Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hi, I'm John Ko and welcome to icons of D.C. area real estate, a.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: One on one interview show featuring the backgrounds, career trajectories and insights of the top luminaries in the Washington D.C. area Real estate market. The purpose of the show was to explore their journeys, how they got started, the pivotal moments that shaped their careers, and the lessons they've learned along the way. We also dive into their current work, industry trends, and some fascinating behind the scenes stories that bring unique perspective to our industry. Commercial Real Estate before we dive into today's conversation, I'd like to share some exciting news.
The icons of D.C. area Real estate Podcast is now part of the Iconic Journey in cre, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting professionals at every stage of their real estate careers.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: With our new website www.ijcre.org, we're expanding.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Opportunities for everyone in the industry.
If you're a student or new to the industry, I encourage you to join the Iconic Journey and CRE community, an exclusive space for learning, mentorship and networking.
If you're an early to mid career professional navigating career transitions, our career coaching curriculum provides structured guidance to help you move forward with confidence.
If you're an experienced professional looking to give back to the industry, I invite you to consider sponsoring or donating to the Iconic Journey and CRE nonprofit to help foster the next generation of commercial real estate leaders.
And for everyone, the best way to stay connected is to subscribe to this podcast, whether directly or on Apple or Spotify so you don't miss an episode. The podcast has been delivering twice monthly episodes since August 2019 and I'm thrilled to continue these conversations under the nonprofit umbrella. Expanding Our Reach and Impact.
To learn more about our community, career coaching or sponsorship opportunities, please visit our new website, www.ijcre.org. thank you for being part of this journey and now let's get started with today's guest.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of icons of D.C. area real estate.
Today we have a true strategic visionary. Joining us, Evan Reagan Levine, the Chief Strategy Officer of JBG Smith.
Among the most prominent real estate operators in the Washington region, Eben plays a pivotal role in shaping JBG Smith's investment approaches through data and analytics, driving large scale strategic initiatives, managing investor relations and overseeing their venture capital investments. His work is deeply cross vertical, focusing on investing, enhancing product and process, especially at the intersection of market research and design.
As you probably know, JBG Smith is the driving force behind the immense transformation of National Landing, the home of Amazon's second headquarters and Virginia Tech's Innovation Campus.
Eben's expertise extends to understanding the critical role of placemaking and creating vibrant mixed use environments, emphasizing the importance of diversifying anchors and leveraging creative partnerships in today's dynamic market.
He views real estate as a people driven industry advocating for the powerful trifecta of communication, analytics and design in successful development.
His insights are particularly relevant as the role of Chief Strategy Officer. Increasing Lee demands strong analytical and financial acumen in navigating market uncertainties.
Beyond groundbreaking developments, JBG Smith, under leadership like Evans, is also deeply committed to community impact with significant philanthropic investments in affordable housing and education initiatives in the National Capital Region.
In the past I've interviewed Matt Kelly, Moyna Banerjee Matt Kelly, CEO Moyna Banerjee, CFO and AJ Jackson, leader of Leo Impact Capital, which is the affordable housing investment vehicle that the company has had Join us as we dive deep into the strategies and philosophies behind building iconic real estate, navigating market changes and contributing to the enduring vibrancy of our communities. It's an honor to welcome Evan Reagan Levine to the show.
So welcome Evan to icons of D.C. real estate. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:05:29] Speaker C: Thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: As a preface to our conversation, I'd like to say that I brought the iconic journey in CRE community to National Landing Marketing Center. It's been been probably two, three years ago when you first opened, I think I think so.
And your presentation was among the best I have ever seen with 3D graphics, lighting and virtual reality. It was quite spectacular. I appreciate that.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: I'm glad you enjoyed it. We try to do our best to sort of bring everything to life, especially three years ago when not as much as real and tangible and out of the ground as it is now.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Well, you expressed your vision quite well. I thought so. As Chief Strategy Officer at JBG Smith, your role involves shaping investment approaches with data, strategic initiatives and partnerships. What are the top two to three strategic priorities for JBG Smith in the National Landing region today?
[00:06:30] Speaker C: So I think National Landing is really special and unique for a lot of reasons. And the the first of those is that when you think about what happened to national landing back in 2010, 2011, it went through the BRAC process and that for people who don't know, is Base Realignment Enclosure. And what that reflected was a seismic shift in the demand landscape for real estate as the military moved people out of leased space onto owned facilities and bases. And it really became the prototype for a lot of what happened to the rest of the world, although we didn't know it at the time, with COVID and the pandemic and the shift in demand patterns for office. And so when we actually acquired national landing back in 2017 and closed our merger with Vornado, one of the things we sort of were faced with was what the rest of the world would be faced with three years later. So it gave us a little bit of a head start to create a plan and a strategy to approach how to reconfigure and reimagine this office market and change it. I think when you talk about big strategic priorities now, I think number one is finishing that plan. And when we think about what's happened there, it's not just bringing Amazon. We talk a lot about Amazon. Amazon was a huge win. It's great. You can talk about that as much as you like. But I think the other big piece is the transformation of that environment. That's residential, that's retail, and it's infrastructure, and it's figuring out how all those things come together and get mixed. And we can't take our eye off the ball on that. It wasn't enough to sort of win Amazon. We now had to then contend with the pandemic and the transforming patterns of office demand that we saw along with the rest of the world and while also reimagining this market. So I think strategic priority number one is that it's really figuring out how to take advantage of that. I'd say strategic priority number two for us in a lot of ways is a mixed one, but it's really. It's continuing our legacy of capital allocation. That's something that our Chief Investment Officer, George Anders, our CEO, Matt Kelly, all of us are very focused on is understanding how we allocate capital. And we've been doing things like buying back our own shares. We've been doing things like making, you know, really targeted office acquisition and Tysons that we talk about. But our strategic priority is always how do we maximize nav per share? How do we really think about capital allocation in the right way to drive value for our investors?
[00:08:34] Speaker A: That's great.
So let's shift now back to your origin story, if we could, a little bit. So where did you grow up and talk about your parents and your influences when you were growing up?
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Sounds great. So I grew up all over. I was actually born in Charlottesville, Virginia.
My dad is a law professor. Teaches legal writing and advocacy. Yeah. So he was teaching at UVA when I was born. And the career of an academic sort of takes you all over the place. And I went from Charlottesville down to Fayetteville, Arkansas for a couple years, taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. So I got a whole different sort of perspective on that growing up. Then we moved to Philadelphia. And in Philadelphia he taught a temple law school and was.
That's sort of where I spent most of my childhood. And then from there, when I came down here to go to school, Georgetown for undergrad. My dad and mom moved to Pittsburgh where he's teaching at Duquesne Law School. So he's had sort of a variety of sort of different academic assignments and sort of locations and being, you know, law professor, tenure professor and dean, all these different sort of things. So it's kept my childhood sort of interesting in that we moved and traveled and saw a lot of different parts of the country and places.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Did he ever practice law or do you.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: He did. He practiced law in Boston for years at a law school before I was born. And one of the things he wanted to do was prioritize having a family, having time for a family. He really enjoyed teaching, which is interesting. A lot of people go to law, being a law professor, to write constitutional treatises and things like that. My dad has always been a real. I had a real focus on not only teaching and his students, but also on really the experience of actually practicing law, which to him is really important. And that's one of the reasons he gravitated so much to legal writing and teaching lawyers really practical skills and a fellow advocacy. How do you go and argue your case and present yourself? Which was such a huge focus for him as a practicing attorney who became a professor.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: So growing up in that environment and since he shifted from being an attorney to teaching, raising children was a focus on teaching for you, I imagine, right?
[00:10:35] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, my mom was a first grade teacher also before she retired.
I definitely got a lot of critiques on all my written. My written papers as a kid. It's hard to do a book report with both of them as parents can be kind of challenging. So, yeah, I'd say had an influence.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So academics was important to you early on then?
[00:10:56] Speaker C: I think it was. It's not even as much academics. It's just curiosity and love of learning. I mean, as long as I can remember, I would sit. My dad would put on a record for me when I was a little kid and I would read books in sort of this library, studying the area at home. And it was always about what I was interested in and exploring interest and creativity and learning about it and then being able to speak to it and articulate it. And I think that was something that, whether it's work interests or personal interests, curiosity was always the big focus, maybe in some ways even more than academics.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: So your dad was an attorney. Did law interest you at all or was that something.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: I thought I was going to go to law school. It's actually went to Georgetown. Undergraduate, did a degree in political science. Science. I wrote my thesis on Air Force institutional pathology. I thought I was going to go work something Department of Defense related.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Really.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: I thought that was always really interesting. And that comes back when we talk about everything we're doing in National Landing. But yeah, I thought I was definitely, definitely, definitely going to go to law school. And my dad told me, he says, why don't you go work for a year or two, go out in the world, work, get a job. He said it'll help you get into a better law school and it'll give you some perspective on maybe what you really want to do when you practice.
And he had sort of told me, look, don't go be a lawyer. Don't just default to this. Don't do this because I did this or because you've seen interviews. You think you'd be good at that. Go get some real world experience. And that's one of the reasons why when I graduated, I went to real estate and obviously never left. I don't think law school is in the cards for me right now, but I was so fascinated by real estate that I stuck around. But yeah, that was a big original goal for me.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: So when did the real estate book bite?
[00:12:31] Speaker C: So for me, I've always been interested in it. I think part of it was moving so much at first with my parents. And if you really kind of go all the way back, it was understanding.
I loved houses and I loved seeing new developments. It was fascinating to go into a room and you'd see the plan for the development laid out and you'd understand the sort of symmetry and rhythm and order of how people designed housing developments or even small communities where you build a house. And I was always so interested in that as a kid and as I got older, the real, I think, formative moment for me where I thought about this as a career was actually because of a general education requirement, art class.
And so I just talked about writing about the Department of Defense and International affairs and stuff like that that I really enjoyed and was fascinated by. But I had an art professor, this guy, Tom Sinakis, and he said to me once, and this is really funny. We're doing this art class, and he says, you draw like an architect. Now, I always love design, and design's been a huge part of my life and interests, but I never really thought about this in any serious way. And he said, you draw like an architect. You really ought to consider doing that.
And I said, okay, well, I'm not gonna do this. This is my last year. I'm about to get out of school. I'm ready to go. But he convinced me to talk to a friend of his who was at uli.
And it was really interesting as I read more about what ULI did. And I got involved in just kind of reading things, looking at stuff. I said, this could be really interesting field. And so I went and I did an internship with a group that did tax credit historic development in Pittsburgh. And that's where I got the bug. And I said, okay, I really want to do this.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Were you at Georgetown at the time?
[00:14:02] Speaker C: I was.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Interesting, because Georgetown undergraduate, maybe at that time, didn't really have a.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Nothing really. No, not at all. I mean, I was as far from the business school as you could get. I lived with a bunch of foreign service students. I was really immersed in sort of the political and international affairs world. I volunteered for a couple different campaigns and things like that. And so I was much more in the traditional Georgetown law school path than I was real estate or business. And I thought that this was so intriguing. Let me go try and find a way to explore it outside of school that wouldn't derail me, but where I could say, all right, let me maybe not do an internship or something back in D.C. although I'd applied for some and ended up getting some interesting stuff. But I said, let me go try this crazy thing to do development. And I just. I was hooked. I took so much that I ended up graduating a year early to go take a job at JLL in their research group. Because it was just. I couldn't shake this. And I thought, let me go do this and see if I can do it for a little while.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Why jll?
[00:15:00] Speaker C: So actually I had applied. Well, I looked at JVG originally, which is of kind funny. I love telling this story. And I had in my head at the time, it's funny, I sit in the investments group now. But I said, I want to be a development analyst because I thought, okay, development, that's what they do. We want to build the buildings. And I didn't quite understand the full landscape. I hadn't gone to business school. I hadn't been Sort of in that program. And so I wasn't thinking about the investments track that I'm on now. But JVG only had investments analyst positions. And I said, okay, I don't want to do that. And I wanted a firm that had some big reach where I might have the chance to travel or work on a lot of different stuff. And I didn't want to pigeonhole myself too early. I wanted to do something that was interesting and academically focused, sort of intellectually rigorous. And I found JLL's research group, and it was at the time led by John Skytis and Scott Homa, who were both Georgetown alums. So I had sort of a leg up there and meeting them. And I started to connect with more people like John Kevl at the time, who was in the investment sales group at JLL through that Georgetown connection. And it was my first sort of experience with that, stepped into professional networking. But that also sort of exposed me to this big multinational, interesting firm, and they wanted me. So I thought, well, you know, let's go give this a shot and try it out. And I loved it.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: So what did you learn there? How did you dive into it?
[00:16:15] Speaker C: I think, and I tell people this all the time, I think that a brokerage firm is an incredible place to start your career. Because I was exposed. I remember the first thing I worked on was helping the investment sales team put together an offering of random apartment building. That was the first time I had ever really understood, okay, how do people think about things like cash flows and market analysis and development costs and all these different inputs. I had just never really thought about that or seen that all in one place. And at the same time, I would work on that. And then a couple, you know, week or so later, I would be on an office leasing pitch to go secure the leasing assignment for a to be built office building. And then I would work on talking to our investor clients about where they should invest in following demographic patterns. And I saw all these interesting aspects of the business and I had to learn how they worked, at least to sort of a high level, you know, analyst level, where I was doing a small piece of the bigger pie. But I got great mentorship, I got great exposure, and that kind of helped me launch into what I wanted to do within the real estate world.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting you were a general generalist up front, which is, I think, a great way to start, because you see everything and if you're smart enough, which I know you are, you start to see patterns develop. So how things Kind of fit together.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: That's so true.
It's not just. It's funny, you're right. You see all the patterns in the interplay, but you also learn about all the different people. I think people is always at the core of real estate business. For me, it's such a people driven industry that I got to meet and work with and experience a lot of different people and see how different firms work. And there are patterns even in that that help guide you to where you sort of wanted to end up.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: It's interesting when I started in brokerage and I go back to Coldwell Banker when it was before cbre and you know, the leasing people were the leasing people, investment people were the investment people. There wasn't much integration. It was interesting. Everyone's kind of siloed in their own little space.
But it's interesting, as I came in as the first investment guy in this office, I was working with everybody because nobody else had knew how to run spreadsheets and do any of that kind of thing. This was 1982, so sit down.
So it was interesting to see the different patterns develop. And then I started helping people think, you know, think a little bit broader than just office buildings or retail or industrial because things start to integrate together a little bit more, which is interesting, actually.
[00:18:39] Speaker C: I totally agree. And I think that, you know, when you look at the way the brokerage firms train their people, I think you can learn a lot from the way people set up things like a wheel program where you get exposure, because it helps a lot of young people, even when they join here. We see this all the time, you know, as a mixed use developer, maybe they start doing one thing, but they really want to do another. And it helps to get exposure because these companies, these. I don't even, I hesitate to call them even brokerage firms because what they really are is that's kind of an old parlance. And so much of this is that the real estate service is of kind companies and they do so many different things that it's a, it is a great place to start because you can hone and refine different skill sets, but you can also figure out what it is you actually want to do. And I think that you're right to the point that the best people I met, the most impressive, you know, people who work at JLL early in my career, were people who could, like you said, bridge those gaps. You know, an investment sales guy who's selling office, who doesn't know about the office market, who isn't plugged in to tenant activity or to why one building makes more sense than another.
They're ultimately not going to be as successful as the people who are spending all the time with the leasing guys, you know, talking about what makes that building special. Why does this work, why does that not work? Those are insights that you can really glean, at least I found from spending time across those different verticals. And that's something that I think informed even the way that I thought about JBG and joining a firm like this.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Well, what's interesting, I look at real estate in three dimensions. One is communications, two is analytics, and three is design.
So how do those intersect and how do they intersect effectively?
And if you can see that with those patterns early in your career, I think you can develop pretty at least figure out exactly where your strengths are and how you can develop them.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: I couldn't agree more. And I think that honestly, one of the strange experiences of my career has been that you think a lot about communication and analytics is being part of this. I think design often gets short shrift and I don't think that's fair. And I think that again, the most successful people in the real estate space have an understanding of all three of those things and an ability to manage projects and people. And I think that, you know, the seeing that pattern early on, one of the things that I've been really focused on because I do love design so much and I do think about that a lot. I have a lot of great relationships with architects. Some of the people I was most influenced by early in my career, one of them, Andrew Masters at jll, who was a.
Yes, he was an office broker, but he also understood how to build a building. He understood how a building was designed, how it was built, what design changes would make something not work. Well, because he had long experience leasing it and developing it and building it, he had a varied career and I'll never forget sitting with him and he would sketch out the different components of not only a space plan, but we would look at a floor in section and understand how to set the H Vac up the right way. And this is beyond what a lot of brokers do, but he was able to sit with his clients and, and explain to them not only when he would sit with a tenant, he could explain why that building was the best design building and why it demanded more rent than a computing building across the street, and why they should pay it. But he also could explain to his investor client on the other side, why do you need to make these design decisions? And he was such an effective communicator at explaining that I always took that away, that he had a deep knowledge of the design. It wasn't like a lot of people I've met over the years and you've met over the years, I'm sure, who sort of pick up one or two terms and can throw it out there, but really say it doesn't matter, it's all commodity. It's absolutely not a commodity. And I think that's where an office and multifamily, someone who understands why and then can put numbers behind it, analyze it, prove it, and then communicate that that's that trifecta that you're talking about. That's that skill set that's really significant. But you can't do any of those things without the other piece of the sort of side of the triangle there. That's the fun part.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Well, some of it's visual and some of it is ambiance and it's subtle and so you can look at plans, but sometimes it's an atmosphere and a way you set things up. And people don't even realize what they've done in some cases.
And that's a very sophisticated way of designing something. It's true.
[00:22:31] Speaker C: But we've all been in spaces that fall flat, that don't feel special. We've all been in spaces that when you go into them, you just say, wow, this is amazing. But some of those, wow, it's amazing. They also don't work very well. And I think of buildings are. They're machines. At the end of the day, they're really finely tuned machines. And to design a great machine that resonates, that sort of disappears, you have to have a really firm understanding of the human quality, of how people actually move through spaces, how they interact with them. And the cool thing about what all of us do in the real estate space is ultimately we build the backdrop for everyone's life. You can't escape the built environment. It's everywhere. And for so many people, it's background. And when it works really well, it's okay that it's background. Sometimes you don't have to be wowed by every space, but nothing should annoy you or irritate you. And I think the great people in our industry understand how to deliver that and to work with and refine, partner with architects, designers and others, but also then be able to fully underwrite that and talk about it and explain it from a mathematical perspective, from a cost perspective. And I think one of the biggest sort of interesting things when I think about design and its impact on the investments world is when people talk all the time, where can I value engineer? Where can I cut cost? I think that's something that if you do it well, that's an incredibly valuable skill set. But to do it well, you have to understand what stuff do you touch and that you can't change, and that contributes to that ambiance. And where can you make those subtle cuts? And we get into this fight all the time. And I'll share an example here, and it's a push and pull. Sometimes we talk about design. It always means, oh, it's this aesthetically beautiful thing. And we have a lot of examples in my career where. Where architects and designers and development folks have wanted to build the most perfect facade. And the reality is people who live in an apartment building, they don't get out and touch that. And it's gorgeous, it's nice, and it looks cool in the renderings and the model on your desk or, you know, when you take someone by and show them, look at I built this building. And that's great. But where we get into fights about that sometimes is what does that facade then do to the rest of the building, Right? And my favorite example is, you know, ventless washers and dryers. And we're going really micro here. But people don't like those. Half the time you get in, and they've gotten a lot better. So I can't say they're all bad, but there have been times early on where someone says, well, I don't want to put a dryer vent in the facade because it's ugly. Okay, does anyone, any consumer ever walk by and say, you know what? I won't lease in that building. I won't renew my lease because I really hate that vent under my unit. No, that doesn't happen. Never heard of that. What I have heard of is when you go and you talk to people in the field, okay, why are we leasing these units at a discounter? Why are we not retaining tenants in this unit? People say, well, my new puppy peed on my comforter and it's been two days and it's not dry when I had to wash it at 2am so that kind of thing, it does bother people. So design and value engineering and balancing all these things, it's not just about that, what that incredible ambiance or that beautiful design. I appreciate all that. It's bringing that functional aspect back and tying it in to say, you know what? I can actually, I would bet that, you know, people Always underwrite a premium for certain things. You have to underwriting a discount when you do things wrong like that. And there's going to be a push and pull of what's actually going to contribute to driving noi. Is it that facade? Sure, to an extent, yeah. But it's also going to be over time if you're holding that building, do the dryer's work. Just a simple example.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Well beyond what you just said is explaining it well too. Not just the numbers, not just the design, but how do you tell that story to investors, to tenants, to users, to management, the whole thing.
[00:25:51] Speaker C: So how do you communicate all that honestly? That's my favorite part of my job. It's the one thing I don't do a lot of things well, but that's the one thing I feel like I really sort of am proud of. And it's hard and it's hard to take somebody to that micro level or explain why. And I think that's where supporting things with data, being able to be fluent and understand how to present numbers and information. And that can come not just from financial spreadsheet, but that can come from things like focus groups and quantitative research where you're actually going out and applying techniques that you take, you know, from the political world, for instance, and take survey data and understand, okay, for a certain demographic, what's going to move the needle, what drives them. And I'll give you an example of that, you know, when you explain certain things. When we first, you know, took over the development and national landing, we wanted to figure out how should we design these buildings, what features should we include, what should they look like, what architects should we hire? We did a lot of focus groups. We did a big quantitative study too where we actually would survey people, have them click through and we would do true market research.
And we made a shift in our architecture actually as a result of that. We had some buildings that tested really, really highly. We could show quantitatively why this one performed better than that one. And then we could look at where people are ascribing premium. So if you said, hey, here are my set of features and you know, this is, it's so funny that this was for so long kind of alien to the real estate world because if someone goes out and they design a car car, they're going to figure out do you want heated seat, heated steering wheel, do you want, do you care more about fuel efficiency or performance, all these different factors. That stuff gets factored into product planning decisions and especially as multi family is evolved. I think it is different in office, and we can talk about that, but multifamily to me is a consumer product.
[00:27:30] Speaker D: And we research it in some ways.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: As an industry, I think less than other consumer products. When you go and you talk about the next cell phone or car, you know, use that example. Someone's researched it and they can put numbers behind it and say, this is why this end. You know, you can talk about Steve Jobs and other people saying, well, that doesn't matter. You have to do what I've got. And I do believe that that can happen and should happen, and you sometimes can make a better decision. But when it comes to explaining why you make a decision that you make, it's a lot easier when you can say, you know, 70% of people who have the income ratio that I'm talking about for this building at these rents prefer this fitness center over that fitness center. And sure, it's going to cost me 5% more to build that, but I'm going to get a rent that's 10% better. It's things like that where you can articulate it, put it into a story and support it. Then it's not, well, you like this and I like that. It becomes a real discussion of what does our customer want?
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Right?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Well, it's a hospitality mindset, in my view, and I've talked about that with just about every guest I've had.
So that mindset has overlaid the industry over the last 20 some years, in my view. Because the old days, you know, even in industrial, believe it or not, people are taking that kind of accommodation approach.
Used to be, you know, guys get on the phone and do a deal and that's it. You know, there would be no, you know, live with it. But now, I mean, especially in the apartment sector, the office, the retail sector, they're all kind of thinking, how do I create a good guest experience? It seems so true.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: I mean, it's expounded on, talked about plenty by so many different people.
But, you know, you use office as the example there. And, you know, we all sort of are realizing that, sure, people are coming back to the office, they're coming back to work, but their patterns have shifted. And so what is the expectation for the best office? It's that it does have a hospitality aspect to it. It is something where, fine, I'm coming together, like you and I are, to sit and be together in person, sit across the table from someone that gets talked about all the time and thrown around. But when you do that, well, you need to provide the setting to do it well. And that means that there's probably also going to be less need for office as demand shrinks.
We're getting better at demolishing office. We're getting better at shrinking the denominator and turning things into other uses. We're not there yet.
You look even at Northern Virginia, 21% vacant last count from CBRE, there's a lot of inventory that has to come offline to drop that number. And in the meantime, who's left? The buildings that are left. They're competing for a reduced pool of demand. And that demand pool, then, because they have so many options, they want to choose the option where that convening experience is the best and where they have the amenities they need. It doesn't just have to come from the landlord, by the way. It can come from the neighborhood. I think that's also something people miss. Everybody's got a conference center and a fitness center and all these things, and they say it's hospitality. Well, are we actually any good at driving the hospitality, or is it better to go find the best gym operator, best conference center operator, and have them do it in the neighborhood? They. There's a lot of debate about that. But where there isn't debate is that that approach of trying to make these things more differentiated, more competitive is critical when there's just less demand going around.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: So I've gotten way ahead of my.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: Questions, but.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: Let me go back now to your career trajectory and talk about your evolution at JLL and how you got to arrive at JBG Smith or at that time, JBG Companies, I believe, right?
[00:30:52] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So I spent about two years at JLL in the analyst role, and I wanted to do that, to figure out what I wanted to do next and where I wanted to go. And I sort of figured out by that point that while I have tremendous respect for what brokers do, I wasn't going to go the brokerage path. I thought about it. I flirted with it a lot, but I really wanted to be on the principal side, and that was important for me. So I actually spent about 11 months, close to a year at Monday Properties as an associate.
Had a good time there, enjoyed it. But I had an opportunity come up at jbg and I had, you know, I had actually had both Monday and JBG clients of jll. I spent time in both of their offices. And by the way, the other plug for doing the, you know, the brokerage thing early is that you get to meet all the different people who you'll ultimately end up working for at some point or with. And so I knew both companies and when JVG called they had a really interesting role that at the time was sort of her head of research and to sit in the investments group and to help inform investment decisions with market data, with analytics. And they were sort of trying to come up with what this role would look like.
And that's how I got to the JVG companies in 2013.
I joined as an associate really working for Matt Kelly at the time, Matt and James Eicher together in our investments group when they were co heading it. And that was how I got my foot in the door here for that role.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: Yeah. For listeners I have interviewed Matt Kelly, so I advise you to listen to that interview as well.
So what did Matt teach you?
[00:32:23] Speaker C: Oh man, Matt's taught me a whole lot and I think that I've worked for him for close on 13 years at this point.
I've sort of found my home here and have really not entertained any ideas of kind of going anywhere else and doing it. Partially because the, the people and the culture here I think is very special.
And you know, when I, when I think about Matt, Matt was an extraordinary and is an extraordinary mentor and partner. And I think when you talk about someone who understands all those different aspects, Matt is an incredibly sharp financial mind. He's someone who can really work through the numbers very quickly. But that would be doing him a disservice to say that's sort of what he's best at. I think what Matt is best at from my perspective, and I tell people this a lot, is that Matt has this unbelievable ability to understand the personal and sort of leverage dynamics of every situation. He is very big on part of it. Listen to your interview, talk about his background, but just understanding the people and their motivations and incentives and weighing that with the sort of the financial analytical component, he's very, very good at basically putting those two things together and making them work like a machine.
And he understands the design side. Obviously he's a great communicator. But I think Matt's extraordinary kind of superpower and what I've learned so much from him is looking deeply through how something is structured analytically and then how it's structured in terms of the people and the players and their different motivations. Because that makes you a better, not only a real estate investor, but also sort of a participant in the market and a player within the real estate space is that ability to sort of dispassionately take those two things apart Marry them up and then make decisions from there.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: That's great.
So talk about your trajectory. Obviously, being, you know, working for Matt helped you obviously going up and into the, up the ladder here. So talk about your growth here.
[00:34:10] Speaker C: You know, I think my growth here, I think that the original role was to help bring, you know, some insight from market data into our decision making process. So I was lucky enough to then get to go to investment committee from day one when I came to JBG and sit and talk and provide information. I get, you know, refine my skill set around presenting information, around communicating around helping shape decisions. But I also then started to learn a lot more about the true acquisition process from the principal side, the development process, what inputs went into each of those. And so as I kind of rose through the ranks here, I kept that ability to talk about data, to apply it to decision making processes. But I widened my aperture on the real estate world and the types of sort of decision points that were involved in building a building or buying a building. And I think what that helped me do was then take on more projects. And I still got to dip my toes in leasing as we do that and marketing and all the different parts of what we do. But as I sort of moved up, one of the things I started to do was go beyond just kind of providing research and analytics to taking on special projects.
And it would be something that had to be cross vertical. I mean, that's a huge part of what I do still now is that I work across things that sort of don't fit neatly into a box. They're not just, oh, I'm going to go work on, you know, my, I'm going to put my head down and focus on my leasing pipeline or I'm going to go get this building built over three years, I help figure out where we're going, along with a lot of other people. But then I also work on, hey, this is a project that's kind of messy or strange or doesn't fit in the box. You know, the MoneyMill sports pursuit was something that I really led along with Matt, but it was, let me go bring together marketing, development, government relations, investments, leasing, all these different parts of our business to work on a complicated project. Same thing with Amazon HQ2. It was a big part of, okay, Amazon, why do you want to come here? Lots of market data, lots of analytics, lots of things about our real estate, but a whole lot of storytelling. And I think I found that as I grew and I took on more of these projects, that storytelling was my real Strength. Like I talked about, you know, Matt's superpower. I think mine is really about how do you tell the story, how do you craft the narrative and then how do you weave that across all these different sort of components of a project or a company and make them all work together and then communicate that message. And that's what I've really sort of honed my career into doing within JBG and more broadly.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well that was evident when we saw your presentation because you told a great story then because at that point it was just a lot of it was just a vision and it's still to some extent in a vision.
[00:36:43] Speaker C: It is.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: We'll get into that a little bit more, but.
So JBG has a significant presence in leading the transformation of national landing beyond Amazon HQ2 development. What is JBG Smith's long term vision for National Landing, particularly in creating a vibrant, mixed use urban space?
[00:37:03] Speaker C: I think you just said it, John. I mean the goal when we first started talking about this, years before we closed the merger, we looked at at the time Crystal City and Pentagon City and Potomac Yard. We saw sort of three nodes that had an unbelievable location. They're just when you think about where Crystal City is, it sits right across from D.C. right next to Reagan National Airport. It's walkable to the Pentagon. But it wasn't a great place. And I remember laughing that John Shetler at the time was the Amazon, had a real estate. And he came in, you talk about a vision. It was sort of, it was nothing then and it was something that had to be remade and recreated and to believe that we could do this and looking at our track record and our plan was really important. But he came in, he said, you know, I spent last night here and it was tumbleweeds. And he said, this place has no soul. So tell me how you're going to bring that soul. And that was such a fun challenge. And I think it shaped so much.
[00:37:53] Speaker D: Of our vision because even when we.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: Were starting to look at it, we had the same reaction the first time we spent significant amount of time. Everyone's been to Crystal City for six some reason, half of us because we got off the train at the wrong place trying to find Pentagon City Mall. But it wasn't a place that people were all that excited about spending time in. It was built though to a purpose. It was an office park that was built to serve the federal government and big corporations. It wasn't really about having a mixed use, 18 hour environment. And for us, you know, we sort of Said our vision was always that vibrant mixed use place. But it was a vision that encompassed a lot of different anchors.
And I think Amazon is one of them, Virginia Tech's another, the Pentagon is another one. But Niagara in and of itself is also what we've been doing at the street level and the place making and the balancing of uses. And so for us, step number one before Amazon, because it was important to win Amazon, but to get anyone else there was figure out how can we reduce the denominator of office. How do we just take some of the stuff offline? Even then we said, look, it's under demolished. This market has too much space for the number of people want to be here. But it doesn't have enough apartments, it doesn't have enough retail. And so first was figuring out how can we take office offline, replace it with multifamily. This is before we were doing conversions and work on a couple of those. We talked about that now, but we really said let's develop the multifamily so we can bring some nighttime people. People have to live in a neighborhood. Then we said we can also curate the retail. We've tripled the amount of street retail already. We have more on the come. But the idea was make it that vibrant mixed use place and demand will follow that. Talk a lot about that.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: It's interesting and I'll share this with the listeners. I interviewed Henry Fonville of now the Rappaport Companies. Henry, before he was Rapoport and this goes back in the late 1990s, worked for Vornado. Actually at that time it was the Charles E. Smith Co. Which was Vornado's predecessor. He was the head of retail for them and did a lot of battling with the Smith and Kogat families about, you know, we got to bring some street presence here because the retail in Crystal City at the time was underground. Everything was below, below the street level, which I believe the Underground is now closed if I'm not mistaken or effectively. Yeah, so he had to bring vibrancy to the street. So I encourage people to listen to that story because then he left after, you know, or before JBG merged with tornado, etc.
[00:40:14] Speaker C: So yeah, I mean there was such a.
I think it's just a different mindset. And you know, what was, what was cool in the 60s and 70s, it was the rise of the mall. It was enclosed. And I think, you know, I remember when we were doing initial marketing and worked with an ad agency who had actually worked at the time opening of the Underground, which was amazing. The principals there, a woman named Jane Lyons, one of the first women owned ad agencies in the city and worked with Smith and Kogod and really helped to launch that. And she printed on me, well, this was cool at the time. It was interesting. It was different and it was meant to be the future. This is when Roslyn had sky bridges and Chris City had sky bridges. The whole idea was people drive their cars. This euclidean planning and a little bit of Corbusier and all this stuff of we're going to have these pathways in the sky that bring cars into this place. And then you live in air conditioned splendor. You don't have to go outside. You don't want to go outside. As that experience shifted, I think it's not fair sometimes to judge the designers of those kinds of places by the standards of sort of the modern experience. But there was a period where I think that old underground experience hung on for too long. And it wasn't what people wanted. It's not what people want here especially the climate doesn't really make sense for something like that. And so they started, you're right, they were starting to do that. There is a strip that was brought above grade. I can't imagine what a fight that was. But I think it needed to be continued and made whole. So you could really look at this as I think a true kind of competitive environment to the other great mixed use places in the D.C. metro area that has the benefit of these incredible demand drivers. Anchors and location.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: So you recently discussed JBG Smith's $40 million repositioning effort at 2011 Crystal Drive, which I believe is Crystal park one, if I'm not mistaken.
Interestingly, I looked it up because when I joined the BF Salt Company in 1985, literally the day I walked in, there were leases stacked in the conference room for Crystal park one, which I think was multi tenant. The rest of the project was leased to U.S.
patent and Trade Office. USPTO was the anchor tenant for Crystal's park at the time. I think they were in two or three of the buildings.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: The farmers, my time. But PTO was a huge anchor tenant in Crystal City.
[00:42:29] Speaker A: Exactly.
And we financed four of the five Crystal park buildings. For the Charles E. Smith Companies. Yes, for Aetna.
[00:42:37] Speaker C: Very nice.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Insurance company.
[00:42:39] Speaker C: Very nice.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: So I have some history with that property.
[00:42:42] Speaker C: So it sounds like a deal.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: I mean we were the construction. We weren't the construction, but we were the takeout lender for whatever they had. American Security Bank, Riggs or whoever it was Those banks no longer exist.
None of that exists. The whole different mindset, as you said, it was a government leased urban environment. There was residential. We financed some apartment buildings there, older buildings that were built in the 1980s. Bob Smith had a penthouse in one of them and all that. So I'm giving that as a backdrop to the story on Tell me what's going on now. Crystal park one, 100%.
[00:43:19] Speaker C: It is funny, by the way, there was such demand at the time for office. This will shock people that one of those residential buildings was actually finished out as office. So they left half of it as condo and the other half is as office. And it's just funny to think about that that in my career no one has taken residential and turned it into office. But that's, that was the nature of the time. And so yeah, I think that that building we really talk about a case in point of collaboration between groups.
We said, look, we've got too much office here. We took some of the natural, functional, absolute candidates offline, made them development sites, figured out other uses for them. Some of them we leased on a short term basis to Amazon for swing space. And this building, we said, all right, we've got this complex parks and it's going to sit next to the new pedestrian bridge to Reagan National Airport. It's funded by the Amazon incentive package. It's going to sit right at the base of the new Amtrak and VRE station as well. So it'll be really connected location. But one of the buildings has a lot of vacancy in it. And these buildings have big floor plates. They're kind of vestiges of the 1980s. We need to figure out a way to enhance them. And so that led to me spending a lot of time with our leasing team. And the first thing we did, warning also back to the research routes. Let's go out there and let's understand what people actually want. And so that was a lot of conversations, a lot of research, a lot of talking about what people want. We heard back to your hospitality point. They obviously want hospitality. They wanted conferencing, but they didn't want a conference center in a basement. You know, so many times you see on the office building torches, conference center, it's okay, it's we're sitting for, you know, the listener here in about a 10 person small conference room. Take this, double it, you know, put a big screen in it and then leave it unattended. And that's a lot of office conference quote, unquote, conference centers. And we knew that what people wanted Was they wanted it to be operated and they wanted there to be F and B. The food piece of this. It's funny, it sounds so simple. Food was critically important. We heard about food more than almost anything else and went out and talked to these big office users and their brokers. So we knew, all right, let's figure out how to create a conference center that's big. It can't just be like this check the box sort of execution. It basically ended up becoming a hotel ballroom without the hotel. And we'll come back to that and talk about that in a second.
So hotel ballroom without the hotel. People wanted outdoor space. They wanted great F and B options in the building or close by to the building.
And you know what didn't come up, interestingly enough, was the things all of us office geeks talk about. Oh, it's got to be column free and have this planning depth and this skin. People like that, they react to it. It's back to when someone looks into a space and they think it feels good. They don't know why. But we said, look, that was deprioritized. It was this huge emphasis on that experiential component of office. And the reason wasn't because we've all just gotten soft, it's that. And this is a great line I'll steal from Cisco's head of real estate who someone I called to ask him project. He said we don't build warehouses for people anymore. I love that phrase, warehouses for people because when they thought about the office or Amazon thinks about the office for some of these other large, you know, tech companies or new occupiers, even defense companies, it's all about when I'm in the office. And I might not be in the office five days a week and you know, a lot of companies are now and it's moving in that direction again. But when we're in the office, we're in the office to collaborate or we're in the office to have meetings and bring people in from other offices or talk to our clients. It's more of a sales and collaboration function, especially in that market. When you think about what a lot of the defense firms do there. So we're building out a 300 person. One room alone is 300 people. We had to take out three columns of the building, which is a heck of a construction exercise and a lot of fun. And we had to really justify talk about the spend to take out three columns on an occupied building.
Then we have room in that conference center for about another 200 people spread across breakout rooms. The whole thing is F and B serviced by a great chef.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: It's this ground floor.
[00:46:51] Speaker C: This is all ground floor. And we took advantage of the fact that these buildings have huge floor plates and they had atypical height on the ground floor. But also the ground plane is number one. When we think about what we're doing in national landing everything along Crystal Drive, it's 8/10 of a mile end to end everything there. We should double side. We should have activated ground planes. It should feel like a true main street. And so this conference center, you don't go into the office building lobby. You have to ask some board security guard where it is and go to the basement. It has zone door, it has its own green room, it has its own drop off. Everything had to engage with the street. And that connected to a vinyl record themed wine bar that sort of draws its inspiration from the vintage age of aviation. That's got some really cool Italian cuisine. That's important because people want a place to go after work. They don't want to necessarily go and have a whole dinner. Where can I go get a great drink, an elevated drink, a business cocktail or a great glass of wine? We connected those two things and then we linked that with a big activated public lobby with two places where tenants could have their own front door. Own front door is such a thing, John. When you think about the ability to have presence and if people are coming and going and collaborating, you don't have to go through the lobby process. You can have your real presence there. So we did that. And then on the other side of that is an all day cafe, grab and go, small groceries that sort of played with the train station. All those things are served by the same kitchen, which then conserves the space. And bumping out the facade. It's of course hard to talk about this. We reskinned the first two floors of the building. We didn't reskin the whole thing. We actually didn't reskin the back of the building either. We really focused on spending money in the right place to create some really good tenant experience where you do have some new glass. But we bumped out to build the conference center and the retail and created some outdoor spaces. So outdoor space for the building, outdoor space for tenants and so that tenant identity, outdoor space, F and B, access to meeting space. We wanted to make that really unique. But we did it. To your point, within a complex, I would never spend $40 million via 1,000 building like this. Gets back to what's the big differentiator in National Landing is we have tremendous scale and control. We own so much of the neighborhood that we can make decisions like this that don't just benefit this building or the four other buildings in the complex. It really is about benefiting the surrounding neighborhood. And so what we've seen since delivering this is, you know, we're just, we're not delivered. We'll deliver in January of 2026, kind of Q1, but we've seen increased leasing interest in this building. Done some level of leasing actually in this building, but also in the building next door and buildings as part of the complex because people see this as a neighborhood amenity, as a reason to be here. And I'll throw one other thing in there that's not in that building, but that's critically important is our partnership with Nooks, who's a secure space as a service provider. Because for our customers here, you know, 90 plus percent of our leasing pipeline is defense and technology companies. And we should talk about what defense tech means. But you know, so much of what happens in this neighborhood is defense technology. Sales, demonstrations, engineering.
They can't do everything in sort of just unclassified space. So the ability to access classified space, even if it's not built out within their own footprint, is really important. And that's what Nooks provides. So we sort of have cross promoted this to say you can do meetings in classified space. You know, as they say on the high side, you can also do unclassified meetings and have that be part of the same complex. It's all about providing a differentiated experience.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: So is this sealed space, in essence, is this, you know, what do they call it? Skiff space, in essence, effectively.
[00:50:01] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:50:02] Speaker C: So that's. And it's not us providing it. We signed a lease with a tenant called NUX Works. Sean Blackman's their CEO. He's really kind of an unbelievable, interesting creative thinker where he took his career as a, as a Navy pilot and he had gone to work in the tech space. And he found that the tech companies didn't understand skips. They couldn't open RFPs. And you know, at a time when from a national security perspective, so much of what we need to focus on is around artificial intelligence and around advanced systems. You need the best tech companies. It can't just be the traditional primes. And so he said, how do I create access to that space? And he went and was able to get a contract that allowed him to provide that space to government users, to others. So it is, it's effectively scif and there's a differentiation for, you know, just secret space.
[00:50:44] Speaker A: Is this kind of like a wework for Skiff?
[00:50:46] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: To some extent. Okay.
[00:50:48] Speaker C: Yeah. And this is someone who, when this guy was a startup, we had to.
[00:50:51] Speaker D: Go bet on him.
[00:50:51] Speaker C: We had to bet on his credit and bet on his business plan. We funded that build out. We're just as involved as, you know, an investor would have been in the. In the company itself. But we believed in this and it became yet another part of that sort of amenity offering across the neighborhood, tailored to our tenants.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: So I read that JLL is your partner, at least with the conference facility. Why is that?
[00:51:10] Speaker C: So I'm a big believer that, you know, there are things that we do really well as real estate companies and there are things that we don't. And when I think about what JBG does really well, we're great investors, great capital allocators. We're good developers and constructors and marketers, leasing people and all that. I don't have anyone here who can run a conference center. And so if I want to deliver, we kept hearing, it's not about just have the property manager run it. And no disrespect to any property manager, but their jobs keep the building running. It's not to fix the AV in a conference room or handle booking conflicts. And so we really wanted to have an operator who could be our partner and deliver a best in class experience. We ran a bake off. We talked to a lot of different companies. JL rose to the top because they had the ability to provide this kind of third party managed service that was really kind of functioned like a true operator, like a tenant. And I tell people all the time, this is jail running this facility. I'm not running this thing. We built it, we helped design it, we specced it, but we did that in partnership with them. Just like for the restaurants there, our opera, we have an operating partner who's running the kitchen, who's providing the F and B, and that's Episcope Hospitality, who's unbelievable. If any of you haven't checked out the water park, you should definitely go check it out. Episcope runs that. That's our other sort of outdoor food hall, incubator and national garden.
[00:52:16] Speaker A: Are they affiliated with any of the big national hospitality firms?
[00:52:19] Speaker C: So no, they're not affiliated with any of the big national hospitality companies. I think the goal here was to go find someone who had the scope of a big national hospitality company, but the ability to deliver something that truly felt authentic and Real. And the reason we like Episcope so much is, you know, it's this really interesting group of people. It's David Morton, who's the founder, who was from the sort of Morton Steakhouse family and dynasty, if you will, but his brother built Hard Rock Cafe. Food is in their DNA. And so David has this incredible white labeled restaurant concept where he can run and deliver unbelievable hospitality. But to the consumer, you wouldn't know that it's run by a third party. So you can think about it more like a Danny Meyer in some ways, where it's this great culinary brand, but without even the sort of headline Famous Chef. It's not about David's ability to cook. David has great chefs who work with him. Really, really spectacular talent. But he's able to provide this level of, again, white labeled but truly authentic feeling hospitality service that we can take advantage of. But he still comes with all the accounting and operational skill set that you would get from a true institutional partner. In a lot of ways, that's the reason we thought they were such a great match. And so that's why, you know, when we talk about the projects that we've done with them or are doing with them, they slot in in a way that we haven't really found anyone else who could do this at that level and deliver that level of quality.
[00:53:37] Speaker A: So in the building, are you going to have full food and beverage service as part of this conference facility?
[00:53:44] Speaker C: Absolutely. So the conference facility, so thinking about it as a central kitchen that's in the building, that central kitchen can serve as the conference facility. So there will be a dedicated catering menu, but then there's totally separate menu for the two F and B outlets that are in the building.
Those are one constellation, which is a all day coffee shop turned kind of craft beer spot, but it also has significant merchandise. So if you need to come off the pedestrian bridge from the airport and pick up dinner and bring it home to your apartment, you can absolutely do that from a prepared food perspective. But even from sort of a hand merchandise set of boutique kind of gourmet grocery items. And so that becomes an all day hub, which is really interesting. You know, a great example for those of, you know, is the Groundswell Cafe in Tiverton, Rhode Island. I know that's a niche reference, but it's good. A really, really cool concept that was created to kind of blend that merchandising of, you know, housewares and small grocery gourmet items with a great sort of pizza oven and coffee shop. It can kind of be all things to all people. It's that great one stop shop. But it can also be a great place to grab, you know, a casual soup and sandwich lunch. Then across the way, on the other side of the conference center, we have a much more elevated concept called Altitude. Altitude is a vinyl record wine bar. So think great wines, think the ability to listen to a vinyl record selection in store. We can feature DJs, but it's an unbelievable audio system. A lot of really cool stuff that we put together and sourced and designed. And the theme of it is the golden age of aviation. Because as you can probably guess between Constellation and Concorde and then altitude, there's a real aviation theme here. Not only because we're next to the airport, but because we also have some of the biggest pioneers in aviation right there in the market. Lockheed Martin is in the building right next door. You Boeing down the street, you have a lot of different groups who've contributed to that rich legacy. And so we wanted to celebrate that a little bit in a way that wasn't super on the nose. But that altitude concept is going to be mostly northern Italian cuisine, a little bit elevated. And it's a small menu, but it's the idea that that's the really cool intimate date night spot or also the great business cocktail location where you can enjoy sort of a small menu of craft cocktails and great food. But the focus is on that unbelievable wine list and being able to enjoy that with music. And it's about bringing a little bit candidly of sex appeal to National Landing. Because, you know, we started it's sort of like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You start at the base where we get a grocery store and a place for people to live. And then you build the stuff like this that gives the neighborhood character. And so just as important as it is for us to do that Ace Hardware deal to go bring, you know, them into the market, it's just as important to have these great kind of intimate spots as well as the grocery and all the stuff that kind of sits around that, the local wine shop, the sandwich place, you have to have all those different elements when you're really trying to make this a place that people actually want to live in at the time.
[00:56:21] Speaker A: So what part of this is public and what part is reserved? I assume the conference facility reserve, right? You have to make reservation.
But if they're attached, is the whole thing reserved or is there public access to it?
[00:56:35] Speaker C: We really wanted to create this as a public, publicly permeable building. So think about the first floor, where we have those concepts, that's a big open public lobby. So you can go into the lobby.
[00:56:44] Speaker D: You can wait to have a meeting.
[00:56:45] Speaker C: You can meet someone there, you could get something from, you know, from Constellation, bring it out to the lobby and sit there. That's public space. And you can obviously go into the restaurants if you want, if as a member of the public, as whoever you are. But then the conference space you're at, you have to reserve that. But that's also something that it's not tenant only. Now, our tenants get special perks and preferences.
That obviously comes with being part of the complex. They get booking priority. But we want it to not just be people from outside.
We want it to be people who are our tenants getting that preference, but then people from the outside still being able to use it so that it is actually vibrant and useful. Because otherwise it's just going to be this kind of dead place. And we want it to be active.
[00:57:25] Speaker A: That's cool.
So if I wanted to bring a group of people there, would I have to reserve it? And you know, well, you're a friend, right?
[00:57:32] Speaker C: So we could make that happen for you. We're going to do that. Groups kind of in our orbit. But if you were just person off the street, I think one of the ideas we've had for this is that we want you gathering in National Landing. Part of this was, you know, when we think about the history of Crystal City, this was a place that people didn't really want to spend time because honestly, it wasn't a great place. There wasn't really anywhere to eat, especially not after five. A lot of places to get a lunch, a lot of places to sit and eat your brown bag lunch. But it wasn't a place that you said, hey, I want to go hang out there. I to want to live there. And so part of changing that wasn't just making the environment better. It was also saying we've got to have places that the public can come and gather and actually spend time, whether that's an outdoor concert at the water.
[00:58:08] Speaker D: Park or, you know, a festival happening or farmer's market.
[00:58:11] Speaker C: All the things that we sort of do. And especially in partnership with our bid, we wanted to make sure that this space became something that maybe it's a defense industry association, use an example. They come here and they bring all these people.
Then they're not only going to stay in the hotels in the neighborhood, that's important, but they'll also get out, eat at the retailers and some of the decision makers who go to those conferences might say, wow, this place is great. It's better than insert competitor here. And that could cause people to think differently about the place. And when they make their office decision or their next housing decision, they have a reason to come back. I think that public part of this, that's been a huge part of the story from day one. This is not just about as real estate developers, we build something for our direct customer. It's about expanding the universe of that customer to be other people. And that didn't start here. You know, when you look back, one of the things we did in Shaw, when we were really trying to bring people to the north end of Shaw, our development, Atlantic Plumbing and the Shea in the Hatton, to kind of go way back to, you know, 2013, 2014 timeframe over a decade ago.
While we were waiting to develop those sites, first we did a really cool public art installation, had people come when we graffitied the warehouse, or I guess artists graffiti the warehouse that was going to be torn down. We saved some of that graffiti, we saved some of that brick and became part of the lobby design of the building. But then while the site was scraped and the first phase was under construction, we hosted, we brought Brooklyn Flea Market down to host a big flea market for a couple of weeks to get people used to going to that site. And when you think back to the earlier part of our conversation, we started tracking whether it was capital bike share data or location data to understand where were we pulling people from. And that informed our marketing and our thought process when it was who our customer might be. Because just like in National Landing, there was no reason to go over there. Why would you go? It was an old plumbing warehouse. You'd go to see the show at the 9:30 Club. Like I would do a lot, but then you would get in the cab or you would walk to the Metro and go home or go somewhere else in the city that had more going on. So it really had to create a reason for someone to be there. And those reasons can change over time. But they started to say, all right, this is accessible. There are cool things going on. This is an interesting spot. So that when we launched, it wasn't totally out of left field. It wasn't out of the blue that there was a project here. And I think National Landing, it wasn't that kind of vacant warehouse, but it was almost worse. It was an office park. And so our ability to deliver interesting, not only programming and public spaces, but now this meeting space just gets people used to the cadence of this is.
[01:00:25] Speaker D: A place where it all happens and.
[01:00:26] Speaker C: We think that's going to be important.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: Your description earlier of what was going on in National Landing reminded me of looking at it as a regional mall, in essence. So thinking big picture. And I know you like thinking that way because that's how you presented your, you know, community or the National Landing to us.
As I look at it as different anchors and, you know, space in between the anchors.
[01:00:53] Speaker C: That's a great way to think about it.
[01:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah, because I was in mall development early in my career so I think about, you know, who are your anchors in the community and you have different phases of the project. So how is that as the development goes, the thought process, as you where you are today and how that grows going forward.
[01:01:14] Speaker C: Perfect. So I think our first anchor was the Pentagon. And we came into this at a time when there wasn't a lot of growth coming into the Pentagon. It wasn't as bad as back in the days, the last supper servants, all the defense companies started to consolidate, merge and change. It wasn't brag, but it was sort of flat. The Pentagon was there. Since then they've become a much more vibrant anchor. They've been driving a lot of business. There's been tremendous growth. So that's one big one. But that was there when we started. Then we brought Amazon hq. They become the second anchor. They're another big one in terms of validating the market. They have 8,000 people here today. That's huge. By any account they're going to grow up to 25,000 all the way, maybe to 38,000 jobs. So really exciting on the Amazon front, another big anchor. Amazon coming allowed us to bring Virginia Tech who when we started interestedly enough, our vision was actually that the first anchor wasn't going to be a.
Wasn't going to necessarily be a big tenant like Amazon because they don't come around all that often. It was going to be a university and we were really actively pursuing universities, thinking about how we bring them in. And I think Virginia Tech in many ways is just as impactful as Amazon. So huge anchor on that front. So those are sort of the three. If I were to think about it as the mall, you have the three big, you know, department stores now we filled in and I think the next thing that had to happen, the great co tenancy. So fine, we've got the best department store. To me, our multi family, that's such an important part. That's like the Apple Store. That's like the Lululemon. That's the like really kind of sexy high end retail that drives a lot of co tenancy then the rest of it that fills in is all the place making you. You wouldn't want to go to a mall where you just had the big anchors and you walk between and there's nothing there. So we have to actually fill everything else. And that's everything from changing out the streetscape and rebuilding planters and doing things like that all the way through great restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores. We just don't have a hardware store like that. To me that is probably the biggest thing. Every real neighborhood has to have a place to go and go to a hardware store. You can't think of a great neighborhood you live in that doesn't have one. So we've been kind of filling in the middle now that we have those big anchors and that's along the way helped us attract the junior anchors, the other big boxes, the corporate headquarters, the leasing deals. But we've really again changed the face of that neighborhood. And I'll tell you, we like in the mall development we looked at our space and said we again like I said, had too much. We actually demolished part of the mall and said we're not going to use that. We're going to put something going to create a great, you know, alternative. But we've been thinking about it very similarly.
[01:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean if you're flying over the area and you're looking in down at it. You think. I think would think so. Let me go to Virginia Tech. I know that's not in my list of questions, but I wanted to talk about how that's enhanced the environment and are they going to be a feeder to this and will they be the catalyst? And this is something I've been hopefully envisioning for our region to bring more tech employment in the region and retain jobs in graduates.
So you went to Georgetown. Georgetown loses. Probably half of its graduates go elsewhere, either internationally or nationally from Washington. They don't stay in Washington typically GW the same way. I was told by some of the people there that at George Washington that half their graduates are from New York or that's where they come from. They go back, they don't stay in Washington. What's going to keep people here and drive that economic engine?
[01:04:32] Speaker C: Well, great, great question. Because so much of when we, I remember when we first pitched Amazon, one of the points we used to pitch them was the fact that we were a big net exporter of talent. You know there are markets where you go and a lot of these tech Companies are concentrated, they have to import that talent. And so we said there's a lot here that's not being tapped. And part of that time was that if you didn't want to go, you know, if you wanted to go into something that involved, you know, the Department of Defense at the time or, you know, the government, you could do that here. There were plenty of jobs, but if you didn't want to do that, you have to go somewhere else. And sure, we've got our fair share of consulting and law and all those other things, and that's important, but we've been a net exporter of tech talent. I think that to an extent can be okay. You want to be a place that produces so many talented graduates that you're sending them out all over the world, but to retain them, you're going to need some of those other employment growth components. And you know, when we can point at Virginia Tech and we do this in every economic development pursuit we show is that one, they are focused on training clearable talent. And that's important, by the way, be able to get a security clearance and understand what it takes to get a security clearance or be someone who is clearable. That's important for a lot of the reasons we just talked about. So they're very big on that clearable talent. They're also doing master's PhD level students. They're producing people who are going to step into those kind of high level research roles. It's not just about the undergraduate, no offense, getting the first job like I did here. It's about bringing that kind of next level type of talent that's going to lead a business unit or work on a critical kind of engineering department development. The other thing is they're focused on technology transfer and that's something that they are always striving to be better at. But you want to be able to create something in the university lab and have it turn into an actual technology or a company that's fertile because that brings venture capital investors. And when you have VCs backing things that come out of universities, you start to create a more natural, self sustaining ecosystem where there is innovation. Right now stuff like that is built in Cambridge, at Kendall Square, it's built in Silicon Valley, and it comes down, down here and wants to deal with the government. Well, what if we could home grow and incubate more of that? And that's why I've been so encouraged that there's way more capital flowing in, a lot more venture capital, whether it's from out of market like an A16Z or someone like that, or with some of these homegrown groups, you know, we're behind one of them. There are a number of different ones floating around that are trying to invest in technology that's being created here, growing here, scaling here.
That's important. So I think Virginia Tech, by playing the role of producer of talent that can drive, drive engineering talent, is different, you're right, than the talent that Georgetown GW produces on its face at that Master and PhD level. That's clearable. That's a clear signal to an employer. I can come here and access that pipeline. But it's also the breeding ground for innovative young companies that attract venture and that attract those kinds of technology growth that you're talking about.
[01:07:04] Speaker A: So, Evan, we saw, I saw an article today about Amazon and they're forcing their employees back to work in their three, three of their hubs, including National Landing and Seattle five days a week.
I know that was written about earlier this year, but it seems to me now they're enforcing it. At least that's what they're talking about. Do you see that as a plus for National Landings, leasing and other things? What do you say?
[01:07:35] Speaker D: Absolutely. You know, I think we were, we've already seen an impact that we said from Amazon just making the announcement in January. I think a lot of people anticipated that as part of that, that it would be taken seriously and they'd have to be back. And people got ahead of that. And what we started to see was leasing in our apartment buildings, more foot traffic, people moving in and clearly occupying the newly built out space at the first phase of the owned part of Amazon's headquarters. So all those things, like we said, were really positive for us. And I think, look, the idea of enforcing this, I think, John, the world is going in that direction. I think part of that goes back to some the executive order on bringing the federal workforce back. It's that I think a lot of companies have pushed in the direction of bringing that workforce back and meeting it. And I think that that has to do with a shift in labor dynamics too that's sort of present right now where I think, you know, when those startup mandates started to go into effect, there was still this thought of, hey, we need to really compete for this really scarce amount of talent and can't do anything that alienates that workforce. If they want to be remote distributed, even if we lose productivity, we're going to go ahead and just keep sort of massaging around the edges of trying to bring people back. And I Think by now two things have happened, maybe three. One of them is that companies have realized that their productivity is less than it was before. When people are distributed, teams aren't in a room collaborating. And look, that doesn't go for every industry or every job or every person.
But I think on the whole you've started to see more people come back just because companies are realizing they need to harness that productivity. So that's one big shift. The second is the labor market is not as tight as it was during the pandemic and right out of the pandemic. So I think more people are out there in the labor force looking for jobs and that makes companies a little more willing to enforce these return to work mandates. And the third part of that that kind of goes with it is that you've also seen, like I said, that executive order. So when the government goes back, it means that the contractors go back, which in this area means if it's not the government contractors, you've got to see private sector also sort of step up and do the same thing. And it becomes more the norm. So it's less of, hey, I'm nervous that all my people will go work for someone else if they're not in the office. And you know, I, I am not one of those people who believes, by the way, that, you know, we're ever going to go back to sort of pre Covid demand levels for office. I think that the world has permanently changed. But I think that in a way, when we talk about permanently changed, it really does come back to what you and I were talking about, that it's really that I don't think we're ever fully utilizing office before the pandemic. I think that advances in technology have made it easier to be flexible. I think we still see flexibility in workplace, but I think the idea of living, you know, in a different state or different city than where your job is based, I do think that that's over. And I think that the impending threat of artificial intelligence and you heard, you know, Andy Jassy also talked about a disruption in the workforce coming from the implementation of AI. I think, you know, no one can tell you exactly how quickly that'll happen, but I do think that's a factor in the future. And so I still think that office demand is going to be less than it was. But I also think that some of the forces that we're compelling employers to say for their, you know, call it right sized workforces, you have to go be in the office, you have to be in the city, you have to be a collaborative present team member. And I think we're going to continue to see more of that. And I think that from a national landing perspective, it means not just more people in our office buildings. And look, we don't own the Amazon office buildings. We own some, some space that they lease from us, but the majority of their space right now is in stuff that they own. So it's not about are they in my office building and does that tell a good investor story or lender story for us?
But if they're in that office, it means they also want to live close by and we have all the apartments around it that they could possibly want to live in. You know, we have retail space and that vibrancy of having people live and work and commute, that's we all talk about that's the 15 minute city. That's the promise of mixed use development that requires people to, you know, not just live there, but also work there. And that's why I think it's a.
[01:11:20] Speaker C: Net positive for us.
[01:11:20] Speaker A: John, that's great. I'm wondering if this might be impetus for them to start phase two.
[01:11:29] Speaker D: Now I, you know, I can't say, you know, they still have capacity in their, in their current buildings. I think a lot of that's going to come down to how they use space. And that's another thing that's changed, you know, pre pandemic to today. And I think I used the phrase with you. You know, warehouses for people are no longer sort of in vogue. And I think it comes back to that same notion that sure they're bringing people back, but they were, that was their plan. Their plan was to have butts and seats people in the buildings. And I think that whether they, you know, how they configured that space, that might shift. And I think a lot of what we do when we're in person now looks different when we talk about that kind of warehouses for people concept. We're not just sitting alone at our desk doing heads down work. And I think that over time a lot of that heads down work. If I'm going to pretend to be a futurist for a minute, there is a big AI impact on doing that. I mean, I know you and I before the interview were talking about notebook LM and sort of the power of some of these AI assisted tools. Well, it hasn't replaced you or me, at least not yet. But what it's done is it's helped us be more productive. And I think that some of that heads down work, if that Starts to be done by AI. Then the collaborative moments, the stuff you actually have to be in person for those become more important. You know, if AI can code, then you don't have to be the coder living, you know, the technomad lives on a beach somewhere in Barbarians Barbados, just writing code and signing in and sending it. You have to be the collaborative, engaged leader who's in the office, who's working with your team to come up with new and creative ideas, even if some other stuff happens in the background. So I think we're going to continue to push into a place where we think about utilization differently. And that's the wild card. That's what I don't know because I'm not inside Amazon's head. How they replan, how they think about that utilization, that'll change their demand curve, that as they add employees, those employees are back and how they use the space, that'll determine when they decide to either start the second phase or at least more space. It all is going to come down to that. Back to our original point, it's really for us, it's about those jobs and continuing to hire and put people into the neighborhood.
[01:13:17] Speaker A: I think about that Helix building all the time. When I saw the plan, I said, why wouldn't this be an ideal building today?
Because if the weather's right, you could go outside and sit out there, have a meeting, and then you walk right back inside on the same floor that you are because the thing spirals up. So in essence, every floor will have a terrace, in essence around the building. So it'd be kind of a cool thing to have, it seems to me, almost immediate access to the outdoors from your space.
[01:13:48] Speaker D: I mean, I think, look, the Helix.
[01:13:50] Speaker C: In a lot of ways, if you've.
[01:13:51] Speaker D: Been to their Seattle campus and I'd encourage people to do it. If you've seen the spheres, super cool, right? That's the early version of that. And think of them as two giant geodesic domes and it's they have inside of them the entire sort of biosphere. So it's actually you are outside, but because Seattle's climate, a lot of it's inside. So think of them as giant super temperate greenhouses where you can go and have a meeting or we could be recording this podcast and that's how they use it. I think it's one of the coolest things about Amazon is the way they invested really heavily in those buildings because they're intentionally not office buildings, but they are places to meet, to collaborate, to spend time. They are really Big on this concept of centers of energy both within their space and in their kind of broader neighborhoods that they're participant in. And I think that those buildings or the Helix, my guess is that that kind of space is going to become even more important when it. When coming to the office means more about person to person connection than it does about sitting in a cubicle. You know, I hope none of us are excited to go back to kind of the 80s style cube farms and the high fabric covered walls and just these farms of people, you know, it always reminds me of the Matrix. It's kind of a weird vibe where people are just being harvested.
Nobody likes that. And so the idea of going instead to a place that's biophilic and biophilic design by the way, we use that at the Grace and the Riva, our two new towers. I think it's a big reason why they've been so well received. People like nature, they like to be around plants. Like just look outside today it's a little too on the hot side. So the ability to have inside and outside and flex that climate but really have a place for people and plants and nature. It's all about well being. I think there's a big and important role for that as we think about the way we use space going forward.
[01:15:27] Speaker A: That's great. The real estate market in the D.C. area, particularly for office space, is navigating significant changes due to factors like hybrid work.
What are the most notable trends you are seeing in the national landing real estate market and how is JBG Smith responding to them? Especially regarding capturing demand in a shrinking pie.
[01:15:47] Speaker C: I think we talked about that a lot around just what you can do to amenitize. But I'd also say that you know, this environment creates opportunity and it has created opportunity. You saw us do a deal in Tyson's Corner recently where we purchased some, you know, a three building complex with ideas on, you know, repositioning that. I think there is more opportunity here than people think for office and to some extent, but it has to be bought, right? And I think that's where there is a window here where stuff is repricing and things are changing. And I think the market has been kind of locked up for a while where everyone said nothing is going to happen because we don't know what's going to happen with return to work and Covid and all these other factors. And we kind of know more now.
But we've gotten to a point where we know more and the distress is very real. And so I think that's going to create opportunities across the market for people to be creative and to think about resetting base basis or making, you know, really sort of significant investments and changes to sets of buildings or submarkets where things will come offline. The denominator of office will reduce. CBRE has talked about 11.2 million feet of real estate on the office side coming out of the denominator to be converted into apartments or hotels or other things. We need to sort of see how that plays out. But I think it creates a window of opportunity where yes, demand is less than it was. We need to be really smart about what we do to attract that remaining demand, demand. But we also have to be really open eyed and thoughtful about how the excess supply gets taken off the market.
[01:17:09] Speaker A: Volatility and competitive pressures are noted threats for JBG Smith how do you assess the balance between risk and opportunity when planning large scale multi year development projects in a dynamic market like the D.C. metropolitan area?
[01:17:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's just always the name of the game game people. I mean you've been in this a long time. You understand volatility is just what happen. You can't underwrite it, you can't predict it. You have to know that your underlying business plan makes sense but also be willing to pivot off of it when things change. And so many times I've seen our, you know, our approach or a strategy shift and it's funny, people think of, you know, strategy as something that's, you know, frozen in amber. It's not. It has to evolve and it evolves, you know, around the same maybe themes, ethos, but we've all seen, seen how quickly things can shift and adjust. Being nimble but being thoughtful, not doing knee jerk reaction but being willing to move off of your kind of held belief is important. And I think that, you know, this is an area where also we, I get asked this question a lot about, you know, REIT versus private. I've been on both sides. But this is one area where having long term permanent capital is great because we can really, we've set the expectation with our investors that we will see this thing through, we're going to get this built out. National Landing has this potential and it's gone from I don't know what's going to happen. You're doing all this development, changing all this retail landscape. I think now we're going to have it proven out this was the right decision.
But it's helpful not to have an approaching sort of end to fund life and be able to be a long term holder of some assets while you see these visions come to life.
[01:18:33] Speaker A: Well, as a public company, you have a different mindset than you did when you were, as you said, end of the fund life type of thing.
[01:18:40] Speaker C: There was a. I think we have different time horizons. I think our mindset always been smart capital allocators. And what you've seen us do is when it's good time to sell something, we sell. You know, when we closed the merger deal, we sold a lot of office over $2 billion.
[01:18:52] Speaker A: Right.
[01:18:52] Speaker C: We were saying that we thought it was overpriced. We, you know, have some multifamily for sale right now and selling that because we think it's priced, you know, appropriately in the market and we can use that capital to buy higher returning opportunities. So I think it's less. Mindset is maybe the wrong word. Only because our mindset is always that of an investor and we're trying to maximize value. We're not just saying, oh, we're a public company now, so we do this. I think it gives us certain opportunities that we wouldn't have had as a private company. Just like being a private company could have brought other opportunities. But we always have that capital allocation mindset at heart.
[01:19:25] Speaker A: So you have stability from that standpoint. The essence of what you're saying?
[01:19:28] Speaker C: Yeah, 100%.
[01:19:30] Speaker A: So your bio mentions a focus on urban infill and transit oriented development.
What is your personal philosophy on how cities like Those in the D.C. area should grow and evolve to be vibrant and sustainable?
[01:19:43] Speaker C: It's kind of a broad question.
I think my personal philosophy on it is really aligned with ours. And people want to live in places that drive. Not to get too squishy on this, but self actualization and that can take a lot of forms. And I think that talking about urban, for instance, what is urban mean to anyone? Urban can mean high density. Tokyo, New York, London. It can mean Arlington County, Virginia or Alexandria. You know, I moved personally from the District. I've been in the district from 07 through 2021. I moved to Alexandria. I love Alexandria because I still have things that I can walk to and visit. It's a smaller city, it's a less dense city, but it's still a city. And I think that a lot of people now in the sort of post Covid environment and just as look, the millennial demographic, which is a huge demographic bubble, ages and as the baby boomers approach and enter retirement, I think both of those big demographic bubbles still crave some degree of sort of walkable engagement. But that doesn't have to happen just in a city proper. It doesn't have to be in the densest of the dense. It can, and that's great. But I think you're going to see more amenitization in some suburbs, and you're going to see places sort of create some of the urban qualities that people look for. I think the age of just drive to the mall, drive to the house, drive to the office building is still. Still gone. But I think that when you do drive some of those places today or take the train there, you have to. They're going to want to feel more urban in their form. They want to have some of that walkable amenity and option. That's really what I think you've seen be really successful, whether it's, you know, Reston Town center and enduring success and a tribute to a lot of what, you know, Ray and the EXP team have done. But even places like Mosaic, Merrifield, you know, that's really busy, that's packed, that's suburban, but it does have a metro and it does have walkable amenities. I think you're just going to see the suburbs continue to become more urban in their form as certain demographics maybe decide to move out of the city.
[01:21:26] Speaker A: Well, I look at the growth of Noma and it's kind of an interesting. It was an industrial market and Edens came in there and just transformed it.
[01:21:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I think NOMA versus Union Market is a really fascinating contrast to that point.
[01:21:38] Speaker A: Well, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. Well, Union Market I see as part of noma.
[01:21:42] Speaker C: It is, but it's just like looking at the two sides of the neighborhood.
[01:21:45] Speaker A: Well, that's true.
[01:21:46] Speaker C: Look at how much has changed what people learned about Development Forum from, you know, sort of the immediate sort of GFC period and the government stimulus and what got built to, you know, it's interesting.
[01:21:55] Speaker A: I didn't. I haven't. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see major investment by JBG companies there or I never did see much in that market.
[01:22:03] Speaker C: We did. We actually. We had a significant amount of land in NOMA that we brought partners on. We've sold some of it. So a lot of times when we're involved, you don't necessarily see us be the vertical developer. We do a lot of joint ventures or even like land sales and things like that. In Union Market, we own the Batley, which is, you know, on the market right now. But that is a building that we made an investment. We Had a whole period there. We sort of were present in that market for several years. And we also have an agreement with Gallaudet that allows us to develop some of the remaining sites in that market.
We'll see where that ultimately ends up going. But we have been participants there and it's just different. I think where EVAS has done such a great job as the placemaker, you've seen us play less of that role like we did on 14th street or the Ballpark or National Landing.
[01:22:47] Speaker A: Right, right.
Creating successful mixed use projects today requires more than just building. It involves activating spaces, places with programming and energy, which we've talked about.
How important is place making in your development approach and what are some examples of how JBG Smith brings energy? We've already talked a lot about that, but is there any other examples you can bring up?
[01:23:10] Speaker C: I think, you know, look at our history. We've invested at scale and the scale has given us the ability to place make. I think that's where, you know, Eden's. I'll give them the shout out at Union Market. They did such a good job with that and they were able to create an anchor where there was no anchor and then do a tremendous amount of retail place making. That's where we didn't have to do it in that market because they had already done it. I think it takes someone with the scale level of control to do it. I think it's hard to do when it's on a one off building. It's really hard to make place with one building where you've seen us do it. Whether it was Shaw or the Ballpark or National Landing. Just again, sticking with those three examples, it's been where we had enough scale to actually make some of these transformative investments. And a lot of times the anchor isn't the best financial deal. It's how do you bring the movie theater or the stage or the music club or whatever else you want to have. That makes more sense when you can look at it across a wide sort of amount of square footage and buildings than it does if you just have one. You have to make that right. You might just turn around and lease that to the bank. Nothing against banks, but that's not the most exciting activated street level use. It really comes as a function of scale.
[01:24:09] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting. Just yesterday I went to your North Plazda project, which is on Rockville Pipe and it's Whole Fort Foods and CVS.
[01:24:21] Speaker C: And.
[01:24:23] Speaker A: The parking lot there was packed. It was Father's Day and just families just Coming there to the restaurants, and I was like, you know, I said, this is almost as dense as pike and Rose. I mean, this is a dense urban place.
[01:24:37] Speaker C: It's true.
[01:24:38] Speaker A: I was shocked because I hadn't really experienced it. I don't live far from there. So it's just like, whoa, this is.
[01:24:45] Speaker C: Is something here that's back to that point. It's like Mosaic, you know, that's unbelievable. That could be packed. They do farmers markets, they do activations. I mean, there's a desire among, you know, a lot of people, whether it's driven by economics or by lifestyle or whatever else, to have that sort of suburban, urban experience.
And I think that you'll continue to see that be really successful as an approach.
[01:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, clearly, what Federal did at pike and Rose is just a spectacle, spectacular project.
[01:25:14] Speaker C: Same thing for sure.
[01:25:15] Speaker A: Yeah. It's just amazing.
The DC Startup and Tech Week schedule highlights opportunities for founders and young professionals.
And you are a speaker. How important do you think mentorship is for fostering the next generation of leaders in real estate and technology in the region?
[01:25:35] Speaker C: I mean, I think very, very broadly that mentorship is incredibly important. And I benefited through my career from having some extraordinary mentors. And we talked a lot about Matt, and Matt has always looked out for me, mentored me, coached me, and he's really that kind of player coach. But I've also benefited from even going further back my relationship with Ben Jacobs, the J, and jbg. Ben is an extraordinary mentor to me. And I think that when I look at my own career, I've benefited from. From, you know, those.
Same thing with those brokerage relationships I talk about. And, you know, early in my career, Jim Cahill or, you know, Bernie McCarthy or any of these folks, it's important to be surrounded by a wide group of diverse people who. It's not always formal like people talk about, oh, let's do a mentorship program. Okay, that's great. I participated in those. And both as a mentor and mentee, that's helpful. But that kind of idea of having being surrounded by a community of organic mentors who may not know they're mentoring you, but as a junior partner, just sitting and listening to them or being around them, being able to ask questions and have accessibility, or being that player coach who lifts up the people around them, that, to me, that's so critical. But you only get that when you have critical mass. You have to be surrounded by people to have those collisions. And that's why I think it's such an integral part of Building any kind of ecosystem or even building your career, be around people who can help you grow.
[01:26:48] Speaker A: Well, you in 2013, stepping into the investment meetings at this company, sitting with people like Mike Glosserman, Ben Jacobs, Brian Coulter, Rob Stewart, Matt Kelly, James Eichert.
[01:27:06] Speaker C: Smart people, incredibly smart people, and smart people who, by the way, weren't afraid to disagree with each other. I think that my fondest memory that I grew the most from in those investment committee meetings was watching and I worked with all the folks you just named, and they're all extraordinarily intelligent, capable people. But watching them sit across and have tremendous respect for each other, but vehemently disagree and watching, you know, Mike and Rob battle it out, I learned more sitting and watching them argue than I think I did in any other aspect of my career. Because you see these people who can present arguments, they can do everything we talked about, bring all these facts to the table, and by the way, at the end, their friends and partners and experts, but they weren't afraid to push. And I think that's something that we lose frequently in our sort of business climate today. And even it's a generational thing that people don't want to make waves and they don't want to fight with each other. And, you know, as long as you keep respect for the people at the table, you should fight a little. There's not a right answer. A lot of times you're going to find that answer in between, and it's going to get pushed and pulled by really intelligent people who care.
That is important to do. And it's okay to have people watch you do it because they're going to learn from seeing both viewpoints that, by the way, they might hear both viewpoints. There are many times I heard, I'll just pick on Mike and Rob because they were there and it's so important. But I hear Mike take a viewpoint, be like, yeah, that sounds really good. Then I'd hear Rob poke a bunch of holes in it and say, I don't know. And I would say, well, that sounds really good, too. How do I discern and judge? It's amazing to hear people like that, who had that ability to both deliver such compelling arguments that we ended up getting to about. And I think that's an important part of culture.
[01:28:38] Speaker A: Well, if you took all those people and you put them in a time machine to go back, say 30 years, 25 years, to the early part of their career, and if they knew today, if they knew then what they know today about what's happened in the last 30 years, they'd all, at that point would been shocked. Absolutely.
Because, you know, time and events change your decision process. Process, absolutely. And it's just, you know, so you can argue all you want in the moment, but five years hence, it doesn't matter anymore because it's a completely different place, a different environment, a different decision. Everything's different.
So the question is, you know, do decisions really mean that much at the moment?
[01:29:23] Speaker C: I think they do, because I think that the world can change, but the rigor you bring to the table, that's what you can control. You can't control whether there's going to be a global pandemic. But you could have been thoughtful about maybe not pushing rents too hard in that model and feeling comfortable. You were at the right place. You could think about designing something for the future. And the future can change, but it's the ability to sort of reassess. And I think that's where, you know, if you just said all that matters, I got to be right, I'm going to stick to this view. You're never going to be able to pivot. And I think the ability to pivot means understanding sometimes that there is a place to pivot to. And that argument in that debate shows that, hey, there might be two right answers somewhere, and you're somewhere in between. And you're just trying to get to exactly where the right spot is between them. The world might force you to one side or another, but knowing you've thought about both makes you better prepared when that happens. I will never not be an advocate for, like, a spirited, thoughtful, respectful debate. I think that process of decision making makes it easy, er, when things change.
[01:30:19] Speaker A: Well, I, I translate that also to the numbers.
So you make a pro forma today.
[01:30:25] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:30:26] Speaker A: Okay, so you have assumptions for that pro forma.
[01:30:29] Speaker C: Right.
[01:30:30] Speaker A: You've given all these numbers objections. What is your argument behind each of those numbers?
And how do you adapt to change, which you know is inevitable to that? So you make certain assumptions about rent growth or expense growth or capital expenditures or whatever you're forecasting, and then catastrophe occurs and it just blows everything up or the capital markets change dramatically.
How do you build in the cushion for that kind of estimate as you're forecasting and as chief Strategy Officer, you have to think of that way. You have to think.
I have to think five years out.
What am I controlling? What risks am I controlling here to be able to do these projections?
[01:31:20] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's totally true. And I remember I almost approach this in two ways. One and this is how we think about it, is that if you build in so much thought for a cushion, you're just never going to be the deal. That's right, because you're going to get to a place where you say, I've taken care of every possible contingency. So you want to be sort of comfortably uncomfortable in some ways.
And I think that that is an area where, where, yeah, everything will change. But if you're smart about some of those assumptions, you can feel like, okay, they're good long term assumptions, you know, they're never going to survive reality at a certain point. So that's where I think it's not just about being good at the assumptions. And this is back to where I think, you know, Matt is very effective. And you know, my partner George Zander is our chief investment officer and he and I spend a lot of time talking about stuff like this. How do you structure the deal to give yourself maximum optionality so that when things go differently than your projections, you feel like you have the space and the flexibility to pivot? And I think that's where great real estate investors aren't great real estate investors because they are better at somehow seeing what rent growth is going to look like. And you know, that's all that stuff's important. But they're really good at structuring deals in ways that don't put them in boxes where they have the ability to pivot because you always know you will have to. And so when we think about, you know, a strategy, I mean, think about all the folks who invested not saying they did the wrong thing, but you invest in the Sunbelt and then you've seen this now shift where it overbuilt itself. You saw rates go up, so stuff turned up, but not soon enough. And you've seen job growth slow and migration pattern shift, all that stuff. Like there's no way you could have seen that. But if you were smart buying one of those buildings, you would have built in the right structure. You might have also had the discipline. And this is another point where if you get to a point, like I said, if you're, if you're too conservative, they'll overdo anything. But if you're so aggressive and you're a follower and you're the last, last one in, you also are always at risk that you know what you're going to do, something that you're going to regret. And having the discipline to say no is another big thing that I think JBG and our approach has taught me that you know, for a long, long, long time. You know, our model at investment committee is if there was someone, one of the sort of senior partners at the time who dissented, said, we're just not doing this. Everyone had the ability to say no.
You know, we get. You could formally vote.
It very, very, very rarely happened or happens because you have to feel like everyone's actually comfortable with the risk. And that's where you get away from just the exuberance. And a lot of people in our business, they build to build. Developers infamously over build because it's always. There's always some way you can rationalize the money's there as long as the money's there. And that's great if you're a fee business, but when you're an equity investor and you're judged on your equity investment track record, you can't do that. And I think so. It's a combination of discipline, structure and debate and range bounding those assumptions. It's all of those things that goes into making a good, sustainable decision.
[01:33:54] Speaker A: That's great.
The Amazon Community Impact Report details significant philanthropic investments in the national capital region, including affordable housing and education initiatives like AWS's Think Big Spaces and AWS's Restart.
How does JBG Smith view its role in contributing to the community beyond just development?
And what areas are you most passionate about supporting?
[01:34:22] Speaker C: Sure. So I think one of them is obviously housing. We talk about, you know, we launched LEO Impact Capital, which was, you know, partnership with the Washington Housing conservancy.
[01:34:32] Speaker A: I've interviewed A.J. jackson.
[01:34:34] Speaker D: A.J.
[01:34:34] Speaker C: Is phenomenal. Right. You. You've met A.J. everyone should, you know, understand the way he thinks about this, because I think he's really the brains behind so much of what. What we've done here. He, you know, AJ maybe was too modest to say some of this, but he was a big part of actually helping Amazon structure the way they approached their affordable housing, you know, investments. And I think AJ and his team, that, I think is a huge priority because what they can do is they can speak authoritatively in a way that's financially literate, but also they can speak to local governments and nonprofits and others and explain not just how they can invest. It started as a mezzanine debt fund, and it's becoming an equity fund in its next iteration. But they can explain why you need to preserve housing. They can explain how to do it.
Having that as part of our engagement with the community is so critical. But I also think there are a lot of other smaller ways. And it used to Be the joke that the developers go out there and they write the big check and they stand in front of the room at the gala and everyone's wearing the tuxedo. That's great. But you can only do a couple of those things and it's hard to choose. And we work in so many different communities, communities over time, that we've really taken the approach that housing is a big thing for us because we can figure out how to rally capital around that and have a big impact and be true experts there because it's so core to what we do. But all the other things we do should be smaller and more direct and pointed and focused and impact people in the community where they sort of sit. And so that's where you see a lot of us and our support show up, is in things that build regionalism, which is a really important trend, but then also our just community impactful. Okay, let's go do something in Rockville, because we were developing in Rockville, you've seen us do that historically. Let's go figure out this priority in Arlington. And sometimes that comes in the form of sort of financial gifts and things like that. But it can also frequently come in an amount of time that people spend on these things that are not just sort of business purposes, but that get to, hey, how do we form an innovation district? How do we work on talking about policy with different, different folks as policy is being shaped? How do we, you know, get involved individually in sort of institutions in the community? You'll see us do again, this, like sort of lots of different, smaller engagements with that one big guiding light. But we're doing that across a lot of different areas.
Interesting.
[01:36:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, one thing I asked AJ at the time in our discussion was, is this set up? Is Leo set up as a nonprofit? He said, no, no, no, no. We're a for profit enterprise. And I said, that's interesting in that normally when you're giving back and philanthropy, it's structured such that you're not looking to make a month make a profit here, but you're making a business out of this, which is interesting.
And I asked him again, does this fit into your overall mission statement as a company?
Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more. He did elaborate at the. But what's your view of that?
[01:37:16] Speaker C: My view is it's back to incentives. You know, there are a lot of great nonprofits out there, but for something to sometimes be really sustainable, it doesn't have to have a profit motive solely at its core. But it helps because when you can Pay the best people. When you can make something that can sustain itself, I think that's okay. And you know, I look at even people who do a lot of different affordable housing development, whether it's tax credit based, etc. It is at its core, often a problem profit making enterprise. And that has its good and bad components to it. But I think that it does help keep it sustainable. That's a big focus for me.
[01:37:49] Speaker A: Yeah, because doing a. If you've ever done a nonprofit deal, there's a lot of subsidy in those deals.
[01:37:56] Speaker B: It's hard.
[01:37:57] Speaker A: I mean, I. Early in my career at the Saw company, I was involved in what we call the Crick program, which was.
So there's a building two buildings down on Columbia Road which are now completely gentrified, but that I financed, one of which Mayor Barry came at the time to sit with me on the ribbon cutting. And there was a ground lease, a mezzanine structure, as well as a first trust from Aetna at the time, just kind of crafting those deals. And it was interesting, but I felt fulfilled by the doing it. I have to say, it's just more of an emotional feeling doing it.
[01:38:37] Speaker C: That's the way. I mean, I get that through a lot of the work we're doing with groups like Special Competitive Studies Project or, you know, I work with ULI or my work, you know, with effectively some of the groups on the policy side. Like, I like helping to shape that. I like giving time to say, hey, let's bring some information to bear. Let's. Let's work on convening the right people. I think that can be a lot of fun and really interesting, but also clearly do a lot of good.
And I think that we need to make sure we all spend time. I work on advisory board for the Arlington Alexandria Economic Development. That's also a way that, yeah, it benefits us. It's good that we do this, but I spend just as much time on that advising on things that are, you know, mainstream programs or things that have nothing to do with us, but where a real estate perspective is valuable. So I like to try and do that, you know, And I have my own private, you know, philanthropic stuff that I do that aligns with sort of my own interests and passions and values outside of work. But I think we can contribute really strongly when we can bring sort of our expertise to bear.
[01:39:33] Speaker A: Balancing demanding professional roles with personal life and values is a common challenge. How do you approach maintaining that balance and what principles guide your priorities outside of work?
[01:39:43] Speaker C: Oh, man. Getting into that, this is the hardest thing I think anyone ultimately has to do.
I don't, and I don't know. I don't have the right, the right answer. I have not cracked the code. I think it's always sort of. It is a balancing act. And it's something that's hard when you're very passionate about the work that you do. And I mean, I love my professional life. I'm challenged, I'm excited, heartbroken. It comes with all the emotions that you can sort of want in anything because I deeply care about what I do. But I also have a life and a family and other stuff outside of work that is equally sort of emotional and, and more in many ways emotionally sort of resonant. And finding time balances things and not feeling like anything is ever robbed, you know, from one to the other is very challenging.
I don't think anyone ever gets perfectly good at that. I think that's the secret. I've found that people manage it and it's something that they can do really well. But I don't know anyone who's totally cracked that perfect work life balance code. I tend to be a little pessimistic there that it doesn't always, always exist and that it's just about kind of back to sort of the idea of capital allocation. It's like, where is your emotional or time allocation and how do you do that in a way that supports both a vibrant life outside of the office and a vibrant life in the office and pursuing your vocation or your interest.
And so for me, you know, I try and just allocate my time when it's slow at work. I overallocate time at home and spending time with, you know, Caroline McCartner and, you know, our dogs or kids yet. But even my extended family and my friends and my interests, I want interest outside of work that I love to spend time on.
And so I try and over index sometimes knowing that there are times when people around me are thankfully patient because I'm over indexed, you know, whether it's Amazon or Monumental or Merger or anything else where I'm over indexed on work and I'm passionate about it and excited about it. It's just part of being a whole person, at least my kind of opinion.
[01:41:34] Speaker A: So when and if you have children, how will that change your life, do you think?
[01:41:38] Speaker C: You know, that's a big one. And it's one of the things, you know, back to sort of Matt, I really admire about Matt and about our culture in general. And Moyna, our CFO is also you know, it's. They managed to do that so well. And it always comes across that their kids are so important to them, and we always make time for that. And the ability to spend time with your family was really. Was important to me. You know, if my dad had stayed practicing law instead of being a professor, I would have seen a lot less of him. And my dad is hugely important to me in my life. And it's both my parents, obviously, but it's. It was amazing that he had the ability to make that change, that he could be around, he could be there for me. And that was super formative for me growing up. And I watch people I work with, you know, Matt Moyna, others really make the time and prioritize. And I had some great advice early on in my career, which is like, you know, get to get yourself to the point where you've sort of almost burned yourself out, and get yourself to the place where then after you've done that and you've sort of gotten to where you need to be or you're closer, you've earned the ability to take that step back and be able to allocate time to a family and kids, et cetera. Don't do it too soon, is the advice I got, because it'll be harder to do that. You'll be pulled in more directions. And I think that, you know, we always try to create space for families here, and I think a lot of people do a really good job of it. But. But it also is something that, at least for me, has gotten easier knowing that I've achieved certain career milestones or earned enough flexibility and respect to always be able to then have time. Because family does come first. And I think at the end of the day, that's the guiding principle. And that's why I respect so much about a lot of folks here, is they never let work get in the way of sort of having that really vibrant, important family life. And they're there for their kids, and their kids aren't an afterthought or sort of an accessory. They're really a big part of their life. So.
[01:43:17] Speaker A: So, Evan, expand a little bit about your interest in automobiles, if you would.
[01:43:22] Speaker D: Some of my favorite topics.
So I am a devoted gearhead. I'm, you know, fascinated by anything that is a machine. Where'd that come from?
[01:43:30] Speaker C: Comes.
[01:43:30] Speaker D: It came from my dad. When I was growing up, my dad was sort of into a lot of that same stuff, airplanes and cars and watches and all that. So he got me interested in it. It's funny Neither of us are engineers. You know, my dad is a law professor.
[01:43:41] Speaker C: Investors we talked about.
[01:43:43] Speaker D: But it just instilled this sort of deep love and I maybe took it a step further than him. This just huge, deep love for all things automotive. And so that's a big part of, you know, how I spend my free time. But it's also, I'll tell you, it's a thing that in my real estate career has allowed me to make some tremendous, deep and lasting connections with people. And I'll be honest with you, you know, I am not a golfer.
You know, I'm not big sports fan. I like a lot of different stuff, but cars are sort of one of the. Those big passions. And I think no matter what it is, you have to have something that you can be truly and honestly passionate about that allows you to connect with someone else. And that's been one of those things for me. And it's really allowed me to form some, I think, really meaningful personal friendships, but also some professional relationships. And that's something that spans, you know, generations too, which is, I think, really important. You know, what kind of music you like might be something that's more generational or harder to connect with. But you know, that interest in the machinery and in sports cars in particular has let me make some really cool multi generation generational relationships and really led to some mentoring mentee relationships like we talked about, that are based on some kind of shared interest and something you can always fall back on.
[01:44:49] Speaker A: Is there a particular automobile that you.
[01:44:53] Speaker D: It's tough. I've got a couple different ones, but my. Probably my two favorites for me are Porsches and BMWs are my two sort of favorite brands. But you know, I think that's. That's sort of the majority. I have German.
[01:45:06] Speaker A: German manufacturing.
[01:45:07] Speaker D: I like German manufacturing. I always want to be one of these people who's more into Italian cars.
[01:45:10] Speaker C: I love them.
[01:45:11] Speaker D: I think they're really cool. I haven't been brave enough to own one yet, but, you know, I've sort of dallied all across the world in terms of different cars. But yeah, the German stuff generally has my heart.
[01:45:20] Speaker A: So any particular Porsche or BMW that you like?
[01:45:24] Speaker C: Oh, man, I like.
[01:45:25] Speaker D: I have a couple different M3s that I really like and I love to buy cars and work on them too. I have two lifts in my garage so I have a chance to.
[01:45:33] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool.
[01:45:34] Speaker D: Actually learn about cars. I think it's fun, by the way, you know, to go out to your garage and try and tackle a problem. I think in our world, we deal with so much that's abstract, that, okay, let me think about, you know, how I'm going to underwrite this building and its future cash flows and, you know, what's going to happen to, you know, interest rates over time. All these kind of like, really abstract concepts. We have to figure out how do we structure deals or how do we think about the performance of a market. It could go on and on, on. But when you got into the garage, there's working and there's broken. There's, you know, it's just something that you can have that's tangible, that you can look at and say, I need to solve this problem and here are my tools and I can control that process. And I find it tremendously relaxing to take something that could be made better and get to spend time working on it and making it better. And that can be as simple as, you know, just spending an hour out in the garage to have my. My brain a chance to think about or work on something different. You know, I love doing that. I think I enjoy that as much as, you know, I've got. My other favorite is a Porsche 911, you know, and taking that car out and enjoying it in the performance and sort of having a fun day at the track or doing something with it, that's always a lot of fun.
[01:46:39] Speaker C: But I think for me, it's like.
[01:46:40] Speaker D: You have to balance that. The ability to sort of work on them, drive them, enjoy them. To me, those are all equally viable and important parts of the hobby. But it's also. It always comes back to, you know, it being about the people and the people I've met through that are like no one else. And being able to commiserate over busted knuckles or work with. I have a really good friend who. His day job is building satellites, but his hobby is the same as mine. Working on cars and hearing about him building satellites and me talking about real estate. None of these things have to do with the fact that we were dropping a transmission on a car the other day and rebuilding the detents in the transmission. It was really fun to do that, but it, again, allows you to build and nurture these really meaningful connections.
[01:47:16] Speaker A: Have you been to South Carolina, to the BMW plant there?
[01:47:20] Speaker C: I have been down there.
[01:47:21] Speaker D: I have been down there. I actually make an annual pilgrimage. I go down to something called the Vintage, which is a big vintage BMW gathering that's at the.
The factory, but it's also held in Asheville, North Carolina. So it sort of spreads between South Carolina and North Carolina. Right on the border. And think of it as a weekend of celebrating classic BMW. So that's a lot of fun. I enjoy doing that and kind of try.
[01:47:42] Speaker A: So you've done the factory tour and the whole.
[01:47:44] Speaker D: That's pretty cool to see it.
[01:47:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:47:46] Speaker D: Yeah. It's a really fascinating. Talk about a cool real estate thing where it has its own airstrip.
[01:47:50] Speaker C: It's always really interesting to me. Yeah.
[01:47:52] Speaker D: Because that's. By the way, those two things go together. I spent a lot of time at my favorite places here in Space Museum. So being able to sort of love airplanes, love cars, love real estate, it kind of all comes together.
[01:48:01] Speaker A: I don't know if you know David or who was another guest of mine.
[01:48:03] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[01:48:04] Speaker A: His big client is.
Is Gulfstream and they're. I don't know if you've been down to Savannah, but their facility there is phenomenal.
[01:48:13] Speaker D: Pretty extraordinary.
[01:48:14] Speaker C: I've seen it only from the Runway.
[01:48:16] Speaker D: I always think it's pretty cool.
[01:48:17] Speaker A: I don't think he developed all those buildings.
[01:48:18] Speaker D: Wow, that's amazing.
[01:48:20] Speaker C: Build the suit.
[01:48:21] Speaker D: That's pretty cool.
[01:48:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:48:22] Speaker D: Being around that, I think is one of my favorite things about the work I get to do in National Landing and spending time with.
I've gotten to have dinner with different air attaches from different countries and talk about this stuff. I really do enjoy. Support the Air and Space Museum personally and really enjoy being around that kind of thing. And that's, by the way, another place where the sort of car and airplane interest runs together. But to get the chance to meet and hear from people who work on the planes is really cool.
[01:48:45] Speaker A: I may have mentioned I grew up in Detroit and I don't know if you've ever been to Henry Ford Museum.
[01:48:51] Speaker D: I have not.
[01:48:52] Speaker A: You should make that.
[01:48:53] Speaker D: It's on my list.
[01:48:55] Speaker A: You should see it.
Greenfield Village, Henry Ford Museum. I mean, the classic vehicles there are just the best I've ever seen anywhere.
[01:49:05] Speaker D: Pretty spectacular.
[01:49:06] Speaker A: Probably the.
[01:49:07] Speaker D: Well, you know that you bring that up. I don't know if you're familiar, but a really cool piece of. A little sort of linkage there. The gentleman at the Air and Space Museum is responsible for the collections and the restoration of the planes used to work at the Henry Ford Museum. So actually has this incredible connection. He talks about going from fine art restoration to cars to airplanes. And the commonality between those things is really amazing. But it's. He was also saying what an amazing collection that is.
[01:49:33] Speaker A: Well, if you happen to go to Detroit, another thing to see while you're there.
Probably one of the most Spectacular renovations I've ever seen is the merit the Michigan Train Central that just was completed by Henry Ford, by Ford Ford Motor.
[01:49:48] Speaker D: It's amazing.
[01:49:48] Speaker A: It's incredible.
[01:49:49] Speaker D: And I think what's happened in Detroit in general, I mean, talk about the ability to totally remake a place and look at it and say, if you had, you know, next to zero land.
[01:49:57] Speaker C: Basis and all this stuff, what would you do?
[01:50:00] Speaker D: You know, how do you make this?
[01:50:01] Speaker A: No city has gone through what Detroit's gone through.
[01:50:03] Speaker D: No, they haven't. And I think that what they were able to do, nobody believed in it, nobody understood it. But being able to remake that place and sort of capture some of that vibrancy, that's incredible. And, you know, I've been to Detroit a couple times. You know, last time was actually to pick up one of my dogs a couple of years ago when I got him.
And so we were kind of walking around with the puppy. But it was even then, it was incredible to see some of that transformation underway. And I think, you know, it's Detroit, but it's also, I. I think people should all check out Columbus, Ohio. I think what's happened there, you know, there are lots of pockets of the Midwest that people write it off, but there is so much vibrancy. Creative urban thinking, development. I think there are places that, you know, back to our point about housing, good governments who looked into the abyss. They said, we don't know what the future holds. And I think a lot of times, times it's not all the time, but people get complacent when things have been good for a very long time or been stable. And I think D.C. is having its moment now, sort of looking into the abyss with everything going on around the, you know, the Trump administration and Doge.
[01:51:02] Speaker A: Coming to my usual final question, but before I do, I wanted to allow you to expound any more that you'd like to say about something we haven't talked about at all or kind of the future of J.B. joy G. Smith and your view and, you know, what, you know, obviously you love working here. So talk about, you know, where do you see the future of the company? How do you see the company going?
[01:51:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I tell everyone this because I get a lot of questions about that. And, you know, with jbg, with the team turning over and changing a little bit, you know, departures and things like that, it's.
People get flummoxed by that when they don't understand the history of the. The firm. And when I look back and I was lucky enough to Be here, you know, like you said with Mike and Rob and Ben and others.
This firm, the only constant to it, it's been around since 1960. It's been deal, syndicator, operator, developer. It's been a closed end fund manager, it's been a public company, it's shrunk, it's grown. The only constant about jbg, I think there are two. One is change the cliched term, but the other one is it's a. About the people. And the people, yeah, that roster changes and our alumni network is vast and people go on to do incredibly exciting things. And we keep, I mean I spend a lot of time with Ed Chagasian and Tim Greenberg and Dave Ritchie and others and Kai Reynolds. Everyone has left and gone on to do really exciting things, whether in a leadership role at another company or being entrepreneurial or whatever it is.
That network in those bonds are still close. We still have them. But within jbg, the core of people, I mean I've worked and sat next to George Andrews to give you an example for 13 years.
I'm very close with our team and my partners and Molina and I have worked together the same amount of time. And Matt. And it's all about that sort of that culture and that core. It can change, it can fluctuate, but that ethos stays. And I think that's where JBG will always look different, has always looked different. I couldn't tell you what it's going to be, but I can tell you that it'll have smart, creative, hard working people who are devoted to, by the way, passing leadership. That's one of the things I think is most extraordinary about this company that has kept me here. That's been a driving factor. It's the reason I wanted to work here is that leadership at this firm. It didn't go to anyone's son or daughter. It's changed over from the original folks. You know, Stuart is a law firm, I mean different original folks to multiple generations of leadership. And that's extraordinary even as people have interesting.
[01:53:24] Speaker A: That's not a family company in per se where you know, where a lot of the real estate firms in Washington.
[01:53:30] Speaker C: And there's nothing wrong with that, but this, you can credibly walk in the door here and one day run the company. That's crazy to me, but it's true. I mean, George Anders started here as an analyst. Yeah, he's our chief investment officer. I was an associate, I came in a little behind him. But it's, you know, I think about Our C suite and the folks who work with us and, you know, circumstances. C suite's kind of funny. It's from the company thing, like we're all partners that, you know, that's always been the same sort of through the history of the company.
[01:53:58] Speaker A: So if you could put one message on a billboard, and I'm going to put National Landing as the place for this billboard for everyone passing by to seat. What would it say?
[01:54:09] Speaker C: So everyone passing by National Landing.
[01:54:11] Speaker A: Yes. So let's assume you're flying into National Airport and you're looking out your window and there's a big billboard on National Landing as you're landing at the airport there.
[01:54:25] Speaker C: I'd like to say, and this is going to sound cheesy, but it's that the future is built here, and I want people to know when they land. It's the greatest concentration of innovation and national security, I think, anywhere in the country. And where else can you have a major research university, the Department of Defense, one of the biggest tech companies in the world, all within a tiny little area, like all the collisions that happen, everything there. The future will be built to some extent. They're not the only place it'll be built. But I think that's what I put on that billboard. It's just so that people understood, like, this is the future and it's the future of how we remake these neighborhoods. Like you said. What is someone going to do with patent and trademark? It's the future of this intersection of.
[01:55:06] Speaker D: National security and defense.
[01:55:08] Speaker C: The future of sort of the urban forum. And what do we do with office? I think that's where there's so many different ways you can read that, that I do think the future is going to be built there, and I'm proud to have a role in public building.
[01:55:18] Speaker A: So before we wrap up, anything else you'd like to say?
[01:55:21] Speaker C: Oh, man, I think you've covered. Everything's been pretty extensive. There's nothing else that I have in my mind.
[01:55:25] Speaker A: You're a storyteller, so I can't cut you off.
[01:55:28] Speaker C: Thank you. I'd stay here all day.
[01:55:32] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Evan. I appreciate time.
