probably our last maybe 2019 was our last acquisition wholly. We still invested with sponsors all the way up until probably about a year or so ago. Actually, that's not true. We still invest actually up to the last year. But jumping in, it all depends on what you're jumping into, right? So a 30% occupied suburban office, OK, sure, if you're going to jump in today, you better get compensated for it. Right. But and that might be a great play, by the way. Those are you know, I mean, there's there's a lot of people out there and myself included. I don't think I'm necessarily opposed to well-positioned office buildings in key markets. Right. Once again, looking at data. I've got to make sure that I've got the facts and figures behind it. Census data, growth trends, people moving there, quality of life, all the things that typically go into our investment thesis anyways. You know what? A decent multifamily that maybe I'm buying at a little tighter effective cap, but you know what? And it's definitely not the home run that I had before, but you're not gonna find those right now. And I think the other thing too is having gone through this several times, The amount of liquidity that comes into these markets sometimes is so great and so big. You can't underestimate it. Right. And that's what we're feeling right now is this. all of that. And that's what every I think that's what makes it very difficult. I think many people would would just say, hey, listen, let's just get it over with. Let's have our correction. Let's get back. Right. Let's go. Let's go back to recovery. That's not going to happen for a while because sellers don't really want to sell until they really have to. And buyers think that there's going to be a heck of a deal. And so it just becomes that, you know, nobody, that's why we have sales data. It'd be tough to be a commercial broker right now, an investment sales broker, right? Because their business is down 70%. So I think that's the way I look at it is, is this going to be a decent deal? Can I pencil this out? Once again, taking data and facts, matching the property pro forma with a debt horizon and a debt optimization will create equity optimization for you.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's we're playing chicken kind of right, you know, as a buyer and seller. And, yeah, and the more information, the better, you know, Rob, what's the what's the most challenging part in y'all's business right now?

Rob Finlay: sort of that indecision in the market, right? Our capital markets group, which relies on transactional volume, right? So our capital markets group, it's to fees with ease, and we do hedging advisory. So obviously, if you're not selling a loan or getting a new loan, you're not, you know, you don't really need those businesses as much. So that's obviously a challenge, right? Transactional volume is down, makes our business difficult. On the flip side, fortunately for us, our asset management side and our technology side is going quite strong because there are borrowers and there's sponsors and investors who are in a situation where they're just looking for some third party advice. Hey, how do I talk to my investors? How do I get the facts to know that I'm doing the right thing? And how do I actually look at information. And our technology business is strong as well. But it's the same thing. People don't want to spend money when the market is bad. It's always the same. It never fails for me. Back when we started our business in the technology, the asset management space, everybody was doing acquisitions. You buy properties, hold it for a year, sell it and make a lot of money and you're a genius. Nobody really cared because it didn't matter. You didn't know that the person next to you did the same thing, but made three times as much. All you know is that you made a lot. And so that masked the operations that we're feeling today. Now it's really into the operation side, but they don't have those big engines of acquisitions feeding so much revenue into the organization. So it comes back to, I think in that particular case, we stress that people need to look at their operations and need to look at their business. And I think that's always a challenge because people are very tactical now. They're looking at individual triage, right? It's this property is 123 Main Street. That property is in trouble. I need to focus on that. And we're trying to elevate the conversation to say, think about your company as a technology company or an innovative company whose product is real estate. and focus on elevate. If you can elevate your decision making and make it more strategic, all of the tactical stuff gets a lot easier and a lot better.

Whitney Sewell: Thank you for being with us again today. I hope that you have learned a lot from the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I hope you're telling your friends about the Real Estate Syndication Show and how they can also build wealth in real estate. You can also go to lifebridgecapital.com and start investing today.