[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
[email protected]. dot thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me for another episode of icons of DC Area Real Estate.
My guest for today's show is Dave Bramble. Dave is the co founder of MCB real Estate, headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Dave grew up in Baltimore. His father was an episcopal priest there. He was a tough part of town, but his father kind of instilled his educational aspect and he went on to Princeton University and then to Penn Law School.
So seven straight years of pretty intense education and then joined Steptoe and Johnson law firm in Washington, became a workout attorney up until 2007, and then decided to start his own company and with one of his clients at the time, Peter Pinkard, who was a retail investor. So the two of them started MCB real estate and started acquiring mostly retail assets up and down the east coast, looking at just building through relationships and opportunities more on the distressed side. But Dave understood the underwriting because he had also had a mortgage company at the the time that he'd set up so learning through the crisis, they picked up good opportunities and then they started to diversify, not only geographically, but in product type. Looking at mixed use projects Dave's passion for the city of Baltimore came out when he started looking at mixed use opportunities in renovation. And we used to talk about four of those projects in Baltimore that he's very proud of and one that is to be renovated and done. And that's the perhaps the largest mixed use development in Baltimore's history, which will be the redevelopment of harbor Place at Inner harbor.
They are on the ballot in November to get the approval by the city Baltimore to go forward with rezoning the property.
And the plan is to build a $900 to $1 billion, 900 million, $1 billion project on the harbor designed by Gensler. It's quite a special thing. I have a link to the design and the website, so it's quite a broad conversation and I hope you enjoy it. So without further ado, please listen to Dave Bramble.
So, Dave Bramble, welcome to icons of DC area real estate.
I overviewed your biography in the introduction, perhaps share your role at MCB in your day to day activities, and then we'll go into your background as my guess is it will be a fascinating story. Thank you.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: I don't know how fascinating, but hopefully interesting enough to keep your listeners from falling asleep.
What do I do at MCB?
My primary roles revolve around finding new transactions to do and raising capital, of course, and then overseeing the overall operations of the company. But yeah, mostly what I do is finding deals and finding money.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: And I assume you have a little bit of a vision and planning and that kind of thing for the company's growth, right?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I mean, I spent a lot of time sort of thinking through what our strategic goal should be and then how, then working with the senior management team and my partners to come up with how to implement those strategic goals. So that's a big part of the overall picture.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: All right, so let's pivot back. Tell us about your origins, youth and parental influences. I understand you grew up in Baltimore. Talk about your family and influences growing up here.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I grew up in Baltimore. I've lived in Baltimore basically almost my entire life. And the biggest influences for me and I assume for many, my parents, my parents are immigrants from the West Indies who became entrepreneurs. And although my father had a job as an episcopal priest, he also spent his time finding things to invest in and businesses to grow. And my mother became the publisher of newspaper here in town of Baltimore called the Baltimore Times. And I think a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit I got came from them. Interesting.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: So which island in the Caribbean?
[00:07:02] Speaker B: It's a small island called Muntserat, which was impacted by a volcano. So, you know, many of the inhabitants have been scattered to the wind. But yeah, that's where my family's from.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: You get back there?
[00:07:14] Speaker B: I haven't been back in probably over 20 years, but as a kid I used to go all the time. I used to spend my summers there with aunts and uncles and other folks having a good time.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: So you still have relatives there?
[00:07:28] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I still have relatives there. And then I have a lot of relatives in Antigua.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Interesting. So your parents, when they came, did come right to Baltimore or did they go?
[00:07:38] Speaker B: No, my parents were, my father went to school here in the states. My mother went to school in Canada after they came. They were originally living in Connecticut before they moved here. Oh, okay.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: So just your mom's opportunity was what brought him here?
[00:07:56] Speaker B: No, my dad. My dad got a job here as a priest at a small Episcopal church in west Baltimore, St. Catharines of Alexandria, and that's where he started his career. And then my mom, I believe at that time, was teaching. And then they decided to buy some little grocery stores and then eventually they got into the newspaper business.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: So that's where the entrepreneurial, that's where it comes from.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: So did you go to high school and everything right here in Baltimore?
[00:08:26] Speaker B: I did public schools. I went to Baltimore City College, high school, which is, you know, you hear me tell it, the greatest high school in the world. Here in Baltimore, we cherish our high schools and very lucky to go to city college. I had a fabulous public school education and was very lucky to get to city, meet those friends and have those teachers and mentors that I got while I was at city College.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Well, you must have done pretty well because then you went on to Princeton University. So talk about that, how you got into Princeton and what your experience was like at Princeton.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Sure. I was lucky enough to be, to have a math teacher who suggested that I take a test and try to get admitted to a program that Phillips Academy in Andover sponsors called math and science for minority students. And that program took me to Andover for all three of my high school summers where we did intense study in math and science. And of course, that opened the doors to some of the best institutions of higher learning in the country. So I was able to do well in that program and well in high school. And because of that, it opened up doors for college that I think weren't available to, you know, may not have been available, but that was one of the, you know, one of those things that you look back on in life. And if that teacher hadn't thought to do that, look, maybe I still would have gotten into Princeton, maybe not. You never know. But that played a major role in my decision in opening up my, I think, my opportunities for different colleges. Now, mind you, my dad went to Yale. My sister went to Harvard and Dartmouth. So it runs in the family, a desire for, to do well in school. So my parents instilled that in me from the beginning.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: So did your dad go to Yale divinity school?
[00:10:33] Speaker B: He did. Okay. He did.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: And he didn't steer you towards Yale then? That's interesting.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: He did. Well, maybe he did, I don't know, long time ago. Now you're getting way back into the memory banks. But I think he was just, you know, I think my parents were very encouraging, very focused on academic performance and most importantly, focused on just hard work, which is something that I talk to my kids about all the time, too, because the reality is most success is the sort of intersection between preparation and opportunity, and preparation is nothing but hard work. And so I think that, you know, every day when I used to go to school, my father would make me recite a poem interesting by Longfellow. The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night. And that stuck with me. And I try to torture my kids to do it now, too, because I think thats important to remind people because, you know, you see Instagram millionaires and this and that and everything seems to be instant gratification, but thats not really how the world works, at least not from my perspective.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: I wouldn't totally agree with that. So what was your experience like at Princeton? It was great.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: I had a good time, still have, I'm still very close with all my buddies from undergraduate. It's Princeton's amazing place with lots of opportunities for academic enrichment. And I count myself very lucky to have had an opportunity to go there.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Did you, were you in sports there at all?
[00:12:13] Speaker B: No, I wasn't. I was a wrestler in high school and I played lacrosse. I'm from Baltimore, so we all played lacrosse. But I was nowhere near good enough to be on Princeton's lacrosse team, which at the time was a juggernaut. I probably couldn't even carry one of the lacrosse balls and wrestling. When I got to Princeton, they'd actually just shut down the wrestling program.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: So I probably, I might have been good enough to make that team, but I didn't, I didn't do it.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: So what did you major in there? I mean, you aimed towards law school, obviously. So what was your undergraduate major?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: My undergraduate major was politics with a minor in russian studies. So city college, one of the things about city college is that it had a program that allowed you to study lots of different languages other than the typical, you know, French, Spanish. There were opportunities for German, Russian, I think, Chinese or Japanese. I can't remember one of those languages. And the deal was that you also got a trip to go on a, do a study abroad in high school. And so I studied Russian as my, in high school, and then I continued that in college.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: It's about the hardest, other than maybe Chinese, hardest language of all the learnings.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: I don't know. I mean, you know, who knows? I mean, I can't speak it anymore, but I used to be pretty good at it.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: So did you go on then? I understand you went to Penn law. Did you do that right after Princeton?
[00:13:48] Speaker B: I went straight through.
I honestly never really considered working in between undergraduate and graduate school. I don't know why that was just maybe the way things happened, but went straight from, straight from New Jersey to Philadelphia.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: So the political interests translated the law. Is that kind of what it was? Yeah.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: I mean, I'd always wanted to be a lawyer. I always thought that, you know, having a profession with a licensed profession would be good because, you know, if you're going to be in business or other things, you're taking a lot of risk. And having a profession with a license is always a good thing. And I did, you know, I went on to practice law, and it was great because practicing law gave me a great base for what we do today, number one. And number two, of course, it introduced me to Peter Pinker, my partners.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: So when you started in law, were you thinking a certain aspect of it, like litigation or property law or what was your, what was your focus?
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Business law? Yeah, it was business, corporate law, as we say. It's sort of the corporate side of things.
So I was lucky enough to get to a law firm with a corporate department, a strong corporate department, and then I ended up ultimately getting into doing a lot of workouts. And that is a, that is a very valuable skill set.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: So that's how real estate entered the equation for you.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Yes, sort of. I will say that prior to that, a friend in Philadelphia, one of my fraternity brothers, my best friend, you know, said that we should get into real estate. This is when we were still. I was still in law school, and there was a group of us. Some were still in undergrad. And I had always had a negative view of real estate because in my brain growing up in the eighties, every movie you ever saw about real estate was, you know, Joe Pesci putting poor people out to build condos. And so to me, real estate was sort of connected to this idea of displacement or doing sort of shady stuff. Even though my parents had always done real estate, I didn't put two and two together. So he convinced me that we should try it, and we did, and it worked. And then, so that, along with another one of my friends who were still partners to this day, we started in the real estate business doing small rehabs. And you were an attorney at the time? I was still in law school. This is before I became an attorney. Then when I actually became an attorney, it opened up more things because then I actually had money. But if you can remember back then, in the early two thousands, money was easy, probably too easy. This is prior to everything going bad in the DFC. And so we got into the business in that way, and we started a mortgage company. And so while I was practicing law, my partner Everett was running our little mortgage company that we had. And it wasn't too long before that little mortgage company was a big mortgage company. And that having the income from my share or my earnings from the mortgage company really allowed us the chance to leave, allowed me the chance to leave the full time practice of law to pursue real estate opportunities.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: So is that where you got your financing chops, then?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah, because I was the, I became the director of commercial lending for the mortgage company. And we did a lot of deals. You know, it was an interesting time. And where were you doing deals?
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Mostly?
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Mostly everything we did was on the east coast, but we had, at that time, we had ability to do nationwide residential lending and nationwide commercial lending.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: So were you doing Fannie and Freddie stuff or are you mostly doing, you.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Know, on the residential side? It was a lot of agency stuff, a ton of agency stuff, and a ton of conventional product and then some alt a product, which I don't know how familiar you are with residential lending, but that's sort of, you know, not sub. It's stuff that doesn't work conventionally. However, it's not subprime. We didn't do a lot of subprime stuff. We never got comfortable.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: That was the age of some prime.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: That's the age of subprime. It was.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Most people got in trouble.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: A lot of people got in trouble that way. But it was. It was a. It was interesting times. Learned a lot. It was our first pretty significant entrepreneurial venture.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: So did it succeed that. I mean, the lending business succeeds through the OA crisis?
[00:18:28] Speaker B: It did not. Okay. And it's one of my favorite stories. A guy came in and offered us, this is a business we started with nothing. We had no money. In fact, if it weren't for my parents being willing to sign for the FHA documents, because at the time, you couldn't get your license unless you had a net worth of x. And our net worth combined, Everett and I was negative x because we were both graduating from school. And I laugh all the time because the guy came in and offered us millions of dollars for a piece of the business, not even for the whole business. And Everett and I laughed him out of the conference room. We said, no way.
This thing's worth whatever crazy number we had, $100 million, or whatever craziness we were talking about. And at the end, we sold it for nothing, basically just to get out from under all the liability. And it's an interesting story, and it's one of the lessons that I wish somebody had told me, which is you never lose taking some money off the table. You know, maybe there was a little bit of upside you gave to somebody else, but so what? So very interesting lesson. I try to tell people whenever. Whenever I get the opportunity to talk to young people about business, I always tell them, you know, it doesn't go straight up like this. It goes up and then down, or maybe goes down and then up and to the side and then left and then, you know, all over the place, meandering. It meanders. And, you know, when you. Sometimes when you're on the upswing, you gotta take a little bit off the table.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: So you would start doing workouts.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: And this was zero eight, right? Is that in that era?
[00:20:11] Speaker B: This is when I got started on the law firm. It was zero one. Oh, okay. So these workouts. These workouts go back to, you know, deals from the nineties, late nineties, mostly cnbs deals and other kinds of workouts. Other kinds of financial products, too. But sort of the 2000 crisis, the.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Russian crisis, in 98 or 99, Namira.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Went under and there was a, you know, that exposure. Then you had a lot of what happened with Enron and Worldcom and all those other countries. There's a lot of financial products that were in trouble. And so we, our firm did quite a bit of that.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: Interesting. So you were doing. Did you do like, corporate workouts as well as some were.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: I worked out insurance related things, but a lot of it was real estate. A lot of it was heavily related to one particular client that had a lot of CMBS positions that needed to be. We were on behalf of a conduit lender.
And so that's really how Peter and I got together, because the conduit that the. Peter was a retail specialist that was brought in to work on a retail related product. I worked across all asset classes, hotel, office, multifamily, and Peter was a retail specialist. And so Peter and I did a lot of deals together. And then I told him about some of the deals that, you know, I had smaller deals that I've done on the side. And then I asked if you would be willing to do some deals with me.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: So when did you sit down and kind of start the company?
[00:21:53] Speaker B: In essence, 2007, right before the GoC.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah, timing. It was great timing and terrible timing. I tell people this too. It's just kind of interesting. The right, you know, we had these deals tied up right before the GFC. The GFC happens and, you know, it was a train wreck we could all see coming, but it was kind of like, just do. Do more deals, do more deals. And I do.
The GFC was a big opportunity for us because we were a small company then. There weren't, we didn't have a lot of assets.
And if you could convince people to do deals, those deals perform right, because you. We weren't dealing. We had a few legacy deals, but not a ton. And so by the time the crisis happened, it was one of the best buying opportunities of the last 25 years, probably, or 20 years.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: If you could raise capital, you could raise money.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: And we were able to raise some money and convince investors to do some deals, and it was very successful.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Interesting. Is Peter a member of the WC Pinkard family? The whole, you know, it's a long history.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Sure. Yes, Peter, it's the four brothers, Peter, Wally and Greg and Bob. Yes, absolutely.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: That's the same family. Okay.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Same family.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: So Bob started casting pink.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Same one.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: That's what I thought. Okay, so you were on Baltimore based, but it seems like you've been active in multiple markets. Talk about your geographical strategy. You have retail properties from New York to Florida. Why such diversity and location, economies of scale, or how did it grow and how did it evolve?
[00:23:35] Speaker B: So we've done deals in 30 plus states, so we are not geographically focused in that sense. We go where the opportunity is.
What we're looking for are transactions where we have some sort of relationship to the transaction that gives us a leg up. And that's sometimes geography. We do a lot here in Maryland and then sometimes it's not geography. Sometimes it's we know the anchor tenant or there's some opportunity that's arisen because we know the seller or whatever the situation is. So we've never let geography be a barrier to our investment strategy. Now sometimes it is like we don't take on. We don't take on large complex redevelopment or ground up development out of the 95 corridor like that. We kind of do sort of New York through Florida where we have deeper relationships, municipalities and other folks. But you know, if we've got an operator that knows what they're doing, we'll do a deal any place in the United States.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: So as far as asset management, that requires either increase in personnel or a very sophisticated way to manage things from distance.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Which is the strategy you used.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: It's both. I mean honestly it's both. It's. We are, you know, we manage money for institutional investors and they expect precision and they expect sophisticated transactional and asset management execution. And so we do that. So we do have a lot of people. We. When Peter and I started this business, it was me and him. And then we had one anal who was making exactly 100% more than Peter and I combined. And today we have over 100 associates, you know, and offices in DC, Baltimore. We have a guy out in Los Angeles and we have a guy in Chicago. So it takes a platform to execute and we made the investments necessary, we think, in the platform to grow it and push it from, you know, to, you know, two guys in a truck. I mean literally not even a truck. Two guys in a. In a. Two guys in a sedan to a pretty sophisticated investment management machine.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: So how did you find deals? I mean was it just organic? I mean, did you just have the broker relationships? What was this, how was your sourcing of business?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Typically? So it is. Yes. Broker relationships, 100%. Brokers are very important machinery. I think people, you know, can ask you brokers, but I think that's a mistake. And it's relationships with capital providers, with lawyers, with other folks who are in the ecosystem, but not necessarily who are definitely brokers. One of the main ways we did deal deals, particularly in the retail space, is we did a lot of deals with leasing brokers. So the leasing brokers would have the ideas, but they're not investment sales folks. So they don't necessarily know how to go about finding investors, but they know us. So they would call us and say, hey, this tenant wants to be here. I know it.
Can we put together a deal? And we did that many, on many occasions. So it's really sort of, you know, finding deals is, you know, people will come to me and say, well how do you find deals? And I say, well it's hot, right? It's a, a lot of phone calls, it's kissing a lot of frogs. It's saying a lot of no, or, but not just no, get off the phone. It's more no. And let me explain why, and let me tell you why, how we could do the deal if you, if these things were in order. Because what that does is that makes everyone an army of people looking for deals for you because they know what you'll do. And you know, look, a lot of it is just returning people's phone calls. I mean, you know, in this business you get busy, you get big, you can't return phone calls. Things fall apart following up, being there, returning people's phone calls. And then when the opportunity does come, you gotta grab it and sink your teeth into it and rip it to shreds. And that's important too.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Well, the reason I'm asking is normally people have a patch, they work their patch, they know the market like every property, and they really understand the geography.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Right?
[00:27:53] Speaker A: You came at it differently. So that's why, you know, it's an unusual approach. And so obviously that's interesting, it has a different angle, but you have obviously a network of relationships that goes way beyond just the region. And it may have come, you know, evolved a different way.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: That's exactly what happens. It evolves. And you know, you start with x relationship which turns into y as long as you treat x, right? Sure. Then X tells Y and Z and then Y and Z you build a relationship with. And look, the way the world works is you're not going to do a deal with one person 9000 times, but you still have to treat that relationship as if it's going to give you a thousand deals, right? Because you want that call, you want the first call, which is I got an idea for you and I think what makes us unique is as a firm is that we can do lots of different kinds of investments. We're not just a one trick pulling that only does one kind of asset. So. Or we'll only invest in one part of the capital stack, we will provide preferred or do a GPLP structure or just be the GP or you know, we've even given people first mortgages if we can get the right return. So we're very flexible on how we look at things, and I think that's what keeps the phone ringing. The funnel is very wide at the top. Now, that has a trade off, which is. I just mentioned to you how the size of the platform, you need a lot of expertise to do that. And so we have that on staff, and that sort of, you know, talk about raising equity.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: And what, what, you know, when you started, was it all just friends and family, or. Yeah. And then how did you evolve into the institutional realm?
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it was friends and family. It's exactly right. And it's hard. I mean, it's easy to do the first two deals, but then after that, they're like, what, you want another 50,000? And, you know, it's hard. It really is. I'm not gonna. You know, there's no way to sugarcoat. It's just hard. But what happened was we did a few deals, they perform, and then a small private equity firm found us, and they backed us on several deals, which all went really well, which led to another private equity firm.
No, New Jersey, which led to another private equity firm finding us, who had some Senate investors.
And then our first big break was a public reit, Acadia Realty trust. They gave us $100 million of allocation out of one of their opportunity funds, and that went really well.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: What was the business plan?
[00:30:34] Speaker B: All value add retail. So it was all grocery, anchor shopping centers, power centers, net lease, retail, anything where we could make a high octane return in retail.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Is there a footprint as far as geography?
[00:30:48] Speaker B: No. Us. Wow. But everything we ended up doing was in the mid Atlantic and the northeast with them. But we had a great, great run. Still do business with those guys today. There's some great.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Was that a closed end fund, or was that just kind of a strategic relationship?
[00:31:09] Speaker B: So they had closed end funds, and we were investing out of that closed end fund. Got it. And those went really well. And then after that, we were able to find other investors that wanted to do deals with us over the years. And now we've got a very broad mix of pension, private equity, insurance companies.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Do you finance one off all the time, or do you don't do a pooled fund or anything?
[00:31:36] Speaker B: We don't. Well, we do, which I should explain. So the way we operate is we do have some funds, but it's not our primary mode of doing business. And not that it will never be. It's just we never have done that primarily because we've always been able to raise capital strategically around a strategy, a program, or a deal, and we can raise large amounts of capital. Today we have 3.5 billion in a UN. There's no big discretionary funds in there. It's all finding good deals and good strategies and then convincing investors to go along with us. And it's been a good run. Been a good run. But it's not a typical. We are not a fund business in the way that some other, some of our peers are fund businesses.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think of the old JBG companies in Washington, which that was their business was just raising fund after fund and investing those funds. And the strategy was pretty similar for them, but they were very geographically focused.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: So it's interesting, reviewing your current portfolio, appears you have four investment strategies, core, core, plus value add development, and invest in at least six product types in multiple markets. This is perhaps the most complicated mix of strategy I've seen for a company your size.
We already talked about your acquisition strategy, but how do you come up with, I mean, that's a huge matrix of both property type and the way of investing the four. It's almost as if you've got an institutional investing mindset in an entrepreneurial company. So talk a little bit about how that evolved and why.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: I think you nailed it. We have an institutional mindset. And look, I think there are other groups that are sharpshooters. They only do one thing. We're not like that. What we did is we invested in people. You know, a lot of times you as your operator, you get a big promote, you say, what do I do with it? Am I buying a beach house or am I investing in the platform? And Peter and I decided that we were going to invest in the platform. So we have experts in every asset class that we're involved in who are dedicated to those asset classes, and they're.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Employed or they partners. Employed.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Well, some are partners, there's partners, but they're part of the company. So what we did is instead of saying, okay, because that's a choice, right? You can make a choice about how you want to grow your business. You can say, okay, we've done really well in value add retail, so let's just do value add retail. And some of it comes from the background, right? I personally came from doing industrial and office. Peter is a retail expert. So we already came with three asset classes. The only new additions really are multifamily now. And now we have a new healthcare division that's led by Will Jermaine, who formerly was a ventas guy who left and we started a new platform with him focused on medical, office and life sciences.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: Interesting. So you have five basically big platforms.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: Multifamily, retail, industrial and healthcare.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So four.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Okay, you're not in the office business per se.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: We are, but who's raising capital for office?
[00:35:01] Speaker A: But you have some big projects that include office.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: We do.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: So we can talk about those when we get there. But that's, that's an amazing structure. I'm impressed. So let's get into the projects. So I've got a list of four here, but you have a lot more than that.
[00:35:18] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: I'll start with the rotunda. Talk a little bit about the rotunda, where it is.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Well, the funny thing is the rotunda is, is not a project we developed, it's just a project we acquired. I wish I could say I developed it because it's one of the most beautiful projects in our portfolio. And it was owned by public Re and a private family and a venture.
It's located in North Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland. And it's a fantastic location. I used to go to this place as a kid. I remember it used to have a Ritz camera in it, if you remember Ritz camera and Radio Shack. And it was the subject of a massive redevelopment right before the GFC. And now it's a mixed use project, includes 200 plus thousand feet of retail and office, as well as over and.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: After story there a little.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: So the before story was this is, it's actually an interesting project because it was one of the first, if not the first mixed use projects in America. This was the old, this is an old life insurance building. Beautiful old building. And was it monumental life building. I can't remember the name of the light. I'll remember in a second.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: I know they were here and they.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: The Mannequin family originally redeveloped it and put a grocery store and retail in the first place floor, and then there was offices above and then they owned it for many years, had a huge parking lot. And this new family acquired the project and they giant moved out. Giant supermarket was in there. They put in a mom's organic market and redid the retail and they built the apartment building, which is one of the most successful in the city. And so we acquired that project from the, from that public reit along with two other projects. One project in Frederick and one project in Montgomery county, in Damascus grocery anchored projects. One is anchored by an H Mart, which is a large international grocer, and the other by Safeway and then this project here, which is anchored by mom's groceries, mom's organic.
[00:37:28] Speaker A: So have you done any redevelopment of the project or what?
[00:37:31] Speaker B: So we actually are in the process of, of. So the project in Damascus that we're not touching, it's a fully leased grocery record shopping center in Frederick. We are. We are. We just got our entitlements to. We're in the, I should say we're in the middle of the entitlement process to add apartments and reposition the retail, which is underway. And then in Baltimore at the Rotunda, which is really sort of the flagship property of that group of assets, we are in the midst of adding a new bank of America and some new restaurants and other things. So we're hot and heavy and sort of in investing in this group of assets.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Okay.
The next one is the Kerwood Logistics park.
[00:38:21] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Talk about that one.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: So that is a large industrial development in Hagerstown, out in Hagerstown, Maryland. That's a site that we bought in a joint venture with Invesco where we specced a 1.2 million square foot industrial building.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: How did you build that relationship with Invesco? Have you done business with them before?
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Actually, this is our first deal with Invesco. And build those relationships just like everything else, which is, you start with, hi, my name is Dave Bramble and I'm in the real estate business. And about 24 months later you get a deal.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Because they're one of the biggest institutional investors in the country.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: They are a very large investor, very smart, a lot of data.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Excellent partners, I will tell you that. And they, they were able to quickly understand that we've gotten the land tied up at a good price and zoned already industrial. So we cut a deal with the. So a group, a group who call, who goes by the name curated development, which is a joint venture between two local guys led by Dave Strauss.
We cut a deal where we basically said, look, we will close once we're ready to go with a permit. So we didn't actually close until the deal was ready to go. But then we did spec 1.2 millionft and yes, we leased it. That's your next question?
We were able to sign a lease with a tenant for the entire building. So we feel really good about that. There's another 300,000 foot building that we've also built that we're in the process of leasing. And then there's still some additional land. But very excited about that project.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: Is it front on I 70 or where is it? Or is it 81 or is it that intersection?
[00:40:06] Speaker B: It's 81 and 70. I don't know. I mean obviously all the information is available. Yeah, it's a great location. It's. It was.
I gotta tell you, obviously the market for industrial specific, specifically big box has been fantastic, spectacular. It has been softening, however. So we were very excited to get that deal done. And what's your user there? Our user? Yeah, it's public. Our user is web. And they committed to a new long term lease and we're very.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: What do they do?
[00:40:35] Speaker B: They do restaurant equipment.
Interesting and stuff. Yeah. So they actually were our tenant that many years ago in another product project. So glad to have them again.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: How did you find them?
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Yeah, Cushman represented us on the transaction.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: Million two was a big use.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: Big lease.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Big lease.
[00:40:53] Speaker A: That's impressive.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: And actually I think just one. That was another deal about to say one deal of the year. That was another deal we did.
A deal we did in Aberdeen.
NAOP just awarded that deal. A transaction.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Another industrial.
[00:41:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it was industrial. That was 865,000ft roughly, or 890,000ft. I can't remember something up in that range that we did in Aberdeen, Maryland.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Both these buildings are one structure.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: One building.
One building. Big building.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: 30 clear or something like that.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: 36 and 40. But yes.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: So they're the big flat. I mean the flat big district, the.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Big old warehouses that you see. They focus.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Flat floor and the whole. So that they put in all the mechanized equipment. Is it all robotic and everything inside?
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Well we don't control the insides of the building. That's up to the tenant. But yes, typically they will typically do. Not all robotic but they'll typically do a lot of racking system. Sure. And then they're, you know, depending on the level of technology that the tenant uses. Sometimes there are. Is automated.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: Amazon is kind of the cutting edge.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: Correct? Correct. Yeah. Right.
[00:42:04] Speaker A: So next one is yard 56.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Oh, that's near and dear to my heart. So that's in east Baltimore. And we. That took a very long time to get done. That is a. Across the street from Johns Hopkins Bayview hospital.
And it was a former porcelain and enamel manufacturing facility. And what's so interesting about it is that business employed so many people in the area and then it was the subject of LBO and went out of business subsequently. And things sat there fallow for many years. And as you can imagine, operated as an enamel manufacturing facility for 100 years. Extremely contaminated. So what you have is you have Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital, the flagship easternmost hospital for Hopkins, just. Just not too far from the main Hopkins hospital.
Then across the street from it, you've got a dilapidated factory, and it's kind of like a symbol of hope, like, of work, and became a symbol of decay. And we are really proud of that project because it was one of those projects. Everyone said, oh, it'll never work. It'll never get done. Hear that? Over and over and over again. And we were able to put together a deal. We did a big cleanup. Cleanup included.
Included, basically oversight by both EPA and Md. Wow.
[00:43:35] Speaker A: So this is Brownsfield site.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: It's a big brownfield site. The environmental cleanup, we combined with the site where roughly $20 million. It was a big cleanup deal. And now we've delivered a grocery store in what was a food desert, Baltimore City's first LA fitness, a new medical office building, and 220 apartment units. And it looks absolutely beautiful. So very proud of that. It was the first opportunity zone deal, first large opportunity zone deal in the state of Maryland. And that's how we.
So I would tell you that deal needed every bit of every brain cell that I could pull together. It has new markets tax credits in it. It has brownfields. It has enterprise zone and opportunity zone. In fact, it was recognized as the first deal in the United States to combine opportunity zone capital and new markets tax credits. Wow. You can imagine a legal bill for that one. It was.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Your documents kind of fill the corner of the.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. All day. It was. It was. It was a zoo getting that done, but it was meaningful. And, you know, you go there today, I mean, that place used to catch on fire. I mean, it would catch on fire. The smoke would blow out.
The president of Johns Hopkins, baby, would call me and say, the building's on fire again, and I'm shutting off the h vac. What are you guys gonna do? And it's so funny because my partner, Dave Frederick, who's retired, but who really led the initial planning here, we used to laugh all the time. He would say, bramble, this is the only building we've ever owned that looks the same before and every. And after, every time it burns down, I mean, it looks as. I mean, it's just. It was just a big, hulking thing, and it looks so terrible. And now it's beautiful. I mean, it is just stunning. So if we do CSA ourselves. So just check it out. But it's. There's. When we open the apartment building, I'll never forget one of the local news stories. News stations did a story where they showed the thing burning. And then they showed the new building, and it's really a testament for what we can do in our cities and the things doing. Fantastic.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: How long did it take to get the cleanup done and all that?
[00:45:48] Speaker B: It took forever.
It was a huge entitlement fight.
It was a big entitlement battle. It was a huge battle to get all the agencies, but they did. They all worked with us. And I'll tell you.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: Was Hopkins a help to you?
[00:46:04] Speaker B: Hopkins was an absolute help.
[00:46:05] Speaker A: I would think so.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: Hopkins leaned in to help us. Everybody did. Once they. I think there's this barrier initially in these deals where people are like, no, no, no change. And then they're finally like, well, wait a minute. Do we want this dump? There's a tipping point, or are we right? And then everyone jumped on board, and it's pretty exciting to see.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: I did a first tiff in Washington, DC.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: On the Mandarin hotel on the water. Oh, sure. And it took almost five years to get that project done. It was. And there was no Brownsfield, but it was, you know, it was tough because a five star hotel in that location at the time was like nothing. But we didn't get it done. We were very pleased. Now the wharf is right there.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: It's unbelievable. That's Salamander now, right?
Beautiful location.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: Finally, we got the vision across the goal line, but it took time.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: It takes time. And, you know, the thing about it is that you have to remember as a developer and an investor is, you know, what you see. You understand the numbers, but the people you're dealing with on the other side, particularly community members, one, they have no idea what you're talking about.
Two, it's not their job. Their job is whatever they do. They're a doctor, a teacher, you know, a homemaker, whatever it is. And we have to explain to them why we want to change the land use, what we're trying to do. And sometimes I got to remind myself to take a step back and put myself into this. You were show up.
What are you doing here? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to change? And it takes a while to build that relationship, build the confidence.
It takes time.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: The final one I have on my list is reservoir square.
[00:47:54] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:47:55] Speaker A: Talk about that one.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: So that's near and dear to my heart. That's a few blocks away from where I lived, where I live to this day in west Baltimore. And when I was a kid, it was a housing project that we used to call the murder mall. It was a tough project, and it's very interesting. It's kind of an interesting story because it had a grocery store, a school, retail and residential and some office. Sounds like a great project. And at the time when they were conceiving this, you know, it made sense, at least it made sense conceptually. We're going to create. Create all these things. We're going to build this community. But then it was all public housing, effectively. And so the concept that I think we all know today of avoiding poverty, concentration wasn't known in the seventies, or people didn't, hadn't seen the results yet. So the building became, the whole complex became a mess.
And when I was a kid, like I said, we call it the murder mall. My mom's first office for her newspaper, when it moved off the kitchen table was in that complex. So I used to go there after school every day. Very rough place. And took almost a decade, actually, not almost a decade. It took over a decade to get it from, to convince all the different stakeholders that needed to be convinced. And then it had all kinds of really state issues related to Amtrak and rail lines. It was just a completely difficult and time consuming, scared.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Walking around as a kid there.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Oh, that was scary. That was scary, for sure. It was a tough place.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Did you see murders or. I mean, things happen or anything like that?
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Not when I was over there. I mean. I mean, I'm from Baltimore, so, yes, I've seen. I've seen my fair share of violent crime. Crime, I think. But that particular location, I mean, when we tore it down, when we finally got the demo permit, we were able to tear it down, changed the neighborhood instantaneously.
Instantaneously. Crime went down.
It was kind of interesting. It was capital from the state's core program that allowed us to actually tear down the buildings. And it's been. And it's amazing to see the transformation. So today. So it took us forever. We got it done. Site work's done. And the first phase, which is happening right now, is lot sales to Ryan Homes. So Ryan Homes is building new townhomes, and then we plan to come back with a workforce building and a grocery anchored.
[00:50:41] Speaker A: How did you establish pricing for your townhouse?
[00:50:45] Speaker B: You know, for the lots?
[00:50:47] Speaker A: Yeah, for the lots there, because there's probably not many cops you could find in that location.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm gonna tell you a secret. Baltimore is hot.
People want to be in Baltimore, and the fact that Ryan Holmes, a national home builder who could be building anywhere in the state of Maryland, is building in Baltimore should be your clue. They're all here, all the national home Builders.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: Because if you think about the geography of this city, you know real estate 101, right? You buy the worst house on the best block of worst, but in this instance, the block is DC to Boston.
[00:51:22] Speaker A: I see what you're saying.
[00:51:23] Speaker B: The city that's got the cheapest real estate, that's got the best opportunity for growth, that has a port. I mean, obviously we have our port issues at the moment that can reach a third of the us population in a day. The furthest western inland port, the largest, roll on, roll off port Hopkins, Maryland. I mean, I mean, look, you're a good salesman. This city. This city is poised for massive growth, right? Just think about this. How many law schools in the entire state of Maryland?
What would you guess? Great. State.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: Five, maybe two.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: Where are they?
Baltimore City.
Now, Maryland is known for medical, right? How many medical schools in the state of Maryland?
[00:52:11] Speaker A: Two.
[00:52:12] Speaker B: There are two. Just two. And where are they both located? Downtown Baltimore. I am telling you that Baltimore has so much room for economic growth, it just has to shed the whole wire thing, image that's, that's hung over its head. Murders are down here massively, right? Which people don't talk about but probably should be. But the real thing here is this. Real estate's cheap and there's lots of space and all the institutions everybody want to do business with is right here. So I'm excited for Baltimore. It's Baltimore's time.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: Well, when we talked on the phone the first time, I think I might have told you that I'm an investor in a property not far from the site. It's the former Frederick Douglass High School.
[00:53:00] Speaker B: Oh, right on the west side. Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: It's. I think it's only about five blocks from this side.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Not far.
[00:53:07] Speaker A: It's tough.
[00:53:09] Speaker B: I mean, look, the way I look at it is that we are at this inflection point.
There's lots of stuff to do on the margin. And for Baltimore to take off, we have to take that margin and spread it out and capture projects like what you're talking about. But it'll happen. It will happen.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: It's just a question. Real estate, if you look at just the physical plan. Yeah, I mean, it's got a spectacular theater inside. It's unused and dilapidated. There's opportunity there physically to do something with it. It just has to have the right vision and the right.
[00:53:52] Speaker B: What Baltimore needs is we need more people. We need people who are willing to live in the city, who are excited. I mean, Baltimore is so cool. Like, people don't know there's all these cool neighborhoods and lots of places to go, and we got to build on that and we got to build on our geography, which is what we should be dominating.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: It has the label charm cities. So where did that come from? You know, you have to ask that question.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: It's there. And I firmly believe that over the next decade, Baltimore is going to be one of the greatest stories in the country.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Okay, well, that leads to your grand slam home run that you're doing now. So if you hadn't invested enough in the city of Baltimore already, you took on the redevelopment of the downtown core project Harbor Place.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: I remember touring the property in the early 1980s when it was the hottest waterfront property in the United States at the time.
So tell that story. I was able to review Gensler's plans for the project, and they are state of the art. I mean, it is very cool. I interviewed Jordan Goldstein, who's now the CEO of Gansey recently, and he was excited about it, as well as Under Armour's headquarters that they are designing. As impressive as the wharf in DC is as a waterfront project, this will certainly rival it, if not exceed your walkability and wonder.
[00:55:25] Speaker B: I love that. You just wrote my next five lines. Yes. So this, so you ask how we got involved with it. I mean, I grew up in Baltimore.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:37] Speaker B: And this was the place. You're right. In the eighties.
[00:55:40] Speaker A: Yeah, early eighties, it was the place.
[00:55:42] Speaker B: More visitors in Disney World. Oh, yeah, it was. That's how hot the place was. But times change and the project was taken over by like, you know, sort of pure corporate interest. How do I get the highest rent? Not thinking about how do I avoid killing the car that lays the golden egg? Because what made the place cool was the cool retailers and all these weirdness. And then it became a mall.
And guess what? Guess what doesn't work. You don't pay to park at a mall and you don't need a mall on the waterfront. And if you're going to get the same goods that I can get on the Internet or at one of our other lovely malls in town, why am I coming down town bearing traffic, paying for parking, do all those things to buy a t shirt that I could order from Amazon or go to the mall and pick up. And the answer is, you're not. And so it failed. And that's not the only reason, obviously. But over time, these projects, especially a project as brand as this, these things need to be revisited. Now, my argument has been, and the reason we got involved is because, honestly, there's only a few people in this town who would be willing to do something like this. Oh, I should say this, there's only a few people in this town who have the capability to do something like this.
[00:57:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:57:06] Speaker B: And then there's no one in the town who'd be willing to do something like this other than Peter and Dave. And the reason is for what you can imagine, the publicity of it all. I mean, mc, we've been doing this for 20 years.
We, if we're talking to someone, we're talking to someone in the space, like you, about real estate, what we invest in and those kinds of things, those are the conversations that Peter and I are used to. All of a sudden, we're thrust into, you know, everybody wanting to talk to us about everything. And with the unenviable role, I would say, of, of trying to solve all people's problems, which we cannot do and which we told people we're not here to do that.
But what we are here to do is make a major investment in downtown in a way that, quite frankly, in addition to it being an amazing project, it's really asset protection. We're huge investors in this city. Both Peter and I love this town. We both went to school here. We love everything about the city. And so there's that sort of psychic investment and then there's also the financial investment which is impacted if our crown jewel is failing, which it is and has been for a long time. And downtown Baltimore, like other downtowns, like DC, is facing an existential crisis around the office space and major investment is needed. And we think this sort of mixed use, walkable, active, you know, pedestrian prioritizing redevelopment is catalytic. And so that's, that's what's happened.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: So talk about your vision a little more. I mean, what for this project? I mean, this is, it's quite ambitious.
[00:58:57] Speaker B: It's ambitious. I mean, but, you know, I don't think you can do a project like this without having big vision. It's just not possible.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: Why Gensler? Why did you talk to them? Not with some other.
[00:59:08] Speaker B: We talked to a lot of firms and we chose Gensler for a couple of reasons. One is the Baltimore office is led by a gentleman named Vahkima, who is an incredible architect and who really helped us put together an awesome team. So Gensler is the lead. But then we also have BCT and we have three xn from Copenhagen. BCT is from Baltimore, too. We have three xn from Copenhagen. And then we have this amazing team of unknown studio biohabitats and Salt and Campbell Britt. We put together this whole team, all different levels of different pieces of expertise to come up with this master plan.
And Gens was great because they got the heft to really execute and really sort of bring all these pieces together and produce the materials we need to convince the neighborhoods and the voters and the government officials and ultimately investors that there's a project here that's executable and doable. So it's kind of exciting. So very happy with what Gensler has done so far and excited to get on to the next steps here.
[01:00:21] Speaker A: So how is it? How about the financing? Have you organized all that now?
[01:00:25] Speaker B: No, because we really, right now, are in zoning.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:00:30] Speaker B: Right. We need to get through zoning and planning, which is really. So the first step to this process was getting city council approval and mayoral approval, which we have. The next process step is getting voter approval. So in November, we need the citizens of Baltimore City to come out and vote in support of the plan. Then once we have that, then we'll turn to hardcore drawings, endorsement of the vote. There's no, no, we are not. There's no financial assets.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: So why do you need the city to vote on that?
[01:01:01] Speaker B: Because the original project was done by charter amendment. So therefore, any changes to the zoning, the changes to the zoning that, that we would need include an amendment to the city charter.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: So it's not just city council.
[01:01:18] Speaker B: It has to be, but it's going to be on the ball.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: General election.
[01:01:21] Speaker B: The general election in November will be on the ballot. And I love it. And people say, well, why do you love that? I said, because it's a chance for people to really say what they want and whether there's support or not. Because, look, here's the deal, and I've said this before, Peter and I need this project like we need a hole in the head. But we, we understand its importance. We know it has to be done, and it should be done by somebody who loves this place and who is going to be here and have to look neighbors in the face and, you know, I got to live here.
[01:01:54] Speaker A: After you saw those plans from Gensler, your developer, Gene's head, and say, oh, this is going to be fun.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: It's exciting. Oh, yeah, it's exciting for sure. I mean, so one of the coolest buildings is the sale building, which was. So we did an international design competition, and we selected three xn from Copenhagen. They won the competition. We had some of the best architects in the world come to Baltimore, pitch us different ideas.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: Did you go to Copenhagen and see what they've done?
[01:02:23] Speaker B: I didn't, but members of our team went to Copenhagen, and I gotta tell you, unbelievable. It's, it's unbelievable, the building, and I'm so excited about it because triangular shaped.
[01:02:34] Speaker A: Building that kind of goes up.
[01:02:35] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:02:36] Speaker A: It's fantastic.
[01:02:37] Speaker B: And it has the combination of the outdoor space, indoor space. Now, of course, we have the unenviable position of making sure the math works.
[01:02:47] Speaker A: That's why I asked the question, which.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: Is going to be, we think, a combination of venue space, market based retailers, and then some really cool, you know, restaurant space. We think we, we can make math work. So we're pretty excited.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I read, and maybe I'm. I don't know if it's accurate or not. You're estimating to be about a 900 million dollar project.
[01:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah, between 900 and a billion.
Yeah. And, but, so it's very important to break it out, though. The actual buildings themselves, we think, are four to 500 million.
The real. The other piece, though, there's $400 million in there of public space infrastructure. And it's not just infrastructure, it's actually parks. It's some of its infrastructure and roads. But the biggest piece to it is the promenade. So there's this beautiful promenade that surrounds the water that was originally developed, you know, and it's a huge park that really covers, that goes all the way around the Baltimore waterfront. And the promenade here in front of harbor place is failing. It's flooding. It's failing in the new conduit. It needs all kinds of things. So a huge chunk of that money, that public is going into the promenade because, and I say, I try to explain this to people who say, oh, it's publicized. Like, listen to me, whether we do this project or not, you still have to do that. You can't hide from that. The only thing that's happening is by doing it in conjunction with us, you're getting buildings that pay taxes.
[01:04:18] Speaker A: Well, you're going to need bonds. It seems to me the city will have to float bonds or the state or somebody to do that.
[01:04:24] Speaker B: The city is not, city does not have. There's no intention for the city to put in any money. This isn't this. That project was previously done with federal money, and the goal is to raise money from the state and federal government for those, for those, for that infrastructure stuff. And the state's already committed, you know, well over 60 million towards the project.
[01:04:47] Speaker A: Interesting.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:04:48] Speaker A: So you have to go to the feds now, too.
[01:04:50] Speaker B: We will, but we're not doing anything until we get our approvals. We got to get through. We got to get through our.
[01:04:55] Speaker A: So not until after November.
[01:04:57] Speaker B: After November, then we'll continue with the fundraising process.
[01:05:00] Speaker A: That's fascinating. Yeah, it's going to be fun to see.
[01:05:04] Speaker B: Maybe not fun to do, but it'll be fun to see.
[01:05:09] Speaker A: Your commit to us at Baltimore is bold and impressive. Other than the Under Armoured founder Kevin Plank there may not be a larger proponent of Baltimore real estate now. Perhaps explain your optimism and why companies you've already done outside the Baltimore should consider locating here. Anything you want to?
[01:05:27] Speaker B: No, I just want to say to you that it's the biggest barrier, honestly, is just getting people here. And it won't be long because we have a new leader at GDC, the Greater Baltimore committee. We have so much institutional coordination that never used to happen before. Now we have this massive institutional coordination with Maryland and UMB and the Orioles and the ravens and all the folks who are saying, well, wait a minute, this is a great place. We need more investment with. David Rubenstein just acquired the word.
[01:06:03] Speaker A: I mean, that's huge.
[01:06:04] Speaker B: Baltimore is going to. Baltimore is poised for so much growth. It's very exciting.
[01:06:09] Speaker A: Let me express a theory I have based on David Rubenstein, because he's a native baltimorean, but he's invested so much in Washington, DC. I mean, he's the largest proponent of the National Mall I think there is, and investing in documents and everything in one. So my sense is he could bring the two cities together, and that's what Baltimore needs. Needs some way to facilitate transportation between the cities other than Mark, you know, like, as we've always read about this high speed train, like we have in Japan, if you could have that, Baltimore real estate would have a huge shot from that.
[01:06:48] Speaker B: Listen, you know, I will say to you that connecting to DC is, and I don't know whether the answer is, you know, what the answer is in terms of rail transportation, whatever. But I will tell you this.
If you think about the real estate opportunity here, the price of real estate relative to the huge opportunity in town, the connectivity to DC train station in the heart of the city, ten minutes to the airport waterfront, all of those things. Like, I look at a city, I look at some of these other post industries cities, many of which have staged comebacks. Like Detroit, for example. Detroit would kill for any one of those things that I just mentioned. Yet they really have none of it right. And they've somehow.
[01:07:36] Speaker A: Well, they've got the waterfront there.
[01:07:38] Speaker B: Not like our waterfront.
[01:07:41] Speaker A: I grew, I'm a native Detroiter.
[01:07:42] Speaker B: I'm just gonna say there's almost no waterfront like what we have here in Baltimore.
[01:07:48] Speaker A: Nothing. Not the walk.
[01:07:50] Speaker B: And what I would say is, if you line us up against other places, we've got more opportunity than anybody. It's just a question of whether we are going to lean into it. I mean, our governor's fond of saying that we're asset rich and strategy poor. And that strategy part, a lot of it, due to his leadership, is turning around and he's giving people a reason to come together and figure out how do we leverage these assets and execute. And it's exciting.
[01:08:25] Speaker A: So even with a huge focus on Baltimore City, you have projects now in Baltimore county with the affordable housing Initiative, Waldorf Maryland, and a joint venture with Greenberg Gibbons in Chicago with your science and health initiative and your industrial project in Aberdeen. You mentioned, mentioned earlier. Are you able to stay in the mix on all these projects, or do you rely heavily on your team to manage them?
[01:08:49] Speaker B: The latter, for sure.
It's so funny. People will say, rebel, how do you do all of this? I don't.
That's not my job.
My job is to find the best professionals that I can who want to be part of this machine and give them what they need to be successful.
Yeah, we can't. We can't operate like that. I mean, we have 4 millionft under construction at the moment. 4 millionft, that's a lot. We will do tons of leases. We will execute, you know, we will execute deals. We're in, you know, Florida and, you know, and Chicago and Illinois.
[01:09:29] Speaker A: So you rely heavily on your team.
[01:09:31] Speaker B: Heavily. And we have a great team at McD. Peter and I, a long time ago, realized for what we want to do, we can't do it by ourselves. We recently just hired, brought in as a partner and now president of MCV, Gina Baker Chambers, who was at Artemis. Artemis was a big investor with us. We've done half a billion dollars worth of deals with Artemis over the years. And Gina was looking for something entrepreneurial, and it lined up perfectly. So through one of her team members who approached us about potentially doing some business together. And I was lucky enough to get an audience with Debbie in a small world story. At the time, Artemis general counsel, the lady who was their general counsel was my law school professor.
Yes. And between that and, of course, we had a track record. They were very interested. Artemis has a program that's focused on supporting emerging managers. And that program which Gina worked on was instrumental in getting us some of our first pension investors.
They've been. Artemis has been just incredible to work with and they've been so good to MCD over the years.
[01:10:46] Speaker A: So what did they invest in? I mean, what type? Was it a certain product type or.
[01:10:51] Speaker B: Everything they invest in? Artemis has primarily invested with us and in retail, industrial and office.
[01:11:01] Speaker A: So are there any projects I mentioned? We talked about a lot of projects. Is there anything I've missed in that you want to, you know, champion a little bit more?
[01:11:11] Speaker B: No, I mean, I think you hit the big ones that we're working on. The only other, you know, large scale project that we're, that's recently been announced is we're working on a lot large scale project in Montgomery county, which we're pretty excited about. Mixed use project that's just at the very early stages. But we, I will tell you that, you know, like I said, there's 14 and a half million feet of sitting here in our operating portfolio. Another 4 millionft under construction. There's always something to talk about at MCV.
So, you know, we got a lot of exciting projects in a lot of different communities.
We're very, we're feeling quite optimistic about, you know, where we sit in relative to our journey as a company, as a firm, and a lot of exciting opportunity ahead.
[01:12:00] Speaker A: So talk a little bit more about your team. You talked about Gina and I read a little bit about her.
I think she started at Goldman Sachs before she was at Artemis. Is that correct?
[01:12:12] Speaker B: I don't think so. I think she was at Fannie Mae.
[01:12:15] Speaker A: Fannie Mae.
[01:12:15] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
But she's in the next room so we can ask her. But. So, yeah. So Gina's been great, as I mentioned, came over as a president. My partner Mike trail is our chief investment officer. He started here with us, with us as an analyst after he left corporate office properties trusts. That's probably twelve plus years ago. Drew Gorman, who has been a shopping center acquisitions specialist and developer for 30 plus years, joined us after he left Echo. That's after stint set federal and Faison.
[01:12:52] Speaker A: I've met him before.
[01:12:54] Speaker B: Oh, Drew. Okay.
Incredibly experienced. And of course, Peter and me, that's the team, that's the partners.
[01:13:02] Speaker A: And then I know that Dan Rigo works for you.
[01:13:04] Speaker B: Yes, Dan Rigaud runs our multifamily development division, which has been very busy. You mentioned the project we're building with Greenburg Gibbons in Waldorf. We're also building a project here for Morgan state student housing.
Another one that we're working with that's by the Hopkins campus. And then the deal I mentioned in Frederick and then several other projects on the drawing board.
[01:13:29] Speaker A: Sustainably sustainability appears to be a focus of the firm, talk about your commitment to it and other aspects of ESG.
[01:13:38] Speaker B: So I would say to you that those things are really just in NCB's DNA. They're not. They are, you know, before they were a thing, they were just things that we did anyway to the extent we could. I think now where we're moving and where the industry is moving is more towards documenting those things and understanding how they impact the deal and the community where you're doing business. I think the thing that I'll say that I think is somewhat, when you think about the environmental piece, I think now people are very focused on it, but they also understand, understand the ROI. And so with all the environmental stuff we do, there's a big focus on what is the ROI on those things, and are they performative, are we just doing them because we want to say we did something? Or can we really show that making these investments actually impacts the overall health of the project? I think solar panels is a great example, or, you know, other decarbonization efforts. But now with the, with the new rules that are being promulgated through Doe, I think there really is a chance to really show how these decarbonization efforts can turn into value for investors and communities on the social side. It's very interesting because that's in our DNA. You can tell from some of the projects that we talked about today, they're important to us. And that's because of who the leadership here at team, at MCD is. Is we want to be placed better than when we. And is every deal perfect? Now, I'm not going to sit here and say every deal checks every box, because it just doesn't. But when we can make those investments and we can say, hey, this is a deal that fits this, our ability to really impact the community, we want to do it, we want to lean in, and we know it has extra costs because it does. But it's worth it. That's great.
[01:15:35] Speaker A: Since this podcast is aimed at young real estate professionals, please offer for your thoughts on where you focus today. If you were new in the business, in both the investment and development businesses, product types, geographies, niches, what would you be focused on if you were new in the business today?
[01:15:51] Speaker B: Good question. And I'll tell you the, I think you gotta go to where the action is, which in my mind is gonna be office.
Yeah. Cause that's where the distress is.
That's where the money's gonna be made. But you know, there's always going to be room in retail and multifamily. And they'll always be room in industrial these days. But the thing to keep in mind is that things change over time. When I got into this business, raising money for industrial from institutional investors was impossible. They wouldn't. They wouldn't do it. Even though some of our best deals back then were industrial. They're like, oh, God, industrial. They all wanted big, shiny offices buildings. Now none of them want big. Now they all want industrial buildings. And it's shocking to me. I used to make money converting industrial to retail. Now industrial rents in some markets are higher than retail rents. And so the world continues to change.
[01:16:49] Speaker A: How about regional shopping centers?
[01:16:51] Speaker B: I mean, our business is very retail. We do a lot of retail and we love retail. We think retail is one of the biggest opportunities there is right now because it's been off the run for so long, it's been underinvested, and people don't recognize the value creation opportunity.
[01:17:08] Speaker A: Well, the redevelopment opportunity, it's huge.
[01:17:10] Speaker B: It's huge. It's a once in a lifetime, no question.
[01:17:13] Speaker A: So, Dave, let's shift now to personal questions.
[01:17:16] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:17:17] Speaker A: What are your life priorities among family, work and giving back?
[01:17:21] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. Not sure I've ever ranked those things, but they're all very important to me. Obviously, family's more important than anything.
You know, I was lucky to grow up in a very loving family. Demanding, but loving. And I want to make sure I provide the same to my wife and my children. And I love what I do. I love deals. I love business.
I love the process of value creation. So I love it. And, you know, giving back is this in my soul. It's like, you know, it's how I grew up, sharing and being part of a community and making sure that people know you're there and that you can count on them. All those things are important, but obviously, family first.
[01:18:06] Speaker A: So since your father was an episcopal priest, did that kind of give you that whole charitable giving spirit?
[01:18:17] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. When I was a kid, my dad used to give my toys away.
And he's still like that. He's what? My dad, my father, my parents, both of them, are some of the most giving people that you'll ever run into. And so it's. It's. It's a. I feel very lucky.
[01:18:33] Speaker A: It's in your genes.
[01:18:35] Speaker B: It is. You're very lucky.
[01:18:37] Speaker A: So what advice would you give your 25 year old self today? Now, you. We talked about, you know, from a business standpoint. What about general life advice?
[01:18:46] Speaker B: It's. I gotta tell you, it's the same thing that I make my kids say about hard work. That poem that we talked about earlier.
So much of this, of everything, is just being there, is showing up and being there and being ready for whatever your opportunity is. And I describe this to young people all the time. I said, look, you don't know when your opportunity is going to knock. You just don't know it's going to. One day there's going to be an opportunity in front of you.
Will you recognize that it's an opportunity, or will you be too scared? Will you be too scared to fail? Will you be afraid to take the step, to take the risk? Then the opportunity is going to come. Will you know what to do with it? You know? Will you know? Oh, well, if I get that, I know exactly what to do with. And those are the things that I try to impress upon people. Because you don't know how your life is going to turn out. Who is going to walk into your life and give you an opportunity to do something? Or when you think a door is shut, that there's really a side door, and all you got to do is look around the corner. And so that's what I encourage people, is work really hard, be prepared, and then most importantly, when that opportunity comes, drive a freight train through it. Drive a train through it, do your best, stay up till four in the morning, get it all done, get it done accurately, and use that opportunity to find the next opportunity. And I think that sometimes can get lost, which is being prepared. And that means studying. That means knowing what you're talking about. That means when you finally get the guy on the phone or the lady on the phone you've been trying to get on the phone for, know what you're talking about. Be ready to ask the questions you wanted to ask, prepare. And it's hard because you're preparing sometimes not even knowing when the opportunity's gonna come. But that's what you gotta do.
[01:20:40] Speaker A: That's where your law school education came in, I'm sure. Preparation center. So if you could post a statement on a billboard on the Baltimore bill, normally as the DC bill, but in this case, we're in Baltimore.
[01:20:53] Speaker B: Well, I posted on the DC Beltway.
[01:20:55] Speaker A: For millions to see. What would it say?
[01:20:58] Speaker B: I would say Baltimore on the rise. There you go. And I'd put that on the DC Beltway, too.
[01:21:05] Speaker A: There you go.
So, Dave, we've had an interesting conversation. Anything else you'd like to say or share with my listeners? And my listeners are primarily DC area people, but I'm now getting out there.
[01:21:19] Speaker B: Well, I would tell your listeners that Baltimore is a huge opportunity. I think that economies between Baltimore, DC, the surrounding counties are all getting more and more connected, not less connected. And there are big opportunities afoot in this little city to the north. And we want to see you here, we want to see your investments, we want to see your dollars. We want to see you coming to visit us. And you won't regret it.
[01:21:44] Speaker A: I think it's important because what I've seen, I'll just share my views of not just Baltimore, but the whole region.
We've seen a wading towards the west, at least in the DC market, with northern Virginia being kind of becoming more of the central. But now with Baltimore hopefully germinating more, it'll pull back to center more or less, you know, coming back across the river a little bit. But in our area, we've seen Virginia really just kind of take off.
So it's interesting, you know, because of what's going on with the pandemic, I think things are hopefully going to evolve back.
[01:22:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and I think you also got to think about having a governor who's excited about growth and economic growth. I think that matters. And I think that having all these different things sort of lined up to push things forward.
[01:22:41] Speaker A: Dave, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. All right.
[01:22:46] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
