 Well, everyone, I'm very happy to be here today for a conference for this topic, especially and it's which is on how to manage a crisis. And I think everybody can agree that right now we're in the middle of a crisis and hopefully coming to an end of one. But as the Chinese say, where there's crisis, there's opportunity. So here we are. And our first guest is Amy Price, who is the president of Bental Green Corp Oak. And we have Richard Stockton. Richard is the chief executive officer and president of Bremer Hotels and Resorts. He was previously with Morgan Stanley for 16 years as the head of real estate banking. Michael Facatelli is the founder of MDF Capital and co founder and managing partner of imperial companies. Michael was previously the president and CEO of Vornado Realty. And Jonathan Rose, who founded the Jonathan Rose companies, which is a multidisciplinary real estate development planning and investment firm, which creates real estate and planning models to address challenges of the 21st century. Jonathan, we're going to have a lot of questions for you. Jonathan also wrote a great book called the wealth of our city and what modern science, ancient civilization and human nature teach us about the future of urban life, which sounds like a great read. Amy, I want to start with you. You manage a lot of money for a lot of different institutions and a lot of different people. In the last year, as your investors are coming to you, how are you explaining the situation? How are you telling them to react? And are you a therapist right now or what's the situation? Explain to us. Okay. Welcome, everyone. Start my lights a little. Lighting seems bad. All right. Good morning. I think there's a couple of themes here. Number one, anytime there's uncertainty, I just think it's important to be transparent. That's a theme. Communicate what you can, including what you don't know. I'd say if you reflect on the last year, we've gone through a few phases. It was reactive. It was triage. It was trying to get our head around what was happening and why. And I think kind of fourth quarter or so last year, there was a shift really toward, I guess what I call, offense or more forward looking. How do we as a firm, we as an industry want to come out of this? Where do we have conviction? Where are we going to invest? How will we manage liquidity? So lots of themes, lots of conversation with our investors. But I guess what I'd say is it is that shift to a lot of communication and focus around conviction, investment strategy going forward, where we're going to invest and why. Again, happy to go into all that. I'm going to ask you guys about that. But that's great. But I just wanted to know the key things you were telling your investors as they were coming to you and telling you what we should do right now. Should we pivot? Should we change strategies? Should we just pull back? Well, again, I think it depends on the risk profile and it depends on the geography. But overall, I'd say there was a pullback and now I'd say there's more of a invest with conviction. So what does that mean? It means that we are choosing our spots. We are pretty aggressive in terms of industrial, which is not a surprise, right? Everybody is. Development, cold storage, more specifically. We are far more cautious on office. We can talk about that. But we like the demographics. We like the thematic, but we're also choosing markets and strategies related to markets. Again, we can talk about that. But markets have like really shifted. I mean, Jonathan, this is more for you. But the construct of the city was being challenged in the last year, like people were asking what's going to happen to the future of cities. And if there's no need for people to go to offices and there's no need for cities to draw talent because talent can be anywhere, what is the need to have a downtown? And obviously, a place like New York or San Francisco and places like that would be the first places to be hurt by it because they're so expensive and there's so much there's so much there. What's your take on it? Yeah, you're on mute, actually. So thank you for the question. Which interesting is that obviously during COVID, we went through a period where a lot of people were able to work remotely. And as we know, essential workers were not able to work. And many major cities saw an emptying out, for example, barely anybody goes to my office, which is right in the heart of New York City. I happen to have been on a really interesting call yesterday with a series of affordable housing leaders. And the question, what are we all going to do? And the consensus was that we need to we need to physically go to the office. We may be only only three days a week instead of five days a week and people may be working from home. But the creative juice, the interactions, the training of young people, the carrying on of your culture, all that requires being in place. And so I definitely think there's going to be return to the return to the office and return to the cities. We're also seeing this, by the way, our portfolio is almost entirely affordable housing, a little bit of market rate development. And we are now seeing the market rate rentals dramatic increase in the last few weeks in action as we think as people are beginning to rethink now, okay, it was nice being away for a year, but I got to get back. The larger concern I have is, so office, my sense is people will need less office space. But on the other hand, we're redesigning, for example, we ourselves are redesigning our office. We've asked, so what is the office of the future? We've said it needs to be a laboratory needs to be a creative space. It needs to be a place, the other thing is needs to be a place you really want to go to. And it needs to be, we actually said in part, a sanctuary. This actually takes up more space. So it'll be interesting to see how different companies reconcile their space needs. So I think people will be back in offices, but my concern for cities, for example, New York City had about 50 million tourist visits a year in 2019. And my sense is that the travel is going to remain lower for quite some time. People are going to get back to traveling. And I think people really also learned to value their gardens and being home and reading and being with family more, being with multi-generational family more. So I don't know what the number is, but maybe New York stabilizes the 30 or 40 million visitors a year instead of 50 million year visitor a year. And that's going to significantly affect retail and Broadway and a lot of elements other elements. I would still make it the number one most visited city in the world. So which is a great thing still, even at 40. My sense is it'll be less and that's going to affect the economy in lots of ways and real estate in lots of ways. But you know, it's even if everything goes back to normal and people have to go back to the office and we get that to 80%. You still have a 20% vacancy where in a city like Manhattan leaves about 100 million square feet vacant. And as you guys know, building is an organism. It has to be maintained and sustained because if it's not, it decays and it affects the things around it. Michael, you guys have projects, office projects going up now. Did you guys at any time when this happened, did you think to pivot or change anything about your plans for the projects that you guys have in development right now? Well, pivots, pivots a nice concept, but it's very difficult to do if you own a, if you own a hotel and what are you going to do pivot away from and sell it? If you're in middle of development, what are you pivot to? So it's intellectually nice, but you own these assets and the worst time generally is to sell us and something like this. So if you wanted to say, I don't like retail, I now like industrial, like Amy said, that's not so easy to pivot. You might in the future be able to say, I'm going to weight myself toward that. I'm not going to do that. So unfortunately, this thing hit everyone so quickly. And by surprise, they had to deal with your existing assets first and your existing core problems first. For instance, I'm owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and we had built an entire city around the Bucks Arena, New Arena. It was doing fantastic. On March 11th of last year, it closed. There was no game, no arena, hasn't been one event in the arena for one year. Now there's limited people coming to the arena. All that entertainment retail around it, the restaurants that retail has been unbelievably challenged, right? There was nothing to pivot to. I mean, I wish I could have pivoted. At the beginning of the pandemic, you're in a car that's about to go off the ledge. Do you jump out of the car or do you just like stay in the car and say, how am I going to make this work somehow? Because the car was already over the ledge by the time we knew it. So if you jumped, you might get it faster, it's shorter than the car. But I think it's a really interesting, like Veneto owns a lot of street retail in New York. They own a lot of office buildings. It's hard for Veneto to pivot. Just say, I don't want retail in New York anymore because it's going to be challenged, right? I mean, vicious business, hotels got murdered during this crisis. What do you do? So I think the concept is, what do you do from here? What's your thesis from here and what actions can you take with your existing portfolio to limit the damage? And what can you do in the future to shape your portfolio differently? I would say this, the other thing in my career, when things are really down and bad, it's generally the best time to invest, generally. It doesn't mean if the future, you know, RTC days, the 2008 and 2009, the real inflection points with it, capital withdrawals, the gentleman you can make outsides, returns, takes guts. That's where I think we should spend. Everybody wants industrial right now. So to say you want industrial, it's nice, but you're going to pay up for that right now. But if you want retail, you can get a lot of that. So I'm not saying you should do that. So I think, you know, the idea of what is going forward, a great risk return is important. And the last thing I'd say is it's very tough to make decisions based on where we are today. I think if no one's ever going to go to your office anymore, that's probably not correct. To Jonathan saying, there will be switches to how people use your office, what you have to provide. But I don't think it's going to be no one's going to go. I think people see this and they make their decisions. You can't make that decision in the middle of a crisis. It's going to step back and wait for them to make, I think, more intelligent decisions. Then let's talk about what we're thinking. Richard, what is your position right now? Obviously, business travel, which accounts for 70% of all travel, which I understand has come to a halt. So what are you guys doing over there at Braemer to address all of this? Yeah, thanks, Samir. Our portfolio breaks down into two sub portfolios. We've got resorts and urban. And so we have 13 luxury properties. They're actually luxury and upper upscale. Eight of them are resorts and five of them are urban properties. The resorts we've seen an incredible bounce back in demand. And we're achieving an average daily rate equivalent to same time last year at an occupancy of about 60% across those eight assets. So in some cases, those properties will have a record year this year. They're achieving all-time highs, particularly an average daily rate. For February, across our entire portfolio, I'll get to the urban portfolio in a second, our average daily rate was up 18%. So the drive-to leisure markets and even the fly-to leisure markets, because we have the wrist Carlton and St. Thomas are performing very well. Now, the urban portfolio, we have the five other properties in Philadelphia and San Francisco and Seattle and Chicago and Washington, D.C. are struggling. And they're only operating in about 30% occupancy right now at a rate that's about 30% down from what it was. In some cases, obviously more. So those properties are being subsidized essentially by our resort properties right now. I get the question a lot of times, are we seeing green shoots in terms of corporate transient demand? The answer is not really, not yet. There's a city-wide calendar when we can look at our group business that is still on the books, starting in August of this year. Pretty much everything between now and August has been canceled. We're starting to see some conferences come up, but really not material enough to make a difference. And so we're still on the lookout for that business traveler. I think people do need to by and large get back into offices first, and then we'll start traveling for work. There's some hopeful signs that I talked to some luxury caterers and they said they're literally booked through the summer in the Hamptons. So some of the guys who are doing stuff all over the Northeast, they're just camping out in Long Island and they have so much business that it's incredible. And there's so many brands that are following the traffic there and doing events and shows in the Hamptons because they really believe by the summer there'll be a major pickup. Amir? Yes. I spoke about the cities, but at some point I'd like to talk about what's going on in affordable housing. Yeah, of course, yeah. Feel free to jump in any time. So as our company primarily builds and buys affordable and mixed-income housing and we've long told our investors that it was the same payment because our rents are so below market and because there's such a demand for it is really an infinite demand that it would be really recession resilient. And that's exactly what happened. The income of all communities are as high as they ever were. Our rent collections have been pretty good and the income has been rock solid because the demand is so steady even in cities like San Francisco and New York there may be people who've been out migrating but there's still over demand for affordable housing. So what's happened is a consequence is that those who could pivot recognized that it was a safe haven and so there's been a tremendous amount of capital flowing in and therefore just like industrial, I would say over some people are beginning to overpay for the asset class. For affordable housing? Yes. Okay, well that's a green shoot, that's nice. Michael, in terms of office, you guys, the building, the stuff that you guys had started developing were underwritten at a certain price point. How are you guys adjusting those price points now? Well, I don't, I think the office market, you had Veneto signed one of the largest Facebook right in the middle of this crisis to take the folly building. So, you know, there are still people who are expanding at the jobless point, Facebook's envisioning using that space in a very different way, I think, than they would have two, three, four years ago. I'm sorry you froze. I would say when you see any offices, people are putting love to see. Now, Michael, you're freezing a little bit. Sure. You don't want to make a five or ten year commitment now because, John, I don't think they really understand what the post-pandemic is. Can you repeat that? We missed some of that. You froze. Okay. Okay, we're recording. It's okay. You just heard what Jonathan said. I mean, he's like one of the leaders when it comes to affordable housing and really understanding the systems of cities and, you know, migrations to cities. Does that sort of give you confidence to tell your investors to put money into affordable housing? I'm sorry, Michael. We went to Amy, but I'm coming back. I've never known a pro forma that actually got exactly met. They're projections, right? So right now we were building something a year or two ago. You have to expect lower rents, but again, we don't know what's going to happen a year or two from now. So it's hot to stop mid-development. So I believe that you're going to see office friends on the pressure. Retail rents are down. Hotels, Rick said there's a tale of two cities, but both negative pressure. There's always been negative pressure on those things. Even apartments in New York, Jonathan, has a lot of them. You know, it hasn't been great. It's been, you've been given more concessions. Marker rate apartments in New York are worse than they were last year, two years ago for sure. So, you know, you just have to say, how bad can you, how do you get through the, how do you price it? So, yeah, for being honest with each other, this thing wasn't favorable to real estate except for very few asset classes. You know, and, you know, we have to just deal with that, but you're in the middle of development. I think we feel there'll be demand. There's a flight to new product, but that will be probably a lower price than we thought we originally envisioned the development. What are the few asset classes that you mentioned that are, that did actually well during this time? For instance, data centers, cell tower companies, industrialism, you pointed out fulfillment things. Those asset classes, you know, so many online filming, I think those asset classes, you know, in apartments and I think in general, in most of the country and affordable housing, held up relatively one high collection, single family homes, limited, did really well, but the retail hotel and office, which are the largest asset class, came under negative headwind for sure. Hey, now, I'd like to go back to you and tell you, would you tell your investors to invest in multifamily or affordable housing as Jonathan stated that he's doing pretty well with them? Yeah, my short answer is yes, we would invest and we would, you know, advocate to our investors, the rationale to invest in a multi-family. I'd say I would probably, for us, we would define it as a kind of lowercase affordable slash workforce slash secondary cheaper markets. I think the trend is toward, or there's, you know, I'd say there's more strength right now in the market and more conviction for the underlying fundamentals when you have a relatively, you know, lower density or lower price point rent and rent to income affordability and that defined that way is a really key factor. You know, we own high rise urban multifamily projects in New York and San Francisco that are absolutely, to Michael's point, struggling the most. They're going to take the longest, but all said, you know, we have a lot of conviction for multifamily as a sector. And again, we like the more, quote, affordable end of that spectrum right now than the higher price point, more dense, more urban for, you know, for investment. Can I just comment? One of the things in our career that's been in migration, urban, urban generally outperforms suburban at most asset classes. It outperformed it, it was by a wide margin, hotels outperform and apartments. You've had a strange phenomenon going on at Richard's point where urban has gotten really hurt and the suburban less has been better because you can drive it. It just seems like, you know, I own an apartment building in New York and one of the suburbs, one of the suburbs has been better than the one in downtown New York, San Francisco, outside of San Francisco, they're way better. So I think you have a, you have something going on that has not been the trend for the last 10, 15 years. Question, will that continue or not? Right. I think it's going to, where we're going to see is that really livable, smaller cities are going to do well. And there'll be more distribution of the America's economy throughout the nation, which is a good thing. We're also going to see the suburbs that are connected to cities. So for example, the suburbs of Denver that are on the light rail are going to do really well. And the suburbs that have more of an old downtown, a walkable town, town of street grid are also going to do better because people, you know, it's interesting, I've watched this for decades now. And when these times come, you see in small towns, people sitting outdoors in cafes and like walking the streets and some people, they're still social animals and they want to be together and they don't want to be isolated. So although we may not all be in the big cities, we want to be in social places. Go ahead, Amy. No, I was just going to jump in and click on that. I mean, I think that's true short-term. I'm going to advocate for the bigger cities on a long-term basis. New York, San Francisco, they're going to feel their pain. But if you look around the world, what we're talking about means a very US-centric point of view. Asia, we're not seeing the same trends even in Europe. So I do think there's an accelerator of what was already happening, what's the migration to the Southeast, Texas, some of those markets. But I think a lot of that's about cost structure of cities. It's about taxes. It's about employment. So I do agree thematically with Jonathan that we will continue. We're on an accelerated path and that is good. But I don't think it means the long-term demise of cities like New York or San Francisco. Richard, what is your current strategy right now in terms of growth? Or are you guys just trying to maintain at this point? That's a good question. I think a lot of people ask us if, just kind of echoing some of the other comments, if we've kind of given up on urban in favor of resorts, the answer to that's absolutely not. I think that this is an interesting time to look at opportunities to buy trophy urban properties that you wouldn't otherwise get, right? Where you're competing with very low-cost sovereign wealth fund money from overseas, et cetera. So we likewise believe in the future of cities. In terms of our ability to grow now, that's much more of a question about balance sheet and liquidity. And lodging reads, such as Breymar have all been really whacked over the past year, where we've used a lot of our excess cash, we've taken on more debt. And so our balance sheet is kind of out of whack. And we need to go through a period of healing now where we've got to generate more liquidity. We have to pay off this excess debt to get on the front foot to acquire. That said, we can acquire with cash or we can acquire, you know, perhaps by merging into an asset through the issuance of shares. And so that's one of the things that's kind of keeping us in the market and evaluating opportunities. Unfortunately, you know, there's a very unique circumstance where you've got sellers, you're willing to take shares as a consideration instead of cash, right? And it's generally where you don't have a major problem with a near-term debt maturity or, you know, some other sort of cash issue. So we're looking at opportunities. I think it'll be a little bit slow going. The reality is transaction volumes in the hotel space are down 80%. So it's not as if we're missing out on a lot of anything. There was an expectation that this would be the buying opportunity of the decade. I'm not sure it is. I mean, there may be some deals that shake free, but there's frankly a lot of capital, hundreds of billions of capital, sitting in funds that Amy and others manage that are focused on hotels and looking to buy them. And that's going to provide some price support. So I think we'll see less transactions. Richard, I think what I see in our career is if what you had is a disconnect, it's usually take some time for price discovery. You know, if the hotel was 100 and you want to suddenly buy it for 50, the seller doesn't want to sell it 50 and the buyer is not paying 100. So you just know what happens, no transaction by metric. But that's historically, these patents repeat themselves, then you just have people looking at each other. And what causes the catalyst is we either not know the underwriting or the bank takes it over, or they think somebody else could do it. And now you're not buying it from that emotional seller, you're buying it for something you can't do it. So I looked at a hotel recently, Richard would appreciate this, and they said things will be back to normal to sell it in 2022. Now, if you wanted to buy the asset on that basis, you could buy it less than you could two years ago, but you're still buying it at a fairly high price per room. My analysis of that situation was about 25%, 30% below that pricing. And it didn't trade. It wasn't like maybe I was something more aggressive. And that's what happened until there's some catalyst that time was by. So if Richard wanted to buy hotels, he probably couldn't buy that many in the next six months or three months, but maybe a year from now he could. So I just underscore that point. In 1989, we all experienced those who are in the business experienced a big crash. Prices exactly for that reason. Prices didn't hit the bottom till 1993. Four years later, it took for buyer and seller mindsets to kind of reach an accommodation. I agree with that point. I think one of the things that we're seeing this time around, and these things are always different, but still rhyme, is that banks don't want to own real estate. And so they're providing forbearance. And we've been through the first round of forbearance last year, which took owners from April to November. And now it's forbearance 2.0. And how our lenders still willing to work with borrowers to give them more time, defer interest, et cetera, wave covenants. We're seeing that's still happening for good borrowers. Some borrowers, not so fortunate, and there will be some foreclosures, but that it's still early days because the banks are so accommodated. None of these banks want to build up an REO department anymore. And they've kind of been there, done that. They learned from the previous crises that that's very costly undertaking. And for that reason, there's less, as Michael said, kind of filtering through the banks into the market right now. There's also a lifeline called low interest rates right now. So the carrying course of this has been a lot lower. And they don't want to, we own buildings, I own a building with restaurants in it. The restaurants have basically been unbelievably hot hit. They don't want to pay the rent. They don't want to pay the same rent. My alternatives are pretty minimal. What am I going to do? So you're working out. You're supposed to pay percentage rent until you get back on. So nobody wants the problem at this point. That's why I think this will be shallower and the amount of money will make it shallower and longer. So it'll be a shallower dip, pricing, and a longer process, I think. Let me ask you, Richard, this is for Richard and Michael. Are there any assets that you guys currently have that you think it's probably worthwhile to think about repurposing them for different use? I'll go first. This is something that we looked at in the depths of the crisis. When the crisis hit, we closed 11 out of our 13 hotels and Franka didn't know when we'd be able to reopen them. That was in a May, end of April, May of last year. We had almost all properties opened again by June. But during that time, we did an analysis. Can you convert a hotel to multi-family? Can you repurpose part of it? What we found in that analysis is conversion really doesn't work from an ROI perspective when you have an asset that is not functionally obsolete, where maybe there's a slight downturn, but you know it will return. So the frictional cost of the construction and the time and the delay didn't make sense for any of our properties. I think you really need to find a circumstance where that asset no longer makes sense in its current use forever. And some of that's happening in New York. New York's got very large structural challenges in terms of cost with labor unions, etc. And some of those assets aren't coming back online and getting converted. I think those are very limited number of circumstances. Yes, the question personally for us, none of it had applied to us. I think it's limited. I mean, I think it's hard to repurpose each case that's got to be justified. So I haven't been as fortunate as some of the assets to go here to be able to just repurpose them on an economic basis. So yeah, you kind of weighed it out, but I do see people converting hotels to apartments or micro, you know, there's some obviously more logical things and what empty office building may go to apartments or workforce type housing. So people are thinking creatively, but it's in the math. I think you have to do the math and see whether it makes sense enough. What are some of the really unorthodox repurposing that you guys have heard of or that people have presented to you? Well, I can think of one off the top of my head. We had a proposal from one of these, I don't even know what they're called, virtual apartment operators, like I'll use some names, Sonder, for instance, where they've got an interesting distribution strategy. And they would take over and lease part of a hotel and put it on their platform and essentially operate it as a different type of hotel, I suppose. And they're doing that also with apartment buildings. And so I think there are some changes in the world of technology that are introducing these new alternative uses that could work and I think in certain circumstances, works really well. But that's probably one of the most interesting ones. One which is I saw is a lot of malls, which is we haven't talked about the mall space but retail. A mall was converted, if you look at this mall, it had typically anchors on both ends. One of the anchors was converted to a senior housing facility. The major problem was converted to a medical center attached to a university to drive through and so forth. And the other was affordable housing to John. So that mall, which had two big anchors, really looks like basically some limited shopping still there, basically a medical center and a kind of associated with senior assisted living and kind of things. And otherwise, so it was the same thing near a college, the student housing. So people are trying to think about the platforms where they have large scale piece of land. Those are some of the ones I saw, I thought were interesting. I saw a guy in Orlando who bought a mall and turned it into a garage, 600,000 square foot garage, which I thought was interesting. There's a lot of students watching this. What are some advice that you guys have for them of where they should go? What sort of hats should they take now with everything that's happened and all the changes and the shifts that have happened in real estate and in architecture? What are some of the paths you think they should focus on where they could see a lot of growth in, where there's a lot of opportunity? And I offered two totally different paths. So one, as Mike said, really important point, this all follows math. And I call it like the rules of gravity of real estate. But in the end, you got income expense and debt service, and you got to make it all add up. And so I think going to a company, a good stable company, where you can learn the rules of math, learn the project management, learn all the essential things that you need to know to be in real estate, makes a lot of sense. It's just a foundation of your career. And there's a completely alternative point of view, which is now is a great time to buy a couple of townhouses or something or a small building in a crappy part of town, or a less desirable part of town, and fix it up yourself with your own labor, manage it yourself and kind of do it from the ground up and get it to be an entrepreneur. So two totally different views. By the way, I've seen great success paths in both of those. That's great advice. And Michael, what do you think? Well, I did a class at Columbia, one of these virtual things. I said, the first thing is get a job. I had three boys, two of them got unemployed quickly doing this thing, and one of them had just got a job virtually, which I commend them for, because I think it's very difficult to do that with the help of Columbia. So I actually think that if you can get a job, and I don't know if Amy or others are hiring, people haven't needed a lot of people right now. So the real estate market, not easy. If you can get a job, I think it's an unbelievably good time to enter the market. But you're going to see a lot of interesting things. Historically, when you entered the markets at peak, it wasn't good. So if you entered in 1989, it wasn't as good as entering in 1992, you got a lot more, but it was very hard to get a job in 1992 versus 89. So I think you just get in with the best company you can, where you're going to learn the most, get the most deal flow and exposure. Again, doing something like John that said requires a little entrepreneurship. If you need a paycheck, I think getting a job of one, not being too good and getting in with the best company of people you can with it, the rest of the people agree. But my sense would be simplistic advice. Do you guys feel in general that salaries have been depressed as a result of the pandemic? I'll jump in on that. I mean, we as a company cut our salaries during the pandemic. So absolutely, we had raises that we had announced and then put on hold. We had people that were up for promotion who were told they have to wait. We had bonuses deferred. So absolutely, that's been an issue. And now that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we're trying to make amends for those past transgressions, if you will. So we just recently put salaries back up to where they were. And now we're going to start to look at raises maybe later in the year. We paid off deferred bonuses. So we're getting back to normal, but there's no doubt that the momentum that it built up over the last eight years definitely stalled and declined. So now let's get back on track. And do you guys feel like it's tougher to find talent right now or much easier? We're not looking that much for talent right now, but we're kind of, well, we're growing slightly, but we're fairly stable. What's been interesting is, we also manage all our properties. So in the community side, in the field side, there's generally in the industry about a 30% turnover a year nationally. And the turnover has been obviously because of COVID people are not traveling, people were very grateful for the jobs that they had. And so we've seen the field turnover be lower. Yeah, I'd say, Amir, the answer to that question is very geographically inconsistent. I think there are certain areas where there are tons of jobs. Look at Dallas. Dallas is one of the biggest employers in terms of growth perspective in the country right now. So we have a lot of jobs in certain metropolitan areas and then very few jobs and others where people haven't gone back to work yet. And the companies there, I'd say a little bit stagnant. So I think the answer is it depends on that one. But here in the South, I'm based in Dallas. There's ample opportunity. And then, Amy, what about for you guys? Yeah, a few things I'd say. A couple of observations. So number one, I'd say within more of the investment management business 2020 actually wasn't a horrible year because there is resiliency of just these dreams, etc. I think that actually going forward 21 could be more challenging. And so I think there's just a little bit of a delay and running, you know, more private investment management business than the world rich rich lives in, rich and lives in. I also say in terms of talent, I completely agree if you're young and you're starting out, it's a great time to just get a job, try to work with good people, try to learn a lot. But I would also say that we are hiring. And I would say it's mixed at a more kind of mid level or senior level. And I think the reason for that is that there is probably a little more resistance to change right now. So if you're at a company and you're like, well, do I really want to make a change now? What could that look like? I think people are a little more risk adverse. But at the same time, I think that there's also a lot, I think people are kind of, let's say, a little more freed of past kind of compensation, alignment, etc. And so there is also you see more people at a more again, mid or senior level willing to make changes or open to looking at other opportunities. Just given kind of where they, there's a natural reset, I guess it happens at these points in time, right? So you see that trend as well. I mean, this is a question I guess for all of you guys, if you have a senior level, maybe not senior level, but mid level people that want to work for your company, Jonathan, for example, or for MDF, Michael, but they want to live in Tennessee or North Carolina and sort of, you know, zoom in for that position. Is that something you guys would consider right now? But like that's, that's the big talk that people sort of can be anywhere and do their job. Is that somebody that you guys would accept into your company? It's complicated. Depends on the position. And again, we're a national company. And so actually, we do think that having distributed national executive leadership is not a bad thing. But we are requiring that everybody needs to show up at an office when we need to show up at an office. And so the bottom line is, and we have some employees who've been with us for a while, who for example, they're one employee who moved to Maryland because her in-laws and parents could take care of the kids. You know, there's been a whole disruption people have had to go through with school right now and taking. So we've been, we've had to accommodate that. And then, but the question is, to what extent can we accommodate that in a permanent way? We're making a few exceptions, but in general, we really think people need to come to an office and be part of a community, part of a culture, and part of a mentoring of our next generation. Yeah, I would say one of the things interesting, my youngest son goes through the process of getting a job during that. It's different. If some of the kids, if you don't have to go into your office for six months, we found people moving out of our buildings and spending time in Ozyman, or Boise, or Austin, or Nashville. But if you have to go into your office two days a week, you're not going to live in Idaho if you're going into New York. Well, if you're in Dallas, you're not going to live in New York, right? It's just it, I think there's going to be a hybrid model, but that will be me, you're going to be in that location or close to that location you could drive. I saw that happening. So my son's just started the job, he's in the office when they can, they had a COVID outbreak, but he's in the office two days a week right now, and he's home, working home, but he's not skiing. He's working like 10, 12 hours a day from a place, sometimes living with us, sometimes on his own. So I personally think that the model again of the future, I don't think people are going to be scattered all over the country when the office in New York. There may be more work from home, but it's going to be a concentric circle. You can get on a bus or on a subway or in a car, be there in an hour, not probably on a plane and be there in four hours with that kind of course. So I do think what I see is people hiring. And I also think they're reluctant to hire and integrate culturally remotely. Let it be, if you were coming with Amy, some of the people she's got dispersed and you work with her for 10 years, you're probably, but if you're brand new, you want to never come into the office, how do you integrate that person in and teach them and bring them in? It's much more of a challenge. So I think hiring is going to be down until people get back to what worked for the most part. If that's going to be the case, that you feel like people will have to be near downtowns, then there's good opportunity in areas outside of cities where people can commute to work. Do you think areas like Westchester, for example, in New York and other sort of areas like Westchester and other neighborhoods are just places going to continue to thrive? I mean, upstate Westchester, I believe, grew in price by 22% in the last year. So is that a trend that's going to continue across the country? In places with such great, Westchester has such great Metro North trains right to Grand Central. As I mentioned Denver where there's the light rail, et cetera, I think you're going to really see that city suburban connection that's strong is going to thrive. Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. Number one, if you're only commuting two days a week, you're willing to take a longer commute. So I do think it makes that more accessible. I think they're thinking we're not talking about a lot of people, the people that are commuting into the office and they need to be there. They also, and particularly in our world, would spend time on airplanes. It goes back to why are you traveling, how do you work? And to the point earlier, I do think that that business travel is going to take longer. I think some of that it does not get back to where it was. We got on a plane like that. I think we rethink that. So I think some of the way we work, we actually are more focused on how do we commute to between office and home and get to an airport, which I think is a different dynamic. And then the last thing I'd say, we're really talking about the parts of our team, I think in this conversation that our more collaborative need to work together in the real estate world, we're in the markets, we're investing in, where do we own assets? But there is a whole other part of the workforce that is more independent, that's more task oriented, accounting, IT, etc. I think companies are going to have to focus more on their cost structure. I think I can speak personally, we've had a lot of those teams integrated alongside of our investment teams. We're rethinking that. What's best for those teams? Where should they work? And that's where I think you will have more, choose your city, but other locations that are both lower cost, but also a better lifestyle for that workforce. And I think there will be a dislocation that will have impacts on demand for types of office in different markets and locations. One thing I'd like to maybe ask Richard, you see, I found it interesting what will be incremental. I'm on a few boards, and those boards used to me four or five times a year. And they always were in person, if it was kind of, you shouldn't not go to the board meeting, you have a crisis, yes. And they mostly were, they moved maybe around the city, one was in Dallas. For 2022, 21, we can't see how we're saying maybe we're going to do half the board meetings in person, half virtually. Now we've learned to do virtual. So I don't know whether the long-term impact on Richard's business would be negative, because that was four trips to state and hotel, you've got airplane tickets, et cetera. So what I see right now, people planning so far in 21, 21, you're not going to see a lot of people maybe in the second half of the year, but it's going to be very tentative. But even 22, we just went through this. We're saying we're going to cut back the number in person meetings to save time, but we can do all this administrative stuff on Zoom. Now, I never heard of Zoom before this crisis started, to be honest, which is not saying I'm a Zoom expert, I'm kind of proficient. So I actually think the Johnsburg Tourism, if suddenly we go from 50 to 30, and suddenly we go from meetings at a four times a year to twice a year, that will have a profound effect through the economy is what you said. I don't wish if you're seeing that, but we've made a conscious decision on the board's online but 22 to kind of go half and half. I mean, nobody can figure out the right answers to be said, let's do half in person, half virtual. Yeah, I can tell you what we do for our company is we do want to see our board members in person four times a year. I don't think that's too much. I think one of the things you miss from a Zoom call is if Jonathan, I wanted to pull you aside and kind of ask you something personal and have a quick chat and maybe we learn something and there's, we can't do that here, right? So we only get to talk to everybody and everybody gets to hear what everybody's saying about everybody. And I think there's some value into having those side chats and side interactions and unintended discussions. So yeah, that's why we encourage it four times a year. I know I also agree with what Amy said is there will be people that kind of rethink, it's like, do I really need to fly to New York for a 30 minute meeting? I can just do a Zoom, right? So there'll be some impact, but hopefully as the economy grows in general, that will offset the impact of kind of the loss of that face-to-face that's been really driving our business since the start of time really in hotel business. You guys are just one other quick antidote on this is that so we're in the business of being in front of our investors, raising capital. You know, I had an NLP investor tell me that she will not take a first introductory meeting in person again. It's inefficient, inefficient for them, inefficient for the managers, the number of people that would get on planes to go in, sit down in person, have their 30 minutes to, you know, give the pitch. Now, also the points made also would never go through the entire process fully remote, right? We'll visit a manager in the office, we'll sit down, look them in the eye, all those things, but you don't need to do it on the first meeting. And I think that's the trend, right? It's going to meet in the middle, but the first meetings and I totally the same thing on the boards I'm a part of, I think once a year you have the big dinner, you do the whole shebang two or three times a year, it's governance, it's business, you do it remote. And I think it allows you to actually get better talent on boards. I mean, part of the reason you kind of think about that commitment you're going to make is like, well, where do I need to be and how many times a year? And I actually think from a company's point of view, again, if I can think globally now about the talent for my board, I think I actually get to a better place. So I really think that's going to be a trend that changes. And I think these will have meaningful impacts on how people travel. For us, for example, for a position for engineer that in New York would have cost us $140,000, we found that person just as qualified in Dallas for $90,000. And then we miss a few hours, but it was a big saving for us. And the more now we don't put a geographic location for our ads and we widen the pool pretty much the whole country. We try to keep it east coast to some degree for our east coast coverage or for the west coast stuff. It's really widening the pool for us in terms of the talent pool, which has been incredible. And it's allowing us to grow at a really nice pace. People in Amy's business that they've never had more success fundraising, and it's been faster, quicker, more efficient. It's particularly true Amy for existing investors, I think they're saying a new relationship may be more complicated to develop over Zoom. And I'm not saying, Richard, that I like to Zoom better than in person. No way. I like in person way better, but the trade-offs, I think. So I don't know, Amy, people have caught more capital raising, having a band of year for that, especially in existing investors. And we did. I mean, we raised over $4 billion last year globally for our business in 2020, which is remarkable. And part of that is the timing of what you're in the market with, what are you offering? There's a certain timing to that. And I think for investors, there's a time where they hit the brakes and then they realize they need to get this capital allocated. They need to get capital deployed. And so yes, when you have an existing relationship, a lot easier to make that incremental commitment to the manager you already know and you've gone through your diligence and your process with, as opposed to a new relationship. I have a few minutes left. I just want to ask you guys, is the US still the Swiss bank of world capital? Are you guys still getting a lot of foreign investors? Has the pandemic urged other more vulnerable countries to invest in the United States? I mean, Amy, I'm sure you're seeing that to a degree. And Michael, are you guys seeing that as well? Good, Amy, good. Yeah, I mean, we do still see significant capital flows in the US. I think that I would say- So you're seeing a lot of foreign capital come to the US? Foreign capital in the US. I'd say Europe more. I'd say, listen, it goes back to probably, I'd say the change administration has been important. I think in the prior administration, particularly with China, Asia, there was more resistance. There was a greater question mark. But in terms of kind of being the bank, where do people feel comfortable investing, outside of a domestic market, which is always number two? Again, I mean, what are your global alternatives? And I do think that we continue to see significant demand from global investors into the US and also into Europe. I think Europe's probably been a net positive actually, in terms of future trends, incremental dollars, because of some of the dynamics around the US. I see people thinking they want to do it, allocating it, but not actually doing it yet. So there's a difference. Like Amy, I'd like to get into New York at hotels at cheap prices, but they actually hasn't done it yet. The second thing I think of Amy and Jonathan, I really believe in New York long term. I came from Providence, Rhode Island. I've been in New York society too, but I've never been quite as shaken about New York because of the political and tax situation, or it's kind of uncertain about it. So I think that people, again, you make your outside return when you buy, when other people are scared or don't want to buy, there's a shortage of capital, or there's an inflection point. But this inflection point is a little bit more complicated for me to underwrite, because of the political, and Amy said early tax, some of the policies are driving away incremental, very, very important constituents that would fuel that economy. So I think when we do think about, and I believe urban will come back and grow back, but I do think we have this overhang of the political stuff that we never worry as much, and certainly the tax. I love people, Jonathan, you agree with that or not, but I feel strongly that that's one thing that's keeping me on the sideline till I see who's going to be the next mayor of New York, and what's it look like? So first of all, on the foreign investment, we too raise investment funds in had a banner year, got oversubscribed this year, which is fantastic. And what we saw in Europe is there's a dramatic increase in impact investing in ESG, all the pension funds are required, etc. So affordable housing, since we do green affordable housing with social services for the residents, we're right in the bullseye of where impact investing is going. So yes, they want to be in America, they want to be in really stable returns. It's kind of like traditional pension fund thinking that I think the pandemic has said, let's be safe, let's not be extravagant. And they're really, really looking for impact. Again, we have an impact offering, so I'm seeing that part of the market, but we saw a dramatic, there was something that happened in the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and all the income inequality, all the things we saw that there was a significant shift in the investor mindset that said, I want to invest and not only do well as a return, I want to do well for the world. And I think that trend is going to continue to deeply affect the investment market for real estate. As for New York City, I would like, I think that it has to rationalize, I keep hearing, you know, the Florida pitch, you know, like no estate tax, you know, no state tax. And so in Texas the same thing, that they're really aggressively pitching on that. So I think New York City needs to kind of both have to see who the next mayor is. I don't think New York City is down and out. I don't think, you know, it's going to be around for a long time. But the other thing is we've seen, you know, what Brexit did by de-centering the financial center out of London. So it used to be New York and London, Hong Kong, you know, there were Singapore, there are a couple of key centers in the world. Well, Hong Kong is not going to be a key for the global financial center because the China's takeover. It'll be a different kind of financial center that's not going to be globally trusted. London is not going to be one. That means the money is going to distribute more broadly and it doesn't have to be in New York. Right. Well, you know, on that note, I want to thank you guys and for anybody who's watching this, who's a New York citizen and a resident, it's so important to make sure that you register to vote. Probably most importantly for the primaries, which is June 22nd, that's probably more important. That's going to indicate who's going to be the mayor of New York for the next eight years. So it's four years, but you know, it's generally eight years. So if you care about the city, make sure to register to vote, especially for the primaries on June 22nd. That's key. I want to thank our panelists. We had a nice full hour. I think we covered a lot. And any final thoughts from anyone? I just want to say to students out there, look, this is a very interesting time for real estate, which is what makes it such a fascinating industry to be a part of. And I'm grateful to have been able to experience both the ups and the downs. And that's what makes it a really great career going forward. So it's fascinating, but it's also fun too. Richard, the next city we're growing into is Dallas. So maybe when I come out there, I'll come see you. Please do. All right, we got it. I say, stay patient. Stay safe, be liquid. That's going to be great. All right. Wonderful. Thank you, everyone.