15min chapter

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Footie Award Winners + Hot Takes for 2025! - Fantasy Football Podcast for 1/14

Fantasy Footballers - Fantasy Football Podcast

CHAPTER

Fantasy Football Awards and Highlights

This chapter reviews the standout players and award winners in the fantasy football community, including breakout and rookie of the year discussions. The hosts highlight memorable performances, playful banter, and nostalgic moments from the past season while voting on various fun categories. With humor and insight, they delve into the dynamics of player evaluations, showcasing the impact of unexpected selections and standout performers.

00:00
Speaker 2
And that's in Park City. People know this project. Raise your hands just to get a sense. Okay, not everybody. So that's cool. And that's a great four season. I would say Phoenix is wonderful for four seasons, but I'm best at guessing you're better for three.
Speaker 1
But before that, I mean, really, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the real estate business. Unfortunately, one thing I've learned is that we sometimes get too complicated. Real estate. What is real estate? Real estate is about us. Me, you, everybody else. Where we work. Where we live. Where we entertain. Where we recreate. Our behavior, our demographics, our psychographics define demand for a product. Right. So the drivers of real estate is number one is us as a population rate. The other one is economy, the cycles in economy. The other one really is capital market. Most of us forget that capital market, what happens, Wall Street impacts the real estate business supply and demand for money. Right. Now at the time technology wasn't a really big disruptor, but technology has become now one of the biggest variable even Wall Street. We've seen what happened to retail, industrial and others. So now technology is a big barrier. So how do we have five drivers of real estate? Fair deal. Number one, demographics. Number two, psychographics. Yeah. Number two economy. Number four, capital markets. Uh huh. Number five, technology. So let me
Speaker 2
add a number. It's not a number six. It's an A. It's going to go through the cycle of a multi-year development. You develop an office building and you, well, whatever. You develop apartment building and you hope you're going to deliver it at the right moment, but your risk is somewhat okay. But the life cycle of something like the promontory, which is how many acres? You know, promontory
Speaker 1
was a stupid idea. Okay. Good.
Speaker 2
That's one. Make
Speaker 1
sure we know that. But because it wasn't what I cycle and here I was a student of cycle and yet my passion to create something special totally took away my objective.
Speaker 2
Because there's no way to be objective. I think it was 20 years ago.
Speaker 1
20 or 7,000 acre project goes, I mean, here we are. 23 years later. It's still going.
Speaker 2
But one thing you've also told me back to cycles is that you were lucky and smart in the cycles of your ownership of that property because you refinance or sold it, bought it back. And as the capital market cycle was happening along your development.
Speaker 1
Unfortunately, actually the project was successful. We broke ground in 01. It's interesting timing. Yeah. By 05 we had sold enough real estate to pay. It was a 250-meter capitalization. Four layers of capital. Extremely complicated. I don't know what I was doing. But by 05 we sold enough real estate to pay. How do we sell our equity? Mezzanine, Prath, debt. We only had 12 million of land care back, no left. I got a phone call from Credit Suisse, the major bank in New York. Well, we've devised a new way to finance large master plan community. And we call it dividend recap. I said, what the hell is that? He says, called dividend recap. We come input debt. You could take money, tax deferred out. And feel like you sell it, but you're still controlling. I said, wow, I like that. That's good. How does that work? Well, they came in six months later. We had raised $350 million a debt. And then... I wasn't complaining. Yes, and then what happened? Well, the project performed well until 08. Yeah. And of course, market crashed. And our sell crashed. It was a non-recourse debt. I sat down with my lenders. By the way, I was six, so seven, I decided I'm going to sell everything. So my brother started selling everything. We sold about three to four billion dollars worth of assets.
Speaker 2
Again, people... Very lucky.
Speaker 1
But in... Oh, hey. Unfortunately, we went to default because we missed the covenant of the debt. And we sat down and we said, look, we're happy to give it to you. We will do the project to you. So the lenders had to go work out of relationships with themselves between the first and the second of our 30 different hedge funds. They had invested in this securitized syndicated debt. And they had to come together to form an entity. They fell to agree and they went to war against each other. And the project went into a financial meltdown.
Speaker 2
Hang on one sec. The financial meltdown to the project is happening. He's non-recourse. Those are words we like here. So you're okay.
Speaker 1
I'm okay, but it was my credibility on the line. It's your logic. This project's your luck. It was, you know, I was really identified closely with it. A third of buyers, maybe even half of buyers were my friends. So I felt really bad. I mean, these people had invested in this project. And some of the other projects that credit suicide taken back, they actually let the golf course and the club will shut down and dry. And I couldn't imagine that happened a promatory. So I actually came in, lent $30 million to give the project going in a bankruptcy in volunteer. I never, I don't farm bankruptcy. I don't litigate. I don't fight. And we lent $30 million. And we agreed that lenders need to come and I put in, I raised $80 million to take over the project, which was based on the own business plan. We agreed. First quarter, we're nine. Mr. Wogo City here, Greg. Greg was involved, took us to the market. And well, they couldn't come up with $80 million to take over the project because they were all imploding at the time in the financial meltdown. So fortunately, I had agreed that if they don't come over the money, we'll go to the market. One to the market. There was no beaters. So last minute, I came and put a bit of myself, $80 million on body pack.
Speaker 2
Good for you. And then the project has continued and it's a successful project through these cycles.
Speaker 1
We have no debt. Okay. Your baby continues. I
Speaker 2
want to change the subject so we can keep rolling because we have 17 minutes and 47 seconds, six, five seconds left. I want to talk about other kinds of investments because alongside real estate assets that have come in and out of your portfolio when you bought all the stuff in trouble during the, both SNL and then a long-term development project. But then you're also investing in technology assets outside. And what's the return profile, the risk profile, the operational profile, and how do you decide what to bet on over there? And then we'll talk about what that means over here in real estate.
Speaker 1
Well, it's very hard for the real estate mind to transfer themselves from what is called tangible asset. Yes. To the world of intangibles because private equity is about intangibles. In real estate, it's all about brick and mortar. You feel in touch. You understand. In a world of non real estate, your values are culture, strategy, expertise, execution. And of course, technology and other things. So because we're always interested in on strategies, non tangibles, fortunately, and we went to, of course, 20 years, 10, 15, 20 years of learning, it was not that difficult for us to kind of transform ourselves. And we always had interest in learning. So, yeah, we formed a private equity and we bought a couple of three major deals. And in the 03 post-02 after I told you a market crash, technology market crash, and one of our most prominent firm was called network solution. Network solution, the firm, the network solution, which essentially was selling domain names. It was the main domain name business in the country. And we bought that and we positioned it as an online service provider for small to medium sized business. And three years later, we sold it out of multiple VEX.
Speaker 2
What was the most?
Speaker 1
It's pretty good.
Speaker 2
In real estate? In real estate, we don't do that in real estate. Well,
Speaker 1
and that's really goes back to how we're positioned. We're really an opportunity firm in real estate. What was that mean? That means that, remember I talked about the drivers of business? Every one of those drivers are changing, demographic is changing, psychographic is changing, economy is cyclical, capital market is changing. And of course, now technology massively impacted everything, including real estate. So you need to understand this at a dynamic, kind of convergent to see where the potential values are at a point in time, and we try to be counter cyclical and acquire real estate assets that are value driven. So the real
Speaker 2
estate mind, the private equity mind, there is private equity in real estate, but we'll not go there. But we'll think of these as two different businesses. Talk about, I want to ask you about two non real estate investments. One, I just want to know what it's like to, what your interest in the suns is, because that one's fun. And then the second is the investment in the meeting company that maybe is a recent investment.
Speaker 1
Yes. In real estate, we bought a portfolio of 3200 apartments in 2014, 15. It was a value add in West Texas. Actually, we bought it at a pretty good cap rate. We bought a 10 cap going in. 10 cap in your work. Yeah, it was because it was West Texas. Nobody wanted to go there. I was going to say that it was a leverage 14 cash and cash return. And we paid 150 million. And we did position the whole portfolio. It was like 10 different complex. We created club houses and pools and put a lot of makeup on. And two years later, we sold it for 300. Yeah. Two ads.
Speaker 2
So the cycle of real estate value add, getting it in, getting it out, promontory, keeping it, developing it for history, and then the private equity investments. They all have these cycles up and down in your student of
Speaker 1
this. And they have not applied or fundamental expertise or investment strategies on promontory, because promontory has been more of an emotional thing. It's been a passion. Although it's really doing very well, but historically, when I bought it back, you had huge negative cash flow for five years. So we had to put in under the 50 million before it actually turned around. So I look at promontory as something different. It doesn't follow our operating principles quite generally. Although it's super successful today, but it took a long time. Right. It's
Speaker 2
really wonderful. It's wonderful to talk about it that way because we mush all the things that someone does. We look into their minds and we see one thing and you're seeing trifurcated.
Speaker 1
Even somebody as rational as I am gets a mic. That's right.
Speaker 2
Of course you do. I love it. Okay. But talk about the sons because you and your brother are partial owners of that. So where does that fit into the mind that we're talking about?
Speaker 1
Well, 19, I think, 90 actually, early 90s. The gentleman named Robert Sauber moved from Tucson to Phoenix. And he and I became good friends. And we actually, we bought SBL knot together on a 50-50 basis for MARTIC in 96. The land part. Okay. And so we bought the land part from MARTIC to get her. It was my partner. And then later on, I bought the risk out turn on the corner from ADW. And so we repositioned. We actually sold and developed the risk that the parcels were responsible. That was developed by our den coverter. And so Robert and I became friendly for a long time within France. Then he sold his bank of illustrate and started to go straight into by a Phoenix sense. They moved back and he said, he called me, he said, he needs to raise some money because it's fine if it makes sense. If I'm wondering this, I said, sure. That's how I got
Speaker 2
involved.

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