 Good afternoon, thank you for joining. My name is Ricky Cassidy. I'm taking over for Dennis Izaki, who started this show a long time ago. I do have some news about Dennis. He's one of my best friends, probably my worst enemy because he asked me to take over to do this show. And for that, I'm very grateful. He actually has given me a possibility of learning something and maybe even growing more mature. I mentioned him upfront, and then I'm going to segue into my guest who's an old, old friend with a fine mind who I've known in my capacity as doing market research. And every so often, she would call up and we'd talk about real estate. And she's a reporter. And it was fun for me to talk about it with her because she had a 360 degree view. She was interested in everything. On top of that, she's pretty intelligent. She did it for PBN for a long time. That's Janice Magnon. And I'm going to welcome her to the show and start by saying, tell me something about yourself. Well, as you mentioned, I used to write about real estate full time, but I no longer do that. I still do, in some capacity, as a freelance writer. So we still talk about stuff, right? Yeah. I'm, yeah, I've been in Hawaii for like 22 years, but originally from New York. So we have some connections, too. And then the serious thing is, I mean, it's great fun being interviewed. It's always fun to ask questions for you. And it's even more fun for me to keep on talking for me, even though many have said to me, I talk too much. But in our context, it was a data dump of all sorts of things. I do a report, some of which would tell the trend. Others were, who's going to develop what, where, when, how. And because of your involvement in that, you had two things. You had, again, a 360 view of all sorts of different facets. So it was fun to be questioned because of all the different aspects. And then you'd pull out examples. And they would be current one. And the thing I did remember being impressed by was your facility of gathering information on the web. You went deep into the internet. And you're able to really track ownership of things. That was your skill. And for that, I give you full credit. How did you kind of develop that? You were the market researcher. Just out of necessity out of having to find information and not always relying on people to tell me what the information was. Because data doesn't lie, usually. And things, public records are very useful. I think a lot of journalists don't take enough advantage of all the public records that are out there that can tell you things that maybe people don't necessarily want you to know or want you to know yet. And like you said about ownership, about projects, being developed, and whatnot. So it was just, I guess, persistence over the years of digging wherever I could find something and then bookmarking it and going back to it over and over again. So. I'm segueing from that. For me, starting out at Gentry and doing market research and collecting data and then representing it, knowledge was power. And the power was making people think it ultimately in my profession led me to be able to answer questions. I used data to answer questions. And that was helpful. Yours is something similar. Only you kind of, as a journalist, anticipate their questions, the five questions that you have to answer in an article. The who, what, when, while, et cetera, et cetera. And then knowing something gives you context and interviewing because you can go backwards in times and then maybe add on something thing. So that's admirable. Did anybody treat you like you were all powerful? I mean. Only you. Well, you were. I mean, actually. No, but it's not a bad answer. I mean, but you, you were powerful to me because you knew stuff that I didn't in terms of other people. Did that ever cross your mind or? No, no, I never made that assumption. Oh, cool. Because there's always somebody who knows more, who knows more than me or, you know. I never assumed that my, I always assumed my readers would know more than I did about certain things, right? Right. And so did they talk to you about that? Did you get a dialogue going at all? Did they say this? Did they say that? Sometimes people would, sometimes people would reach out after something was published to comment on, you know, what, what the story was. Or to say, yeah, but you should really look at this thing or that thing or, you know, to let me know there were other things going on. Because, you know, I was not privy to conversations behind the scenes. And I was not privy to a lot of things. So what you can glean from public records is one thing, but sometimes something else is going on, as you well know, right? It's all context. Context is why, why news is important. There's a great quote from Alan Kay, who was one of the original computer scientists in Bay Area. And he said, my paraphrase, context is worth 50 points of IQ. And what he meant was that when you form a team to solve a problem like build a computer, you don't always need the smartest guy, or they don't always have to be the smartest. But if somebody can give you a frame, that's, that's worth 50 points of IQ, which meant that after I read that, I said, well, I'm at 51. So the press has a great utility in public. It's protected by the First Amendment. You, you can protect your sources. You never protected me, unfortunately. That's a joke for those of us that don't know how I roll. But it stands out singularly, well, amongst all other things, as a real public benefit. Because if you can protect your source, you can get something valuable. Today with a blog that we see, it, maybe I'm jumping somewhere, but I just, I don't, you and I talked before about complying news and how we get our information. And a lot of it is blogs rather than paid journalists. And you get what you pay for. How do you respond to that? Well, I mean, well, I, you know, I went to school for journalism. I trained as a journalist. I worked for Associated Press for a number of years and came out here with them. And so then you have people who have a blog and call themselves a journalist. So that's like, you know, I just because I have a box of band-aids doesn't make me a doctor, right? So anyway, well, anyway, so I mean, that's the value in having, in having somebody who's a journalist who knows what they're doing, who has experience and who is working with other journalists and editors, you know, too. And there's, and it goes beyond knowing how to write or knowing how to find things on the internet. There's judgment that is, you know, you don't necessarily have just from starting a blog. So yeah, that's my, that's my two cents. But I mean, there is value. There are a lot of bloggers that I do read. There's a lot of people who write newsletters. There is value to what they have to say. So it's not everybody, but, you know, there is it's, there's a lot more noise out there right now than there was, you know, 20 years ago even. So the thing about having a team around you as editor, publisher and constitutional right lawyer is that, yeah, it gets vetted very well. Some of the problems I've always had with professional journalism is the standard that you have to get to store sources. And it's not that you have to get to sources per se. It's just some subjects are so, I mean, are charged and the response, say, of me talking about somebody else, if I do it wrong, then they're going to get mad at me. And so I'm not going to be frank and honest. That's the common one. The other one that used to bug me was that I wanted, I wanted my point to be taken first and foremost and the heck with everybody else's. But that's human nature. And so I would read to hear the opposite side. TV news for me has just gotten horrible because it's shouting and it's selling commercials. And then I'll cave in a little and say, validate what you said about bloggers. There's a couple that really have integrity. They're usually specialized and they follow things through. So a lot of them are former journalists or former working journalists. So so it's screened into a ground into them. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's got to be one of the more fun professions. Kind of like taxi driving as a taxi driver. But when you get up in the morning, again, you don't know where you're going to go. You know where you're going to start, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it depends on what you do and where you do it. For a lot of reporters, they're out in the field. They show up to the office and then get sent somewhere and maybe don't come back for hours and hours and are out running around interviewing people or, you know, when I worked for AP, we had there were natural disasters that, you know, I got sent to a tornado that hit and it was in the south and it hit on on a Sunday and took out half of a church and half the people in it. And, you know, I was kind of the junior person on the scene. There were a lot of people, you know, several people, you know, my colleagues, but there were national news from all over. And so that's something that not everybody gets to do, right? So, and it's not always, you know, it's not always good news. There's a lot of tragedy that happens, you know. So, you know, covering business, we didn't really have as much tragedy covering business. Yeah, that segues into the next one, which would be, okay, you deal with the fence and you're at disasters, but when you deal with business events, there's always disasters, but business events, to my mind, would give you an idea of trends. There'd be incremental or stories repeated with incremental or stories repeated with incremental changes or evolutions. Right. And what yet, you talk to yourself about that or when you were reporting, did you kind of bring that out in when you were interviewing people? Yeah, I was always looking for trends because trends are good stories and they, it's a good way of like kind of piecing every, some maybe disparate stories that maybe didn't look like they were related, but then they all have a theme of growth or I don't know. Like, I'm blanking out on thinking of a good trend to give you an example of, but we- No, I'm gonna ask you about that. Okay. Because in the sense, the other thing to segue from is real estate, it's multi-disciplinary and the hip bone is connected to the neck bone kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And that's why it was fun to talk to you to go down all the different avenues. That thing was fun and then trends would develop out of it. So over your time here, you've seen a number of trends, the big one today is affordable housing. The big one before that was probably, I mean, way back in the 60s, it actually was land reform when they got real peaceful system. But I mean, what do you look for today or what? Well, I write primarily about residential real estate now. So I'm always looking for trends because I'm trying to give readers kind of more of an overview, less of specific about one particular person or place or, you know, ask, but try to pick off different aspects of, because like you said, real estate, there's so much that it touches. And especially in Hawaii, it's kind of a big part of our economy here. You know, it's very expensive. They're land ownership. There's still some large landowners in the state that control some of the properties, but not as much as you touched upon land reform. We don't have the same kind of leasehold environment that we had. It's much smaller now, right? And, but, you know, real estate is a huge, it's the biggest investment, a home is the biggest investment most people will make in their lifetime. So it's there, and especially in Hawaii, I think a lot of people, they're home because our values have gone up so much, it's like 40% since pre-pandemic. So on a while, overall, like not different neighborhoods are different, right? But, you know, a lot of people look at their house as their piggy bank and how they're gonna retire or send a kid to college, you know? So it's an important, it's an important topic for almost everybody, even if they're not looking to buy or sell a home, they're living somewhere, right? Majority of people are living somewhere. And majority of people are paying a lot of money to live in that place. So, yeah. I mean, interest rates have been the big story in the last year that we went from an environment of two, you know, two and a quarter percent, now it's pushing seven. So at cut spying power, a lot of people just kind of dropped out of the market because, you know, maybe they have the down payment, maybe they have the monthly income, but their monthly payment just went up considerably. So. Oh, thank you for sort of subjects. Yeah. Let me turn it around and say, it's not just a personal issue, then it's widely personal. And Landon, more than any other place I can think of Hawaii and land is a big deal. You got a, you mentioned that there was an award given to the real estate reporting that you do in Hawaii. And my response to that was just how personal it is. But some of the trends, some of my feelings are that, it's not just personal, but you aggregate everybody, be it the mortgage situation or the buying situation or the rental situation. And in my lifetime, I've seen the regulation on housing a grow by the end of it being more and more important to more and more people and being kind of one of their major issues or factors in voting for people. And it's resulted in, to my mind, there's a lot of confusion out there about affordable housing. And part of that is because politicians have said, vote for me because I'm for affordable housing. But the definition of affordable is a made up one and everybody gets frustrated because I say, I representative Ricky am at a groundbreaking for affordable housing. And in order, and the project, had to bring in affordable prices that everybody don't consider affordable. There's no kind of way of explaining this easily. And that's, it has to be complicated. Yeah, very complicated because the definition of affordable housing according to government, right, is housing that's regulated according to the financing of how it's built, right? With some public money from in Hawaii, it's the rental housing revolving trust. And it's also low income housing tax credits that investors get involved with. And then the developer has all kinds of regulations on them and then there are the amount of money that they can charge for rent is spelled out under those rules as well, right? Right. And it's not, you know, I look at the rents and there's a project that I was talking to my mother about maybe she shouldn't go there and she's actually paying less for a private apartment and then in an apartment building, then she would in this, you know, quote unquote affordable housing project for seniors. So, you know, your definition of affordable online may not be the same. It has to be that way. And it's also the landlord. I would think in your mother's case, but I was smiling a second ago thinking to myself, affordable housing really is a lousy story. You just regurgitate the facts, but the, and you know, the eyeballs will follow, but it doesn't have context. And so you see, you would know this best in Kailua, you see Makane Maeva trying to get to do some affordable housing infill and the six or 10 or 20 neighbors around her are rallying the neighborhood totally against it. And she tried very hard, but she just couldn't convince him. So this is an affordable housing that turned into a drama. And I'm seeing more and more of that. And rightfully so. Everybody wants affordable housing. They just don't want it next door to their house, right? But I think there's also the other misnomer about affordable housing is that I think people equate affordable housing with public housing. And affordable housing is something, it's for people who are working. Like there's a stack of paper they have to fill out to qualify. And chief among it is a job with a paycheck, right? So it's people who have jobs who are, but maybe they just don't have very high paying jobs. So it's the people who work at restaurants or even they'd like to say cops and teachers, right? So. And then it rolls through the economy when restaurants can't get laborers. And it downsizes things. One of the things that is new in my life is that all my working life, at least in Hawaii, I have depended on housing and development and production for my paycheck. And as I get to the end of it, hopefully not right now in this moment, I start to think, well, what's sustainable and what's balanced? And how do you have locals versus visitors sustainable and a productive and sensitive society? Equitable stuff. And I just don't know how to start that conversation. Do you have any ideas? It's hard because there's so many different factors in the play, you know, just the regulation and the pace of how fast or slow things get done here. And the money, money is at the root of it all, right? And the carry, you know, developers say, I have to charge more, the longer it takes, I have to charge more because of the carrying costs because they're paying interest to the lender on land that they can't get permits for. So, you know, I don't have the answers. Right, it needs profit and profit doesn't necessarily mean a great word. If you want to stop a project, you throw sand in it and slow it down and all that happens. And yeah, basically they will fold up and go away. Some of it is you just don't want change but you're not building for the future. And you're kids and not a lot, you know, no. I will at the risk of not sounding like one known Johnny, I'll end the show here because I'm about to say it's obvious which is, you know, the balance of sustainability and profit. So on that note, we've hit 30 minutes, how about that? All right. You get a round of applause for sticking with us and your smile is worth everything in social friendship. So thank you very much. All right, you're welcome. Thank you for having me on. Hello.