Blackstone’s Jonathan Pollack on Real-Estate Post Corona

Many have been surprised that areas of the real estate market are booming, Post Corona. So what do we know about the pandemic’s impact on an exodus from some cities, and the growth of other cities? One of the ways that I have learned on this limited series podcast is from our top flight guests, but also from our listeners. A business practitioner - an operator or investor - will hear one of our experts on the pod and get a hold of me with an alternative analysis; it’s like I get to crowdsource ideas from our listeners. Well today, we’re bringing one of those subscribers on the show. Jonathan Pollack is a Senior Managing Director at the Blackstone Group and Blackshone’s Global Head of the Real Estate Debt Strategies group. Blackstone is one of the largest owners of real estate in the world. Jon, who is based in New York, manages a large team, overseeing Blackstone’s real estate debt investment strategy. He’s also a member of the firm’s real estate investment committee, and serves on the board of Blackstone Mortgage Trust. Prior to joining Blackstone, he was a Managing Director and Global Head of Commercial Real Estate, as well as Head of Risk for Structured Finance, at Deutsche Bank. To call Jonathan Pollack a “New York Bull” may be overstating it, but let’s just say he’s a skeptic of some of the skeptics we have featured on Post Corona. So is real estate in New York and other big cities coming back? And what does it tell us about the future of cities? Or - did the Pandemic set them back in ways that will take too long to recover from?