[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 Crew, 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
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[00:02:24] Speaker B: Thank you for joining me for another episode of Icons of DC Area Real Estate. I'm so pleased to introduce my guest for today's show. Who is Cameron Pratt? Cameron is the CEO of Folger Pratt, which is a three generation family development business located in Potomac, Maryland.
I was blessed to be able to interview his uncle, Bryant Folger, who is the current chairman and his predecessor as CEO. Cameron has led the firm now for ten years.
He discusses building a legacy, the company as the third generation. He's been there 20 years and he's led the company now for ten. He got an MBA at Harvard and took a course on running a family business and learned considerable amount from that and felt that that education really helped build the foundation of his leadership style. Now he started a strategic growth strategy when he came on and the evolution of his role, and he decided at one point not to raise a fund, instead opting for a diversified business model that thrives through market cycles.
He now has over a $3 billion portfolio and a robust development pipeline, even in the capital markets we're in today.
He discusses mastering the art of site selection. He looks at the intricacies of competitive DC market and looking at various areas of the marketplace. He shows a defined preference towards northern Virginia. And he goes into detail talking about two projects there, the landmark Mall redevelopment and the Tyson Central project, the office project that they have.
He talks about adapting to the pandemic impacted world from COVID-19 how it affected both the markets as well as his company. We also talk about embracing ESG and social responsibility, and he discusses how the company has evolved. But mostly it's pretty much stayed the same throughout that growth and that new business plan. And then he finally talks about his message of kindness in the world. And he shares about his child's battle with cystic fibrous rosas and his relationship with another former podcast guest of mine, Don Wood. And they co chaired the cystic fibrosis locally. And he got a lot out of that and being able to raise money to fight that bad, that terrible disease.
So without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Cameron Pratt. So Cameron Pratt, welcome to icons of DC area real estate. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: Well, I'm honored to be on your show. So thanks for having me.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Thank you. So what I usually like to do is start with your current role. And also I will mention that I interviewed your uncle, Bryant Folger about two years ago. He set the stage with somewhat of the history of your company with your grandfather and his father and how the Folger family came to Washington and all that. So we have that backstory. So what I'd really like to get to is you and, you know, how you came into the company and what you're doing now currently.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: And then we'll get into a lot.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: More details later, but just talk about that now. What you're doing great.
[00:06:08] Speaker C: My current role is I'm the CEO of Folger Pratt and have been in this role for ten years and have been with the company for 20 years. So about half my tenure here has been as CEO. And it's been an interesting last ten years. It's been a good run for the last ten years. And now the last year and a half or so, we're kind of seeing what a cyclical industry feels like. So that's kind of where we are and we can talk a lot more about how we're dealing with that and how we're adjusting and continuing to grow and take advantage of.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: How do you define the role CEO at a firm like yours?
[00:06:47] Speaker C: Well, I kind of oversee all, I set the strategic vision of the company and then oversee all investing and operating activities. So I've got a c suite of executives that report to me, and I'm very involved in, like I said, setting the strategy of what kind of deals we're going after, what markets we're going to be active in. And then I'm very involved in capital raising and interfacing with investors and kind of marrying real estate investment opportunities with capital. So that's kind of the role I play at Folger Prep.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Clay company is a family company.
And you report up to your uncles and father, I assume, since they're on the board with you.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's been an evolution. And, you know, family businesses are interesting and they have some incredible benefits and they have some, you know, some serious danger zones as well, you know. So I think we have been, we've tried to be extremely careful and cognizant of the downsides of family businesses. And quite honestly, if you look at very few businesses last through a second generation, very few family businesses do. And when I was at business school, I took a class called managing the family business. It scared me to death. I can talk more about that later. But some of the things that families in business class pointed out was the dangers of a family business and why most family businesses fail. And so that's something that we've tried to have eyes very wide open about, and I think we've done a good job of managing through those things. So, yes, my dad and my two uncles, who were kind of the generation two of the company, they continued to be on our board of directors and on our investment committee. And so I certainly am accountable to them and the other members of the board. But, yeah, so that's, we try to balance all those things. Yeah.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: When we talk a little later, I'll share some of the other experiences I've had with other family office interviewees I've had, particularly the Bizzuto family, the Peterson family, and few others as well.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: Yeah, we know them both those families very well.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Yes. So let's go back to your personal history, Cameron. Talk about, you know, where you grew up and how you were raised and all that here.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Cameron. Yeah, I was born right here at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, and grew up in Potomac, Maryland. And so, you know, grew up in the area, grew up, you know, being very familiar with the family business. And, you know, my dad kind of ran the construction division of our business. And so many Saturday mornings after a, you know, soccer game, I'd be, you know, in the backseat of the car going to visit. So I was very, I was very aware of the business when I was in high school. I worked on some of our construction projects, you know, for summer jobs, that kind of thing. And then I went off to college at Brigham Young University in Utah. I tell people I'm, I'm Mormon, and I love to ski, so Utah was kind of a natural fit, and I was a civil engineering major at BYU. I took two years off after my first year of BYU, I took two years off, as many young men do in our church, to serve a mission. And interestingly, I think, given the current events, this is 1993 to 1995, I served my mission in Kyiv, Ukraine. So, yeah, so I. So this, the last, you know, the events of the last two years there have been struck, you know, very close to my heart, and I still have friends in Kiev that I'm in touch with. And so, anyway, that's, that's a, that's a whole other conversation. But. So I took two years off to do that, returned to BYU, finished my degree in civil engineering. Never intended to work as a single day as a civil engineer. I just thought it would be a good background for a career in real estate. And from BYu, I went to work on Wall Street. I was, I worked at Morgan Stanley for two years. And there was real estate investment banking group, which was also kind of commingled with their real estate, private equity investing, which is called Mesref back then. So I worked there for a couple of years and then went to business school at Harvard, which is where I took the class that I mentioned a little bit earlier on managing the family business. And interestingly, I was kind of always planning to come join Fulgeprat after business school. And I took that class the first semester of my second year of business school. It absolutely scared me to death about family businesses. And I started calling my dad and my uncles, as I was taking that class, saying, hey, wow, have you guys thought about this issue? Have you thought about that issue? Because Harvard has a case study method for teaching, and every class I'd go to, every time we'd have a class for managing the family business, the case study, it followed the same narrative. You know, the arc of the story was always the same, which is entrepreneur bounds business, highly successful, brings in children. Fast forward 15 years, business goes bankrupt. Nobody speaks to each other like that. That was, that was the arc of almost every family business story. And so and every, you know, they were always for different reasons. And every case study kind of pointed out a different problem with family businesses. And so it really opened my eyes to the challenges of a family business. And so I called my dad and my uncles and kind of said, hey, have you guys considered all these things? And the reality is they thought about those issues, but they're complicated issues and they're sensitive and they're hard to talk about. And so they had not really addressed any of the issues. And so I kind of said, well, you know, I'm probably not interested in coming to work for Folger Pratt. Granted, they hadn't offered me a job, but I let them know that this was probably something I wasn't interested in coming to do given the, you know, the challenges family businesses face and so, and the fact that they hadn't really, to that point, done any real planning around those issues.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Well, let's, let's stop for just a moment. I want to. Because your family is unique. Well, not unique.
[00:13:07] Speaker C: I mean, there are a lot of.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Mormons, but I'm just going to say that there's a culture there that's different than most families. You know, I mean, most, and Bryant talked about it when we talked. And there's a closeness and there's a tradition of Monday dinners and all the things that you have in your religion that are unlike most business, family businesses. I think, and I may be wrong, but I really believe that your faith adds a little tie that other families may not have in the business setting. Am I wrong with that?
[00:13:44] Speaker C: I would like, I would like to think that you're right, that, you know, that our faith, you know, look, our faith isn't that, at the end of the day, not that different from many other people that have deep faiths. But, I mean, I would say the mormon faith does put a particular emphasis on family, which is important. And I do think that that really has helped keep our family close. But that being said, there, there are lots of examples of families that had, you know, were very strong in their faith, whether it be mormonism or Catholicism or, you know, buddhism or, you know, pick your faith that, you know, that are in business together and end up, you know, going the way of most family businesses. So I would, I would say that, yes, on the, you know, on the margins, our faith has probably helped in kind of the way we've stuck together. But, but still, I think that looking at those family business issues with eyes wide open about why most family businesses don't succeed was important to do. And so respecting that. You know, when I was at school taking this class, I called my dad and uncles and said, listen, you guys really need, whether I come to work with you or not, you guys really need to focus on these issues. And to their credit, this was the winter of three. They dropped everything, and they were in the middle of some big projects. They kind of dropped everything. And they came up to Harvard for a week and participated in a week long executive education course on families and business. And I would say that was kind of a real turning point in the history of our company.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Really?
[00:15:19] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think they left that week kind of recognizing that if they wanted this business to outlast them, they really need to just start thinking of it as an enduring enterprise rather than just a collection of real estate deals. And I think prior to that, they had really each been project managers. They go out, they put a deal together that execute it, they stick it on the shelf, so to speak, and try to go out and do the next one. And they came away from that saying, wow, we've got some family business issues that we need to think about. But even before we get to those things, like, we need to think about a company culture and a mission statement and setting up an organization that is going to be enduring rather than just be a means to do a bunch of real estate deals. And so they came back. They worked on that. They hired the professor from Harvard, had a consulting business around this.
They hired that consulting firm to kind of help them. And after they'd been at it for about a year and a half, I had gone. I'd graduated from school, gone out to California to work for. I worked for Clark Realty Capital, actually another local DC.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Oh, sure.
[00:16:30] Speaker C: But I worked for their office out in California. And after about a year and a half, my dad and uncles called and said, hey, you can see we're really serious about focusing on succession and planning and all this kind of stuff. It would really be helpful if you were here to kind of represent the next generation in thinking about all this. And so at that point, in kind of the end of 2020, 2004, I moved from California back to DC and enjoyed Folger Pratt. So that's kind of my brief history of how I ended up.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: What specific aspect of that course scared the heck out of you the most, just out of curiosity?
[00:17:05] Speaker C: Well, I think that you pointed out earlier how in our faith, that family is really important. And what I saw from all these things was, look, you know, I did not want business issues to drive a wedge between me and family. Members, because to me, family is more important than business. But that doesn't mean that you always sacrifice the priorities of the business to take care of family. When you do that, your business goes bankrupt, of course. So the main mantra of that class is you treat your family like a family and you treat your business like a business.
That's really easy to say. It's really hard to do.
And so that's kind of, I wanted to make sure that there were clear guidelines about how to treat family like family and business like business. And everybody had buy into those things before I came and joined because I didn't want to sacrifice a career just to make everybody feel good in the family. And I didn't want to, you know, come to business, prioritize business and alienate family. It's a very tricky balance to strike. And so I, you know, I wasn't ready to come to the, to the company until I had, you know, I believed that everybody was kind of on the same page and trying to strike that right balance.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: So you probably have not necessarily in writing, but a clear understanding, you know, face to face with all the family members, how far you can push on certain decision making and things like that, I imagine.
[00:18:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And it is in writing, we actually put a family constitution together. We really. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a very deliberate multi year process with, you know, these Harvard consultants that really helped us kind of guide best practices. And, you know, and it's something that evolves. I mean, it's just like a business strategy. It's always evolving and new cause you to have to rethink things. And so it's an evolution. But I would say the most important thing is that the principles are kind of being adhered to, which is try to treat your family like family, your business like business, and try to have some separation between the two, recognize kind of how they complement each other and how they also need to be kind of treated in isolation.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: So other than that course at Harvard Business School, what else did you pick up from that, you know, that two year education that's helped you today in your strategic planning and guiding?
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Interesting question. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of, like, technical, you know, technical skills, I guess, that you study there. I'm not sure how much of the technical skills really stuck with me. I'd say a lot of the soft things kind of stuck with me more or were more impactful on me. You know, I'd worked on Wall street for a few years before business school, so I kind of had the, you know, I had a very solid financial analysis kind of training, so I didn't really, you know, we took some finance classes at Harvard, but I felt like I'd really already gotten exposed to a lot of that. But I would say that on the soft side, one of the, you know, the most important skills that I gained was, you know, you're sitting in a class of, you know, your first year, you're in a section with, call it 80 people, plus or minus, and, you know, you're convinced that you're the dumbest person in the room. And your grade, at least back then, there were no tests, there were no papers, no projects. It was 100% based on your participation in class. And so you had to come prepared. And probably more importantly, you had to learn the skill of being called upon at the right time and making a comment that was intelligent and moved the conversation forward.
You couldn't just have a pre written kind of comment to make that you just raise your hand and make it out of context. You had to stay in the flow of the conversation, and so it forced you to think on your feet, respond to the people that are talking to you. And I think I learned, you know, you learn kind of the skill of what to say as much as the skill of what not to say and when to keep your mouth shut and when to weigh in. And when you weigh in, it better be meaningful or, you know, or people are going to ignore you. You're not going to get called on again. So I think that. I think that. That it's intimidating, but it also helps you develop a certain amount of confidence in terms of, you know, just kind of being in those higher pressure situations and, you know, and knowing how to make impactful comments, I'd say so that, I mean, that's just one example of kind of a soft skill that I think, you know, helped me. And, you know, you gain a lot of confidence in being in a rigorous environment like that and, you know, measuring up to people around you that you are, you know, that are pretty impressive. So it was. It was a great experience, a great, wonderful time there.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: So that experience has to have given you kind of the qualifications, to some extent based on the rest of your family, to more or less take the leadership role of the firm. Was that kind of part of the.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: Decision making as you grew up?
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Chad?
[00:22:28] Speaker C: I mean, I had a great experience at Harvard, but I'll be the first one to admit that, you know, a degree from an Ivy League school is.
It's just a degree at the end of the day, and it doesn't give you any right to anything. In a lot of ways, it's so early in your career, it's not even a good measurement of your ability. And so while I had a wonderful experience there, I don't put any stock or credence in the fact that I've got a degree from a prestigious school. It's kind of what I tell people because I get people calling, you know, younger people now calling about, you know, advice for applying to business school and stuff. And what our problem is. It will help you get your first job out of business school. After that, if you.
After that, it's all up to your performance. Like, your degree is not going to help you one bit if you're not performing well. So don't put too much stuff like a degree from one of those schools is not a, you know, it's not a guaranteed lifelong financial success. It will help you get your first job. That's it. That's my opinion.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: It also helps with your network, too. It does help, let's add to that.
[00:23:38] Speaker C: I made a lot of great friends there that I've actually done a lot of business with over the years.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: And a lot of people move around based on your relationships from that as well.
How did your family help you in the business, and what was your initial role, and how was it determined that you would be the eventual leader? Talk about how that happened and how you grew within the firm.
[00:24:00] Speaker C: Well, I will be the first to admit that nepotism is a real thing. And I got hired. Probably they could have hired other people that were just as qualified as me. I think that when you have a certain level of trust, trust goes a long ways. And so while they could have probably hired someone equally or even more qualified than me to do what I did, there was. There was a level of trust that, you know, kind of put me in a position where, you know, I was able to excel faster in an organization because of that trust level. And so, you know, when I got hired, Folgerpratt was a pretty small company. I think there were two people in the development team. And, you know, one of them was a cousin that was an intern at the time, I believe. So. Like, it was a. It was a pretty small group. And I remember my first day, you know, and back then, there was, like, Folger Pratt construction was one company, and Folger Pratt management was another company. There was no kind of, like, overarching holding company. It was kind of all these different things I remember, you know, I needed to order business cards and I said to my uncle, you know, what? Like, I don't know, what should I put on down for my title? And he goes, well, I don't know. What company do you want to work for? Like, you know, which one? I mean, it was, you know, there was, there was not a lot of structure back then. And so, you know, I mean, when I initially started, I, I took over kind of running a couple of smaller medical office building development deals that a colleague had been running, and he was getting ready to retire. And so I kind of took those over.
And then my role just kind of evolved.
There was no plan on how my role would develop. I am the oldest of my cousins whose fathers were in the business, so there was some. I had a head start, so to speak. But my role just kind of evolved. And I just took on, I saw a need, I'd step in and get involved in it, and then I'd go find deals. And before I joined Folger Pratt, we'd done a lot of partnerships with other developers, but we had not really had institutional capital partners. I mean, there was one project back in the eighties where we had institutional capital partner, but in the recent couple of decades, we hadn't. And so having worked on Wall street and been familiar with that kind of limited partner, institutional investor model, we started, I went out and found some deals and brought some institutional capital in and started doing different deals that we'd done. I think when I joined fortify, we'd done one multifamily deal. Not too long after I joined, we hired an executive named Dick Knapp from Kettler, who helped us kind of plow into family in a more meaningful way. And so we started doing different types of deals and different types of capital structures. And so my role just kind of evolved over time. It wasn't kind of predestined or not totally clear, but it just kind of evolved as I kind of took on more.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: So you were a deal guy to start with and then eventually took on more responsibilities with regard to management and, and other aspects of the company.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: Yeah. And back when I started, if you did a deal, you were by default the asset manager of that deal. Got it. So I was dealing with the full lifecycle of these projects from beginning to end. So I had a pretty well rounded experience base from kind of sourcing a deal, sourcing capital, executing the entitlement design, overseeing construction, and then kind of lease up property management, asset management, refinancing. I was kind of involved in the whole lifecycle of the deals in those first many years, which gave me a pretty broad exposure to the whole business.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: That's great. That's a great way to learn.
[00:27:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: So talk about how this company has grown. You said it was a small company to start with. How did it all evolve? I mean, how did it grow to where it is today? And what was the strategic thinking as it grew?
[00:28:10] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I think that there, when I joined Folger Pratt, I believe that 100% of our. We might have had one asset outside of Montgomery County, Maryland. But the vast majority of the portfolio was in Montgomery county. And in Montgomery county, the significant portion of our assets were in Silver Spring, Maryland. And Folger Pratt had been pretty prolific in that market.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:34] Speaker C: And so when I joined, it was, I think the company was extremely focused on hyper local, Montgomery county kind of focus, and it was mostly office, some retail, and then one multifamily project, all in Montgomery county. And so I started looking in the district and in northern Virginia to kind of just have a little bit more of a regional diversification, like I mentioned a minute ago, started bringing on some institutional capital for multifamily deals, which typically required a little bit more upfront equity than the office deals that we've done historically.
And so it just kind of evolved. I wouldn't say there was a lot of high level strategic planning, other than I felt that we needed to be more diversified geographically within the DMV and also by product type. I think early on, for the first ten years I was at Folger Pratt, I was more focused on diversifying byproduct type in the DC metro area.
And then when I became CEO ten years ago, I spent about the first year trying to decide how we would capitalize our growth. We had a pretty big development pipeline at the time, and we had to figure out how to capitalize the growth we had. You know, I looked at everything. I looked at raising a fund. I looked at programmatic joint ventures. This was back when JBG was kind of doing their New York ret thing that then evolved into, you know, so there was some, like, public company, you know, ideas. There was, you know, some, you know, raise a fund, like, you know, several of our competitors were doing. And I spent a year meeting with everybody, you know, that I could getting as many insights as I could going to New York every two weeks to talk to different capital. And at the end of that year, I came away with a couple of key takeaways. And the first one was that I actually did not want to raise a fund because what I didn't want to do is to be put in a box by an investor. And I think at the time, had I tried to raise a fund, we had a great track record, we had a big pipeline. We were DC development. And I think I could have raised a fund, but the fund would have been a DC metro area development fund and that would have been very confining. It would have been great because we had a lot of capital and we could have done a lot of deals. But I had the takeaway that, look, we are in a very cyclical business and different product types work at different times, and different markets are in favor and out of favor at different times. And I did not want to be put in a box and be defined as a Washington, DC area development company. So I knew that at the time, if we'd raised a fund, we would have been very confined to that strategy. And then the second reason I didn't want to raise a fund is I did not want all our promotes cross collateralized. I saw that one bad deal can take down the promote for an entire fund, and I did not want that. I didn't want to have to do that. I wanted to have more diversity. And so I would say my overall takeaway from that year of exploration was we need diversity of strategies and product types, and we need diversity of markets that we are in and we need diversity of capital sources. And so I spent, you know, I've spent the last ten years trying to do those things, get more experience in different product types, different investment strategies, expand into different markets around the country, and have a wide range of potential capital partners that we could go to. And I certainly won't declare victory because while we've made progress, I feel like there's still a very long ways we need to go. But over the last ten years, we've expanded into several markets around the country. We've got an office on the west coast, an office in Carolinas. We've done deals in Texas, Utah.
We're doing development acquisitions. We've done some other kind of unique strategies and working on several more right now. And so I feel like we've done a good job of expanding into different markets, expanding into different product types, and then on the capital side, we've got a whole host of big institutional investor relationships, and then we've got a bunch of family office relationships. And then we have worked really hard on building a network of direct retail and kind of a direct retail investor network. And then we've actually supplemented that by raising capital on Crowdstreet, which is an online platform. So we really run the gamut in terms of our access to different capital sources. And I'll say there are times where the big institutional investors are not investing, they're out of the market, and there are other times when the retail investors are not in the market. And it has served us very well to have access to both ends of the spectrum from a capital standpoint. And so that's something that I continue to work hard on. All of those initiatives diversify geographically, diversify by product type and investment strategy, and diversify by capital source. And I think there's a very fine line between being a jack of all trades, master of none, which I don't want to fall into that, but bucket, but also having a broad base of investment opportunities and capital sources so that you have a diversified business that can withstand the cyclicality that's inherent to the business we're in.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Can you talk statistically about your firm a little bit, the scale of what it is now and the markets you're in, and then beyond that, why you're in those markets, if you could? Sure.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: So we have our owned portfolio today. I don't think anybody knows what values are right now, but I'd say in the range of a $3 billion portfolio of stuff that we own and operate. We have a development pipeline of land that we control, some of that we own, some of that we have long term options are on a variety of different ways. We control land, but our total development cost to build out that development pipeline is probably another 3 billion. Is any of it financeable today? No, almost none of it's financeable today. But that's okay. We control it. And we're pretty careful about how we control land. And so we don't have a ton of land loans. We have a few, but nothing that we can't manage. And so we've got a big development pipeline, and then we are, we're actively buying properties. And I think for the next couple of years, there's going to be way more opportunity and acquisitions than there will be in development. So that's a little bit of a shifting focus. So that's order of magnitude, kind of the size of our firm.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Okay, so you've completed many landmark projects in the area. And Bryant and I talked about a couple of the large ones, the NOAA project at Silver Spring and this retail with the Peterson companies, and then your park Potomac project that you're sitting in in Potomac, Maryland, and several other large multifunily projects. And here in the DC area, you now have several large projects, including West End, Alexandria, the accolade, downtown Washington, Tyson Central and Tyson's corner, and several other mixed use, perhaps overview those and others in the region of note, please infuse your site selection criteria and how you differentiate yourself among other developers if you can.
[00:36:25] Speaker C: That's a good question. I mean, site selection. I'll kind of zoom out for a minute in the DC metro area, this is a very interesting market to work in because we have three distinct jurisdictions. We have Virginia and DC.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Absolutely jurisdictions.
[00:36:46] Speaker C: We have different counties, and they all have very different, different personalities. And our history has been, like I mentioned earlier, we're hyper focused on Montgomery County, Maryland, because that's where we lived, our offices were, and that's where we found a lot of opportunity. In the eighties and nineties, Montgomery County, Maryland, has become an increasingly difficult place to do business.
And I would say that we have a couple of existing sites that we own in Montgomery county and we'll build those out as time permits.
But the vast majority of our focus for development and investment going forward in the DC metro area will be in northern Virginia because of just the business friendly nature of Virginia versus Maryland. And that's where job growth is. And at the end of the day, real estate ties back to where people want to live. And people, historically, this has obviously changed since the pandemic a little bit, but where people live has a lot to do with where their jobs are. And, you know, and northern Virginia has been a job creator and that has not been the case in Maryland as much. So I would say from a macro level, the different jurisdictions have differentiated themselves. And look, this is not an opinion unique to Folger Pratt. Ask any developer or investor in the area and they'll tell you the same thing. And when you look at property values, it translates to property value, too. I mean, a multifamily property is just more valuable in northern Virginia than it is in suburban Maryland. The facts don't lie, and that comes back to public policy. And if I've learned one thing from the pandemic, I would say my biggest overarching takeaway from the pandemic is that public policy matters.
And you just look around the country at how the public policy in different cities and what has happened economically to those cities and public policy matters. And that's not a political statement. I'm not making a political statement. I'm just saying public policy matters and we have to invest where we believe we can make money. And more and more that's having to do with public policy.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: You mentioned Maryland and Virginia. But you didn't really talk about the district. So let's, you are invested in the district and you've been involved in not only a major office to residential deal but you just announced recently, well it's under construction now, a large affordable housing project in northeast Washington too. So talk about those projects and other ones in the see that you're focused on.
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean we've done a lot in DC over the past five or six years and you know DC's, you know, I mean look, I think that urban cores all over the country are reeling after the pandemic. Washington's no, no exception. I think Washington has been particularly disadvantaged because the federal government has been extremely slow to ask people to return to the office and when, you know, when they have come out and said hey, federal workers need to get back to the office. One senior federal administrator told me it's a don't ask, don't tell policy which, you know, and when you go downtown it's pretty clear that the district is being really impacted again because of policy.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: No question.
[00:40:21] Speaker C: It's not this. You go to Dallas, you go to other business friendly states and you know, their downtowns are much more vibrant.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: It's a political issue.
That's simple because the unions.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: Yeah, look I'm not going to, you know, I mean I think that, you know, Mayor Bowser has been pushing very hard to get federal workers back. You know, that, that's my criticism is more with the federal government not being, I agree, you know, not, not with our DC local leadership. So, you know, I mean, look, I mean I think DC has been trying to do a lot of things right. I think Mayor Bowser's push for more affordable housing is absolutely the right thing to do and we're very supportive of that and we're trying to participate in helping that effort and we are, as you mentioned, just finishing up a large affordable housing project in northeast. That being said, it's tough when people don't feel like they need to live downtown anymore and pay high rent because they don't have to go to the office.
That's a real challenge on our multifamily properties downtown and we've seen that there's been a lot of supply that's come in that's been made it hard to push rents when the demand is dropping off because people don't feel like they need to live downtown. So it's challenging and certainly public policy is part of that. Part of it is just the effects of COVID and the aftermath of that and so we're not seeing that as much in the suburbs. Virginia is more of a suburban market than an urban, and so I think that has also kind of played in Virginia's favorite.
[00:41:51] Speaker B: So the accolade project, is that coming on board soon, as far as leasing?
[00:41:56] Speaker C: No, that's still about a year out from being complete. Yep. Okay.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: So you won't start leasing that until early 25 or so, correct?
[00:42:05] Speaker C: Yep. Got it. Okay.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: The West End Alexandria project is an interesting one that maybe you can talk a little bit about, that being the former landmark mall, how your new joint venture partner there. It's a very interesting project. So maybe you can highlight that a little bit.
[00:42:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So there's an interesting backstory in that. When I was 16 years old, just got my driver's license, and I could have my first summer job that I could drive myself to. And my first summer job back in, I guess this was 19, 80, 88, or 89, I worked as a construction laborer on the renovation of landmark mall, really, because the general contractor on that renovation was fuldroprap, just as a contractor, as a construction company. And so it was kind of interesting, full circle, fast forward 30 so years to being involved in putting together a partnership to redevelop them all. And so it was kind of fun to go back there and be able to look at the internal courtyard water fountains that I worked on as a summer construction labor 30 years ago. Then getting to watch them get demoed was kind of full circle. But, you know, that project is interesting.
It's a very long story, which I won't go into all of it, but the efforts to redevelop that have been going on for well over a decade. And there were some incumbent landowners. Howard Hughes Corporation owned the mall and bought out some of the out parcels. Seritage, which was a spin out of Sears, they owned their Sears store. Both of them wanted to be part of a redevelopment. They were having some issues getting on the same page in terms of a vision. Then there were some kind of strategic changes at those companies that gave Folger Pratt an opening to be able to come in. And we had relationships with both companies, well, directly with Seritage, indirectly with Howard Hughes. But we were able to come in and present a vision for the property and convince everyone that we were the right team to be the leader in terms of. Of pushing forward this development. And we were able to convince both Seritage and Howard Hughes to contribute their land to the partnership, that we would come in and be the managing member of and push forward the redevelopment. And so, you know, we had strong relationships with the city of Alexandria with Anova, which was a critical piece of the project, to get Anova to come and decide to rebuild their well, to build a new hospital in Alexandria. And so we just had the relationships and the experience and the track record to be able to bring a lot of disparate parties together to get something done that had been stalled for quite a while. So we're very excited about the project. It's well underway and we think it's going to really transform the west side of Alexandria.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: So you're going to have a hospital, talk about what other real estate aspects are part of the deal.
[00:45:05] Speaker C: So there's a, you know, Inova's building a hospital that, you know, order of magnitude, a million square feet, about $2 billion of total cost. I don't know the exact number, but it's in that, you know, in that range, I believe. And it's going to be an incredible anchor. I mean, it's going to be an incredible public asset for Alexandria, you know, a world class hospital.
I'll get in trouble if I start naming the trauma level because I can't remember what it is. But it's a significant investment on the part of Inova to really bring world class healthcare to Alexandria. And the current Alexandria hospital is in need of significant physical repair. And so they made the decision to start from scratch and build it at a better location and really bring world class hospital. So that's, that's really the anchor of the project. And we're just thrilled that Innova is partnering with us to, you know, to push this project forward. And then we're going to build a few thousand units of multifamily, a few hundred thousand square feet of retail. We've got a component of townhomes that are for sale, that are, that are, you know, going to be built and for sale. We're going to have some workforce housing, some affordable housing, a senior care building, firehouse, city of Alexandria Firehouse, and then there's a couple acres of public parks and open space and we've got some really exciting parks planned and some great public amenity space. So, I mean, it's going to be a very dynamic, really well designed, wonderful project and to put together a project, a 4 million square foot project that only has about 80,000 office, because office is not something that's financeable these days. And it used to be in these big mixed use projects, office was your anchor that brought daytime traffic to the project, which would help your retailers be viable? Well, that's not really a viable business plan anymore. And so to be able to get ANova to come and build a hospital of this size with, I think the latest number I heard was, you know, 3200 full time employees and obviously, you know, patients and visitors and all of that, I mean, it just brings a tremendous amount of traffic to the property for daytime traffic, which is just critical for retailers success. And then obviously, all the multifamily there will provide the nighttime population.
So we're really excited about it. And even in this time where, you know, it's very difficult to underwrite development deals, we think that this project is so unique and is so transformative that we're very confident that we will be able to attract the development capital. We need to go vertical. Starting later this year on the first phase of the project, the hospital is going to break ground in just a few months and we'll be right.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: So are you going to have, you're not going to have medical office there?
[00:48:06] Speaker C: The office that I referred to is medical office, so it's not, it's all medical.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Do you think 80,000 sqft is enough medical office for that?
[00:48:14] Speaker C: Nova is building some medical office that they will, that they will own as part of the hospital. And we're building one medical office building next door to the hospital.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: So there. You shouldn't have any demand issues.
Well, I wouldn't.
[00:48:27] Speaker C: That's the plan.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: Right. Right. So you did say office is difficult. So I'm going to pivot to a major office project that you have underway, and that's Tyson Central. Talk a little bit about that project, how it's doing as far as lease up and, you know, the rationale of why you did it in the first place and then how it's evolved from there.
[00:48:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, this was several years ago and we had been very active in building multifaceted family, and the office market was still perfectly viable back then. And I looked around and said, man, Folger Pratt's got this long history of office development. We haven't done one in a few years. I don't want to atrophy in our skill set with office development. Let's look around DC. Let's find what we think is the best office development site in the whole DMV and let's try to do an office deal. We looked all over the place and we came to the conclusion that Tysons was a great office market, just given its access to transit, being halfway between our two major airports right on the Beltway Silver line had just expanded out through Tysons Beltway toll Road 66. It just has a lot of transportation access. Not everybody loves Tysons, but their track record of leasing large blocks is pretty impressive. And the number of, you know, large scale corporate headquarters that are there are pretty impressive. And it's convenience to where the executives live, convenience to where there's more affordable housing, great school systems. I mean, there are a lot of reasons that a lot of corporations have decided to locate in northern Virginia and in Tyson specifically. And so when we decided Tyson's was an area, we wanted to focus again back to northern Virginia, job growth, business friendly environment. We looked around tysons and decided that, you know, the location where we are was the best. It's right next to, you know, what Meridian had done at the borough. They just brought in a whole foods, a bunch of restaurants, a movie theater. So the amenities were there. We were right on top of a metro stop. And, you know, we thought it was a great location. Did a deal with MV commercial, who was the land assembler, and designed a building and went out. And, you know, at the time, there was a lot of rationale to move forward with the spec building because when you looked at the large blocks of trophy space that were available, there were very few. And the track record of buildings that went spec, which were leased up before construction completion, was pretty impressive. And so we felt like there was a lot of momentum. We knew where we slotted in was the right time. We're going to be delivering when no other big blocks of class A space would be delivering. We went out, talked to a bunch of potential equity investors. USAA came in as our equity investor, and we were able to get construction financing. And USAA had been doing multiple spec office buildings around the country, and we built it spec. We bought it out at a great cost basis before construction costs ran up. And then while we're under construction, COVID hits. And before COVID hit, we were trading. You know, we were in conversations, I would say, with three corporate headquarters, kind of Fortune 500 companies to locate their corporate headquarters into the building. COVID hit. All those conversations stopped. Fast forward a few years. We've not leased 1 space in the building. There have been interested parties, but they were of a size that were too small to break up the building for a. For a small tenant or the creditworthiness of some of the larger tenants we've been talking to was not, didn't make sense for where we were. So, yeah, I think it's an incredible case study in how the trends that have come out of COVID have really had an incredibly negative impact on office. So on paper, I think it checked every box in terms of what would be a successful development. Great location, great sponsorship, great equity investor. You know, project that was built on time, under budget. It checked every single box. And sometimes you get drowned by a tidal wave that came in the form of COVID Work from home, dramatically expanding interest rates, drop in office demand. And so we've got a great relationship with our lender and our investor, and we're. We're in the process of figuring it out. But it's nice to be in meetings with our lender and our investor and look around the room. Nobody's upset with each other. Nobody thinks anybody did anything wrong.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: SaA has been there before.
They understand the office market in Washington as well as anyone. The fellow who runs it used to be a broker here in Washington. His name is Len O'Donnell.
[00:53:26] Speaker C: You probably know Len.
[00:53:28] Speaker B: He was very knowledgeable about this market, so he knows its volatility.
So he'll hang in there with you, I'm sure.
[00:53:37] Speaker C: Yeah. Like I said, we've got a great relationship with our lender and our investor, and everybody recognizes the world we're in, and everybody's kind of locking arms and figuring out how to help each other get through this. And look, I mean, it's still a great building. Beautifully designed, beautiful, you know, built at what was historically a great basis. Who knows if it's a good basis today? But, you know, time will tell, but.
[00:54:01] Speaker B: I think you're in a great location. There's no question it's a good, physically beautiful building, and over time, things will happen, I think.
[00:54:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: The tech market there continues to be explosive. I mean, we've done tours at Reston Station and also at Reston town center. The office demand there is absolutely spectacular. So if you know those markets, they're just really strong. I think it's only a matter of time that it'll come to tysons.
[00:54:28] Speaker C: Yeah, we'll see.
It's one deal. Unfortunately, like I said, I think the way we've structured our deals, every deal stands on its own, and no one deal is going to dramatically affect the larger enterprise.
Kind of how we, you know, we try to execute every deal really well, and we also are very careful about protecting our downside.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: So talk about your geographic expansion, if you would, and your markets you're in, other than the DC area.
[00:55:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, our geographic expansion. I mean, the first market we expanded to was California, which I think defies logic for a lot of people. That, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at, you know, hey, let's expand up the Baltimore and down to Richmond from DC. And we went to Southern California, and that was partly decided to expand geographically. One of the things we decided was, look, this is a relationship business. Let's look at places where we have relationships. And so I started my career in Southern California after business school. Two of my partners had started their careers out there. We just had a lot of friends and acquaintances in that area. And so we opened an office in Southern California, and we've got the handful of development deals out there. And I thought it was good to have a flag on the east coast, flag on the west coast, and from there, working, you know, towards the center of the country is a lot easier. And so we've done, you know, deals in Texas, in Utah, California, did a couple of deals down in North Carolina. And actually one of our guys has been with us, McBees, and he's been with us for eight years from Carolina, went to school in Carolina. He moved back down there a year ago and opened an office for us down there. So we've got a few offices around the country and really willing to look at deals in places where it makes sense for us. I mean, obviously, we're looking at higher growth areas, some belt areas in California. We went out there, it was growing well. It's since slowed down quite a bit. And I'd say we're not looking at a lot of new deals in California. We're finishing the ones that we're under construction on. We're more focused on some of the higher growth intermountain west, the Utah market and Colorado markets have been very strong. Texas has continued to grow really well. Carolina is growing really well. So we're looking at markets that have growth and that we have relationships in because at the end of the day, this is a relationship business. And so that's kind of how we chose those markets.
[00:56:53] Speaker B: So how do you manage all that? Do you have partners that handle those other markets, or do you do it all centrally from where you are there?
[00:57:01] Speaker C: Well, I have, so we have Brian Folger, who's one of the partners of Folger Pratt. He lives in Southern California and manages all our activity out there.
And then, you know, we've got lots of great partners and colleagues here in the DC area, down in North Carolina. So, you know, I'm very in touch with everything that's going on everywhere, but we certainly have senior executives kind of managing each of those markets.
[00:57:28] Speaker B: So you talked about the pandemic, it's changed the real estate business considerably. How did it affect your, how operating businesses and markets where you invest to develop? I mean, how did that overall change your thought process?
[00:57:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I don't know that the pan, well, the pandemic directly didn't necessarily change a lot of that when the pandemic started. I mean, we have a lot of our, we have kind of on site staff and offsite staff. So our construction division, they're on site. You can't, it's hard to do construction.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: Remote, that you can't change much property.
[00:58:04] Speaker C: Management, very much an on site business. And so we had a lot of our staff still going to their sites every single day during the pandemic and then our office staff that was able to work more remotely, we kind of had a hybrid policy. So, I mean, every company's been dealing with those same issues. But I would say that the pandemic and kind of the resulting slowdown in the commercial, or the challenges in commercial real estate that were directly attributed to rising interest rates, which was directly attributable to all the stimulus spending during the pandemic that has caused some changes in our business.
In 2023, I made some very significant changes to our business that came out of those things.
Historically, we've been vertically integrated, acquisitions, development, construction, property management, asset management. Two of those divisions are. Most people don't have. Most people outsource construction and property management. And we've kind of always had those internal. Our construction division, for years did a lot of third party work. We had a regular general contracting business. When I became CEO ten years ago, the first thing I did was, was stop doing third party work in our construction division. We had enough pipeline that I could keep our whole staff busy just on our own hand and house stuff.
And the third party construction business is a tough business.
It can be profitable.
[00:59:35] Speaker B: You can also, and it's risky too.
[00:59:37] Speaker C: It's very risky. And so I wanted our guys 100% focused on our own projects. And I just believe that when we build for ourselves, there's just a more collaborative relationship and we can manage risk better, because at the end of the day, we were signing construction loan guarantees and I wanted to be able to control that construction process. So we had in house construction and property management, but at the end of the day, construction and residential property management are high volume, low margin businesses.
[01:00:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:00:08] Speaker C: And so when you look at what Graystar, which has really led the way and considered consolidating the residential property management business, quickly followed by several other players, including Bazuta, a company that have really dramatically grown their property management businesses. They have been able to drive down expenses, including their fee. So residential property management is a very competitive business. It is very low margin and the only way to make that work is, is high volume. And so you see this massive consolidation going on in that space.
Also, construction is a high volume, low margin business. And to deal with all the risks that you're taking on in that business, you need to have high volume. You need to be spreading that risk across a lot of different projects. So we were really comfortable having both those groups in house. But when we had a significant slowdown in our ability to start new development projects, I could see that two years down the road it was going to be a problem for our construction group as we started finishing projects. If we couldn't get new projects going, it was going to be a problem.
In parallel, we were starting to see that these third party residential property managers, they could just flat out manage properties at a lower cost than we could. They had purchasing power that we didn't have specifically. And maybe most importantly as it related to insurance. And that was these run up in insurance expenses were becoming very challenging and our residential property management portfolio was only 6000 units, not a small size, but certainly not big enough to command the kind of purchasing power that a bazuto or a Graystar could command. And so looking down the road a couple of years, I could see that we were going to really run into challenges in these businesses. And I would say the other important thing was I was not willing to do third party work in either business. I was not interested in trying to grow a third party residential property management business and I was not interested in taking on the risk of doing third party construction work again. And so by constricting the amount of volume we could do to just our own business. When you have that high volume, low margin, well, when you take high volume off the table, low volume, low margin is really not a good business to be in. And so we made the decision that those were probably businesses that we needed to exit again. We did it two years before it would have been a problem and really tried to look down the road and do it from a position of strength, not a position of weakness.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: Do you still build your own projects?
[01:02:50] Speaker C: No. So last October, Folger Pratt's construction division was joined Clark Construction as a, as a new division of Clark CFP, which is, you know, obviously a nod to Clark soldier Pratt. And it is, it is a new division of Clark that is focused on doing stick build apartments, which is not something that they not a, not a product type that they focused on in house prior to this. So our entire construction division joined Clark. They are continuing to build out all the projects that were currently under construction, and they will be our go to contractor for everything Folgerpratt does going forward. And on the same day, our entire residential property management team joined Bazuto.
And so October 1, both those were effective and obviously a massive change to Folger Pratt. It represented two thirds of our headcount moving to other companies. But what it did, was it really twofold?
I think it was the right thing to do for business because of the low volume, low margin dynamic I talked about a minute ago. But equally importantly, I believe it was the right thing to do for all our employees of those divisions, because what it did, if you think about our residential property management business, people join those businesses young.
And the really sharp folks are able to progress very quickly in their careers. But by constricting the size of our portfolio, as people progressed in their careers, they didn't have upward mobility, and ultimately they had to leave Folger Pratt, you know, if they wanted to get promoted any higher than kind of a point, and they didn't want to do that. They loved the culture of Folger Pratt, and they didn't want to leave Folger Pratt, but they needed to for their career, because I was artificially constraining the size of that organization to our own. And then, very similarly on the construction side, I restricted our guys from going out and doing third party work. And in a market where our own portfolio was getting a little harder to build, we were able to put them at a platform at Clark that really gave them access to the whole country and all sorts of clients. And so I think it was the right thing to do from a business standpoint, and it was absolutely the right thing to do for our employees to give them job security and upward mobility. And so we were.
Our core values and our culture of culture brat are critical to us. And our number one core value is we treat people the way we want to be treated. And that was our guiding principle in figuring out how to transition those groups. And Clark and Bazuto are both top class organizations. I have very close personal relationships with the CEO's of both of those companies that have gone back 20 years.
Trust in them and the cultures of those companies. And I knew that our people would be honored and respected there. And so that was a very big transition that we made last year.
[01:05:58] Speaker B: Stepping back from that though, for a moment, thinking about the heritage of Folger Pratt.
That's an interesting change. I mean, your grandfather was a construction guy. That was his thing. You started out doing 100% 3rd party, as I recall.
[01:06:16] Speaker C: Correct.
[01:06:18] Speaker B: That's how the company started. So that had to been a little bit of soul searching there when you finally made that decision, I'm guessing.
[01:06:25] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, another one of our core values is we plan thoroughly and execute effectively, and we did plan thoroughly for those. It was a very, you asked about strategic planning earlier. I mean, this is something that I've been thinking about and kind of laying the groundwork for, for a number of years. Years, because I recognized that at some point, if there was a slowdown and I couldn't continue to start development projects here, that our construction business would be challenged. And so for years I've been kind of thinking about this. And so it actually wasn't a hard decision.
I knew it was the right thing to do for the business, and as long as I could do it in a way that was consistent with our core values and honored our, then I knew it was the right thing to do. So after a lot of thorough planning, it was honestly a pretty easy decision.
[01:07:17] Speaker B: To make because that's great.
[01:07:18] Speaker C: I think it was the right thing to do.
And once I was confident that we were doing it consistent with our core values, then I felt I slept well at night after that.
[01:07:30] Speaker B: That's awesome. Besides the pandemic, we've seen social changes accelerate as a result of several incidents over the past several years. How is Folger Pratt adapting to the diversity challenge and more broadly, ESG issues in general?
[01:07:46] Speaker C: I am really happy to say that this whole ESG movement has not changed the way weve done business one bit, because we were always a company that had a lot of diversity and honored diversity.
It really didnt, you know, it didn't really affect how we did business because, like I've mentioned a couple of times, our core values, our core values are very consistent with honoring, respecting people, listening to divergent opinions and views. And so we didn't need to make changes, to be honest. And that's great. Yeah. So that's that. It's just, it's just kind of part of who we are and who we've been for a long, long time. And so, yeah, we didn't really fundamentally have to change anything because I felt like the way we operated was very consistent with these trends.
[01:08:35] Speaker B: Relationships are key to our industry, as you've referred to already a couple of times, other than family and colleagues who have influenced you most in your career, the public or private sectors.
[01:08:48] Speaker C: Interesting question.
You know, I would say, look, a lot of people have been a wonderful influence on me. I have really. When I joined Folger Pratt, my dad and my two uncles had never really worked anywhere else.
One uncle had worked as an attorney briefly, but really, all three of them started their careers out of college at Folger Pratt and kind of came up in the business. And so they certainly had been very successful, and they knew one way of doing things the way they'd done things. I was trying to come and bring a different perspective, and so I really looked to people outside the organization to mentor me and guide me. And I would say that that's something that I've very proactively done throughout my career, is try to suck as much wisdom out of friends as possible. And back to your conversation about my network from Harvard. That's actually a group of people I've leaned on heavily, friends, colleagues, peers, but that are at significantly larger, maybe more sophisticated in some way. Companies that. That I've been able to really kind of learn from over the years. And then I would say early on in my career, someone that has, you know, had a. Had an influence on me in a meaningful way from a business standpoint was Don Wood at federal Realty. And Don and I became acquainted right after I moved to Washington, DC, because Don has a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I have a son and daughter with cystic fibrosis.
[01:10:18] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[01:10:19] Speaker C: Yeah. So Don and I, Don quickly recruited me to help him with the assistant gala, which he had been chairing for several years, when I kind of moved to DC, and he quickly convinced me to co chair the gala with him. And so for about ten years, Don and I worked extremely closely on the cystic fibrosis gala. And I was very early on in my career, and Don was the CEO of Federal Realty, which was, you know, and continues to be an incredibly dominant and, you know, you know, a company that just is a pillar in the DC region and obviously all over the country for what he does. But for me to be able to sit with Don for hours and hours and hours every month working on, you know, raising money for cystic fibrosis, which we're both passionate about, you know, I had the opportunity to be in his office and just observe many, many meetings, the kind of impromptu meetings where his CFO or his general counsel will walk in to talk about something. And, you know, and I got to be a fly on the wall for that. And it really, you know, I'd say it impacted me and the way the vision I started having for Folger Pratt in terms of, you know, what was possible. And so, you know, Don's been a wonderful friend and in that way, kind of an indirect mentor of mine, you know, and there are many other people I could name that have helped me. But, you know, given how young I was in my career and the access I had to Don and kind of seeing his world, that was meaningful to.
[01:11:44] Speaker B: Me and for listeners. Don Wood was a guest of mine about a year ago, so you could look him up in that podcast and hear about Don's story, which is a very good one.
[01:11:56] Speaker C: Yeah. As well.
Yep.
[01:11:59] Speaker B: So what are some of the biggest wins, losses and surprising events of your career?
[01:12:06] Speaker C: Oh, good question. I mean, I would say lots of wins on this transaction here, that transaction there, putting together this West End Alexandria project, it's the largest project Bolger Pratt's done in our history. So that was a big win. And being able to pull together that partnership, I think it took a lot of, I'd say a lot of things had to go right, and we had to convince a lot of people that we were capable and qualified of, of pulling that off. And so being able to convince folks and then move that project forward, which was stalled for literally decades, that was a win.
You learn a lot more from the disappointments and the mistakes made. Certainly made individual project level mistakes, countless project level mistakes.
I think I have been too conservative at times.
After the great financial crisis, we bought a handful of properties in 2010, 2011, and by 2014, I thought prices were too high. Well, I missed a five year run of buying multifamily.
And so that's a mistake I'm not going to make after this market correction. So there are definitely things that I've learned the hard way and also had some great wins, but certainly I lose, I lose sleep. And I think a lot more about the mistakes I've made than any wins that I've had.
[01:13:34] Speaker B: What about the biggest surprise, what came out of left field that said, whoa, it was something, anything like that?
[01:13:42] Speaker C: No. You know, there's not a single one that jumps to mind, to be honest. Yeah. You know, yeah.
I don't have one that I can point to that is a massive surprise.
[01:13:54] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:13:55] Speaker C: I'm sure nothing's coming to mind at the moment.
[01:13:57] Speaker B: Sure. So without disclosing any secrets, share some stories of your favorite and not so favorite experiences and any lessons you learned from them.
[01:14:06] Speaker C: Not as much on like a deal level. But I'd say from a leadership standpoint, one of the things I've consistently probably not done as good a job of as I should, and it's a lesson I, like continue to have to learn every year, it seems, is that the importance of communication and really communicating to my team, and there's almost an insatiable appetite for team members to be, quote unquote, in the know. And so my town hall meetings that I have, you know, company wide town hall meetings are called in the know. That's what I title them, because I, you know, I want people to feel like they're in the know, because people need to feel leadership. They need to understand the vision and where you're going. And I think the balance that I am constantly trying to hit is communicate. But the reality is sometimes the vision isn't clear to me either. You're trying to figure it out. It's not like the strategic plan is written on the wall and we're just always executing it. That has to change. And as the market changes, things have to change and have to change, and how organized has to change. It's not like I've always got it all figured out. And so there's a fine line of communicating and laying out the vision, but not over communicating and having people be confused because the vision isn't crystal clear. And so I would say that, like, those are the lessons that I have learned and I am continuing to learn is how to strike the right balance in communication. And that goes with, it goes with team members, it goes with external partners, it goes with investors.
I err on the side of trying to over communicate, and sometimes that doesn't work so well, and sometimes I under communicate, and it's just a balance that I'm continuing to try to figure out.
[01:16:03] Speaker B: Interesting. Well, to me, listening is probably as important as talking, if not more so.
[01:16:12] Speaker C: Yep. And I would think that, you know.
[01:16:16] Speaker B: Keeping your ears open and then aiming in a direction, but not necessarily with a map, but in a, in a kind of a compass like approach to it. It would be my reaction to what you just said. Yeah, to some extent, yeah. So you've been very active in the community, including board memberships, real estate organizations, volunteer activities. You participated in this to stay visible in the community, or do you find personal satisfaction contributing, or both?
You mentioned systems by Rosa.
[01:16:49] Speaker C: I've never worried about being visible in the community. I don't know. That just hasn't, that's not ever been something that I've been too worried about.
I have been active. I'm very active in Uli. I'm a product council chair, and I've done that. Going back to what I mentioned earlier, I really try to surround myself with the smartest people I can and learn as much as I can from them. And that's why I do what I do at Uli, because I can help determine who I spend time with on my product counsel. And so that's been something that I've done for selfish reasons, to spend time with people I think are smarter than me and doing interesting things. My involvement in cystic fibrosis, again, it was selfish. I've got two kids with cystic fibrosis, and I feel like. I felt like I needed to do something about it.
Don and I worked our tails off to raise as much money as we could because we were trying to save our kids. And so, again, that didn't have anything to do with being visible in the community. It had everything to do with trying to change the course of life for my children. That's a long story for another day. And if you don't know the story of cystic fibrosis and what the cystic fibrosis foundation has accomplished in terms of essentially curing, they don't call it a cure, but essentially curing that disease, it's a remarkable story. It's worth looking into. Yeah, so that's, you know, so, yeah, I try to be involved in a lot of things. It doesn't have anything to do with visibility. It has everything to do with finding things that I'm passionate about, and that's great. I want to learn from.
[01:18:28] Speaker B: That's awesome. What are your life priorities? You've already talked about your family and your work and giving back. I mean, is family still number one for you among everything else? I assume it is.
[01:18:40] Speaker C: I think it is for most people. You know, I mean, I think as you get older, you realize that relationships matter, and there are no more important relationships than your family. And so I don't think that's unique to me. I think that's. I think that's. I think if you interviewed 100 people that all say the same thing, pretty much, family is really, really important. And, you know, I tell my employees, like, look, we come to work every day to create, you know, value so that we can, you know, spend time with our families and we can put our centered kids to school and college, and, like, it all comes back to providing for our families. And so that's, you know, yes, family is number one. And I. And I feel like my work colleagues are an extension of my family. So, you know, I care about these people and I care about their, many of them are. Yeah, of course few of them are.
[01:19:32] Speaker B: So what advice would you give your 25 year old self today, Cameron?
[01:19:36] Speaker C: I think I would. I think I would tell my 25 year old self, you know, just go for it. You know, just, just put yourself out there and go for it and dream big. And, you know, I mean, I think, you know, one of the, when I was 25, I was working on Wall street, and I had the opportunity as just a young analyst, but to sit in, to sit in the room with, you know, the CEO's of some of the biggest real estate companies in the country. And, and I think my biggest takeaway was, you know, this isn't rocket science. I mean, these guys are smart, but they're not that smart. Like, you know, I can do this, too. And that's, I hope that's not interpreted as arrogant or cocky. It was really interpreted as finding some self confidence, recognizing that the world's not that intimidating at the end of the day and, you know, go out there and, you know, try to punch above your weight class because you, you can. And fortune favors the bold, so go for it. That's the advice. That's the advice I'm giving my 22 year old son right now.
[01:20:41] Speaker B: That's great. That's great. So it's my last question. If you could post a statement on a billboard on the Capitol Beltway, from millions to sea, what would it say? Cameron?
[01:20:52] Speaker C: I think it would say something along the lines of be kind.
You know, just be kind. You know, I just, you know, I think that there's just so much division and divisiveness and anger in the world right now. And I just think that if everybody could just be a little nicer and listen and try to understand each other, people would realize that, you know, most people agree on about 90% of things, and we tend to focus on the 10% people don't agree with. And I think our political system is a mess because it incentivizes people to, you know, to whip people up in anger and resentment, and it's just causing, you know, I think it's, it's really destructive for the conversation and the tone and the optimism in the country. And I think if everybody would just take a breath and be kind and try to sort of listen to each other and not vilify each other, then it would be in a much better place. So, yeah, be kind. That'd be my billboard.
[01:21:54] Speaker B: So, Cameron, thank you very much for this very wide ranging conversation today. I appreciate it. Thank you.
[01:22:00] Speaker C: Happy to be here. Thanks for the invite.
