Leading Voices in Real Estate

This week, Matt is joined by Stephen Ross, Founder and Chairman of Related Companies, one of the country’s premier real estate development organizations. Stephen talks about their current mega-project, Hudson Yards, where we recorded the episode, the breadth of Related’s activities and both his personal business and philanthropic interests, including as owner of the Miami Dolphins NFL team.One of Stephen’s current projects takes the form of revitalizing downtown Detroit through a major new development. Stephen grew up in Detroit until he was 15, when his family moved to Florida. As soon as he had the chance, he moved back for college before planting himself more permanently in New York City. Detroit has been through changes and challenges since Stephen’s days there, but he still sees a bright future for it. His hope is that this new development will serve as a catalyst for a renaissance of the whole city.Stephen brings a trove of experience and a vision of real estate’s future to today’s episode. His desire to create ventures that matter is defined by mega projects like Hudson Yards and the Time Warner Center in New York, as well as Related’s ongoing business in affordable housing — an area which Stephen acknowledges is one of America’s biggest current needs.

This week Matt is joined by Bob DeWitt and Greg Bates from GID, the Boston-based, vertically integrated real estate investment manager. Bob is Vice Chairman and former CEO of GID and Greg is currently CEO and President. The pair tell the story of generational transitions in the real estate business through GID’s unique lens. Bob recalls transforming the business in the 90’s and early 2000’s as GID, and others, institutionalized their businesses. This opened doors to significant professionalization and scaling in both the apartment sector and commercial real estate. GID underwent another major growth spurt more recently when it has scaled to compete with the new huge private equity investment shops as part of real estate’s transition from an alternative asset class into a primary asset class. Greg foresees operational excellence becoming valued over capital appreciation as a measure of success as the market continues to shift.The theme of transition continues with Matt’s firm, Terra Search Partners, which has recently become part of the global talent advisory firm ZRG Partners, where Matt will become global co-head of their real estate practice. This merger will enable ZRG to grow its real estate practice globally and further Terra Search Partners’ long standing mission to help shape the future of the real estate industry.

This week, Matt is joined by Doug Yearley, CEO and Chairman of Toll Brothers, widely recognized as the most admired homebuilder in the nation. Doug’s leadership and extensive experience in growth management and expansion offers important insight. From the current supply chain issues to strategies for exiting the pandemic, he highlights the opportunities and challenges on the table. He also touches on the unique juxtaposition of a homebuilding business and the corporate, client facing culture required to meet the needs at the luxury end of production. Matt shares a surprising but significant connection with the Toll Brothers’ founder, Bob Toll. Growing up, they both attended Maine’s Camp Powhatan, albeit at different times. Bob went on to acquire Camp Powhatan which he has helped nurture as it transformed into an international peace center. Now called Seeds of Peace, the old camp is a space for children from opposing sides in conflict areas to camp together and foster open dialogue, relationships and understanding. Seeds of Peace serves as a powerful example of philanthropy done right, and the kind of values the Toll Brothers culture is built upon. What it takes to create a “best places to work” company has been a strong throughline over the course of this season, and this episode with Doug is no exception. His desire and ability to create a culture and business platform that transcends the transactional side of the real estate business is marked by determination and intention ripe with inspiration.Resourceswww.seedsofpeace.orgwww.tollbrothers.com

An internationally recognized leader in developing innovative strategies to end homelessness and strengthen communities Rosanne Haggerty joins Matt on this week’s Leading Voices in Real Estate. As President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Solutions, Rosanne oversees a nonprofit that assists cEmmunities throughout the U.S. and internationally in solving the complex housing problems facing their most vulnerable residents. Community Solutions also leads “Built for Zero”, a movement of more than 90 cities and counties using data to radically change how they work and make homelessness rare. As a 2001 MacArthur Genius, Rosanne broadened her work in this space after spending decades working in supportive housing. She formally established Community Solutions in 2011, and in 2021 The MacArthur Foundation provided an additional $100M grant to further develop her methodology. While homelessness is a step removed from our typical Leading Voices conversations, this discussion provides a perspective on a societal issue that ripples across real estate and how our industry can address homelessness.Rosanne was a Japan Society Public Policy Fellow, and is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Ashoka Senior Fellow, Hunt Alternative Fund Prime Mover and the recipient of honors including the Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism from the Rockefeller Foundation, Social Entrepreneur of the year from the Schwab Foundation, Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum’s National Design Award and Independent Sector’s John W. Gardner Leadership Award. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.Resources“Homelessness is Solvable” – Rosanne’s podcast interview with Malcolm Gladwell (June 2019)

In this episode, we take a visit back to Matt’s conversation from February 2018 with Keith Oden, Co-Founder and President of Camden Property Trust. Camden is one of the largest multifamily REITs in the U.S. that owns, develops, acquires, sells, and manages apartment communities with a current portfolio of 171 properties containing 58,300 units. We revisit this conversation since the themes of this pre-Covid conversation still deeply resonate. Camden was one of the first REITs to use its scale and business platform to invest meaningfully in technology and it also “took a stand” to create an outstanding culture. At the time of the interview, Camden was celebrating 11th straight year (now on its 14th straight year and currently rated 8th on the list) as one of Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”​, an auspicious accomplishment for the first real estate company to achieve any ranking on that list, which lifted the bar for the overall industry.Keith was co-founder of Camden’s predecessor companies in 1982 and has served Camden as President and Trust Manager since 1993. As a Principal Executive Officer and Director, Keith drives Camden’s strategic initiatives, leads the property operations and corporate support services, and promotes the company’s culture.After completing his Masters Degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin, Keith began his career as a management consultant with the then-public accounting firm Deloitte, Haskins and Sells in 1979. He joined Century Development Corporation, one of the most active real estate development firms in the Southwest in 1981, and later became Director of Financial Planning.For more than twenty years, Keith has been committed to developing one of the best multifamily companies in the industry. Under his purview, Camden successfully completed the mergers of three public real estate companies: Paragon, Oasis Residential, and Summit Properties in 1997, 1998 and 2005, respectively. Keith’s work was instrumental to the assimilation of these three companies into Camden’s culture.Keith is a member of the Executive Council of the Center for Real Estate Finance at the University of Texas and serves as advisor, financial supporter, guest lecturer and panelist for the faculty and students pursuing their MBAs in real estate finance. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and a licensed real estate broker in the State of Texas.

Co-CEO and a Founder of ACORE Capital, Chris Tokarski joins Matt on this week’s Leading Voices to talk about the CRE debt business in general and, specifically talk about the private debt providers, like ACORE, which have become a major part of the market, particularly in construction and transitional lending since the Global Financial Crisis. With approximately $17 billion of assets under management, ACORE is one of the largest private debt providers focused on commercial real estate, originating and managing first mortgages, B-notes, mezzanine debt, and preferred equity, deploying over $28 billion in more than 375 transactions since inception in 2015. Chris also talks about his early start in the business at Nomura—the then disrupter in the CRE finance business, meeting his current partners there and their path together at several firms before co-founding, and co-leading ACORE.Chris has over 25 years of experience in leadership roles with large, national lenders, including four years as Chief Credit Officer for Starwood Property Trust, and has served as an advisor on workouts and other financing solutions through multiple cycles. Chris has personally invested in commercial real estate throughout his career.The Commercial Observer has honored Chris in their annual listing ‘The 50 Most Important Figures of Commercial Real Estate Finance’, ranking him in the top 15 for the past 5 years.Chris earned a B.A. degree from Brown University with a double concentration in Business Economics and Organizational Behavior and Management.

On this episode of Leading Voices, Laura Foote, the Executive Director of YIMBY Action (the national organization for the “Yes in My Back Yard” movement) joins Matt and doesn’t hold back as she shares how we can influence policymakers—especially at the local level—to reduce barriers to building more housing that will address the huge housing shortage in the U.S. YIMBYs are the pro-housing counterpart to the NIMBY’s who so often block density and development. YIMBY Action is a national network in nearly 20 cities that understands the extreme housing shortages in our communities and takes political action to advocate for “abundant, affordable housing and inclusive, sustainable communities”. 

CEO of Boston Properties, Owen Thomas, joins Matt for the first conversation of 2022 on Leading Voices in Real Estate. Boston Properties is the largest office REIT, developing, investing, and managing Class A office buildings in Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C, with a portfolio of 193 properties. Owen exemplifies leadership in our industry with distinct parts of his career. First, he climbed the ladder at Morgan Stanley through a 24 year career, a large part of which was running their real estate state group, then serving as Chief Executive Officer of Morgan Stanley Asia. After his “retirement” from Morgan Stanley, Owen became Boston Properties’ CEO, where he’s served in the organization for close to a decade. Finally, he has made a commitment to the industry in key leadership positions, including serving as the immediate past Global Chair of the Urban Land Institute and his significant contribution to ULI’s Net Zero Imperative Initiative working to reduce our industry’s carbon footprint. Beyond sharing his career story, Owen provides insights on where he sees the office sector heading into the new year.In addition, Owen is Director of the Urban Land Institute Foundation, a Director of the Real Estate Roundtable, a member of the Executive Board of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts and a member of the Economic Club of New York. He is a Director of Episcopal Charities of New York and formerly Chairman of the Pension Real Estate Association and Director of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company. Owen attended and is a former Trustee of Woodberry Forest School, received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Jordan Moss, Founder and CEO of Catalyst Housing Group, joins Matt on this episode of Leading Voices in real estate to discuss his company, Catalyst Housing, which has focused on creating housing opportunities for the “missing middle”. Jordan founded Catalyst Housing Group in just 2015, which now controls or is under contract for 6,000 units, about $2.5 billion of asset value. This housing, which Jordan calls “Essential Housing”, is structured to preserve long term affordability for the essential middle-income workforce including nurses, teachers, and first responders (among others) who earn too much to qualify for traditional affordable housing, but are priced out of the communities where they work. On the podcast, Jordan describes the unique structure of public ownership that he pioneered and the critiques of the model, and his company’s work combining investment, innovation, and impact in our industry.Over the past two decades, Jordan has been actively engaged in the investment, acquisition, development, financing, and management of more than $4 billion of institutional multifamily transactions. Jordan founded Catalyst Housing Group in 2015 to combat rising income inequality, specifically through addressing California’s growing middle-income housing crisis.An active real estate technology investor/advisor, Jordan launched the Catalyst Innovation Lab, which focuses on incubating, piloting, and scaling innovative solutions, tools and partnerships that drive operating margins, building efficiencies and portfolio sustainability across the Catalyst portfolio and throughout the multifamily sector.Jordan formed the Essential Housing Fund to foster additional innovation across the complete spectrum of housing affordability – from homelessness to homeownership. The nonprofit’s current endeavors include scaling new shared-equity models addressing our country’s racial wealth gap, subsidizing rents for public school employees, and furthering diversity and inclusion efforts within the multifamily industry and beyond.ResourcesCalifornia Scheming (Forbes December 2021)

During this episode, we are rebroadcasting a Leading Voices favorite with Lisa Picard, CEO of EQ Office. EQ Office is the vertical of Blackstone that oversees the office assets of one of the world’s leading investment firms and its acquisition of the portfolios of Sam Zell’s Equity Office, CarrAmerica, Trizec, and other office assets. Lisa’s story exemplifies one of the most compelling career trajectories in real estate and passionately articulates the meaning, the ripple effects, and opportunities around innovation in real estate. This is a pre-pandemic discussion of the office business which will be a great background for our conversation right after the New Year with Boston Properties’ Owen Thomas about the current state of the office business.Lisa Picard is a woman with a vision. Thanks to technology, the office development space has evolved from a B2B market to B2C, and she’s on the front lines of in an industry resistant to change.“We’re really not producing products per say; we’re creating ideas. And so, … organizations’ access to ideas is really through collaboration, connection, of having really high-quality talent.”CuriosityLisa grew up in Southeast L.A. County with her twin sister and Depression-era parents who taught her to cherish and respect her resources. This instilled in her a fascination for her urban environment, and she went on to study Urban Planning at California State Polytechnic University.After graduation, she worked closely with the City of L.A., and she saw how developers had a different view book than she did. She wanted in and applied to MIT to dive deeper into development, planning, urban economics, and finance.Just before heading to MIT, at the age of 22 her father suddenly died and her mother the summer after, and Lisa had what she calls her mid-life crisis at 22. As painful as the grieving process was during her time at MIT, it taught her the importance of embracing each moment fully and staying true to herself.Navigating the Development FieldAfter MIT, Lisa moved back to San Francisco and began her journey with the Bristol Group where she had the freedom to grow and learn what a deal looked like and how to create one. From there, she joined the Hines team in Seattle and rode out the rollercoaster of the dot-com era. Next, she was approached by Canyon Ranch, where she learned the power of experience and brand.“Humanistically, there’s always got to be an invitation… when I say an invitation that’s the brand piece, that’s the promise of whatever it is, when I have that engagement with a piece of real estate.”When she was let go by Canyon Ranch, she felt like she had lost her sense of identity. She moved back to Seattle, and learned how to value herself as simply “Lisa Picard.” She started Muse Developments focused on multi-family development, and was soon approached by Skanska to expand their business in Seattle. She agreed and joined them in merchant building.Her vision for bringing humanity and experience-driven spaces into each of her projects made a big impact on Seattle, but she felt called to influence other cities. So when Equity Office approached her, she was ready to join them.TodayAs the CEO of Equity Office, Lisa is focused on the vision and positioning of projects, like the Willis Tower in Chicago, in a way that satisfies the desires of the market.She looks at it with the mindset that every worker needs a balanced diet of productivity: concentration space, collaboration space, and community space. This is what the modern workforce desires, and that is the value and level of service she is striving to deliver as she repositions assets.Being a WomanAt first, Lisa admits that she tried to fit in. But thanks to her mentors who instilled confidence in her and empowered her to believe in herself, she learned her worth. She hopes to do this for other women.AdviceWhen you work in the urban environment and real estate, what you put into the environment affects people. It changes the urban environment and you have to give a sh*t. You have an obligation to people and your surroundings.