Leading Voices in Real Estate

This week Matt sits down with Alex Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Juniper Square, a real estate technology company that is providing major backbone infrastructure for real estate investment managers and how they interface with their LPs. Juniper Square has gained tremendous market share over a short six years. Now that it has significant scale, it has the opportunity to play a major role in helping to create a more transparent and low-friction marketplace for GPs and LPs to bring capital and investment opportunities together in the real estate investment business. Juniper Square’s next level of work in its capital marketplace could be truly transformative for the industry.Alex’s success with Juniper’s Square’s resonates deeply with Matt on a personal level. Matt shares that years ago, when real estate was still the domain of the mom-and-pops and the deal cowboys, he was the Executive Director of the Multifamily Housing Institute. One of his jobs was to compile and share property and loan-level data and create an industry-wide database that supported moving multifamily from a secondary asset class into a primary asset class for real estate equities. His data project was 20 years too early, but it fills him with pride to see Alex start to make headway in that area.Alex and Matt drill down into accounting, reporting, transparency and capital markets. For Matt, this conversation has been timely given his recent work with CFOs and CEOs — the capital markets are the core driver behind every action taken in the capital intensive real estate business. ResourcesJuniper SquareLinkedIn | Alex Robinson

This week’s guest is Tim Schoen, President and CEO of BioMed Realty, a Blackstone company and an industry leader in life science and technology-focused real estate. Tim is a deeply experienced real estate and capital markets professional, and he is a true business leader within the biotech field. In this episode, Tim drills into the dynamics of the biotech real estate space, which has such a different business model, unique customer base, and range of specialty skills within the team to make it a market leader.Tim shares his passion about the real estate business overall as well as the intellectual engagement in focusing on the biotech field. Tim is fascinating to listen to because he is “always learning,” as evidenced by his leadership at BioMed, serving on the Salk Institute Board, and the challenges and opportunities for both the bio tech and real estate businesses to contribute to carbon reduction. ResourcesBioMed Realty

Mikael Colville-Andersen | Author & Founder of Copenhagenize Design CompanyThis week Matt’s guest is Mikael Colville-Andersen, speaker, TV host, author of “Copenhaganize”, and founder of Copenhagenize Design Company, a global consultancy firm that helps cities understand best practices and implementation of bike infrastructure for their communities. Mikael has a Canadian public TV show called “The Life-Sized City” and also hosts a podcast of the same name. Mikael and Matt talk broadly about urban bicycle infrastructure in-person from Copenhagen, one of the most bicycle friendly cities on the planet, in which 60% of commuting is done by bicycle.Matt is an avid cyclist, often cycling 30-50 miles on a given weekend morning. He reflects that bike culture in Denmark is not so much about riding for exercise as it is transport. Riding a bike in Copenhagen is casual — seeing people in suits coming home on their bikes, moms and dads bringing their kids to school, bikes with full baskets of groceries, people young, old, out of shape and in shape all just pedaling on their clunkers to get where they need to go are normal, everyday sights — and the protected bike lanes make it feel safe.Mikael is an urbanist and a deep believer in creating bicycle infrastructure and getting people out of their cars. He explains that a more intentionally-designed urban infrastructure will improve our cities, health outcomes, quality of life, and carbon footprint. This conversation provokes an important question: How does the real estate industry help promote this change on a larger, more consistent basis?ResourcesMikael Colville-Andersen | LinkedInBikes 4 Ukraine | Cykler til UkraineThe Life-Sized City | TVO Today“Copenhaganize” by Mikael Colville-Andersen2019 Copenhagenize Index“Best Bike Cities in America 2018” by A.C. Shiltron and the Bicycling Magazine Editors“The Best Cities for Cyclists” | The New York Times“Why We Shouldn’t Bike with a Helmet” | TEDxCopenhagen “The E-Bike Skeptic” by Mikael Colville-AndersenThe Life-Sized City Urbanism Podcast: Vancouver, Tall Buildings and Brent Toderian | Episode 09Matt’s Strava Feed

Matt’s guest this week is Sara Neff, Head of Sustainability at Lendlease Americas, a globally integrated real estate and investment group specializing in creating strong cities and connected communities. Sara dives into all aspects of sustainability in real estate, emphasizing that materials, construction practices, and management need to support carbon-neutral goals.Sara inspires business leaders to raise the bar in their companies on decarbonization and encourages young people interested in sustainability to join the real estate business. There is huge work to be done and this is an opportunity to move the needle on carbon not just in the industry, but nationally and globally.Sara believes that a business’ level of commitment to sustainability is a good indicator of its overall management quality. Leadership that cares about sustainability has a long-term vision for their company and can see that carbon-neutral, sustainable buildings are the future of the market.August kicks off a month of podcasts dedicated to climate change, beginning with this conversation with Sara. In two weeks, a conversation will be recorded live in Copenhagen with Michael Colville-Anderson, author of the book “Copenhagenize” and the host of the podcast series “The Life Sized City Urbanism Podcast.” Join Leading Voices all month for these crucial conversations on how real estate is changing the conversation around climate change and sustainability.ResourcesLendlease’s website

Matt converses with Doug Bibby of the National Multifamily Housing Council and Ed Walter of the Urban Land Institute this week. Doug and Ed are retiring soon from their respective roles, and both are stalwart leaders, especially through how they have pointed their organizations and, by extension, the industry as a whole toward responsible citizenry for the next generation of the business.Matt believes that as real estate development has become more scaled and institutional, responsible long-term thinking and stability are becoming more important industry behaviors than maximizing profits — it is a smart business practice that protects both individual companies as well as the reputation of the overall industry. Doug and Ed remind the listener that in this interconnected world, anyone can fall victim to the behavior and opinions of their neighbors or competitors. Yet, it is the real estate industry’s responsibility — especially through its investors and developers — to set a high bar for its reputation.ResourcesNational Multifamily Housing CouncilUrban Land Institute

Matt sits down this week with Mark Parrell, President & CEO of Equity Residential, one of the largest and most respected public companies in the real estate world and one of the long term leaders in the apartment space. Their conversation is a deep-dive through the different aspects of what is truly one of the best-run long-term hold real estate businesses in the country.Mark homes in on themes that are familiar on Leading Voices that merit repetition: Great operations, efficient technology, customer service, investment savvy, disciplined capital strategy, transparency, and the impact of political risk on the business. Mark emphasizes political risk in the business goes beyond rent control to assess whether jurisdictions are proactively investing in infrastructure or general pro-business policies. With EQR’s target affluent renter profile, their business needs to be in high functioning, exciting urban environments.Mark dives deeply into the operational aspects of the business, including using EQR’s size and scale and business platform to build long term career paths in the apartment business for site level workers, the importance of technology implementation on the resident experience, and comparing the advantages of the REIT model to the private equity model in the new market cycle.ResourcesEquity Residential’s website

This week Matt’s guest is John McLaren, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Communities, a REIT and the largest owner/operator of manufactured housing communities. John and Matt explore the different facets of the manufactured housing business in general, as well as a deep dive into Sun Communities’ business. John lends particular insight to manufactured housing as part of the affordable housing toolkit and its ability to address the financial and social needs of people from a variety of income levels. On the subject of manufactured housing providing different options for housing affordability, we also refer you to a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post from a friend of Matt’s, Daniel Weisfield, from Three Pillars Communities, about misperceptions about the manufactured housing industry, its overall impact on housing affordability for its residents as well as having inevitable rent increases in the business. Here is a link to Daniel’s post via LinkedIn…..Before Matt and John went on air for this episode, John shared that he unintentionally fell into the real estate and mobile home park businesses. He went on to say that his career has been a great blessing in which he has achieved success, and it’s clear from the way he talks about it that he has found a great deal of meaning and purpose in his work. Matt connected with this because he often feels the same way — he fell into real estate early on and then fell into recruiting mid-way through his career, both of which he grew to love. Sometimes a deep sense of purpose comes from career paths you don’t expect, so it’s worth it to keep a flexible mindset.The heart of this conversation lies in John’s vigilant commitment to the communities he serves. He believes that for a community to thrive, it must be built on a foundation of stewardship. Everything from relationships with manufacturers to innovating more aesthetically pleasing housing is done with the local community and its member’s quality of life in mind. Intentionality of this degree is one of many reasons why Sun Communities enjoys around a 99% resident retention rate — an example to which many in the industry should aspire.ResourcesSun CommunitiesLetter to Editor of Washington Post from Three Pillar Communities on LinkedIn

This week’s podcast guest is Majora Carter, a real estate visionary, developer, and author who is dedicated to revitalizing communities through talent retention. Her new book “ Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One,” pulls from her deeply personal experience in her own community, the South Bronx.The belief that they have it within themselves to succeed is the cornerstone of the culture that communities must establish to keep their best and brightest asset: their people. Persistent poverty is a problem that is self-replicating for low-status communities, but Majora says the solution lies in reimagining the measuring stick of success. Instead of success being defined by how far away you can get from your hometown, it should be defined by how you can transform it and impact it. This is a critical shift. While this conversation highlights the tangible benefits and opportunities that exist for today’s neighborhoods and homegrown entrepreneurs, the real takeaway is how these transformations create ripple effects that last for generations. Looking beyond the immediate task at hand to the broader view of what certain decisions and relationships, investments and developments can do is a central theme of the Leading Voices podcast and the larger Terra/ZRG vision.ResourcesMajora Carter GroupReclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better OneGreening the ghetto3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship

This week Matt is joined by Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim from Nabr, a real estate development company specializing in sustainable, customizable apartments. Nabr’s mission is to address the housing crisis with a unique approach: a business platform that creates, at scale, well designed, attainably-priced apartment units on a homeownership model.Its founding team comes well-qualified for the task. Bjarke is one of the world’s leading architects and the founder of BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group architectural firm; Roni came to Nabr via his role as WeWork’s Director of Development; and Nick boasts a background with Sidewalk Labs and Google.The trio reveals that the secret to Nabr’s business model and designs is that they are inspired by consumer productization. Too many developers build cookie-cutter housing that is not consumer-friendly in terms of technology, delivery, and design. Nabr is breaking the mold by pulling inspiration from consumer companies like Lego, Tesla, and Apple. Matt highlights a throughline between his conversation with Bjarke, Roni, and Nick and the Terra Search merger with ZRG Partners, as both are intent on building businesses of scale with a bespoke consulting model.

This week, Matt is joined by Joe Margolis, CEO of Extra Space Storage, one of the largest providers of self-storage in the U.S. Joe explores the drivers of the exponential growth the industry has seen in the past few years, the importance of company culture and customer care, and why self-storage is ultimately about hope.Matt shares an interesting connection with Extra Space. His wife is a member of its board and was instrumental in helping raise Extra Space’s first institutional capital. They have seen from both inside and out that Extra Space is a company that cares deeply about providing an excellent customer experience and maintaining a family-centered culture. Joe illustrates this point with a story from his first week at Extra Space. He’d moved from the East Coast to Utah for the job, and at the end of the work day asked an employee to run some numbers for him. Joe expected the employee to jump to it right away, and was shocked when he took the numbers and went home to have dinner with his family. He learned quickly that family time was a priority for the business and that not everything needed to be treated as an emergency.Joe shares the diverse industry landscape that comprises self-storage. While Extra Space and its five top competitors make up about 30% of the country’s storage facilities, the majority of the storage facilities in the country are still owned by smaller or regional owners, who usually have a portfolio of two to fifteen stores. Thus, self-storage is on the more fragmented side of the real estate industry and will be fascinating to follow as its demand continues to increase.