AI, Real Estate & Risk: Lessons from Goose Hunting & Billion-Dollar Deals | Investor Panel Highlights

What does goose hunting have to do with investing in AI and real estate? A surprising analogy kicks off this dynamic investor panel covering today's most relevant topics in the real estate market.

In this video, you'll hear from a powerhouse lineup of investors, developers, and operators across multifamily, private lending, regenerative real estate, healthcare-integrated communities, and more. Topics discussed include:

Real estate investment strategies for the next decade

Why preferred equity and syndicates are being re-evaluated

How physicians and family offices are partnering on purpose-driven developments

Why raw land and eco-retreats are growing trends

The risk of being “first in the V” when chasing new ideas like AI

Featuring insights from:
✔️ National REIT operators
✔️ Next-gen family office investors
✔️ Surgeons turned real estate developers
✔️ Eco-resort and net-zero project leaders
✔️ Legacy brokers with 200,000+ agents

This conversation blends hard-won wisdom with fresh ideas for navigating today’s investment environment — don’t miss it.

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#RealEstateInvesting #AI #PrivateEquity #FamilyOffice #RealAssets #TripleNet #EcoRealEstate #CapitalMarkets #RealEstatePanel

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Transcript

Hey guys, you know, I can't help but tell you when they were talking about the AI
thing Do we have any goose hunters in the room any goose hunters? What you learn
when you're out hunting geese is That the probability that the goose that's in the
front of the V gets popped is very high because the minute you pull up with the
gun you instinctively go hit that first goose in the V and so when new ideas come
along it makes me think of goose hunting because we tend to sit back and go let
those guys go try that first and let's see if that works so anyhow we're here to
talk about real estate real estate investing in the next decade. We've got a great
panel here. We're going to start out by allowing everybody to introduce themselves.
And if you will, talk about any specialty area real estate that y 'all look at
specifically. I can tell you I'm a little different here because I'm more a broker.
Many of you heard me speak yesterday. We have a very large company, 200 ,000 active
agents with the largest privately owned real estate franchise in the world. And I
get this question all the time. People go, did you know you were going to do that?
No, no way. I mean, it just turned into this very fortunate that we had a lot of
people who believed in what we were doing. But we see all asset classes because of
that. We have 3 thousand commercial agents embedded around the U .S. and parts of
the world. So we see lots of parts of the market. So let me start out. Why don't
you guys take a little time. Tell us who you are and about your firm and then any
assets, specific asset classes you look at. We are an opportunistic real estate
investment trust. We're a national fund. We specialize in private credit. And as far
as real estate and what we look in, we're all real estate professionals. I'm sure
you could probably tell from my accent, I started in New York real estate 30 years
ago. So as far as what we are looking at with respect to what we're investing in,
we have no specific bucket. We have no specific asset class. We look at the real
estate, we look at the sponsor, and if the basis makes sense, if the deal makes
sense, we're in. If it doesn't make sense, we're out. So, fortunately enough,
we're balance sheet lenders in the private credit arena. So we do not have a
necessary bucket that a deal has to fit into for us. So again, just any real
estate deal, and I know that sounds so broad, but real estate deal could be good,
right? Any real estate deal could really make sense if the basis is right, if the
sponsor is right, if the location and the fundamentals are correct. So, that's what
we're looking for. We're a Dallas -based family office.
Partners are Indian Americans, so, you know, the DNA first and foremost as a basis
is land, hotels, and gas stations, but we're branching out right now.
We're looking at a canopy by Hilton, a hotel, opportunity zone and historic building
and as well as triple net deals right now it's tax season so you know we love to
invest you know a triple net preschool buildings government buildings 7 % cap rate we
do it all in -house off -market thank you hey Barry would you do me a favor define
for the group here what triple net is I'm not sure everybody would know. Right, so
Chippum Net basically means that you know we don't like to get our hands dirty, we
just collect the check and the tenants do all the work. And I spent a large part
of my career building US academic medical centers outside the US where I worked with
sovereign wealth and high worth individuals and that led me on a journey when I
came back to the US to really explore how we can better invest in our biggest
export in the US which isn't military.
development, investment, and management companies. So delighted to meet you all here
today, and I thank Richard for the kind invitation to participate. - If I can stop
you a second, Rakesh, that's incredible, because I have people now who say to me,
well yes, I need to have this procedure done, but we're gonna go down to Panama to
have it done. How does that impact what you do building these centers outside of
that?
Well, there's a lot there. So people travel for different reasons. Sadly, one of the
most frequent reasons that you're citing is cost. We simply are crippling in the
health care system because people without insurance or people who cannot be employed
by the right employers simply cannot afford to have life -saving therapy. And that's
a bigger question regarding rejuvenation and rebuilding of the health care and
insurance system, which I'm also involved with in my executive's roles. Yeah,
but it makes me think that what you're doing is just brilliant. Well, you know,
it's a very personal reason. So I trained at the Mayo Clinic as a professor of
surgery there and also at the Cleveland Clinic. And what struck me is even in these
neighborhoods, even in these world -class medical institutions, we would work in one
place, and then live and play and raise our families in another place. And simply
speaking, it just didn't make sense when we dedicate 40, 50, sometimes 60 years of
our lives to saving lives, to generating world -class research that drives our
specialty forward, and yet we can't live next to where we work. And therefore, I've
dedicated the rest of my life to making a dent in that problem. - Wow, cool idea.
Next. - I am a next -gen single -family office.
I also founded a company called Lightspace. We are a regenerative real estate
consulting company. Is that too much of an echo? - No, it's not an echo,
but I'm sitting here in my mind going, What does a regenerative, explain what that
is? - Okay, so regenerative real estate is real estate that gives life to people and
to the planet. So I focus on building eco -retreats and eco -resorts with people all
over the world, everywhere from eco -hotels to personal properties to islands and to
cities and now with countries that are implementing innovation,
to be self -sustainable, off -grid, and net zero, and also to have holistic ecosystems
within the property that can sustainably support the local community and provide
essential resources like food, water, shelter, education,
these types of things. So I am very happy to work around the world.
We've worked with hundreds of properties around the world. I started by building
islands in Indonesia, building sustainable development plans for these islands,
for the thriving of the local community with respect to indigenous people that are
living on the land, as well as implementing innovation so that the people on the
islands and the community can sustainably prosper. I'm very blessed to be working
with indigenous communities all over the world and supporting them with building their
properties in places like the Amazon rainforest, in Tepluzon,
Mexico, Indonesia, Europe, United States, and we've worked all over the world.
And I personally have invested as well in an eco -retreat property in North Carolina.
We host retreats and help people to heal themselves from all types of things and to
host retreats for meditation and nature bathing and things that are good for people.
I really see this as a trend out globally and people are,
especially since COVID, people are moving into nature, they want to be closer to
nature, and also to have resources available to them that are not reliant upon the
the existing systems. And so I'm seeing this as very much as the future of real
estate in many ways and also with the adoption of net zero policies globally,
this is certainly an emerging trend and also is an niche yet growing market
globally. So I'm really happy to be on the forefront of it and happy to introduce
Regener to Real Estate as an asset class, thank you. - Very cool.
- Sasha, you're up. - That sounds great, Andreas, happy, since it's happy, New Year
everyone, can we do one of these at one of these eco watches I guess next year.
It's a really a small multifamily office. I used to run Chaltenham.
It's one of my partners. So I just consider ourselves to be, we invest
opportunistically but real estate has always been our core. We go up and down the
capitalist structure. We like to support what you call emerging sponsors.
The sponsors that don't have funds and we can invest with them and help them grow.
And it's been really, I think these past couple of years have actually been a
golden opportunity coming out of COVID. I think senior living at one point really
took a hit so we've been finding that it's been an interesting area because of the
tailwinds and interesting enough we also think office could be an interesting place
so very opportunistic in looking for people who have interesting ideas.
You know it's interesting too you say senior housing took a hit but we've got 10
,000 people a day that turn 65. So if it's a hit, it's not gonna last very long.
So tell me what type of structures y 'all tend to use?
Y 'all, you can tell them from Texas, right? That y 'all tend to use when you're
acquiring the real estate or syndicating. Talk a little bit about what your
structures look like. Yeah, I'm happy to start. We're very creative in our
structures. So, as a private lender, we will look at any structure ranging from,
obviously, senior mortgages, sub -debt, mes, pre -equity,
anywhere in the capital stack. Also, if we're lending to other lenders, we're happy
to look at A -node, B -node structures, syndications. So, as a lender, we really
leave it up to the sponsor to come up with the proper structure for the
acquisition, obviously, where monitoring that that structure makes sense from a lending
perspective as well. So again, very creative when you're doing transactions,
especially in the $100 million range transactions, you know, we've come to notice
that cash is king to most sponsors. So with the, what I call the deleveraging that
occurred over the last couple of months or years, sponsors now, if they're getting
institutional financing, they're only getting 60, if they're lucky, 60 % loan to value
on their acquisitions. So you have to get very creative in your structure. If you're
doing a $100 million deal, that's a $40 million equity infusion that a sponsor may
be looking for. So as a private lender, we could come in, stretch that senior loan
maybe to a 70, 75 percent loan to value. Definitely going to be more expensive.
We're not putting money out at bank rates. We're putting money out anywhere between
9 and 11 percent. However, when you're talking about a 75 percent loan to value,
it may be a preff equity slice, and there is well, a sponsor's equity just went
from $40 million to maybe $10 million. So these are the different ways that we've
been structuring transactions in this type of environment. - That's smart. - One of
our partners is a former CPA and it's tax season. So a lot of investors alongside
of us want that bonus depreciation, right? So we've just formed basically LLC and a
Propco and take down like a $5 million triple net building preschool or government
building. So it's pretty simple.
So there's a lot of people
is they throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and just throw go for the swing for
the rafters. So number three, we've taken a different approach. We're not looking to
offer the incorrect field of dreams vision of free money from nothing and therefore
we stick stay away from structures that are traditional syndications. We love that
our partners are actually partners on a couple levels. We've partnered with Quaker
Lane, who is an institutional level developer with over 20 billion in institutional
level development, management, and resale. And they're partnered with a very similar
thesis to us developing around academic medical centers, but the point is, is that
we attract middle market institutional capital into our deals. Then what we're looking
for is between one and ten million dollar checks from others who are really invested
in our thesis. High net worth individuals, family offices, groups of physicians who
are actually part of our structure in terms of governance and decision making rights,
which allows us to build communities worth living in for generations to come, which
is what we're passionate about. - Interesting. Marin, what do your structures look
like when you put these things together outside the US? - Well, actually, we're
focused in the US now. I'm saying my former career built a medical center and had
to structure the capital and the funding for it operationally. So we're focused in
the US now around University of Pennsylvania, in business school, Children's Hospital,
Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard. Those are our thesis areas right now. So we structure
in a combination type, tier type of structure with mid -level institutional partners,
high net worth individuals, single family offices, and groups of physicians who come
in with LLCs for between a one and $10 million check. We like that because it
gives people an opportunity to educate themselves, particularly physicians I'm talking
about now, and we know physicians are great learners. They just have never had the
opportunity to do what we're doing right now. When they come in, they're great
partners and really creatively add to where we're going with the project.
So when we are structuring deals for properties, We utilize a combination of blended
finance, methodologies, some depending on the property and where it's at and all of
the ecological aspects of it. There are often a lot of times government grants,
incentives, subsidies for things like carbon credits and solar power ecological
-friendly practices are very supported by government structures as well as a lot of
public grants for these types of buildings. We also source anywhere from direct
investments, lending structures to do the developments.
We work with major development companies all over the world, bioregionally,
that are focused on the preservation and the conservation of these local biospheres.
A lot of the times these properties as well are implementing solutions like gardens
and water rights and things like this, so people are also very interested to be an
equity stakeholder in these properties because of the abundance of natural resources
that are available and that are also included in the property as part of the
offering to people. As a result, we have also formed because we work with hundreds
of properties globally and now we're building a Web 3 platform to streamline that
engagement between the properties and the climate tech innovations and to open this
up to a more global community and to serve all the properties that are adopting
this trend. We are also creating a regenerative real estate fund with a group of
different properties that are protecting and uplifting sacred biospheres and are
beautiful places to live, play, They work in stale over the world. We're also,
with that, we're offering tokenized investments so that people can purchase a stake
in the fund and then have equity holdings and properties all over the world that
they can enjoy. We call it space sharing. And also,
there are abundant returns for each individual property and also with the funds of
properties that's--
that live there for the next seven generations and beyond. Thank you. - Cool. I'm
unfortunately not a next gen, so my partners only care about don't lose me money.
So I'll tell you a couple of things that I've learned and I've thought about a
little bit more. As a rule of thumb, I do not participate anymore.
As a rule So in general, I don't pretend to participate in syndicates because the
problem with that is is when things go wrong, you as an investor really don't have
any rights. And you saw that really in the past few years. And so for about 10
years, most of our investments came through the form of preferred equity because I'm
sure if you were in real estate you heard for a long time where the 9th inning,
where the 9th inning. And the point of doing preferred equity was to give you a
cushion, right? You have a cushion that if things go wrong that your preferred
equity was equity. And what we saw was the preferred equity that we provided to
syndicates who brought in a lot of equity, they were more willing to actually walk
away from a project because it really wasn't their equity, right? They had gotten
all the fees of management and acquisition fees, all the fees already in a project
was made through all these fees and it was no longer their money, it was a
collection of doctors, for example, right? And so while I thought I was protecting
myself by having a cushion, I was like, wow, they don't care about walking away,
so they're not gonna go to the bank and do what you have to do to protect
yourself. So that's just something to keep in mind. But I do believe that now,
it's a good time to go into equity because we know that we've more or less have
hit the peak in interest rates, which means that values have gone significantly down
from their peaks in 2021 to now, right? And so essentially you have,
if you're buying a project at a good basis, price per door or whatever, now you
have more of a possibility of getting something cheap and if there is
capricompression, it's essentially an option that brings your property up,
but at least now you know that you're downside protected. And I think it's important
though that as equity, when we structure it, it's a JV agreement where we have
controls and rights and the ability to make sure that we're getting quarterly
numbers, we understand what's going on, we know where the budget or where the
money's being spent. And if you are a syndicator, you're better off going in with a
third party that you trust that may be leading the syndicate, not the sponsor
leading the syndicate. So those are things to really think about when you're
structuring your deals. - Something that all the panels yesterday and today have said
and understand when I sit down with our agents and we train wealth building because
we look at the agents and say if you're not out there buying real estate you guys
are nuts and of the ten rules that we talk about,
rule number seven to me is critical and that is here's the rule, I'd rather be in
a crummiest deal in the world with great partners than the reverse because not every
real estate deal you're going to do is going to be great. As Richard said earlier,
talk about the elephant in the room. Most real estate transactions get into trouble
because of two reasons. One, they run out of time or they run out of money.
And when you're entitling real estate, we deal in raw land. I am a raw land guy.
And we buy this land that we find from our agents because they're everywhere And
they come to us and go you're never going to believe this deal if I just had the
money and As we tell them call me I can get the money. That's what we have a
fund for Well, we've learned over time. It's kind of like we're renovating your home
when they give you the estimate and the date Double the estimate and double the
date and you're probably going to be correct and that's just the nature of the
beast