 Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University, and I'm thrilled to host this event tonight. In my role here at the University, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders and volunteers to organize events that keep alumni and parents connected to and engaged with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. This webinar is cosponsored by the New York City Alumni Chapter and the Charles F. Dolan School of Business with the support of chapter leader, Ryan Moran. As this is a collaboration, I would like to begin this evening by introducing my esteemed colleague, the Dean of the Charles F. Dolan School of Business, Dr. Zan Lee. Dr. Lee. Thank you, Pat. Welcome, everybody. My job is really a relatively easy one compared to our panelists, so I'll introduce our four panelists and two co-moderators. First, Mr. Steven Pech, Class 83. As a managing director, Steven joined the stock bridge in 2005 and focused on ongoing management and oversight of stock bridge opportunistic and platform investment, and his operating partners, as well as new acquisition opportunities. Prior to joining stock bridge, Steven served as a chief operating officer at typical West Properties. Previously, he served as a senior vice president at a cornerstone properties, a national real estate investment fund, and as a managing director in charge of West Coast real estate investment at Aetna Life and Agility. Steven received a B.S. in finance from Dolan School of Business, Fairfield University in 1983, and MBA from Fordham University. Welcome, Steven. Mr. Mitch Fairfield, Class 82. Vice Chairman with Newmark, Knight, and Franks, multifamily capital market debt and structure finance group. He established the Santa Monica office of Newmark, Knight, and Franks predecessor firm in 2001, had grown the office to average annual debt origination of over 1.7 billion. Prior to joining Newmark, Knight, and Franks predecessor firm in 2001, Mitch founded Carbon Massa Advisors in 1994, one of the original leveraged debt funds. He served as a president and CEO until he sales to the WMF group in April, 1998. In 1990, Mitch was one of the four co-founders and principals of Secured Capital Corporation where he helped lead the company to successfully completing over 7 billion in asset sales and over 1 billion in acquisitions in less than four years. After graduation in 1982 from Fairfield University, Mitch joined commercial mortgage consulting group of Kenes, Neventhal, and Company, where in 1984, they worked on the development of an original commercial mortgage securities reading model with a standard and poor. Welcome, Mitch. Our third panelist is Mr. Mark Dorrigan, class 1978. Mark is the CEO of Hoffman Associates. Hoffman is a leader in developing innovative and transformative mixed-use residential office and retail communities across Washington, D.C. and the meat and the landing area. The firm is best known for the transformation of a portion of the Washington, D.C. skyline with a WOLF project, a 3.5 million square foot mixed-use project lining almost a mile of the waterfront and Potomac River within the walking distance of U.S. Capitol and National Mall. After graduating from Fairfield University in 1978, where he was a Fusar president and a senior year, Mark completed post-graduate studies first at Sydenhall University School of Law, where he received his law degree and then at NYU School of Law, he received LLM in taxation. After graduating from NYU, Mark secured a clerkship with a Chief Justice of Federal District Court for the District of New Jersey. After completing his clerkship, Mark joined the law firm of McGuire Woods in Washington, D.C., a firm of over 1,000 attorneys and 21 offices worldwide. Mark made a partner with a firm specializing in commercial real estate in 1985. Recruiting to join the Mills Corporation, Mark spent the next 10 years as a real estate general counsel and then co-general counsel completing his tenure with sales and mills to Simon Property Group in 2007. So welcome, Mark. Our first panelist, Michael McCarthy. Michael graduated from Fairfield University in 2006 with a degree in communications. He has worked in a commercial real estate industry ever since. Starting with new Mark Knight of Frank Collier's International. Mike currently is a director for Cushman and Wigfield in White Plain, New York, where he focused on office leasing brokerage, servicing a wide variety of tenants and landlords in the Westchester and Fairfield County, markets and beyond. He remained connected to Fairfield University, serving on the local Fairfield, Westchester County Alumni Chapter Leadership Team since 2013 as chairman of the Business Development Pillar. Mike and his wife Kerry had two children reside in Greenwich and Connecticut or residing far away from Greenwich, Connecticut. In LA, California, Lisa is our co-moderator today. Lisa Shams has extensive background in public affairs spanning from campaign politics to issue advocacy to commercial real estate. He currently works with LFG, Laoy Family Office and Investment as a senior strategic advisor to Exhaustant Solutions, a consultancy in developing consumer-centric brand design and development strategy to retailers, designers and property owners. Also, Lisa, prior to that, Lisa was a senior executive vice president, government and community affairs for Westfield, one of the world's premier developers and operators of flagship retail centers that all of us went to while Westfield centers. Prior to Westfield, she served on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and campaign team for a number of well-known U.S. senators. Previously, Lisa served on the advisory board of California Business Property Association and the board of Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation as a chair of the Development Committee to also participate on the advisory board of Los Angeles Alliance for a new economy and has been very active with St. Jude Children Research Hospital. In 2012, Lisa was recognized as a woman of achievement by the Century City Chamber of Commerce. Lisa holds a master's of an arts degree with concentration in survey research from University of Connecticut and has a bachelor of arts degree majoring in politics with a minor in religious study from Fairfield University, which I think is the most important one. Dr. Katja Bartos is Associate Professor of Finance and Interim Director of Graduate Finance Program at Fairfield University. She is our co-motivator today. She teaches real estate and corporate finance courses and serves as an advisor for the real estate club on campus. She received BA in Management from Hartwick College and PhD in Finance from University of Connecticut. Prior to joining Fairfield University, Katja worked as a visiting assistant professor at NYU Stern Business School. Katja had published articles in top journals such as Journal of Financial Quantitative Analysis and Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Urban Economics and Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. Her research attracting media attention received outstanding paper awards at conferences and Dolan School of Business, which has been presented at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Reference in the U.S. Treasury White Paper and Top Tier of Academic Journals. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce our two co-moderators take over today's event. Thank you. Thank you so much for this great introduction. I look forward to hearing from our participants. Let's start with the corporate landscape and working from home. Michael, can we start with you? So many employees have pivoted to working from home. Do you think this will change dramatically? And if it does, how will that change the corporate landscape and commercial real estate? Yes, great question. First of all, thank you to the university for putting this together and for the community to get involved and take a liking into this topic, which I think is gonna be very interesting. So with regards to the current climate, obviously work from home is a buzzword that we're all probably sick of hearing in the news every time you turn it on. It's certainly going to change the landscape going forward. You have to keep in mind that pre-pandemic, we had it, and we being in Cushman and Wakefield's research at around a third of employees would work from home on some sort of hybrid model. We anticipate going forward that will probably shift to about half. I personally think it's probably gonna be a little bit more than that, but I also don't think it's sustainable. I was reading the paper yesterday and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan had a very poignant quote that I certainly would agree with and I think a lot of people that are running companies would agree with. And he said, remote office doesn't work for generating ideas, preserving corporate culture, competing for clients and for those that want to hustle. And I think that hits the nail on the head. A lot of people that are tuning in to this seminar tonight are probably students of the university. Guess what? You're gonna get into the workforce. You're not gonna be learning at the pace that you probably need to be in a new job on a Zoom call. It's just not a sustainable approach. We're in a business, most business are modeled after an apprenticeship business model where you're gonna start day one and you're not going to be texting or trying to get on at someone's Zoom meeting calendar to ask them a question. You're gonna walk down the hallway and jump into your seniors office to ask them because they've probably dealt with this issue a million times. There's water cooler talk of just bumping into someone and collaborating with ideas depending on what business you're in. There's also the camaraderie aspect of it that you're not gonna get from a work-from-home environment. A lot of the seniors in this seminar tuning in, you might be your best friends or the friends you see at the great couple of nights a week. Well, you're gonna keep those friends going forward but you're also going to be making new friends with coworkers, they're people that you're gonna be spending a lot of time with. And that's gonna be in the office trying to navigate a new job. And also let's go grab a beer at happy hour after work. And that just adds to the cultural environment that again, I think just focusing on working from home five days a week is not sustainable. Where I think that it will remain in place with most companies is that it's gonna be a hybrid model. We're going to see companies that, the employees will work from home one or two days a week and the rest of the time, they're going to be working in an office. Now, how does that shift the dynamic of the landscape of actual footprints in real estate? So over the years, we've seen a enormous densification of real estate. People weren't using 250, 300 square feet per person like back in the 80s and 90s in big law offices. Everybody decided to shrink their footprint to save money essentially. So where it was on an average of two and a quarter, 250 square feet per person years ago, it shrank to about 125 square feet per person. So everyone started sitting on top of each other. In a trading floor setup. Now, what don't you wanna do coming right out of a pandemic? You don't wanna sit on top of each other. So there's social distancing. So it's almost net neutral. I think footprints will shift overall, but as footprints shift, because you don't have as many bodies working in office 100% of the time, you're going to see the anti-densification where footprints will grow a little bit in the sense to give more space with regards to the per square foot per employee. On the other side of it, from a sublease standpoint, you're going to have companies giving up their space that they don't need, access space, especially in major markets. I just saw something, a report from our folks at Cushman out of San Francisco. Half of the availability in the San Francisco market is sublease space. So now how does that change the overall picture? Well, if I'm a tenant in the market and I'm going to look at sublease space that could be 50 cents on the dollar, a 50% discount of what direct space is going for, I'm gonna probably go to the sublease space if I'm a savvy tenant and can make that deal work. So landlords that are sitting on direct space, they're gonna feel the brunt of that. So that sublease space has to get offline for the economics, for these big cities to balance out, for the economics for landlords to balance out and making direct deals. So that's an interesting dynamic to watch. The other thing is you have to keep in mind that most companies have not gone back to work yet. So I think from what we're hearing, a lot of companies are gonna try to get back to the office or implement some plan to get back to the office after Labor Day. So I think we'll understand a lot more after companies lay down the law and say you guys have to come back to the office. But it's a bit of a wait and see approach. Some tenants are sitting there saying, well, we really don't know what the future holds and our lease is up. So let's kick the can down the road for a year or two year short-term renewal where other companies that are savvy in a very good position, they know where they're gonna be in the future, they're taking advantage of incredibly below market tenant-friendly deals for sure. So it's a very interesting landscape that COVID has brought upon us. And like everything, it is cyclical but there'll be certain factors that do stay around for quite a while. Great insights, thank you. So if there was a moment from the cities to the suburbs which we are certainly observing at least in some markets, how do you think the office space of major markets will be repurposed? So in backing up, I don't think that you're going to see you're gonna see a bit of an exodus from Metro into suburban tertiary markets. And I don't think it's gonna call for repurposing especially in major cities. I mean, if you look at where I live and work in Westchester and Fairfield County there has been a mass exodus and influx into the suburban market. And we're seeing the commercial folks fall behind that a little bit. Well, we're getting a lot of inquiries from New York City firms that have a large presence in Manhattan and they're going to look to open up satellite offices up in the suburbs. So I think the hub and spoke model is here to stay. The repurposing that's been talked about for quite a while. You look at in Westchester County, for example when I got in the business 13 or so years ago there was about 32 million square feet of office space. Present day, we quote about 25 million square feet of space. So a lot of that ancillary obsolete product has been taken off the stats and it's been turned into warehouses which there's a big demand for that multifamily which has been on fire that market and medical. So to the extent buildings get repurposed in major markets or suburban markets I think that multifamily and warehouse space and medical space are certainly atop that list. Great, thank you. Mark, you wanted to add something to the conversation? No, actually I've been agreeing with Michael's observation certainly as it relates to logistics and data centers and life sciences. I mean, that's certainly going to be the sweet spot for office in the near term. I would just add that what I see out here in California anyway is that we have companies like the apples of the world that you might kind of touched on it's the environment, right? They want to make sure their employees have a good environment to come to work in. And what we see them doing is going towards newer buildings. Obviously they built the big, you know spaceship out there and and I was down there about 10 days ago. And they're still looking at taking down new buildings and getting out of some of the older obsolete stuff. What we're seeing is some of the stuff that might have been built in the early 90s, you know late 80s, early 90s is getting converted to life sciences, which is quite a trick amongst itself because to do a life science building there's so much specialized improvements. It's hard to take a traditional office building. My attitude is like unless you knock it down because a lot of times you don't have the clear house that you need and things like that, meaning the size of the room to just do all the work. So, you know, what we see out here anyway is that the obsolete buildings are going to get moved out of. And Mike, I think you're right. There's a lot of subway space available in San Francisco. Part of what might take us on that is that if you're a CFO and you didn't put your space in the market during COVID, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't everyone else is doing it? Why wouldn't you do it? Because you don't have to, until you decide to get out of the space, you still have rights to it. So suddenly you decide everybody come back. We had a number of our tenants down the peninsula that came out within a month or two of COVID saying, we're never gonna be in the office again. And about three, about two or three months ago they all issued the comeback to work dates to all the people. So they're all coming back to work. So it's just, it's an interesting time and, you know, kind of different than all the other different cycles we've seen, but. So, so as we are transitioning from urban to suburbs, so to from office to residential. Mitch, if I can throw this first question over to you and then invite the panel to weigh in as well. I'm interested in your perspective on the notion of, you know, what we've talked about quite a bit over these last months, which is the housing flight to the suburbs. Do you see this as something that is longterm or is it a COVID glitch? And so what are your predictions around, you know, demand and pricing? And if we have an opportunity to get to it, I'd love for the panel to weigh in too on affordable housing, especially in high rent areas. Mitch? You know, when you can work from anywhere, it doesn't have to be a rent-controlled one bedroom apartment in Eastern Santa Monica. It can be anywhere. It doesn't have to be that rent-controlled apartment in the, you know, East Village. It can be the Behanthons. So the natural reaction of the market was that people said, well, at least for, I mean, I have a daughter that lives in Manhattan. She was, you know, she went to her landlord and said, my lease is up in a couple of months and I'm not renewing. And he came back and gave her, you know, a bunch of months free, so she stayed, but she wasn't living there. She was back here in Malibu. So when you can work from home, home can be anywhere. And the stat would create less demand for housing in the city and where it's higher density and more demand for housing in the suburbs where there's more space to open up. Fairfield County was a huge beneficiary of COVID. You know, I was deeply concerned for the direction of Fairfield County going into 2020 because of what was happening at the budgetary level, you know, state budgetary level. And COVID saved it, at least temporarily. So I think the answer is that, you know, I don't think you're gonna be able to work from home five days a week. So I think that you're gonna need to be, I mean, it's, I think that there will be people that live further out, further removed from their places of employment because they only have to come in one or two days a week, but they're gonna need to be close enough that they can come in one or two days a week, at least, at a very minimum, in my opinion. We share the cultural aspect of in-office employment. We, I don't know how you train young people and people that are joining your team. I don't know how you train them if they're not there to talk to. And if you're not there for them to ask questions though. We have our daily Zoom calls and it's not the same as getting up and walking down the hall and saying, hey, what do you think of this? Or this is what I found. What do you think we should do about it? It's just a completely different, it's just a completely different animal and I don't think we're ready for it. I don't think we have the technology yet. I think we're close, but I don't think we have the technology yet. So pricing has also been quite high as a result of people fleeing into the suburbs. Major metropolitan areas are seeing big spikes in residential pricing. What are your views on that? And at what point do you think this starts to even out of it, level out of it? So just put things in perspective. I don't do single-family housing. I do multi-family housing. So, and the good news is, is that multi-family housing is, we're two thirds or three quarters of the population lives, but not very many people talk about it. One phenomenon that we've seen to start to occur more and more frequently in a lot of capitals being organized around it is the built for rent. Is single-family subdivisions that are actually, at one point in time might have been built for sale, so that they, builders build them and then they sell them, people move in and they own them, and now they're being built for rent. So that is contributing along with the increased demand that COVID has caused in the suburbs to higher and higher prices. So if you wanna go buy a house in Weston or Norwalk, there are fewer homes for sale because the people that live there aren't going anywhere. They're certainly not moving into the city yet. They may have been on their way to be moving into a more urban and dense location at some point, but they're not doing it now. There are more people fleeing the city and wanting to live in Norwalk or Weston or Stanford. And then some of the housing that's being created to absorb some of that demand is now being taken off the market by people who are gonna rent those homes on a monthly basis or an annual basis instead of selling. So all of that contributes to higher and higher pricing, much more so from a lack of supply than anything else. There's a tremendous amount of demand and there is this supply deficiency that has been exacerbated by COVID. So that's the suburban story. We, I mean, if you wanna live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, now's a good time to buy. I mean, I can tell you that some of the units and some nice buildings have gone down 50%, 50. So you could buy a two and a half bath unit on East 64th Street, three years ago would have been 3.7 million hours and today you can buy it for less than two. Young people don't wanna live on the Upper East Side and people that are starting families don't wanna live in the city. So you've got this little pocket of product that doesn't appeal to anybody right now, but I think that it will over time because people will wanna be in a less dense area of the centers of commerce. So it's just, there's a little bit of, you know, there's a, I think that we're gonna see, we've seen the pendulum swing one way and I think it's gonna start to swing back. I don't think it'll come all the way back to where it was pre-pandemic, but I don't think it's gonna stay anywhere near where it is now right now. That's just my opinion. Mark or Steven, Michael, did you have anything you wanted to add? I have a couple of comments that Steven here, Lisa. So I think, you know, typically if you look at the US, the US is significantly under housed, which is why we have an affordability issue. We do a lot of entitlement out here and, you know, it's interesting. We were working on Treasure Island, which will ultimately be 8,000 home units. We got approved and we just broke ground about 18 months ago on the first 250 units. It took us 20 years and 450 meetings. Okay, so you can't, and that's for 8,000, which may sound like a lot, but if you divide it by 20 years, that's not a lot. And so you mentioned affordability, that's gonna have of the 8,000, 2,000 are affordable at different levels of income. So there's some of a solution here, but I think the issue is a lot of these areas that have, or desirable, whether it's New York, maybe not the city so much now because of COVID and all that, but San Francisco has done pretty well even throughout COVID. Certainly the peninsula down south and north and the East Bay have done extremely well. You know, we know LA pretty significantly. And so we know how well LA has done during this. So we're investing heavily actually in a single family residential space because less so in New York, obviously, we're doing it heavy in the Southeast because that's where the job markets are right now. The heavy growth in the Southeast, especially Georgia, Florida, in Texas and whatnot. But the biggest down payment for a lot of folks in the millennial age is the down, it's the biggest issue rather is the down payment. So if it's a $2 million deal in New York City, it's a $400,000 down payment, which is a stretch if you're doing it on your own without help of parents. So I think the issue is gonna be fairly, unless interest rates suddenly stop the whole show, which if interest rates spike, prices are gonna drop, right? Because that's gonna be a big effect on it. Unless there's some way to solve the consistent issue of under developing housing for folks, I think you're gonna see a gradual continual rise, especially because things like lumber prices, steel prices right now, the cost of building this is going off the charts. Funny story, my son just came back from Michigan as a freshman and his classic thing is the first day I've got to start building my dice table. And I said to him, well, because I wanna go out and get some wood, my lumber prices have gone up pretty good. He said, how do you know? I go, well, just go. He texts me like 25 minutes later, he goes, we're gonna go borrow it from someone else. It's just crazy. So there's so many pieces that go into this. And so it's hard just with this one group to say, okay, here's how you solve affordable housing. Here's how you solve this. There's so many different parts of it, whether it's the bigger picture sense of interest rates or cost to construct or just the process to get entitlements done. There's hurdles in all of this as you know. So just as my two cents. Great. We touched a little bit about the potential need to repurpose some office space. But as we look at commercial real estate across the country, there are obviously, especially in retail real estate, a large number of vacancies. And as we look toward urban planning right now, the buzzword is all about mixed use. Something that Mark knows quite a bit about. Mark, I'd love for you to weigh in on mixed use. Why is it all the rage? What are the benefits for tenants and owner investors? And then, what the heck do we do with all this vacant space? Well, thank you. The often misquoted Mark Twain quote, news of my death has been greatly exaggerated comes to mind, particularly when you're talking about, certain segments of real estate like retail, but it really does come down to it's cyclical. And what has COVID done is it's really accelerated trends or cycles that we've already seen or already experienced. The difference really with COVID is that it was such a black swan unforeseen event with such a draconian shutdown, which is really the first time probably anybody on the panel has seen in our professional lifetimes of every segment of real estate being significantly impacted. And then just as we've talked about it, the impact on office and the remote work environment, the impact on multifamily, the migration of housing from the urban areas out to the suburbs and whether that migration is gonna be permanent or whether it's cyclical, whether the migration north to south from New York city to Florida due to taxes from San Francisco to Texas because of entitlement risk. All of those factors are in some respects, not cases of first impression for us related just to COVID, but it has allowed us to see an acceleration of trends that normally would have taken five or 10 years. We certainly just sitting on this call, I think all experienced that just in our interaction with Zoom or Teams or whatever the digital use is going to be. So looking at the mixed use environment, the urban environment, people are quick to say, well, everybody's moving out of the city and so the city centers are dead. Well, city centers aren't dead, the urban environments aren't dead, multifamily inside the city centers aren't dead, but the certain segments of real estate are certainly being impacted and how that impact lasts is really gonna be the something that we're gonna have to look at long term and what drives real estate is still, it's what we've already mentioned, it's jobs, it's the cost of living, it's the capital, it's the lifestyle and that brings you back to why do people wanna be in a mixed use environment? Well, a mixed use urban environment provides many of the features that people want even in the post COVID environment. Generally speaking, it's gonna be new office and that's gonna allow people to have more space, it's gonna have more amenity space, wellness, fitness, being outside, having the opportunity to have the green space that usually goes along with most well-planned mixed use environments. It's critically important when you're trying to retain the office workers that we were just talking about and keeping them interested to come to their office as opposed to staying in their pajamas on the couch and just working from home. So the segments of real estate that go into the mixed use environment, really whether it's retail, hospitality, office, multi-family residential, those all come together to really create what is a very vibrant urban fabric that lets all of that lifestyle come together where it's an often overused axon but the work life play environment. We're fortunate in Washington DC, which is where we have our headquarters and do most of our work in the Mid-Atlantic that the Southeast Mid-Atlantic is a great market. It's a great job market. A lot of drivers drive that job market. So where we are located in whether it's Washington DC and Virginia and Raleigh Durham, the areas where they're big universities, they're great job drivers. Cost of living is lower than places like San Francisco, New York, Boston. That allows people to invest in those markets in an area where you've got to bring a big piece of real estate together and to pitch his earlier point, but you've got to take 10 years to get it entitled. And then during that period, you've got to invest that capital. So you've got to get the returns on that capital and you've got to bring the investors into the mix over the lifetime of a mixed use project or whether it's something in San Francisco or a million, two million square feet. It's, you're looking at probably a four or five year entitlement process another two to three years to build it another two to three years to stabilize it. So that's a hell of an investment period for most developers. And to do that, you have to bring those components together. And it's got to be something that people will want to live in, work in and be excited about. So from my own personal perspective, I don't think we're going to be picking winners and losers out of COVID. I think there's going to be some short-term impacts like we've been talking about for hospitality, for housing, for multi-family, for office. But I think long-term, it's still a great time to be focused on real estate. It's a great time to be focused on urban real estate, even though you might be able to buy a good condo in New York or Washington or San Francisco, a little cheaper today, partially because of low interest rates, partially because of COVID. I think you're going to see a big bounce back in 2023, 2024. And a lot more people are going to be coming back to the offices and coming back to the urban environment. Great. And you said something that I just think is so true, which is that the pandemic has accelerated trends that the industry has been seeing for many years. One of the trends, obviously, is the move to digital and to delivery of goods. So do you see any of the vacant space, especially in what I might call B or C-level markets being turned into warehousing or delivery centers? There's also obviously opportunities around things like ghost kitchens, et cetera, in more B plus or A minus sort of regions. What are your thoughts? Well, I think in the urban areas, and one of the other panelists mentioned it before, turning some of the traditional B, the low ceiling height office buildings into life sciences or even multifamily is difficult. And you're almost at a point where you're looking at replacement costs and whether or not you just tear it down and start over again. Repurposing some of that for whether it's data centers or the family kitchen that you had mentioned, there's absolutely going to be opportunities for there. There's a little bit more entrepreneurship in this kind of environment where people are looking for creating new retail experience or new experiences. And I think retail is everyone's quick to kind of segment retail into the malls or from your experience, my experience, whether it was mills or at Westfields, malls are going to get killed. They're going to get killed by the outlet centers. Well, that didn't happen. The big box, they were going to kill Main Street. Well, Main Street adapted. They became the cute town centers where food and beverage then rolled out into the streets and now that's where everybody wants to go. Amazon's going to kill everything. Well, that's probably close to true. But I think that there's certainly an opportunity for particularly in real estate for there to be a lot of creativity used because there's just a lot of capital looking for the opportunities to invest when you can build a core, build a yield at six, but you can invest your dollars at a negative return. Real estate is an attractive investment. It's still a great asset class. You know, Lisa, I don't know. And if you saw this either mark with Prologus for everybody on the phone is the largest industrial owner in the US, certainly. They just purchased a mall out here. And now they say they're going to make it mixed use. So we're going to take it down to like 10,000 square feet of retail and then 2 million square feet of industrial. But I think that repurposing it, because most of the retail is really a good location, right? Usually on a corner or something. That's the stuff that's probably the last to go down because the stuff that wasn't on the best corner died well before COVID. That just emptied out well before COVID. But it's interesting to see a large industrial company that certainly has the balance sheet and the time and patience to take something through because they see it. And I think you're right with Amazon. Amazon is just, they're doing a lot. So they're taking down a lot of space. So I think someone said that 25% of all the space taken last year in the industrial sector was Amazon. And it was hundreds of millions of square feet. So. And just to dovetail that, when you look at from a warehouse standpoint, I do think that there is certainly a need, especially in last mile distribution locations where Amazon needs to jump on I-95 and get to a dense area. You look at US commercial vacancies, office vacancies is about 16%, which is a 10 or 12 year high. And warehouse vacancies, I think is sub 5%. So there's certainly a need there and Amazon has come into our market. They're taking spaces in the Bronx and Hunts Point for 40 bucks a foot. When five years ago, that would probably trade just to store whatever product you're storing that would have traded for 15 bucks a foot. So they have just completely skyrocketed landlords' expectations in those markets and they've driven prices up tremendously. But there is certainly a warehouse need and the pricing that they're getting for warehouse now in certain suburban markets is on par with what they're getting for office rents, which is unheard of. Great. Can I stay on the topic of investment in real estate? Many Americans in surveys say that they think real estate is a good investment and many believe it's a great hedge for inflation. Which sectors of real estate do you think will perform best in the post-pandemic world? We already touched upon some of the topics but perhaps Steven, you have something else to add. Yeah, sure. So we did touch on a lot. Obviously residential I think is gonna do well. Multifamily is coming back. I think the single-family residential is gonna do well. E-commerce, the industrial logistics, that's gonna do well. Obviously continue to do well. One of the, we've gone very big into buying a logistics space and just to give you a perspective on it, is more commented before about retail and shopping centers, things like that. That's not going away. Actually the size, the pie got bigger. E-commerce, I was reading some numbers a few weeks ago, year-over-year e-commerce took down like another 40% of the growth year-over-year. But having said that, because that was the numerator, the denominator grew again. So e-commerce is still less than 25%. So people are going out and shopping and things like that. We still think that's a good play. As you think about other things in real estate, clearly the life science play, I think what the pandemic showed us is that research, medicine, and then also medical, to a certain extent as well, is gonna do well over the longer term. In terms of the stuff that got hit a little bit too, the hotels, I think the hotels will come back, office will come back, it'll take some time. But I do think the bigger winners would be, obviously more on the e-commerce side, residential, anything data related, broadband services, whether you're investing in data centers, companies that do cell towers, that do fiber, I think those are gonna be doing really well because every time your Zoom call crashed, that's just an issue of data, right? So that access has gotta get better. So I think, and others may have other opinions, but I do think that's been playing out pretty well. It's interesting what they've done in the e-commerce side. If you look, there was a piece in Bloomberg about two or three weeks ago, a video showing a Kroger's center in the Midwest, I think it was in Ohio. And they basically have robots that are of the size of about dishwashers. And so, because Kroger's believes that more people are gonna wanna get their staples, toothpaste, shampoo, just delivered to their door, right? Why do I have to go to the store for it? So they show these robots screwing across the floor, just literally sucking the product out of the ground. And then it gets, the robot goes to the delivery truck and somebody packages it and off it goes. So it's interesting to watch, because I've never seen it before. I've seen some of the Amazon things, which are pretty cool with robotics, but it's changing so fast, and where the movement was, where tech was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, it's amazing how much the economy has been so influenced by tech across the board. And as Michael said before, a lot of these companies pack people in, all the ones out here in the Bay Area and the other ones up and down the West Coast are talking about loosening up the space. So I think that'll blow well for office, not quite this year or next year, but I think as these companies grow, I think out here, Google hired 12,000 people last year, which is ridiculous, right? So they're gonna have them come to the office. They didn't hire them to keep working from home and not collaborate together. So I don't know if anyone else have got anything to add. Well, I would add that if you're just getting in the real estate, you gotta be careful because everything that Steven's talking about and some of the stuff that the other panelists talked about is pretty highly specialized. I mean, yeah, Amazon might be renting a warehouse space in the Bronx for 40 bucks a foot, but not every warehouse space in the Bronx is gonna go for 40 bucks a foot because that space had special characteristics that made it acceptable for Amazon to utilize. I think the same with the cell towers and the data centers, you really have to know what you're doing to get involved in that retail and office. I've been investing in real estate for 40 years. I don't touch retail or office because I don't know anything about it. I mean, relative to what I know about apartments. So, and this isn't a plug for apartments because I'm in apartments. This is a plug for apartments because it's really simple. If you'll live there, you guys can recognize what a good apartment is and where the deficiencies are easier than you probably can recognize what the deficiencies are in a life science conversion or an Amazon warehouse or a data center because the apartment owner is selling product to people like you. So, I've been... And the public markets, Mitch, do you think, I mean, the public markets have allowed the retail investor a whole lot more flexibility in terms of re-investing in sectors that don't really have to be an expert in multifamily or an expert in hospitality or an expert in retail. They get a broad basket of re-investments and they can pretty much cover a real estate investment portfolio as opposed to what you and I think over most of the panelists think of investors in individual assets of real estate which is really a secondary and very sophisticated area. I don't know. I don't think you're gonna get rich with investing in REITs. I just don't think it's gonna happen. I think it's a good capital preservation and a good yield play, but the most of the REITs that I'm looking at these days on a public basis, the dividend yields are in the three to 4% range and every single apartment deal that comes across my desk, the cash and cash returns, which are tax advantage because you don't pay current taxes on them is in the 5% to 6% range at a minimum. But that's not available to the... No, I think it is. I think the crowdfunding has done for the apartment space what the REITs had done in the 80s and made this type of investment accessible. And I think that if people are going to get involved in investing in real estate, it's certainly something to think about doing on that basis instead of in the public markets. I think the public markets serve a different purpose. Sure, you can make some directional bets. I've done so myself, but only with a very, very small portion of my investment portfolio because I literally take every single dollar that I make and I put it into apartments. I've watched people... I mean, 20 years ago, I had clients that were former real estate brokers that had just started investing in apartments. And I know a half a dozen of them, literally a half a dozen of them, and they never sell it. This wasn't fixed and flipped. These are guys that would buy and hold and buy and hold and take every dollar that they were making and put it into real estate. Six of them are billionaires today. And these are guys that weren't worth $500,000. So it's just my two cents, I'm pretty opinionated. You're a Jets fan, so you have enough misery in your life. I'm right. You're gonna take those helmets down, man. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I was, look, I lived on Long Island. I was 10 years old when I just won the Super Bowl. We were seasoned ticket holders. I'm sorry, my blood is green. I was at the last Jets game in Chase Stadium when all the bathrooms started flowing and all the pipes were breaking, it was crazy. Anyway, this is not about real estate. We digress, right? We digress, yeah. Well, great conversation. We actually have some questions from the audience as well. And I think the one that we saw from a number of participants is asking how to get started in the real estate industry. If you were a student coming out of Fairfield University or you're a young alum, or maybe you are thinking of a change in the career, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to break into real estate industry? And perhaps you can start by telling us how you got into real estate. So this is a question to all our participants and our accommodator, Lisa. I'm happy to start unless you want to start, Mark. Yeah, go ahead, Mitch. So I had no idea what I was gonna do when I got to Fairfield or when I left Fairfield. I ended up getting into graduate business school. I didn't, which I didn't even know existed. I was a pre-med convert. So junior year, I converted from pre-med to business. And I found real estate to be very, very down to earth, very simple, not too esoteric, bricks and sticks and beds. And it was just pretty easy to understand. And so I really liked it. And it was very mathematical too. And I liked that about it too. So I took some real estate courses in graduate business school and I got a degree in real estate, specializing in real estate finance. And I went to work for a consulting firm in New York that happened to specialize in real estate as well. And literally we got staffed on a variety of different assignments. And one of the ones that I got staffed on, and it was just one of many, was in the commercial real estate sector, commercial real estate mortgage sector. And I liked it and I just followed my, it's kind of like I just did one foot in front of the other. If somebody asked me how I got into real estate and it's no pun intended, I staggered into real estate. I literally just followed the next step. And here I am 35 years later and it's been great. It's been a great run. It's not to, I don't have to worry about anything evaporating overnight. I don't have to worry about technology. I don't have to worry about too much about technology. I don't have to worry about data breaches. It's pretty simple. It's a pretty simple industry. And if you're smart and you work hard, you can excel. It's pretty simple. So if somebody is intentional about getting into real estate, what advice would you give them? Well, if they want to live in LA, they should call me. Call you when I'm done. Let's go, let's go. Yeah, you know, getting on the ground floor. I can take a stab at it, Mitch. I think what I like is what we've experienced. So some of our best folks that come in have the background of either a Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, investment banking background, a couple of year program, or with one of the brokerage firms or a place like that Mitch works for that they've got experience with looking at how a bunch of other different clients look at real estate. Cause I bet you if you gave each one of us the same asset and we can pick multifamily or whatever, we all might come at it slightly differently, which you're like, how's that possible? You're looking at the same asset, but our perspectives might be different. And what I like about the training programs that they have in some of these banks or brokerage firms is that it gives the folks that are going through it an opportunity to see how a stockage may do it or a new market or a Cushman or a private developer may do it or a retail shopping center. To me, that's invaluable experience to get a perspective of a lot of different potential buyers, owners, sellers or what have you. So when anyone comes to me and says, what should I do? Cause I have zero experience except an undergrad degree, maybe some internships. I would push them towards a more formalized training program. I think today, Mitch went, I think he went right to grad school after Fairfield. I can't remember you, but I think that's harder to do right away today and get out and get, I think you need a couple of years of like doing something. So like I say, some of the best people we've hired have come with that background and I would encourage people to seek that out. I talked to some folks that Fairfield sends me occasionally and I tell them, like I'm gonna put you in touch with these type of firms. The training programs are hard to get into at the banks. They take you through a program. So, but certainly Fairfield, I mean, I'm like, Mitch, I shut up one day, father and Neil said, hey, there's this real estate guy that looks for a job. I didn't have a job. I called them and then boom, I was in real estate and then 38 years later, I'm still doing it. But I think the training and just have that. And oh, and obviously networking like crazy. I think there's a good alumni network of folks just not more than us on the phone that are more than happy to make a phone call or give a reference. But I do think the training programs are a great experience whether it's in a brokerage firm, you know. Deal volume, yeah, deal volume. Deal volume, you get to see everything. You just- You gotta see a lot. And you'll learn, you're not gonna understand how to construct something, but you'll see mistakes. And you don't learn by success. You learn by mistakes. And that's, I've made a lot of mistakes. And that's how you get successful. You know, hope they're not fatal flaws, obviously, but because if they were, I wouldn't be on this call because I couldn't, you know, but the training programs to me are invaluable. Great advice. Thank you, Stephen. Mark, how about you? How did you get started? And what advice would you give? Well, I'd probably go quickly to the advice how I got started. I think I followed along. I was a pre-med major as well at Fairfield and then I got to organic chemistry and that was the end of that. So I quickly jumped to psychology and what it really underscored just listening to the other panelists. What it underscores is it really almost doesn't matter what your undergraduate degree is. If you've got a passion for it, if you've got a real interest in it, you can find a doorway that will get you into real estate. There are so many different avenues. You know, just in talking about the different segments we've talked about today in terms of all the different types of commercial real estate, whether you're coming into the bank, whether you're coming in through a training program, whether you're coming in through a brokerage house, whether you're coming in from an accounting firm or you're coming in as I did from a law firm, you know, transactional real estate, you know, engineering, construction, marketing, communications, you know, there's as many ways into real estate as there are majors that, you know, Fairfield specializes in, finance, you know, analysts. I mean, it's just so varied. But what I think we all share the passion for it and that's why, I mean, even, you know, me sitting here after 40 years of doing this, I still get up every day, enjoy what I do, enjoy the people I work with. It's changing, it's different. It's not the same widget that you're making day in, day out. It requires all of your skill sets that, you know, that Fairfield taught me, you know, whether it was at stagger in or, you know, in the dorm, you know, you've applied those throughout your entire, you know, your entire career. My advice would be if you have a passion for it, whatever you're doing, you'll find a doorway into it and then hard work, there's just, that's what's gonna help you really get to the next level. Thank you so much. Michael, what about you? So I always knew I wanted to be in a sales role, doing what exactly I wasn't sure. My father actually was a real estate broker. He had a brokerage shop, still does to this day. So he's been 40 plus years doing now what I do, where I should say, I do what he does. So it was always dinner table talk growing up and I had an interest obviously in real estate, got out of school and dove right in. You know, I think advice for the students listening, most likely your first job out of Fairfield is not gonna be the job you retire with. So, you know, certainly don't get frustrated if a couple of years in you're juggling what you wanna do. I'm in, you know, mostly in a sales role and I think, you know, the biggest advice and it was said earlier, network like crazy. You should know what your parents' friends do, what your friends' parents do. Just try to build a network because whether it's, you know, at a cocktail party or a dinner or whatever it may be, you're gonna run into somebody that's going to be able to help you out and you might not even know you have an interest in a certain type of industry until you meet somebody and then, you know, you build a network that way and that's gonna be invaluable. So network like crazy and hard work and immerse yourself in whatever business and you wanna be a part in and, you know, read the Wall Street Journal of New York Times every day and stay informed and you'll certainly find your way. Great, thank you. And Lisa, last but not least, can you please share your story and your advice? So I think I have the somewhat opposite experience to many of the panelists in that I wasn't a business major at Fairfield. In fact, I never took a business class at Fairfield. I was a politics major, religious studies minor, went on to get my master's in survey research. I knew that I wanted to work in politics and government and I left graduate school and did that for a number of years, had a very successful career and then I happened to meet the CEO of Westfield on a project that I was running that Westfield was participating in. And when that project was wrapping up, he basically said, why don't you come out to California? I feel like the company could use somebody like you. And I said, what will I do? And he said, we'll figure it out. And so I think that my advice to the folks who are watching who may be considering their career options is to be open to possibilities. And when opportunity comes your way, say yes. 20 years at Westfield was dynamic and exciting and I met some of the smartest and most fun people I ever worked with. So I developed a passion for real estate in much the same way I have a passion still for politics and government. So just say yes. Great. Thank you so much to all of our participants. This was a lovely conversation. Pat. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you all. This was outstanding. So to our alumni, Mitch, Lisa, Mark, Mike and Steven, thank you so much for your willingness to share your time, talents and expertise with our alumni, parents and students. This really was outstanding. You have my sincere and deep gratitude. To my campus colleagues, Katya and Zahn, I also thank you for your knowledge and for your collaboration. And I do have one more thank you. To my advancement colleague, Kevin Delaney, Senior Director of Development and Liaison to the De Olin School of Business, I thank you for your partnership on this project. Before we leave tonight, I wanna direct you to the Fairfield University calendar of events, www.fairfield.edu forward slash alumni events where you will find that there's so much going on at the university. I thank everyone for attending this evening. Please do keep in touch. I always enjoy hearing from alumni, parents and future alumni. So I hope to see you all at an in-person event very, very soon. But until then be well, stay safe and go stags. Good night and thank you all. This was terrific. Thank you. Good night.