[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hi, I'm John Koh and welcome to Icons of DC Area Real Estate, a one on one interview show highlighting the backgrounds and career trajectory of leading luminaries in the Washington, DC area real estate market. The purpose of the show is to highlight their backgrounds and their experiences and some interesting stories about their current business as well as their past, and to cite some things that you might take away both from educational standpoint as well as lessons learned in the industry and some amusing and sometimes interesting background stories. So I'm hoping that you will enjoy the show. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to share that both this podcast and the community I started in 2021, called the Iconic Journey in Cretever, is now part of a new nonprofit organization with that same name. The new company will offer opportunities for sponsorship to grow the community both in membership and in programs. It also allows you as listeners to show your appreciation for this podcast, which has delivered episodes twice monthly since August 2019 with a charitable contribution.
Transitioning the community and podcast into the nonprofit organization is underway. The community, which is open to commercial real estate professionals between the ages of 25 and 40 years old, is currently up to 65 members and growing. If you would like to learn more about either joining the community or contributing to the podcast, please reach out directly to me at John coenterprases.com separately, my private company co enterprises now we'll focus only on advisory work for early stage real estate firms and career counseling. If you have interest in learning more about its services, please please review my
[email protected]. dot thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Icons of DC Area Real Estate. I'm so pleased to welcome Brad Olson for the final of our three part series with Brad, who is an international real estate advisor and my mentor for the last 40 years. In this episode, Brad shares his insights on building a successful network in the industry through personal relationships and strategic positioning at global conferences.
He discusses his involvement with a fire the association of Foreign Investments in real estate and the evolution of events like Mippum conference in Cannes, France Expo Real in Munich, Germany and the Global Property Conference in Toronto, Canada, emphasizing the importance of non marketing, relationship focused interactions. Brad also highlights his unique approach to hosting dinners at these conferences, creating engaging experiences and the significance of mentorship in his teachings at the University of Wisconsin, which he talks about. Additionally, he reflects on the changing landscape of real estate investment and offers advice to young professionals on broadening their perspectives and staying informed about global developments.
And also stay tuned for a post trip that follows this episode with the iconic journey in CRE members Sam Glass and Colin Madden, who will, together with me, review the entire Brad Olson series with perspectives and commentary. So without further ado, please enjoy the third and final episode with Brad Olson.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: So Brad, you built your network of clients and investors via several associations and affiliations.
Let's start with a fire, which I know is in a relationship that you've had for many, many years. The association of Foreign Investors and Real Estate. Let's start with that one.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Thanks. John Afar was established in 1988 and I think I got involved with it beginning in about 1990.
From the outset I found that it was an outstanding way to meet and interact with foreign investors who were either interested already investing in us real estate or were considering doing so. Jim Fettgadder became the chief executive of Afire shortly before I joined, and Jim deserves much of the credit for creating an environment which made it such an effective organization for me. And I think the keys were that it was a non network, a non marketing kind of networking. People came knowing that they weren't going to be sold stuff. And in the early years particularly, it was a smaller group. Senior decision makers came from basically around the world. It started as a Dutch, primarily a dutch organization. As the Japanese were getting out of the market, still a couple of them were. Some of the big japanese investors were involved. I know I got to meet Masashi Otaki from city Fudisan. He and I remain close to this day. He's been probably the longest career in us real estate, if any of the Japanese, he still lives in New York.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Why was it formed, Brad?
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Well, the idea behind it, you might remember Will Vainhausen, who was with ing there in DC. Will was one of the charter members of it. The idea was to create a place for foreign investors. Best foreign investors could share information about how to invest in the US, what to watch out for, how to do it better, and talk among themselves with a relatively select group of advisors, lawyers, bankers, really a non broker kind of environment for all those years, I think is still was probably the only, quote unquote marketing group that was active in afire in the early years. But the idea was to create a place for us to get together and talk one on one without a sense that there was marketing going on. And I think that it started predominantly with the Dutch because as we talked before in the mid eighties, the Dutch were among the most active.
And essentially it became the voice of foreign investment in US real estate. It was not a lobbying organization, but it was an information provider to lobbying organizations like the Real Estate Roundtable, which would take information from a fire members to share with Congress and regulators. But I think it was this personal nature of the organization and the commitment of the members, both investors and investment advisors, which made it so special, a unique organization. Because of that, I'll call it that friendship that developed the Brotherhood that developed among investors and advisors. And because the investors knew that they were coming for an information exchange rather than for a marketing event, they were much more open about it. They were willing to share things that we spent a lot of time talking to each other and I would say it was critical to me in terms of building those personal relationships and talked about it time and time again. But for me, it all comes down to the one on one relationship, whether that's with a client or with an investor. And afar was unique in that regard for creating that relationship.
When Jim retired, Gunnar Branson took over as chief executive. He's put his own stamp on the association. It's much bigger now, but it still maintains many of those same elements which made it so special for me. I think one of the things that's helped a fire survive and prosperity is that Lexi Miller, who's the chief operating officer now, worked with Jim for many years and now works with Gunner. And she's provided sort of the important continuity that any association needs. Because the chairman rotates among foreign investors, the staff remains constant, and Lexi has been. She's really been the glue to keep it all together over all these years.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: How do you qualify to be a member of the group?
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Yeah, it was easy if you were an investor, by definition, if you were an investor, you could join, if you were calling an associate member service provider. There was a distinct limit to how many law firms could be members based on how many institutional investors were there, how many advisors could be member, associate members based, again on how many institutional members who are. So there's always this balance between investors and service providers, which was unique. I think it's unique in terms of most organizations dealing in real estate, which tend to be overrun by service providers to the point where, I mean, I think of things like prea. I've had investors tell me at prea, they have to hide in the hallways because they're going to be besieged. It's almost like they've got a target on their back.
Sorry, Priya, for making a comment, but afar was unique in that regard. It was always a balance between investors and non investors.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: So that was one of your foundational organizations to be involved in for sure.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: Starting in the late eighties, as I was more and more active in foreign investment, in us real estate, Afar became my touchstone, my lodestone, my by principal activity. And John, I know you've been active in Uli over the years. And one of the pieces of advice I give to young people is pick an association and get committed to it. Don't try to do everything you can't physically. There is not enough time in your calendar to do everything. So pick something that matters to you and commit the time to make it successful for yourself and for the association. Over the years, I probably have brought in more members to a fire before I retired than just about anyone else, and served on the board, served as the head of the program programming one year.
Basically just been a loyal supporter of the association, just as you've done with Uli. And I think, to me, that's the way you get something out of an association. No question based on what you put into it.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: No question.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: We've done the same with you a lot.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Yeah, no question about it. So let's pivot now to your european relationships. Start with Mippm, which is in Cannes, France. Talk about that one.
[00:11:28] Speaker C: So MIppim, for most people, is the granddaddy of the european conference circuit for real estate. It was started in 1990, as you said, it's held in Cannes every year. It's in the. The original meeting place was the palais de festival, where the Cannes festival was held each May. Actually, curiously, I was told by people in the hospitality industry that they make more money out of Mippum than they do out of the film festival.
It attracts more people, and the real estate people pay more than the people who come to the film festival. When it started in 1990, I did not attend. I started going in 92 or 93.
It was pretty much a french english event. So what I mean by that is, the french attendees were there and they were only talking to french people. And the guys from the UK were there, but they only talked to other people from the UK. There's virtually no cross pollination. I remember working at the Rich Ellis stand, the booth at the early mippume, and literally, if someone came up to the stand, I was about the only person besides staff who would come up and talk to people. Because the Brits were over in a corner talking with their british friends, and the French were in another corner talking their french friends, and very little cross border business seemed to get done.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: No other european countries, nobody else.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Germany in the early years, it was really the French and the English not talking about the first four or five years, and there were virtually no Americans, probably less than a dozen Americans in the first couple years I was there. And then explore real. The big german conference started in 1998, and by then Bipham had become a truly global event. We had people from all across Europe, the Middle east, the US, Canada, Asia.
Bipham was global.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: How did that happen?
[00:13:25] Speaker C: Well, I think what happens is as the universe of investors became more global, so as canadian investors started investing in France, they discovered miplum.
As middle eastern investors expanded their portfolios, they discovered MIPM. They were looking for a place to meet people from other parts of the world. Certainly that's true of the asian investors. It was a great way to, great way to come together for a few days to meet people from all around the world.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: It's interesting, the 1990s, it's an interesting analogy, because in this country, in the United States, so many innovations occurred in the early 1990s that exploded the investment business. CMBs, Upreitz, all those things. And that to me was the blossoming of the institutional investment real estate market is the early 1990s, when you think about it.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Yeah, and I think also the notion of creating modern portfolio theory, the idea that real estate had a role in an institutional portfolio. John, you and I are old enough to remember when no institution, no pension fund investing in real estate. Yeah, well, not deemed to be an acceptable investment really, until FriSA was discovered.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: That'S what I was going to say.
[00:14:51] Speaker C: Was created in the early 1980s. And until then, real estate was not part of the, of the typical institutional portfolio. Right. And as we get into the nineties and as portfolios not only become larger, real estate portfolios not only become larger, but investors start to look outside their local boundaries and real estate in other markets. And part of that, John, is the result of the situations you described, the emergence of different technologies and tools. Part of it is literally the decoupling of real estate across borders. So that in theory, the idea of diversification is that when one thing is down, the other is up and vice versa. And what we were seeing in the nineties was the notion that, okay, maybe I should be looking at Europe because the european real estate markets are moving differently than the us markets, or if I'm an asian investor, I need to look at some place besides Asia, because moving, they were hedging, they were taking diversification positions in order to reduce the risk profile of their portfolios. But even in the late 1990s, as MIPM was this incredibly unique international real estate event, it still had a french feeling to it, business was getting done. I used to joke that among my northern european friends, certainly my contacts from the Nordics and from the Netherlands, it seemed like they came to Mippum not to meet people from outside their home country, but to see their fellow countrymen along the beach in the sun and start their finish off the q one of their business year by hanging around at the beach with fellow countrymen.
It was the Dutch had a huge event every mipum, and you couldn't go unless you were Dutch. I couldn't go even though I knew all these Dutchmen. It was the Tuesday night at MIPM or something, and they just hung out together having fun.
And Mippum has always had, and I would say encouraged french feeling to it. So french food and champagne on the Mediterranean, yachts, sailboats, events up in the hills of Provence. It was very definitely a french event. And one of the challenges it faced as we got into the two thousands was it had developed a reputation among many investors, particularly investors, not just advisors, but particularly investors. It became known as sort of a party destination. And so as travel budgets were scrutinized, a lot of investors all of a sudden realized that they couldn't justify spending three nights in south of France. Even though the organizers Omipum as is not unusual for these events, they would pay for the institutional investors to participate. In other words, free housing, sometimes free airfare, subsidized by the advisors and the brokers and the lawyers and all.
It went through a whole series of changes, and at its peak, it was less useful to all of us who were serious about it than it had been in the early days. Or candidly, in my mind, once it started to compete with export real, because expo real, which became, as I said, started in 98, it was german. It was much more focused on getting business done, and people started looking around. If you were doing both Mipum and expo, you would say, oh yeah, MiPm is a lot of fun, but boy, I sure get a lot more done at Expo because the Germans are more organized about it. And if Mipum became known as fancy french food and champagne, expo became known as bratwurst and beer. It was very german, and intentionally so, because it typically starts the day after October fest closes. The idea was bring a bunch of people over here for Oktoberfest and then they stay on for export reality. Now, I will say that when Expo started the first couple years, it was almost completely german in terms of german centric, let's put it that way, german exhibitors, german attendees, and those people who are doing business in Germany. But when I first met Claudia Baumans, the exhibition director of Expo. This was early 2001. She told me when I would make the comparison to MIPM. Yeah, well, MIPPM is more international. For those of us who go international, MIPM is more useful. She said, well, I'm committed to making Expo more international. And so she mandated that every stand to have english signage, that they have english speaking people working at the stands. And all those efforts by Claudia paid off as it became, as it started to attract more and more international attendees, including people from the US. And it was in 2001, when I was working with principal, that I recommended that they create a presence at Expo. They agreed, and in the spring of 2001, I toured the convention center with Claudia and with her help, selected a location for our stand, our booth, our display area.
And I kept that same location for 19 years. And after I retired, no one ever had that space again. And my friends would send me pictures of the empty space and call it Brad space. There's another interesting story about the difference between sort of the american way of this business and again coming back to relationships and how we market. But when I toured the facility with Claudia in the spring of 2001, there was one public restaurant. And she walked me into the restaurant, introduced me to the manager of the restaurant, and he's walking me, showing me the facility. And out of the corner of my eye I see a private dining room.
And I say to the manager, would it be possible for me to reserve that dining room for the entirety of expo?
He looked at me like I was crazy. He said, gee, no one's ever asked me that. Well, yeah, I guess so. If you want the dining room for the whole of expo, you can have it.
And so for every year I was in Expo real, I had the very same dining room for private meetings, as opposed to having every meeting in the public.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:21:25] Speaker C: And even better, for the first ten or twelve years, I didn't have a room charge. It was only later that he figured out maybe he should charge me for the room. He would charge me for it. We had a full catering, it was part of the restaurant. So breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks during the day, I could do anything I wanted.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: You covered food?
[00:21:43] Speaker C: Yeah, we covered all of that. And it was fantastic because you could hold a private conversation and we had signage.
It was really quite incredible. But anyway, so principal and I had a stand starting in October of 2001.
And at that expo, as far as I could remember, we were the only purely american firm to be at expo reality. Now by purely american I mean a firm that did not have an office in Europe. So CBRE or Jones Lang or Cushman, they had stance, but they were there because of their european business and their americans might or might not show up for expo, but it was there because the Germans had a position principal and I had this uniquely american location. And in the early days you had to walk by our stand to get into the facility. It was main and main from that perspective.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:22:39] Speaker C: And it gave us, and again, John, back to sort of the thrust of your question.
It gave us a unique branding opportunity, a unique position, a unique ability to be seen by the german marketplace because we were at their event. Just as Mipum seemed to be a french event even no matter who you were, Expo was, it was the home field of the german investors. So if you wanted to be playing with the german investors, no better way to do that than to stake out a spot that they could not where they couldn't miss you walking into their annual conference. And that's what we did at Expo Real. It was typically american marketing move, John, but a very atypical movement by the us real estate industry since no one at that point, no one else at that point had really discovered what export rail was. And that leads me to sort of the.
I don't know, John, I guess probably the coup de grace, the most of amazing part of my Rippleman Expo careers, and that was in 2001. I made this decision. I had this idea of hosting a dinner.
And the idea at the beginning, principal's my client. The idea was instead of doing the typical marketing dinner that you see at these events, and there were at Richell's, we had dinners at MIPM. Most of the big firms, developers, brokers, lawyers, whatever, had dinners at things like Expo and MIPM from the early years. But they were always marketing events. They were always these opportunities for the host to brag about how great they were. And I went to a bunch of those, don't get me wrong, they were fun.
But from the beginning, principal and I had a different idea. The idea was in principle, being based in Des Moines and I'm coming from Chicago. The idea was, it sounds today, it sounds corny, but the original idea was to make it sort of a midwestern family dinner.
It would not be marketing, it would be a group of friends, family getting together, having good food, good wine and most importantly, good company. The idea being just, we're just there because we like each other.
Unheard of at the time, from my perspective, unheard of at the time. I launched the first dinner at Expo in 2001.
We had eight people at the first dinner at Expo in October of zero one and eight people at the first dinner at Milford in 2002.
The idea behind the dinner was constant. All the years that I held that, we held it through to 2019 because of COVID So it was still a midwestern family dinner. It was just that my family kept getting larger.
So eight people at the first expo dinner in 2001, eight people at the first Mipam dinner in 2002. My last miplum dinner, which was 2019.
100 people at my dinner.
My last dinner at expo, October of 2019, 152 people at my.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: And a couple of really unique parts about dynamic. There was no marketing. No one got up and said, here's who principal is, here's who atlantic partners is, who's bell partners or USAA or Behringer, Harvard, whoever was my co host. Because it changed over the years with different clients. Nobody marketed. Period. End of discussion. And here's the other unique part of the dinner. No one got invited because he or she was important.
They got invited because they were friends of mine.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Friends of Brad.
[00:26:34] Speaker C: Friends of Brad. Exactly. For many years, I've had what I call the kids table. I had junior people because they'd become friends of mine, and I openly called it a kid's table, and it became a sort of a badge of distinction. Some of my closest friends said, hey, I'm at the kids table this year.
The other element of both dinners was I spent hours assigning seats. I was the wedding planner of these events.
You sat where I told you to sit, or you risk not being invited to future dinners.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: In all the years I did the dinners, all the years, I probably had three cases where someone didn't sit where I told them.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: What was your criteria for choice of seats?
[00:27:20] Speaker D: Seating.
[00:27:21] Speaker C: John. Interesting. John. The idea was I wanted to put people next to someone they'd find interesting.
I wanted to create conversation.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: A dinner party. They would remember. I had some fantastic success stories. I remember in one of the early years of expo, two Germans came up to me to say that they'd known each other for years, but they'd never done any business together until they. I put them next to each other at last year's dinner, and they had subsequently done business together.
People. Again, it just. You have this. If you spend the time thinking about people and what you know about these people, you know, so and so is interested in expanding into Germany. Well, let's put him next to a German who's actively doing Germany. If it's someone coming from the UK who wants to go to France, put him next to somebody from France or Germany who wants to go to. Anyway, the idea was find areas of common interest. And, you know, there were. I had certain guidelines. I typically would not have more than one lawyer at a table, which the lawyers loved, by the way. The lawyers loved, of course, because they were able to talk to people that wouldn't come to their own dinners, but they would come to my dinner because they knew it was going to be, wasn't going to be a lawyer dinner.
And again, I shouldn't be saying this, you should be hearing it from others. But over time, the dinners became events. The guest list ended up being a who's who of my friends in the industry. Not necessarily the most important single people in the world, but rather important people who happen to be friends of mine and who like coming to a dinner, knowing what that dinner was going to be. They knew that they were going to be seated next to somebody interesting. They knew that the food was going to be good. They knew that no one was going to market to them. They knew they were just coming to have a nice family dinner, even though that family had grown to. And the other interesting thing about it is, and people couldn't believe this about the dinners, I did business with relatively few of the people who came to my dinners, they weren't there because we did business together. They were there because I liked them and I thought they would add something to the dinner, to the evening.
They may not have done business with me, but many of them did business with each other. And.
Go ahead, John, you're going to ask a question, but I'm going to make a point about relationships. This was a fantastic way to build relationships with people and build this reputation in the industry. But the ability to create relationships with people who knew you were with them, they were there because, not because you were trying to do business, not because you were selling something, but because you genuinely enjoyed their company. And it created a whole different level of professional relationship because it started as a personal relationship.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: So one of my friends and who, you know, went to that dinner and he said the games or the interactions that you had were unique. So talk about some of those games.
[00:30:32] Speaker C: Okay, so some people came to my Mifflin dinner and didn't come to expo. Some came to expo, didn't come to mifflin. Some came to both just because they were at both events. But there was a big difference between the two dinners.
Growing up, I remember my mother having us play games around the dinner table on Sundays.
And with that in mind, in 2003, I had the crazy idea at my expo dinner that I would introduce a game.
When I announced it at the table, at the, at the dinner. And we had probably, that year, we probably had count tables, 50 or 60 people at the dinner.
I stood up on announce we were going to play a game. I described the game, which is not relevant today, what that game was, and I got the craziest looks, particularly from my german friends.
They had never heard of such an idea, and some of them didn't take to it quickly.
But in the next year, in 2004, I started the tradition that the game was a trivia contest. And I came up with this idea that table would compete against tables. So I had eight people at a table and they competed against all the other tables.
The trivia questions were insanely difficult. Intentionally. They couldn't use their iPhones. I was master of ceremonies, walking around the room yelling at people, and they were yelling back again, these are people I know. So if I. If I wanted to make a joke about somebody, I would call him out. He would call me back out.
It was just a way to build this spirit of it. And because it was table against table, it was designed both as entertainment, but also as a way for the people at each table to get to know each other better. So it was a team building exercise.
[00:32:29] Speaker D: Zach.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Yep. That's great.
[00:32:31] Speaker C: And it worked remarkably well. And just as I had spent hours coming up with the city chart, I spent hours coming up with a theme for the trivia contest and the questions.
And there was always this energy level at the dinner before we, the game would be played between the main course and dessert. And there was always this energy level. And somebody who hadn't been to the dinner before was being told by somebody to, oh, my God, wait. Wait for Brad. You will hate that. You'll just. Oh, it's unbelievable. You.
And there were always, by the year three or four people were trying to guess what the theme would be. And during the cocktails beforehand, they'd come around and say, brad, I know it's going to be about such and such, right? I wouldn't even tell Louise who would come to audition. She never knew the questions. She never knew the theme.
And so there's this buzz in cocktails and during dinner, what's the theme going to be? And then when I would announce the theme was, oh, God. So the first year's question since 2004, we had presidential elections. So I stand up and I announce that we're having a trivia contest. And the theme of tonight's contest is US presidential history. Now, the audience in every year was probably two thirds non american, one third american.
And needless to say, in that first year's trivia contest, the non Americans were highly vocal about how poor a choice I had made.
[00:34:10] Speaker B: Unfair. Yeah.
[00:34:13] Speaker C: I'm happy to announce that the table with almost. With the majority of, or almost exclusively non Americans won that first trivia contest. They knew more about american presidential history than the Americans did. By the second year saw Germany was gonna host World cup. The year after my 2005. No, the 2006. Germany was hosting World cup. So in 2005, October, I said, okay. So I stood up and said, okay. Last year, all my european friends were upset with me because the topic for the trivia contest was american president, us president. So I'm gonna offset this. So tonight's game is based on World cup history, and the Europeans are cheering and the Americans are booing. And that was the way the evenings went. And amazing thing to me, I would always have some tiny little prize for the winning table. The people at each winning table, just the idea that they won. And to the date of my retirement, the last time I saw people, I would frequently hear from somebody, you know, Red, I did win one of those contests one year. I mean, they literally remembered winning the trivia contest at my dinner. And it was like the highlight of their. Their year, their. Their expo. So that was. That was the expo dinner. And I only had the game at expo. And the Midland dinners didn't have a tricky contest, but they had Sophie. So Sophie's the interesting story. I mentioned I was looking for the venue for my first miplum dinner. And Cecilia Sonden, who was the wife of Eric Sonden, who I mentioned earlier, my multinational living in France, but from Sweden. She'd done marketing for Mipplum in Sweden and knew the cannon area very well. And so when I told her I needed a small restaurant, she came up with a restaurant called comme sais foie.
Like my house, it was owned by this woman, Sophie Messonnier.
Incredible, incredible restaurantrice, but also an incredible person. And over the next two decades, she became a very close friend and my not so secret weapon behind the success of my mippum dinners, which didn't have a game. So we started with one table at Sophie's restaurant. Remember, eight people for first dinner. Within three years, we'd taken over her entire restaurant, which was 60 something seats.
Worst thing at the seams. And she lost her restaurant during the GFC. But I hired her each year after that, and she became my go to person. She helped pick the venue, she picked the menu, and she served as the unofficial hostess at all of my dinners in Denver.
She knew all of my regular guests by name. And candidly, I think a lot of them came to see her, not to come to my dinner. They came to see Sophie because they love Sophie. She was just. She was the. She was the entertainment, if you will, that was comparable to the trivia contest. And people call these my dinners, and I have made that error myself. But as I said from the beginning, they were co hosted by my clients. So the early dinners by principle, and then over the years, Behringer, Harvard, HCI, USAA, BNP Paribas, and again, John, this all relates to relationships and client relationships and how we do things.
They all knew it was my dinner, even though their names were on the signs. And without exception, they let me do the dinners my way. Each year they might have had two or three names they wanted to add to the list. They knew that the reason people kept coming was because it wasn't a principal dinner or it wasn't a Behringer Harvard dinner or a USAID dinner or a BNP Berryville dinner. It was Brad's dinner with them as the co host.
But again, that relates to having fantastic clients. We saw the value of the branding exercise. We saw the value of creating those very distinct relationships broadly across the industry people. Principal had no relationships in Germany or in France, across Europe with these real estate people. Behringer Harvard was unknown there. USAA was unknown there. BNP had lots of relationships, but with different people. So they bought into the model, the Brad Olson model, if you will, of how to create their own unique position, not just at the Mipplun dinner or at the expo dinner, but broadly across the industry while we were working together.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: Well, the fact that these dinners were social and nothing business oriented. And I, you know, obviously, I'm sure one on one, when they were at the table of, I don't know if it's eight people per table or whatever, that guys would pair off and they are ladies and they talk business, I'm sure, you know.
[00:39:29] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: But, you know, we tried to make it such that they bring up personal things and this game, it would personalize the dinner. It wasn't all business, which is phenomenal. That's great. So I look at events in the United States that are analogous to that. I think of the one I think of, of course, going on currently in Las Vegas, the International Council of Shopping Centers, which is always the largest reference in the United States and it's a retail conference, but people do business there. There's a lot of social activity because it's Las Vegas, of course. But if you're a leasing person at retail, you're not playing much. You're working because you're making deals there or you're building relationships.
[00:40:14] Speaker C: You're not.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: A dinner like you have, you could do there and it would be fun, but it would be looked at as, wait a minute, it's not quite what we're here for kind of thing.
Not the same thing. It's interesting, and I don't know, you oi probably would have a better. At their fall meeting, something like that. Some of the, you know, the product councils would have dinners like that where they would, you know, intellectually talk about the industry per se and have more social type of arrangements, I would think so. That's probably an algorithm.
[00:40:48] Speaker C: I would. I would argue that you will, that ICSC would have been the perfect place for the dinner.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Well, that's interesting.
[00:40:55] Speaker C: The reason I say that is that expo and Mipum were the ICSC equivalent.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: Right. Okay.
[00:41:01] Speaker C: In Europe.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: So deal making was done, mostly deal.
[00:41:04] Speaker C: A lot of deal making was done, but the idea behind the dinner was to create the personal relationship that lead to future deals, as opposed to the mania that is in Vegas of everybody rushing around. I gotta make this deal today. And that's, that's the difference, John, between the typical us real estate model and my model.
The typical. And I make this, I made this distinction for decades with my european friends. The Americans tend to be transactional.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:36] Speaker C: Let's do a deal today or I don't want to talk to you.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:40] Speaker C: The Europeans tend to be relationship driven.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:43] Speaker C: I may not do a deal with you today, but if we get to know each other, I may do a deal with you tomorrow or next year or the year after. And that's why I like doing business in Europe. I was much more comfortable with the idea of building relationships that might lead to business than rushing around trying to do the deal today, knowing that in our business, if you're getting on the investment side, it may be different on the leasing side, but on the investment side, deals take time.
[00:42:08] Speaker D: They sure do.
[00:42:09] Speaker C: They need that. You need to trust me.
And so I think it's.
I used to get a kick out of it, John, at the dinners, because two things would happen every year at every dinner. First of all, I'd have people trying to get invited. They would reach out to somebody they knew who knew me and say, can you talk to Brad and get me an invitation. And my friends would say, you can't get invited to Brad's dinner that way. Brad has to want to invite you because he knows you. And people would say, but you know Brad, he's a close friend. And they would say, it doesn't work that way. I can't get you an invitation.
And obviously there were exceptions to that, John. You'd been there and you said, brad, I've got somebody with me can never bring him along. So I had people say, brad, I'm bringing, you know, the head of such and such. I've got to bring close friend from California for the first time at expo. Can he get. Sure. Those are always exceptions. The other thing, I got a kick out of all the people who tried to crash my dinners.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: That's interesting.
[00:43:12] Speaker C: I'll tell one story without mentioning a name.
We were at Mippum and we were at a restaurant along Croisset, along with the main drag.
And we had a sign out front that was USAA was my co host at that for that year and Atlantic partners dinner. We had a table at the front of. Along the sidewalk leading into the restaurant. We had the whole restaurant. So leading into the restaurant on the sidewalk was a table with a sign, USA. And a person comes up to the table and tells the restaurant staff person who's at the table, I need to get in. And she was looking at Mike, at the guest list and asked his name. And he said his name. And she said, I'm sorry, sir, you're not on the list.
It's a private party. And he said, no, no, no, I need to get in.
And he was quite insistent. And then the staff person from the restaurant found Sophie. And Sophie came and talked to him. And he was the same demanding person.
And Sophie finally came to me and said, brad, there's this guy at the front. He's insisting he'd be allowed to come into the dinner.
He's not on the guest list. So I go out and he proceeds to tell me that he is one of the most important real estate lawyers in the United States, maybe the world, and he's entitled to come in.
And I proceeded to tell him that I didn't care who he was or how important he thought he was, but he was not a guest. He was not on my guest list, he was not welcome at my dinner, and he was not going to be allowed in.
So he went off. He left the following. So this is march of whatever year this. I have to go back and look at the year in October of that very same year, I would hold my dinner every year after year one at the Berscherhof, the one of the grande Dame hotels of Munich, which I used as my headquarters for expo real, and became friendly with everybody from the owner on down to the bellman.
So we do our dinner there and there's a sign, private dinner.
I guess it was probably USAA again, and Atlantic partners.
And it was in a private room, and you had to walk through the private room after you see the sign. And as you walked in, there was a table with the guest list. And I hired people to work the table. And sure enough, the very same lawyer tried to catch my expo dinner and I had to throw them out of both dinners. I literally refused admission. And it became a standing joke that this particular person.
But there were others, John, there were real estate brokers. I probably could come up with some names, you know, who thought they should be invited because they were, you know, the most important real estate broker in Philadelphia or Washington or Boston or Chicago or wherever. And they couldn't understand why I didn't invite them to my dinner because they were so important. And the same was true of, you know, very senior real estate people.
They typically were getting invited to three or four dinners a night, so they weren't worried about crashing mine. But what was particularly, what felt particularly good was that those most senior people would come to my dinner as opposed to go to another dinner. Anyway, that was, that's MIpPM, that's expo. And they were both fantastic ways for me to establish the brand, my brand and the brand of my clients over a period of years in a way that was remembered by the people we cared about in terms of investors and investment advisors and create those relationships which made the business work.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: So then you, well, maybe subsequently started a relationship with the Global Property conference in Toronto, Canada. So you went to the canadian investor?
[00:47:32] Speaker C: Yeah.
Every year in Canada, the largest real estate event is held the last week of November, the first week of December, depending upon when the US Thanksgiving is. It's called the Toronto Real Estate Forum now. It's just known the real estate forum. It's been going for 30 plus years. It is the Uli of. It's like your fall meeting, John, at the ULi.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:52] Speaker C: It attracts the senior real estate people from across Canada and leading real estate people from around the world. It was the really was the fall meeting of Uli equivalent, 2200 people sells out every year. You don't get your name on list early, you don't go because they keep the list. They lock the number at 2200. In 2007, at the urging of Ivan O. Cambridge and Oxford properties, Ivan O. Cambridge, subsidiary of case to deposit the Canadian the public pension plan for the Province of Quebec, Oxford properties, those were the two most international, most active international investors from Canada on a global basis in the mid two thousands. So in 2007, the principals of Ivan Oak Cambridge and Oxford went to the organizers of the forum and said, you know, this is really good, but all we talk about is Canada.
We think there should be something special for those of us who are investing outside of Canada.
And so, beginning in 2007, the organizers of the forum added a separate one day event.
The day before the opening of the three day forum, it became known as the global property market, the Global Property Conference, and it was focused solely on outbound capital.
So the idea was to provide market information, strategies, introductions to those canadian institutions either were already investing outside Canada, like Ivan Oak, Cambridge and Oxford, or for those canadian institutional investors who were thinking they would like to invest outside Canada. And bear in mind, canadian investment, us real estate was on the upswing in a big way. And the canadian investment in european real estate really had started with Ivano because they were french. They opened an office in Paris and started investing in France. Early on, Oxford had begun investing. It opened offices. But most canadian institutions were completely newcomers to the idea of investing, certainly into Europe and even to a large extent in the US. And so they created this event. The first one, I think, attracted roughly 40 people. I didn't attend the first year, but I was active in it beginning year two, I guess, and attended, became a contributor to it. And by the time of the last one I did, we had almost 400 attendees over the years.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: How did you get attracted to it? Brad?
[00:50:27] Speaker C: Well, I was going to Canada for USAA, and I was told, you really should come to the forum. So. But the forum was so pro, so uniquely all about Canada.
Good. It's true that the canadian investors all came, but it was hard to be seen there because they were all doing their canadian business and there were hundreds of people. And again, sort of your Icse comparison, John. There'd be a cocktail party and be 200 people there, and, you know, you might meet five people, but it was really hard to be visible, to be noticed by anybody.
But with the launch of the Global Property conference, and particularly once I got active in it, I was a speaker, a moderator, I was on the advisory board for it. I helped plan the program. I became actively visible. I became part of the team that ran Global Property conference, and therefore developed this level of visibility and the ability to create, create relationships, because I became known as the guy from the US who came up to do the Toronto, to do the global property conference every year. And again, it was a focus. John, it's like you go into ICSC or you go into Uli. When you're focused on something and you become visible at it, it adds to your ability to succeed. And then eventually, I added a Toronto dinner to my annual calendar. Initially, I did those in cooperation with Gordon Vollmer. Gordon was at Mooreguard, one of the big property advisory firms. He'd been to my expo dinner and he said, brad, be fun to do one in Toronto. First one he did as a takeoff of mine as just Moorgard. And then in subsequent years, Gordon and I did it together. And it was through the GPM, through the global property market conference, that I got to be really close friends with George Przbelowski, who was running the GPM, and Sarah Siegel, who was the equivalent of Adiabauman. She was the executive director, essentially the event director for global property market. And because I was willing to commit time again, it goes back to put something in rather than get something out all the time. I was quite happy to work with George and Sarah to try to bring more european investors and european advisors to GPM, to bring more american advisors and american investors to GPM, to make it more international, to make it more satisfactory, more educational for the canadian investors, and candidly, from their perspective, to make it a bigger financial success. Because as it got bigger, they got bigger, they got more fees from it. And then Covid came and we couldn't do these events, we couldn't do expo, we couldn't do MIPM, we couldn't do Toronto real estate forum or the GPM. I came up with the idea that we create a virtual GPM. So we called it global Connect. Sarah Siegel, Peter de Hazma Good from the Netherlands, and I created global connect. And essentially we created a platform, or international advisors, to display their store, tell their story to canadian investors virtually by using a podcast, sort of like what.
[00:53:51] Speaker B: We'Re doing, a Zoom kind of thing.
[00:53:53] Speaker C: But a Zoom call which the canadian investors could sign in for to listen to a marketing pitch from a european or an american manager. And it was remarkably successful, considering how quickly we tried to get it off the ground. And then, of course, Covid was over. And when Covid was over, people wanted to get back and visit in person. So it had a relatively short shelf life, but it was effective for those people who participated in it wasn't Canada.
[00:54:25] Speaker B: Or at some point, Canada became the number r1 estate investor.
[00:54:29] Speaker C: R1 estate in the United States.
Exactly. And they were for quite a number of years. I haven't looked at the recent numbers, but they would still be among the top three or four, I'm sure.
[00:54:38] Speaker B: Was it during this time when you went over there? Sure. Yeah, absolutely right.
[00:54:43] Speaker C: Absolutely.
Initially in, in the early years of my work in Canada, going back into the late eighties, they were, they were limited to how much they could invest in real estate outside Canada. They had a bucket of 5%. Other 5% was everything other than investing in Canada or investing in public stocks. So there was almost no investment in us real estate by the Canadians into the nineties. And once that limitation was removed, it was a natural for them to come to the US. Ed?
[00:55:15] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting. I remember back early in my career, companies like Olympia, New York and Cadillac Fairview and mean, they were big development companies out of Canada as developers, John.
[00:55:26] Speaker C: But not institutional owners. Developers came in, huge developers in the, in DC. They were the biggest single developers in the district for years.
[00:55:37] Speaker B: Well, New York City, Olympia, New York.
[00:55:40] Speaker C: It owns Chicago in a lot of real estate.
[00:55:43] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[00:55:44] Speaker C: They didn't have that limitation because they weren't institutions. The canadian institutions had the limitations, not the developers.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: But the Canadians would like, for instance, CIBC, which is a big bank out of Canada, would invest with those developers coming to this. So they would provide capital.
[00:56:03] Speaker C: They were debt providers, John.
[00:56:04] Speaker B: That's what I meant.
[00:56:05] Speaker E: Debt.
[00:56:06] Speaker B: That's what I meant. Yeah. They financed all the developments.
[00:56:09] Speaker C: They were huge investors in much the same way, John, to go back in time that the japanese banks became.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:56:17] Speaker C: Huge lenders in the eighties.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, exactly.
[00:56:20] Speaker C: Very much the same as the canadian banks and with some of the same results. And the german banks then in the next wave, became leading investors and had some of the same problems that the Canadians had or the Japanese had.
[00:56:33] Speaker B: I mean, there was probably more foreign debt capital that came in than equity capital.
[00:56:37] Speaker C: Oh, for sure. Absolutely sure.
[00:56:39] Speaker B: Probably at least twice as much.
[00:56:41] Speaker C: Probably. Probably in order of magnitude, John. Probably ten times as much debt as equity.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: Ten times as much. Okay.
[00:56:47] Speaker C: Yeah, in the early years, because the foreign banks didn't have that same limitation anyway. So that was the canadian story. But then, interestingly enough, I ended up with a german version of the global property market conference. So through the beginning in about 2012, a very good friend of mine, and we'll get to that story, and his wife launched something called funds forum platform in Germany. So this was a platform for german investors to invest in who were interested in the german real estate markets. So it was very well done conference program, but again, solely limited to german investors investing in german real estate. It was started by Oliver Strumpf and his wife Anya. Ali and I have.
[00:57:35] Speaker B: How did that differ from Expo Real, Brad?
[00:57:37] Speaker C: Oh, it was a very, very focused, it was almost, John, like your council. It was like there's been the fall meeting of ULI and a council meeting. This was a select group focused solely on the investor side. Expo Real was like ICSE. John had developers, owners, leasing agents, lawyers, whatever one's forum Washington. German institutional investors investing in german real estate. So you didn't go, you didn't get in there as a broker or a lawyer or whatever.
[00:58:11] Speaker B: So it was pension funds. What about high net worth family?
[00:58:15] Speaker C: It was almost exclusively insurance companies and pension funds.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: Oh, I see.
[00:58:19] Speaker C: Intentionally, because that's where the organizer Oliver Strumpf and I had met when he was running marketing or the institutional real estate investment arm of.
And so when he left Commerce bank, he set up a variety of things. But one of the things he did was he realized he had these great contacts among the german institutions and they wanted a platform, they wanted a way to expand their knowledge base. And so in 2012, he set up funds for him. He and I had met back in 2002 when I was representing principal. We tried to get a us german fund off the ground and got really close, got our first commitment, and then the exchange rates changed and the Germans pulled back from the US. And Ali went on and did some other things. And then he started this platform, investment platform, and then sort of the same story as Ivan Ocambridge and Oxford as it related to Toronto real estate forum leading to the global property conference in about 2015. Some of Oliver's german investors who were active in funds forums said, we're starting to look at the us again. The market looks more interesting. Can we do something about the US investing? Can't we figure out a way to add something to the funds forum platform to talk about investing in the us real estate market? And Oliver called, Ali called me. He said, brad, I've got this interest. I can't decide. Should I do it as a one session in my funds forum or, or should I do it as a separate event? And I explained to Ali that the people that I was seeing from Germany come to the US typically were focused on the US, or at least were focused on outward investment from Germany. They were not the same person, same people who were investing in german real estate for their institution I said, I think youd do better if you created a separate event. And I told them about global Property conference in Toronto and how it distinguished itself from the forum. So he said, okay, Brad, you've convinced me now. Make it happen.
So in 2017, he said, brad, create the program, recruit us sponsors for me, and you run the day. You moderate everything. You do it all. I'll bring the Germans, you bring everybody else, and you do all the rest of them. I'll organize the venue, my will, or our team will do the food, all that Av, all that stuff. But you find me the us sponsors, you create the program and you moderate the whole day.
That was 2017. And so I found us sponsors who wanted to be in front of the Germans. I created a program and had to be, I was going to say vicious, but I had to be careful about making sure that it was not a marketing event, even though it was a marketing event. So I had, and this was a challenge. The US sponsored, it paid money to have a speaking role at the conference.
I had to approve their presentations. So they had to send me in advance the presentation, and I would mark them up and say, no, you're marking too much. It's too much sales pitch. Get rid of these three slideshow. Go back to telling the story of why student housing made sense or why senior living made sense.
[01:01:35] Speaker B: An intellectual.
[01:01:38] Speaker C: Exactly. And I did that until I retired, did my last one in 2021. And John, back to your point about how do you use these things effectively? How do you, how do you make something? Well, again, because I was willing to commit the time to make it work, work the right way, as opposed to a marketing exercise. The USAID conference became seen by the german institutions as the best place to go, or one of the best places to go to get information, real information about what was going on in the US. And, oh, by the way, at every one of those five events, who's standing up on the platform introducing the whole conference? Who gets credit for creating the whole conference? None other than Brad Olson and Atlantic partners. Now, my clients, whoever they were during that time, got plenty of exposure. They got speaking roles. I got, they introduced them, but it became, again, a great branding exercise. And again, John, I hate to say these things, you should be getting them from my german friends, but as an aside, I'll tell you that at one point in this whole cycle, from, let's call it 1990 to 2021, one of my german contacts came up to me and said, brad, I just want you to know you've developed your own personal brand among german institutional investors, they know. Brad Olson. I was an article in Faz. It was Expo real. It was the USA conference. It was going to other events held in Germany.
Some of my friends used to joke every time they turned around, I was in Germany. But I was in Germany six to eight times a year, and I was at every event that mattered. And so, yes, I had developed this brand, but it was a brand based on this different model. It was the european model, American using the european model. Go back to my german culture. I used mister as opposed to calling by their first name. I was respectful of their culture. I committed the time at their event. Expo rail was their event. I was the first american. We were the first Americans to acknowledge it was their event and be there for them. And through that period of a couple decades, I had been able to build this brand among the Germans. It was unique. It's, I guess, no longer unique. Other people have done it.
I was there early and I was there consistently, and it made a big difference.
[01:04:11] Speaker B: Well, I think, you know, I mean, you're very good on your feet, you're very quick witted.
And even though you know and you understand culture, you can understand, you can get behind the culture piece real quickly. There are very few, probably caught them, on one hand, Americans that do that like you did and, and your real estate knowledge. So it's just, you know, it made you completely unique. I mean, you'd be, almost, could be in the State Department and be like a, you could go and be a diplomat in our industry. Basically, you are the diplomat of our industry.
[01:04:51] Speaker C: John, there's another distinction, and that is that I had the luxury of doing it my way. I didn't work. I didn't work for somebody who was quarter to quarter. Need to look at results quarter to quarter.
[01:05:02] Speaker B: The president of the United states telling you what to do.
[01:05:04] Speaker C: No, no. I mean, in terms of real estate industry, I don't work for a big institutional manager who had to report earnings quarter to quarter. I had a remarkable group of clients who bought into my way. And candidly, I think if you ask the people from principal people, USAA or Barrington, Harvard, or any of these people, they would say, yeah, we did it Brad's way. But you know what? It worked. The proof is in the pudding.
We were able to use Brad's model to our own to achieve our own success.
But I couldn't have done it working for somebody else. I could never have done this at Richard Ellis. That's why I left Richard. Owls, they were so focused on how much are we making this quarter or this year. And are you sure it makes sense to keep traveling to the Netherlands when no one from the Netherlands investing? Well, it made sense because over a period of, from, from when I started Atlantic partners in 95 to when I retired, I'm guessing a couple billion dollars flowed from the Netherlands into the US real estate market through people that I'd introduce people to, and the same from Canada, the same from Germany, and backwards and forwards. Forwards. But none of it would have happened if I'd had to be responsive to somebody's earnings report anyway.
[01:06:25] Speaker B: And you didn't raise a fund where you had to get money out and you had to report to investors and all that. Yeah. If you even. You had your own proprietary fund.
[01:06:35] Speaker C: If I'd had my own proprietary fund, I would have been subject to the vagaries of the market up and down. And just as we had had to basically walk away from everything we did at Lexington as the Lexington property fund, we didn't get the promote from it. We got their money back, but we didn't. I would have had to do the same. How many cycles we've been through, John? Since 1995? Big cycles. So, yes, it's a different model. And again, we come back to the early, early conversation about why I set up Atlantic partners, what I was doing. I was trying to avoid risk for myself and having to build a team that I might have to disassembled. The only way not to fire somebody is never to hire somebody, and I never hired anybody.
[01:07:18] Speaker B: All right, so now let's discuss what I believe is perhaps the most important aspect that leaders need to share with proteges, and that is mentorship. Early in your career, you developed a relationship with the University of Wisconsin real estate program. Talk about that experience and what prospered from it.
I was a ULI mentor for 16 years myself, and now lead a community of 75 young professionals. It is a key skill. What do you think makes a great mentor and conversely, a great mentee?
[01:07:51] Speaker C: So early on in the podcast, I said, accidents happen.
And I told your audience, particularly the young people, don't be afraid of accidents. Welcomed them because sometimes they're really positive. So this next segment relates to another accident.
It happened during my first tour of duty. Rich Ellis. Back in the early 1980s. We hired an analyst from University of Wisconsin.
I apologize. I don't remember his name at this point in time. Anyway, sometime in 1983, he walked into my office and he said, rad, the real estate club at the University of Wisconsin needs somebody to come up and talk. You feel like going up to Madison to talk to them about international real estate.
Well, as I guess everybody who's listening to this podcast can tell, I'm quite happy to talk the drop of a hat. I'll get up and talk. But I said, sure, I'll go up, I'll go to Madison, I'll come talk to the students and say, yeah, I'd love to.
So this is sometime in 83. My talk took place at a kegger hosted by the real estate club in the old student union building. I have no idea how many students were there, but I do remember that the topic for my talk was going to be the global flow of real estate capital. Now, remember, John, this is 83.
There must. Okay, I'm going to exaggerate. There couldn't have been 100 people in the us real estate community who would talk about that topic. Who even. Who could talk about that topic?
But that's what I was doing at Richard Ellis. I was trying to bring capital, move capital around the world. And I had access to information from rich Ellis officers around the world.
And so I went up to Madison. There was no technology, there was no PowerPoint, there was no anything.
So I went and I bought a large plasticized map of the world.
I stuck it up on the wall in the room I was in, and I brought a bunch of permanent markers.
And over the course of my talk, which probably lasted an hour and a half, if I had really remembered correctly, I drew arrows on the map. I said, here's the Japanese. Here's Japan. This is now early eighties. Money in Japan wants to go to the US. So I drew an arrow from Japan into the US. Here's the Netherlands. Most of these people have never heard of the Netherlands.
Bear in mind, John, 1983, University of Wisconsin students. 90% of them hadn't been out of the Midwest. 50% probably true, 50% had probably never been out of Wisconsin. Maybe they'd gone down Chicago.
So here's the Netherlands. Money coming from the Netherlands wants to go to Germany. Here's money in Germany that wants to go to England. Here's money from the UK. We represent coming to us. Here's money in South Africa wants to go somewhere. Here's money. Anyway, so the map, by the time I'm done, the maps got lines all over the place.
[01:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:10:44] Speaker C: Jll, I think, still does this map, but in a much more sophisticated way. Anyway, so I do this whole thing about capital going in different places.
In the audience is a guy named Rod Matthews, who was one of the lecturers on the faculty. He'd been in Vietnam served in Vietnam and had this very globalistic view of the world and was really excited about global real estate at the time. I met Rod, I think, was working on some kind of a project to introduce american style recordation, recordation of deeds into Russia. He was. He had this very interesting idea about global real estate. Anyway, so he's in the audience.
Came up to me afterwards. He said, brad, this is fantastic. This is what would interest me. I love the idea of global real estate, and I think the university, I think we should be teaching global real estate, international real estate, within the program. The head of the real estate program at that point in time was Jim Graskamp, who was arguably the most important real estate educator in the history of the United States, I would argue, incredible. He was also the most incredible personality I had ever run into. He was a quadriplegic. Quadriplegic. I knew that he had the most dominating personality, most compelling personality of anybody I think I've ever met. And so he takes me to see Graskamp, the chief, as the Wisconsin students called him. And Rod tells him, Brad just gave this presentation on global real estate, and we need to start teaching our students about the rest of the world.
And Graskamp says to Rod, you got go do it.
And as they say, the rest is history. So, basically, as a direct result of this lecture talk I give to the real estate club in the fall of 1983, and again, I will cite things as though they're true. And I don't know that they're true, but I don't know they're not true. To my knowledge, Wisconsin was the first real estate program in the United States to start teaching students about international real estate. And they did more than teach them. They took them around the world. So Rod got the assignment from Grascamp. Okay, you like this idea? Start teaching. So you start teaching a class in international real estate. I would go up there and guest lecture twice a year, he said. Rod said, there's no way to learn real estate about the world's real estate. Sitting in Madison with, we got to take these students on trips. We started taking them around the world, started taking them to expo and to Miplam, and, of course, who was their guide at Mipamid Expo.
[01:13:30] Speaker B: Who else?
[01:13:33] Speaker C: So I would. I would help organize their trips. I set up meetings. I didn't go to all the meetings, but they wanted to meet somebody from the UK real estate market. Fine. I got a guy in London. Talk to him. They want to talk about France or Germany or wherever there was. I always knew somebody who would meet with the students and tell them this at MIPpM. The big fun part is they've got big yachts. Some of these big investment managers had yachts. Deutsche bank had a yacht. I knew one of the guys at Deutsche bank. The students from Mippam from Wisconsin went to Mippam. Got to go on the deutsche bank yacht to hear about what Deutsche Bank's view of the real estate was.
There was an evening german event organized by a buddy of mine. I said, can I bring the Wisconsin students? Sure, bring the Wisconsin students. This thing, a beach party in Cannes organized for the Germans. And.
[01:14:24] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[01:14:25] Speaker C: And the Wisconsin MBA students got invited. Actually, for several years they worked the dinner for this, my friend. One was the official photographer. A couple of them would work the front desk as people would come in. It worked, exposed to remarkable people over the Spanish. So whether it was, what a great.
[01:14:43] Speaker B: Experience for college students, unbelievably incredible.
[01:14:46] Speaker C: Then a number of years later, the head of the part was a frenchman whose name was Francois Carlomegnier. And Francois had a very, he was french. He had this great view of creating a center for international real estate study at Madison. And he came with the idea of organ of offering for Madison to offer a global real estate master's degree. The idea was, take a semester at Madison. You're a foreign student studying something business someplace else. Coming to Madison for a semester, take four or five courses. In depth, hard work, us valuation, methodology, all the things that the Madison students had to learn about real estate. He said, I'm going to bring them. Can you help me create the program? So I served as one of his sounding boards to create this program.
And then with him helped create something which you call a global real estate market conference, which was the sort of the capstone each semester for these foreign students was held in New York Stock Exchange. Toll Brothers, which is a member, Fred Cooper from Toll Brothers, had a son at Madison when I started working in there. So Fred said, well, I can host this thing at the New York Stock Exchange. So we would have the real estate, the global real estate conference and the New York Stock Exchange in Wall street. On Wall street. The kids got it. The kids, the students got a tour of the market, of the stock exchange before it closed. They would go out, literally go out there, and then they would take pictures up on that stand where everybody ring.
[01:16:20] Speaker B: Or they ring the bell.
[01:16:21] Speaker C: They ring the bell to. So these foreign students had this incredible opportunity. Initially, the students came from France, from South America, from Hong Kong, and I met some unbelievable, unbelievable people with whom I had maintained close relationships to this day, who came to Madison to study for a semester. And when we started the conference at the stock exchange, quite naturally I ended up helping create the program for the conference. And I moderated the capital markets panel each year. And then they went on without me when I retired. And then last November they called and said, brad, would you come out of retirement? We're doing it in Chicago this year. Would you come out of retirement and moderate the capital markets panels? So I did another great conference. And all this was, the amazing thing about this, John, is that I'd never been to Madison, Wisconsin before I went up in 1983.
I had no connection to the university whatsoever. Other, in fact, we had hired a student from there.
And then in the mid two thousands, 13 or 14 or 15, something like that, they asked me to come up for a special award from the business school. Business school. Each year awards gives awards to distinguished faculty members and alumni who support the business school.
So they called, they said, brad, could you come up for our awards ceremony? The business school is having an award ceremony. It was actually the week after expo, I think.
So I go up there and I, they give me a special award. Shape the Future award, recognizing the fact that I've been contributing to the university's real estate program in the, in the business school for 30 years. And that the announcement was, this is kind of an odd announcement because Brad is not an alumnus, he's not a faculty member. He's just somebody who's been giving his time to the university for 30 years. So we thought it was a, that we finally recognize him with an award. And then they asked me to serve as an honorary member of the Graskamp center, the Grascamp center for Real Estate. And I've been on the board ever since and active in its various responsibilities.
And John, I know this whole question was about mentorship. I've been a long winded way to get to this, but since 1983 I've mentored Wisconsin real estate students.
I don't know the number, but it's well over 1000 students that come through the real estate program at the University of Wisconsin Madison with whom I've interacted in some way or another. They heard me talk to one of their classes. They went to Mipamber Expo. They did the global real estate market conference. Or they just came to a real estate club event when I was up there speaking.
Some of them I continue to mentor. I had a LinkedIn message a couple of weeks ago, a month ago from somebody said Brad, you were not going to remember me, but I graduated from Madison and I remember you were there and you told me at the time, if there's anything you want to know, reach out to me. So reach out to me on LinkedIn and said, brad, I'm thinking I'm setting up my own business. You talked about the importance of networking. Can you tell me how I should network? What can I do to network? How do I build my business? The, you built your business. And so we talked about the whole method of networking and the give part, not the take part, so you get more out of it when you give, rather than trying to take all the time. The network needs to be, you need to be a net giver to the network rather than a net taker from the network. We had a great conversation. Then just this past week, I get a message from a woman who graduated from Madison, I guess 15 years ago. He said, again, same story, Brad, you won't remember me, but you told me how I should reach out to people. I haven't done a very good job of staying in touch, but one of my colleagues is going to be down in Raleigh this week. Would you mind visiting with him when he's there? And I wrote back and I said, ashley, of course I remember you. You went to work for Robert Byron at Blue Vista Capital. And I remember talking to Robert and telling me he should hire you because you were such a great student. So, yes, I remember you. And sure, I'll meet your colleague who's coming down. So it's, it's the mentorship thing, John, is it's a matter of finding ways to connect, finding ways you can be helpful, being a sounding board. I think it's, again, I think part of it, there is an assumption that the mentor is a net giver and the mentee is a net taker.
And I think it's what I've learned after all these years with the students in Wisconsin, that's reversed over the years. I can easily say I've got much more out of doing what I've done at Wisconsin than I've done for them. Now, the students would tell you, people from the program would say, oh, that's not, can't possibly be true. But it is true, because when you do this, when you spend time with young people, and John, you're doing this every day now. So you know what I'm talking about. They give you energy.
[01:21:48] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:21:49] Speaker C: They ask questions which nobody in the industry would ask you. They want to know why you do something, not just what do you do. But why do you do it? And you have to stop and think about, oh, yeah, why do I do that? And am I doing what I should do? Am I doing it the right way? It becomes a dialogue. It's a two way discussion between the mentor and the mentee, between the senior and the junior, however you want to describe it, but to get value out of it as the mentee, you've got to be willing to put some stuff at risk, put yourself at risk of it. You need to be willing ask a question which you think is stupid. It's not stupid, but you word that it's stupid because no one's ever said it before. From the mentors perspective, you got to be willing to get outside your comfort zone a bit.
You've got to be willing to commit time and candidly for me, and I think, John, for you as well, you've got to be willing to be personal. You got to get willing to say, here's why I did it. I don't know that it was right. You and I have talked now for couple hours about what I did over the last 50 years. I can't tell you that what I did was right. In fact, I can tell you for sure it wasn't right for anybody but me, but it was right for me. And this is why it was right for me. Here's things that went into the decision. Here's why I did what I did in 1995 when I set up my own business. Here's why I left Richard Allison, 1983. Here's what we did to create Lexington. Here's why I retired at the end of 21. Those sorts of things are personal, and if you're going to be an effective mentor, you've got to be willing to open up and share the personal side of all of that. You're not a lecturer. You're a sharer.
[01:23:31] Speaker B: So let me broaden that a little more.
[01:23:33] Speaker C: Before you do, John, before you do, John, I want to digress for a moment because I want to cover something which I think is getting attention, the industry, but late in the game and not feeling not dearly enough. And that's a diversity within the industry.
[01:23:46] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:23:47] Speaker C: And if I can digress for just a minute, I want to talk about one element of that diversity, and. And that is the fact that over these, I'll call it 50 years, but call it 40. Since I got into real estate, I've interacted with some incredible, remarkable women both in these organizations and events that I've talked about and within my client teams, my clients teams and I just want to. I want to call out a few names at the risk of forgetting somebody. I want to mention some people who have had an incredible impact on my career and they happen to be women.
And I think our industry needs to recognize the value of the contribution of women in the industry.
[01:24:35] Speaker B: So I agree.
[01:24:38] Speaker C: At the Grass camp Center and the real estate department, University Wisconsin, over the years I worked some really amazing women. So I want to mention Lee Gottschalk, who runs the Grass Camp Center, Sharon McCabe, who's been a professor, lecturer there. Jeanne Truan at the, at the Grass Camp Center, Mary Brost and Allison Izuba, who used to work at Grass Camp center. These people made my time at Madison so enjoyable and organized things and organized the events for the Grascam center. And then among clients, I realized that after my first couple of clients were a string of, I don't know, 20 plus years. Every one of my principal relationships, principal client relationships started with a woman. So at principal it was Julie Lawler. At USAA, it was Susan Wallace. At BNP, Perry bought was Barbara Knoflock and Natalie Charles, who took over for Barbara, Lilly, Dun and Bell. I've talked about my german private family. Client now is an Sophie Lodi. So these are all women who, with whom I've interacted. And then when I get to the events, I mentioned Claudia Bauman's at Expo, I mentioned Sara Siegel, global Property Market conference, Anya Strumpf, Thatine Gruen said at USA conference, Lexi Miller, Nancy Knight and Sue Aldrich all at afar. These are all amazing professionals, just happen to be women. And I think while we have a lot more to do to improve diversity in every category, there have been some amazing women in my career, and they've had an incredible impact on my career. Anyway, thank you to everybody. All right, John, you were going to go to something else, but I wanted to get that out.
[01:26:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'm going to broaden your mentorship in the. Into even relationships in general. Relationships and building a network are fundamental glue that holds the industry together.
Talk about your strategies for building and fostering relationships. I know you've interspersed a lot already, but why do people say such nice things about their relationship with you?
I know why. I do. You listen. You are very quick in assessing a problem and taking time to understand not only the root of the situation, but how to carefully communicate it to your client or friend in a way that feels supportive and empathetic. That ability is a true gift. That is a learned skill, I believe. Tell me your thoughts about that.
[01:27:06] Speaker C: Well, John, first of all, I'd say, I'm not sure Louise would agree. I'm a good listener.
And I would say most people who know me and anyone who's listening to this podcast probably think of me more as a talker than a listener. But I think you make a really important point. The willingness, the ability to listen is an important part of building and fostering relationships. And it's been a critical part of what I've done over these years. I talk about being willing to go to the Netherlands and listen to the Dutch when no one else is going, going when they weren't doing anything of going to a MIPm or an expo, and listening when people were talking about things which didn't look like they were directly relevant to what I was doing, the willingness to go to Toronto and listen to people, help them figure out what it was that they were trying to identify. So I think, number one, listening is much more important than talking. Even though I do a lot of talking. It's more important than writing, even though I do a lot of writing. You need to know what you're going to talk about or write about, and you do that by listening first.
But there's, I would say the most fundamental aspect that for me, more important than even listening is the desire to build and foster relationships in the first place.
And I don't think I enough people in our industry, or broadly in business, are as committed to building and fostering relationships as they should be. If they're trying to build a successful career in real estate or whatever industry it is, you have to want to, you have to want to build those relationships. They just don't happen. They don't happen. You may be a great listener, but if you don't invest the time, invest the energy to build that relationship, and then having started the relationship, to foster that relationship, to keep it going over the years, it takes an enormous commitment of time and energy.
And candidly, a lot of people just don't, aren't willing to put the time or give the energy, put in the time or exert, expend the energy to make it happen. And I think that one of the reasons I've said it before, one of the reasons I started Atlantic partners, and I think probably the key reason that it's, that it lasted 26 years and that I achieved a lot, was that that focus on relationships. To me, it was all about the people on the other end of the phone or in the meeting. It was not about making a money, it was not about me, it was about them. And and creating that relationship with them. It's why sort of every part about this is everything we've talked about relates to that. And there's something else, John, which to me is, again, you asked me about networking relationships. What was important to me, what I've done to try to build and foster relationship relationships. And the other element of this, which I think in the real estate industry generally, sometimes is in rare supply, is candor.
When we were younger, Louise used to accuse me of being brutally honest, honest to a fault at times. You know, you didn't really need to tell her you didn't like her haircut. She asked you, did you like the way she's wearing hair? You didn't have to say, I like it better the old way. Or do you like the color of this dress? I really like the red one better than the blue one. You didn't really have to be so honest.
I think I've mellowed a bit over the years.
But to this day, if someone asked me what I think about a particular problem or an issue, I'll still tell them what I think, what I believe, not what I think they want to hear, what I believe. And I think that the people with whom I built long lasting relationships in our industry have learned to have come to know that if they ask my opinion, they're going to get my opinion. And it's going to be a candid opinion, and it's not going to be what I think they want to hear. It's going to be what I think they should hear.
And I acknowledge that that candor has meant that I don't have relationships with certain people in our industry. It's. But it does mean that the people with whom I have the relationship, people, clients, friends, you, others, people with whom I've established those relationships and with whom I have lasting relationships, appreciate that candor. And absolutely, I think that that combination of the willingness to build a relationship, the willingness to put in time and effort, the ability to listen to what, what someone is saying, and then the honesty, the willingness to be candid, even though it may not be what they want to hear, even though it may be exactly opposite of what they want you to say, means that the relationships that survive that combination of factors, those relationships tend to last forever.
[01:32:23] Speaker B: But the other thing that you do is, and I'll say this, you will advocate what you believe, but you're also willing to say, you know, you're willing to be. Your mind is still open to have your mind changed, which is important, because some people are very close minded and they have their beliefs and they're just not going to come off their beliefs. You're willing to listen and say, you know, you have a point there. I think I'm going to back off my issue because that's information I didn't know before.
[01:32:52] Speaker C: I think that's the other point. That's good, John. It's the added information. It's learning something you didn't know. Willingness that never stopped learning.
[01:33:01] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:33:02] Speaker C: And you're right. As we get older, it's harder to admit that we don't know something. It's harder to admit that the other side may have a point. And I think, again, I'll come back to what you do and what I did for 40 years with Wisconsin students. It's one of the great values of being with smart young people.
[01:33:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:33:18] Speaker C: They bring perspective that we don't have.
[01:33:20] Speaker B: We never even saw thought about it.
[01:33:22] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They make us rethink why we're doing things a certain way. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's absolutely critical and I think that the openness, and again, I'm not nearly as open minded as I wish I were sometimes, but I think the willingness to, again, when we put ourselves in environments where we're not comfortable, where we don't have all the answers, I think we end up coming out of that. Stronger, better people.
[01:33:49] Speaker B: Absolutely. That's great.
So you've said a lot of them before, but in your 50 years plus of both law and business, what do you see as your major life lessons?
[01:34:02] Speaker C: John? I start back where we started, which is the two lessons I learned from my father.
I would say, first of all, be that pebble that gets dropped into a pond and celebrate the ripples you create. Don't worry about making a big splash. Make lots of ripples and see where those ripples take you and be excited for the ripples that you create. So that's number 1. Second one is don't burn your bridges. And then my corollary, which was be happy to burn bridges to nowhere, I think some of my favorite bridges over these 50 years have been bridges that didn't lead anywhere but to a relationship with somebody that I enjoy spending time with. And so build the bridges to people you meet along the way without regard to where that bridge might take you, if it's going to take you anywhere. So those are the two from my father, which I've moderated, modified a bit. Then I would add two more. And the first one should be obvious to anybody who's listening to the podcast. Love what you do and do what you love, right? I have a fantastic passion for what I've done these last 50 years. I've been incredibly fortunate to work with amazing people, to do amazing projects, but I've loved doing it along the way. And I didn't stop because I stopped loving it. I stopped because I want to do some other things. But I could tell stories of family and friends who worked at a job just because it was a job, who couldn't wait to retirement.
I rarely had a day when I woke up that I wasn't excited about what I was going to do that day, or a day. By the end of the day, I wasn't excited by what I did that day. So love what you do. Do what you love. And then the other one, which is actually, I have a sign here that Louise gave me. She bought for me. It is what it is for me.
I don't worry about things I can't control. I worry about what I do and how I do what I do. I accept things and I move on to the next thing. I don't dwell on things that I couldn't control, right, or that went the wrong way yesterday and I can't change today. So those two love what you do and do what you love. And it is what it is. I would say to me, those are the new ones I would add to be the pebble. Great ripples and don't burn your bridges.
[01:36:17] Speaker B: Those are great.
[01:36:18] Speaker C: Those are my four.
[01:36:20] Speaker B: Those are great.
Since this podcast is aimed at young real estate professionals, please offer your thoughts on where you'd be focused today if you were new in the business, in the real estate investment businesses, what product types, geographies, or niches would you be focused in if you were new in the industry?
[01:36:40] Speaker C: No right answer to that, John, which applies to everyone, I guess. If I learned anything over the years, it's that each person has to find his or her own answer.
[01:36:51] Speaker B: I would agree with that, yes.
[01:36:53] Speaker C: What works for one doesn't necessarily work for others. But as someone who always has opinion about every question, I figured that I will give you mine.
Here are a couple of things I would suggest to the young people.
Young people on the podcast. First of all, think broadly about what constitutes investable real estate.
One of the things we've seen over the 40 years is that the capital base has grown geometrically over those 40 years. We talked about before. When we first started, John, you and I started, there was almost no institutional money in real estate. Now there are trillions of dollars in real estate. And one of the realities, one of the results of that expansion, that explosive expansion of the amount of capital trying to get real estate, is we've changed what we, how we define real estate. Investible real estate used to be office, retail, office, retail used to be office, used to be office. Maybe retail, maybe industrial, maybe residential.
[01:37:57] Speaker B: Some hotels, some hospitality, but.
[01:38:00] Speaker C: Some hospitality, but, but the beginning of my career, let's, let's say even through the mid seventies, late seventies, the two act, the two sectors which are most interesting, office and retail. No, no. The two which are most interesting today are multifamily and industrial or logistics, and they didn't exist in any institutional portfolio.
[01:38:20] Speaker B: No, that's true.
[01:38:21] Speaker C: In 1980, yeah, they didn't invest in institutions, didn't invest in multifamily. They thought it was too management intensive. They didn't want some evicted tenant showing up on the, the word of the.
[01:38:31] Speaker B: Pension fund or the one year leases were too risky. Too risky.
[01:38:36] Speaker C: And then on the industrial side, John, the buildings were too small to be of interest. Institutions. I mean, when you and I started a 20,000 footprint, warehouse building was a big warehouse building.
[01:38:45] Speaker B: Yeah. My first deal was $250,000 loan.
[01:38:50] Speaker C: Exactly my point. And so one of the realities from my perspective is I'm looking to young people, is that the sectors and structures and geographies which have changed so dramatically over the 40 years will continue to change. And so as a young person, think about what sectors, what's investable real estate, what constitutes investable real estate, what structure is acceptable? Again, you made the comment about the emergence of reits and upreach. What geographies?
Yes, the US looks attractive on a global basis. Yes, investors like to come here, but try to imagine if you're young, get ahead of the wave of the capital that's going to come. So what sectors could be interesting, what structures could be interesting, what geography? I would argue that Africa has to be an example of a geography that has enormous potential, lots of risk, but given population growth and density growth, Africa should be on everybody's list as something that they ought at least know something about. Can you identify where the growth is coming in Africa? And are there opportunities in Africa that we should look at? The second point I would make, John, and it's, again, it's going to sound like a broken record, and that is educate yourself about the world, even if you're working locally for over the years. One of the benefits I've had from working internationally is that it exposes me to things that I would never have seen if I'd stayed in downtown Chicago, right, even within downtown Chicago. Remember the first time I had a scottish investor come walk with me along the Chicago river and say, why isn't there more office space along the river? This is now west of the west side of the river.
[01:40:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:40:30] Speaker C: Fulton Market is now the biggest, hottest part in town. But the river got explosive growth.
I hadn't thought about why we didn't build more along the river. The other example I would give goes the reverse. Student housing. The US has been investing in student housing for a decade or more. In Europe, it's just taking off. It's booming. And so this notion of learn what's going on in the rest of the world, not just in terms of real estate, but in terms of the world at large. And so read about the world, try to develop a better perspective about what's going on in the world, what's happening, why something that happens in Germany could affect what's happening in the US. You mentioned the lenders from Canada. Why do lenders in Canada coming to the US? Why were lenders from Japan coming to us? Why were lenders from Germany coming us? Why do investors come from one part of the world to another part? We talked about that earlier. Get to know the world a little bit better again, even if your focus is entirely on residential real estate in Madison, Wisconsin, there's value to know what's going on in the rest of the world from my perspective. I've subscribed to the economists for years. I can't claim to read it cover to cover every week, but I do get a great deal from it. And I particularly get a lot from the newsletters that pop on my computer every morning from the Economist. I like knowing what's going on everywhere in the world. And then the other one, which you touched on, John, and which I think you agree is as important as I do, and that is participate actively in at least one professional association. Yes, we've talked about John. For you, it was Uli. For me, it was a fire. There are dozens of associations, young people, that can add value to a young person's career, life, career. Some are broad, like Uli, or afire. Some are very specific, NIOP or NMHC, sector specific or geography specific. And the only thing I'd say is, find something that interests you as a young person and jump in with both feet. Get active.
[01:42:27] Speaker B: Exactly. I'd agree.
[01:42:28] Speaker C: Part of it.
[01:42:29] Speaker B: Just today I did had a webinar about data centers, so we haven't even talked about that yet. But oh, my goodness, you talk about an industry that's exploding.
I learned today that we are one third the capacity that's necessary over the next ten years of data center ability.
What does that mean? That means that there's not enough power being generated on the planet right now to power the need for the data center growth that's coming. So there's spectacular growth potential.
[01:43:07] Speaker C: There's an example, John, of why I think we need to keep open minds.
I would argue without any authority, that because of the problem you identified in power and because of the change in technology, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that the data center business you're talking about today will not exist in ten years time.
[01:43:32] Speaker B: Well, that's probably true. We'll have to argue with that.
[01:43:35] Speaker C: We'll have to figure out a different way to deal with data than what we're doing with now, because there is no power, there is no capacity. There is no. We don't have space to accommodate if, in fact, data continues to grow at the rate it has been growing, and we don't solve it, the data storage, some other way. That's why I think, keep in mind that things change. And that's why I love this. The fact that talk to young people, you find different ideas.
It's an exciting time, but it's one that's challenging. What does AI mean for real estate? I have no clue. All I know is that it's going to make a difference and is already making a difference, and we can't imagine what the world looks like down the road. Ten years.
[01:44:16] Speaker B: I mean, you think back to beginning of your career and what's changed in 50 years.
But he said today, this is staggering, that all the knowledge on the planet up until two years ago is equal to what we've created the last two years.
[01:44:34] Speaker C: Everything, I believe it.
[01:44:37] Speaker B: That's just spectacular.
[01:44:40] Speaker C: We talk about the fact that on our iPhones, we have more power than we had to take the man to put the man on the moon. I mean, easily. I mean, just. It's crazy.
[01:44:48] Speaker B: He said the 2006 iPhone was four megabytes or whatever gigabyte. Now it's 512. It's 100 times the much in 17 anyway, so that's incredible. What are your life priorities among family, work and giving back?
[01:45:06] Speaker C: Brad?
We were at Lexington. Don, Jerry and I used to talk in jokingly about our priorities as the three f's in this family, fun and fortune. And I guess I, for me, they're still valid. And if I want to add a fourth one, which I'll keep with an f. Call it fellow man, which is giving back, I guess, for me. Me, it's family fun, fellow man and fortune. So I'm more interested, my family, in having fun than anything else. And then after that, I want to help, like I've been doing with the students from Wisconsin and everything else we've been talking about. And the fortune. The fortune is the fourth death. It comes last. So that's, that would be my, my order of priorities.
[01:45:47] Speaker B: So I guess I asked this before, but in a different way. But if you were talking about just yourself, what advice would you give to your 25 year old self?
[01:45:59] Speaker C: Pretty much the same, I guess, as those life lessons. We talk. I definitely would urge myself to think about the real estate world and the world at large. In very broad terms.
[01:46:11] Speaker B: You had just finished law school at 25, right?
[01:46:14] Speaker C: I finished law school. I had literally, amazingly, never been to Europe, barely been out of the United States. So again, I think if I knew then what I knew now, what I know now, it would be take a much broader view of the world and keep an eye out for the sort of cosmic changes that came down, that we know have come down the pike. So, open mindedness, think about the world globally, and two other things. Again, find something to be active in, which I did relatively early. But the most important piece of advice, and I learned this, I would say, the hard way, although it hasn't been so hard, keep those life priorities in focus, constant focus. Don't forget what's important to you. Do the things which you care about and do them well. Integrity. Personal integrity. You know the old adage, takes a lifetime to build a reputation and an instant to lose it.
It's important how you live your life.
[01:47:27] Speaker B: Your reputation.
[01:47:28] Speaker C: Your reputation is critical. And work on that. So those life priorities are really important.
[01:47:34] Speaker B: Final question as I ask all my guests.
What if you could post a statement on a billboard on the Capitol Beltway for millions to see? What would it say?
[01:47:44] Speaker C: Brad, so you told me a billboard question, and candidly, I wasn't sure whether you wanted my billboard to be addressed to. Those young real estate professionals are going to be driving on the capital beltway.
[01:47:58] Speaker B: Really?
[01:47:58] Speaker C: To the planet? To the planet, or the general population? So I have two for you. If I'm addressing it to the general population, to the planet, everybody driving by my billboard would read, be prepared. The future is closer than you think.
And if it's just the young people in our community, in our industry that are watching the podcast or joining you in your community, it's be prepared. Ripples ahead.
[01:48:28] Speaker B: That's great.
[01:48:29] Speaker C: And for me, John, I've used be prepared, that's the Boy Scout motto. And not to the fact that I was an evil scout, but the message is clear to me. Change is coming and be ready for it. Help make it so. I would say those are my billboard signs.
[01:48:47] Speaker B: Brad, as I expected, this was a very incredible conversation and I really appreciate it. All your time and energy in putting this together and we'll assemble it. Thank you for listening. And thank you, Brad, for participating. I appreciate it.
[01:49:03] Speaker C: Thank you again, John, for inviting me to join on the podcast and more importantly, being such a good friend for so many years. And thank you for your commitment to helping shape the future of young people in our industry. You're doing great work and you should be proud of it. Keep it up. Thanks again and we'll stay in touch, that's for sure.
[01:49:23] Speaker B: Thank you, Brad. Take care. So we just listened to the third and final episode of the three part Brad Olson interviews that I did actually in three separate interviews with Brad. And we tried to capsulize it with number one being kind of his origin story leading up to is starting his own business, North Carolina. So most of his career in Chicago leading up to that, which was from about 1975 until 1995, about 20 years. Then the second one was his Atlantic partners business going up to from 95 until 2021, his 26 years doing that. And then his third, the one we just heard. Of course, he talked a lot about his participation in both MIPM and Expo real, which were the european conferences he was fortunate enough to be early on in doing that. And then his mentorship and teaching at the University of Wisconsin and its program and the building of this international program that he did there with no affiliation other than being called to lecture up there, which was interesting. And then he then finalized with his lessons learned on his ripples and bridges and then his other advice as well. So I wanted now to bring on two of my close associates in the iconic journey in Cre, Colin Madden, who was one of my co founders of the, of the community, and Sam Glass, who's on the board of directors for the community as well. So we're going to start with Colin. I'm going to let Colin kind of talk a little bit about his observations of the podcast's interviews and his thoughts about Brad Olson. So take it away, Colin.
[01:51:26] Speaker E: Thanks, John. Thanks for having me as well.
Yeah, I personally and professionally had never met Bradley, but leading up to listening to the podcast, you spoke very highly of him. And then you shared some of the testimonials of his clients and mentees. So I got to read those and hear them prior to listening, it kind of foreshadowed what I was about to hear. But everything the testimonials that you have said conveyed pretty well across the interview you did with him. And he just seems like a top notch individual and professional, someone anyone who's worked with or knows and we're married to would be lucky to be a part of his life. He just seems like an Ubermensch is kind of a word I would use to describe him.
He kind of gives a sense that he just effortlessly connects people and creates value through his connections and kind of willingness to put himself out there in certain situations and creatively put himself in the right place, right time, types of scenarios. So a lot of the stories he told, especially kind of the international business events and dinners and what have you, was super interesting to hear. Also how he just creatively, you know, like the story that he booked the entire dining room of the one restaurant for the entire week, and it just became a place to be, and it was front and center for branding, something like that, where most people would maybe not have the foresight to do something, but it was like a big value driver for his business and his career. And I personally loved the ripple effect philosophy that he mentioned throughout the episodes. It emphasized the long term impact of small and positive actions. And I think he's instilled this mindset in his mentees, and I'm sure he instilled it into you, John, as well. And kind of. I got the sense that you should just do stuff. What did he say? It was like ripples and bridges. Bridges to nowhere, was his quote. You know, to really do active efforts without any real expectation you'll get something in return. And he's done that his whole career. And many of those bridges, I'm sure, led to nowhere, but I'm sure some were asymmetrically beneficial to what he's done. So I liked that theme throughout. That's something I would probably pocket for my own career and try to.
Try to make an intention to do something similar to that. I'll stop there and kick it back to you. I don't want to talk too much.
[01:54:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
Sam, your thoughts?
[01:54:14] Speaker D: So, John, as you know, Brad has been sort of an idol, if you will, for me, for a long time. I've obviously had the good fortune to meet him with you. And he, I can say, maybe part of my coaching trees, so to speak, in that one of my former bosses, of course, Esco Porhonen worked for Brad and, you know, he's been such a mentor to you in Turner, been such a mentor to me. So Brad's career and his accomplishments have been known, but obviously listening to these three rounds of interviews has given me, has added much more sinew and much more detail around the specific deals, the relationships, the career decisions, the role of mentorship and his career, both the giving and the receiving of it. I would say that these episodes, they're really like a favorite book in that, you know, if there are a couple books you, I say you, the royal you read once a year, just to give you grounding, to give you clarity, to help inform your upcoming year, to give you a bit of a compass. This podcast will serve as, some series of podcasts will serve as something similar for me in terms of a touchstone to come back to over the years. He is really what I would call the OG of real estate merchant banking. And he almost invented a genre of offshore capital raising. And he, I guess these podcasts should really be, I would say, almost required listening.
For anyone who, like myself, is running a partner led real estate capital advisory business, the lessons are simply timeless.
Colin sort of hit the nail on the head. He really, Brad Olson really is an Uberland. I don't know if that's a word he would use to describe himself, but I think it's very apropos. Obviously, the takeaways, the major takeaways from a philosophical perspective for me are twofold. The first of course, is Colin, referred to as this notion of be the pebble and create ripples. So for any business relationship you're in, be it an intro call or be it work, working with a client or with a counterparty with whom you've had very long term dealings, create, you know, have an impact, but you know, be aware of the impact that you're creating for the long term and know that, you know, the world is a small place and, you know, treating people in a positive way and coming to every interaction with a certain degree of integrity, the world will ultimately reward you.
Second is this notion, and this is more now for more specific to the real estate capital advisory realm, the three pillars that Brad talked about in terms of working with people that he likes and respects, getting involved in situations more formally. When you feel like you can really add value, when you have a high conviction, you can add value and have fun. Life is short and we need to always be conscious of that. Every day is one day closer to the end of the your career. So if you can build these, these great, lasting, fulfilling relationships bring people together, great ventures that add value for everyone involved. That feels like fun. You know, all the deals he was talking about, they sounded like a lot of fun to me, and that's certainly the ideal that I strive for. So he's nothing short of an inspiration.
Certainly these lessons are timeless and are applicable to a whole host of professionals, not just real estate professionals, but for me, they hit home in a serious way. And this is a wonderful honor to be able to add some form of postscript to this three part series that really needs no bow tied around it. But it's a great honor.
[01:58:53] Speaker B: Thank you, Sam.
So let's. Let's kind of drill down a little bit more with some of the events in Brad's career that might have been, you know, kind of amazing or synergistic or opportunistic, that, you know, kind of propelled things for him. And some of the obstacles that he faced, as most of us do early in our career, it seems like we hit the most roadblocks.
That certainly was the case with him, particularly in the 1990 era when he, you know, they broke away from Richard Ellis, and then he went, formed the Lexington group and built up his company. And then the early nineties hit. Things just kind of completely unwound. He had to completely shut down everything and Laydena his whole team off really hard times. Perhaps you guys could talk a little bit about, I don't know if you have any situations that have been that distressing so far in your career, but how do you think he managed that relative to how you would do what he was doing? You know, how would you look at that circumstance if that happened to you? I guess it's kind of where and what takeaways did you get learned from him going through those problems and challenges, whoever wants to take it?
[02:00:25] Speaker E: Gala yeah, I think in that specific example, and kind of his entire career, he's all, what I gleaned from his conversation was that he always did the right thing. There was probably opportunity to make decisions that, on paper were the right decision or from a legal perspective or a legal decision, but he would always, you know, do the right decision. And sometimes that's not always an easy choice to make. And there are difficult choices to make in business, especially in extremely distressing periods. But what I picked up was, despite some of the more difficult decisions he had to make, it was always with, like, the right values and moral compass backing, kind of the ethos of that decision, because you can't always make the perfect decision for all parties, but I think if you just follow your moral compass, that's the best you can do, especially during these downturns.
And I think the stories he told kind of reflected that that's how he acted.
[02:01:30] Speaker B: Wanna add to that, Sam?
[02:01:31] Speaker C: Sure.
[02:01:33] Speaker D: I'd certainly echo Colin's sentiments that Brad acted with a great deal of integrity during that time. To me, the biggest takeaway I drew, or what was most interesting to me, was this straight line between maybe trauma is not the white word, but the trauma of having to let people go at Richard Ellis and drawing a straight line between that to 1995, when Brad set up his own business at Atlanta partners, he made a very conscious decision not to hire.
And this notion of Occam's razor, building a business that is the most simple business you can build to achieve victory, he really did that. But it was as much about what he wanted to eliminate from his life, which was the. The stress and the pressure of being part of a larger organization where he didn't have the autonomy to work on the deals that he necessarily wanted to in the long term minded fashion and the non sort of pure transactional fashion that he had in mind, but also alleviated of the responsibilities of having to manage and potentially having to fire.
Circumstances like the early nineties downturn happened again. That, to me, was a great takeaway and something that resonates with me in terms of how I think about my own business. The other anecdote, and again, that maybe illustrates the notion of the integrity that he brought to that period of time, was the anecdote, of course, of Lilly Dunna, who was his analyst he recruited out of the University of Michigan in 1989, and then within a year, had to summon to his office to give her the unfortunate news that she was being let go as part of the broader downturn. But he continued to mentor Lilly, helped her find her next job at Tremont Pro, where she spent a number of years and rose to leadership positions. And then she, in her own right, obviously became an icon of an industry. And Brad, this particular midwestern modesty speaks of Willie lacking him, quote, unquote, I'm sure a phenomenon that he would applaud.
But, of course, the analyst, the mentor became, the mentee became something, the mentor became client. So the ripples that Brad was putting out there and the impact that he had on Louis Dunn's career ultimately came back to inform this rewarding, not only personal relationship, but business relationship. So it's how you treat people in the tough times, I think that ultimately, and the ability to have the hard conversations, but the ability to also work with people very constructively in these very tough times is a hallmark of a person professional with true integrity.
[02:04:43] Speaker B: You know, the idea that he had many people, including me, calling him in the early 1990s and saying, you know, Brad, I know I can raise money for you if you put your shingle out there to say, I want to start a fund or I want to start acquiring property, or, I mean, you've got a great track record for that. And why you had to wind down the other property, other situation had nothing to do with your capabilities. It had to do with the marketplace at the time. And you knew full well that you could do it. And, Sam, you capsulized it well, that it wasn't what he wanted to do. He didn't want to take on the risk of not being able to deploy capital effectively for others, have other people tell him how to do it and what to do and hiring people to help him do it, he just said, you know, it just isn't worth it. However, I know I can help people deploy capital, and I just can do it, you know, effectively. And I think he learned by going over to Holland, you know, to the Netherlands. He knew, based on his experience at Richard Ellis, that there is going to be investment, need to get money out, because as he explained, these countries just don't have enough real estate to invest in these small countries. They have to invest. And the United States has more than anywhere else with the amount of largest market capitals in the country. So you got to invest in the United States. And so he knew that intuitively as well as really.
And so he goes over there and he eventually finds people that say, does it. And then he works on this very innovative structure that comes up with the idea of pension fund investing in Holland based on their legislation to invest in reits in the United States, and then works on a program that he finds an institutional investor of principle to then co invest, to invest in deals, equity deals in the United States. Then, of course, principal says, wait, we can do debt, too, right? So Brad goes to Germany and raises money for that. So it just kind of his intuition led to going to Europe to do this. He knew he had the relationships over there. He was the most active person going to Europe and among United States investors of anybody. So he set that tone back in.
[02:07:24] Speaker C: The eighties and nineties.
[02:07:26] Speaker B: And so there was really no one else. He's kind of a unique unicorn to do all those things. So there was no one else could have done it better. And of course, his personality and his belief in pebble ripples theory just, you know, transformed his business, you know, to just extraordinary.
I never asked him, so how did you manage all the incoming? He said, you know, he alluded to the fact that he was very clear it was more or less two or three things at a time, and he wasn't going to take any new business beyond that. And, you know, that's a discipline that a lot of people, a lot of us can't. You know, if you've got so much incoming, oh, I could bring on partners and we can handle more income. Well, he's, you know, he just decided not to do that. He could have built his practice up if he wanted to, but he, he decided not to.
Any other thoughts based on that?
[02:08:31] Speaker E: I know you're a fan of Shane Paris perish, but his brother thinking, yeah, there's a quote. You don't need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out position them.
[02:08:43] Speaker C: Kind of.
[02:08:44] Speaker E: To Sam's point, I feel like the decision not to grow as much as he probably could have at the time and take on as many clients as possible was at the first principles, thinking just to stay in position for bigger opportunities.
And I think an underrated skill in business is the ability to say no. And he seems to be very good at that. So he's, I get the sense he's just very good at positioning himself and kind of keeping dry powder, which in his case is time and just kind of brain function to really focus on the key integral decisions he would make. So there's definitely a lot of the, you know, Farnum Street Charlie Munger thinking kind of in his career that I picked up on. And not to say he wasn't smarter than everyone. So he's not only smarter than most people, that he's also pretty good at positioning. So key to a successful career.
[02:09:35] Speaker B: I mean, the comment that one of his clients said, he said, you're a one man business that runs a $300 billion enterprise, or whatever it was.
[02:09:47] Speaker D: That was principal, I believe.
[02:09:51] Speaker B: And then the other funny comment was to take, you know, Pat Halter, a principal going over to, on these trips. He says it was like a Brad Olson death march because he'd have meetings nonstop for like three days in a row, you know, at the conferences. And then of course, the conference, you know, brilliance of, you know, as you suggested, Colin, the getting that hotel, that restaurant reserved during the entire, you know, I think it was expo reality. He had that done.
And then developing his relationship with Sophie at Mippham to have just extraordinary customer service with clients and everything else. And of course, the dinners, which, you know, the people that attended him will never forget them, he said. And they were always the first thing that people wanted to make sure they were on for every conference they'd attend. I mean, that's brilliant marketing on his part. It's just very special. And then this whole idea of a kind of a Midwest family dinner thing with games and things, I mean, it's just not many other people would think of doing that.
It's just incredible.
Really cool things.
Any other observations, guys?
[02:11:24] Speaker D: Just sort of echo COllins comment about the buffet, the munger, and sort of the long term view, how he conducted his business affairs and his life, and how he's a sort of developed a zone of competence and really leaned into that, so to speak. You know, what I would say is the legacy. I'd actually sort of paraphrase another LinkedIn influencer, fellow by the name of Sahil Bloom, where I think if you look at the legacy of Brad Olson and the body of work and the integrity with which he brought to the business, he lived a life. And you could kind of trace the arc to really the inception of Atlantic partners, where the eight year old boy growing up in Palatine, Illinois would have been super proud of what became of the man. And the 80 year old, obviously, he's not 80 yet, but we look back on the career and really just. Just smile. Have cause for a lot of pride and a lot of delight, and a legacy, not just of deals done and ventures formed and path breaking structures he helped create, like the domestically controlled Reed, and getting the Dutch to really buy in, post tax treaty of 93. But just this richness of friendships that continue to sustain him this day. I mean, you could go anywhere in Europe and probably be able to put on an impromptu dinner. I'm sure friends and colleagues continue to pay expiations and go visit him in North Carolina or on Zoom or what have you. There's just this rich life that he's leading that's just nothing. Not simply a trail of deals and money, but it's these wonderful relationships, these form in the business. And it's truly a reason why a lot of people get into the real estate business, because it's not just an avenue for building wealth and financial success, but really finding these great relationships. I know, John, that's very much a model and ideal that you share with Bradley and you've now extended it the community you formed, but it's really a great life lesson. And it's not just he pulled the plug one day and retired. But everything he's done to that point is going to continue to sustain him in his retirement, his semi retirement, I should say.
[02:14:11] Speaker E: Yeah, I feel like it just popped my head. But his whole career and all the podcasts reminds me of the Frank Sinatra I did it my way song. Yeah, like he kind of played by his own rules, didn't really do what the crowd was doing. Retired, got pulled out of retirement, but only on his terms. Probably had some regrets, but he's not really thinking too much of those. So that's kind of how I think of the whole podcast. But I wanted to ask a question to you, John, because he seems to be kind of like a genius on the EQ intelligence score. Very, very good soft skills and kind of people networking.
You didn't get too much into the hard skills, but he was working on some extremely complex real estate transactions.
[02:15:04] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[02:15:06] Speaker E: In your experience, did you work on anything super complex? And is he as brilliant? Kind of on the hard scale side.
[02:15:14] Speaker B: As far as complexity?
One of his deals we talked about at length was 208 South LaSalle, which is a large office building in downtown Chicago that they acquired, actually, right after he joined. Richard Ellis had already been bought, but he was going to be the asset manager, and then they were going to. He was approached by VMS Realty, which was a very aggressive tax based syndicator that existed back in the early eighties before the 1986 tax law. That changed the tax law considerably. So he went, you know, he said, no, no. Every time they. And then he made. They made an offer they just couldn't refuse.
So he had to figure out, okay, well, we can't turn this down, but they certainly did the analysis to understand why and when made sense. And then beyond that, they set up a real estate equity fund after doing that. So building that, he had all the legal understanding doing, putting all that together, but they had to have a business case for it, which he had to build. And then he gets into some of the more sophisticated structurings, as we talked about earlier, this joint venture with Reitse that was cutting edge, that the Dutch had to figure out a way to invest in this. They couldn't buy direct real estate, so how do you figure out ways to doing it? And he cites an attorney in Chicago that was apparently expert at engineering that kind of structure or a commingled fund type of thing.
And then from an analytical standpoint, this one family office client he had with ground leases, they had to come up with a structure for that that made sense for these german investors. And they had this look, and I have to say that I tried to negotiate three different ground lease situations through Brad with these Germans. He said, john, they just wont accept that. But terminology, they dont look at this as a real estate financing vehicle. They look at this as a, a hundred year investment that they want to hold so he can quickly assess whether something makes sense or not and understand, oh, well, that's a financing structure. You're looking to structure this in a way that is more of a, instead of a family office. So he was so good at, and is so good at discerning nuances on deal structuring and all that, because he saw and dealt with perhaps the most sophisticated entities in the industry, in the world.
The Dutch investors are not unintelligent, nor are the Germans. They're very smart people that understand what they're doing. And then, I mean, he was dealing with principle and with USAA and so big institutional investors, so they understand the business.
So he's, I put him up against any deal maker in the country or the world, not against, but certainly to do a deal. And he thinks win win, usually on all transactions anyway, even if somebody's confrontational.
And that's another great thing about Bradley. Other thoughts.
[02:18:47] Speaker C: Sam?
[02:18:49] Speaker D: No, just that, you know, this was some of your finest work as a, as a podcaster, John, you know, yourself credit too. I mean, it's like a Ken Burns magnum opus. I mean, 7 hours of interviews condensed is no mean feat. But I know it was fun for him and was fun for you. And I think he playfully refers to, you know, the professional relationship with you as a, as a bridge to nowhere.
It's a funny phrase. I know the Simpsons had this escalator to nowhere in one of their episodes, but it's really true. You have to be in an advisory scene open to the notion of building relationships with people you like and trust, whom you can learn something from, not knowing exactly where they will go from a business perspective, being willing to invest in those relationships. I mean, I would never thought, meeting you in the second or third month, forming my business during the teeth of the GFC, that we would be doing a podcast. I didn't even know what a podcast was, but it wasn't in the popular lexicon yet, and nor that you would be the remnant podcaster on all things DC real estate. You probably didn't envision that future for yourself at the time you and I met in late 2009, early 2010. So you never know where the world takes you, and, but you, you have to put yourself in a position where, you know, you can sort of take advantage of the Lux surface area, so to speak. And I feel that Bradley Brad's career in life is really a testament to that notion of putting himself in positions in places where he was likely to succeed and succeed on behalf of others, and so on behalf of him himself, and being open to possibility. Being open to possibility of leaving the law after only a year and joining his original mentor and rich batch and pursuing what was then probably a very non traditional path out of Harvard law. How many folks who were his cohorts would have quit a job at a leading law firm to go in house with the attending risks and rewards after a year, or, as you say, when he moved to Richard Ellis, of taking on a completely different type of career, essentially marketing the first firm to institutional clients and being a business developer, when his mother was asking him, why did you st. Loz? It's a bit familiar to me, but he's taken a path less travel. But there's always been sort of a philosophical guidepost, and it's always informed, I think, by a willingness and an eagerness to challenge himself to get out of his comfort zone, to expose himself to new. I mean, this one of the most remarkable revelations. He didn't even own a passport before the age of 30.
[02:22:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[02:22:01] Speaker D: And these path breaking contributions to international real estate that have had a real lasting impact on the institutional real estate investment industry.
And he effectively helped build almost from the ground up and help make them the thriving sort of entities and trade associations that they are today.
So just always this spirit of adventure combined with this certain level of rigor, a certain level of integrity, have exposed him to situations where he's able to take advantage of luck, the luck of knowing which two parties to connect. The luck of knowing when he's in the midst of a business situation where he can sort of find lightning in a bottle, that's truly the inspiration. That's truly what I took.
[02:23:03] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, after knowing him for 40 years now, and every time I'm with him, I just have this really incredible feeling of inspiration. And anytime I talk to him, I just feel like he really cares about what I'm thinking and what I'm wanting to do. And I get the sense because I've been with him with a lot of other people, and you just watch the admiration for him among others and then reading what people have said.
But he's, you know, he is not an arrogant person. He is very humble, so nice to be with. He's so kind and very empathetic as Colin, you know, suggests a very high EQ. And that's what's so great about him because, I mean, with his intelligence and, you know, capabilities, he could be, he could do anything practically, but he just cares about the people he cares about. And that's what's really important to him. And his story, the one thing I'll, one funny story I'll say is the story about the attorney that tried to break into his dinners. And it just, oh, I remember that.
[02:24:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:24:16] Speaker B: Two straight times.
He didn't, this attorney would not take no for an answer and he came back again a second time. It's just, and Brad just discerns people very quickly. You know, I just, you're not invited and I don't want you to come. And just because you, you are who you are doesn't mean you're invited to my dinner. I'm sorry, you know, that just, you know, he made decisions about the people he wanted to do business with.
And I could, you know, knowing him, I could never have seen him work in New York City, for instance. That would never have been an environment he would have been happy in. It's just because this whole idea of self importance with a lot of people in our industry just turns him off big time. So he just cares about getting deals done and doing it in a very fair, ethical way and not without too much ceremony. He just, you know, trying to solve problems and help other people.
And his, we didn't talk about it, but his mentorship at the University of Wisconsin is quite a story. And they gave an award and everything.
And from what I understand, based on what Brad told me, Lee Gottschalk, who is the head of the program that got at the grass camp school there, is going to share this episode with and all the episodes with all their entire alumni association, which will be great because it's a preeminent program in real estate. And I think every student that hears this episode will learn something about how to treat people and how to be in our business. So I want to kind of end with that and thank Colin and thank you. And Sam, thank you for your wise input here on the story of Brad Olson. And I will conclude with saying, thank you, Brad, for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening.
