He's Exposing The Biggest Real Estate Secrets | Hiten Samtani
With Hiten Samtani — Founder, Ten31 Media
Listen to the full episode1 hr 15 min
The episode in one minute
What this conversation gets into
Uncovering the Hidden Power Structures in Commercial Real Estate with Hiten Samtani (Founder of Ten31 Media)Deep-dive conversation with Hiten Samtani, former Editorial Director at The Real Deal and…
Uncovering the Hidden Power Structures in Commercial Real Estate with Hiten Samtani (Founder of Ten31 Media)Deep-dive conversation with Hiten Samtani, former Editorial Director at The Real Deal and founder of Ten31 Media, on the unseen forces driving commercial real estate in America's biggest markets. From long-term family dynasties and low-basis empires to cultural niches quietly controlling billions in Los Angeles and New York, political leverage in mega-projects, the surge of private credit and insurance capital, and the evolving role of insider-focused media in an opaque industry. Essential for commercial real estate investors, brokers, developers, lenders, operators, and professionals looking for unfiltered perspective on market movers, capital flows, and power dynamics.
Sponsor — Loan Titan
Upscale your experience with
https://loantitan.com/
Connect with Taylor Avakian
Newsletter: https://www.thegroupcre.com/newsletter-signup
Instagram: https://instagram.com/tayloravakian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tayloravakian
Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tayloravakian/
Connect with Hiten Samtanihttps://www.thepromote.com/https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-promote-podcast/id1801355295https://youtube.com/@ten31tv?si=Ke5cIHVQCNAnXptY
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro & Real Estate as Nexus of Power, Money, and Politics
Chapters:
1:29 - Guest Intro and Background in CRE Media
Chapters:
2:14 - Who Really Shapes Cities: Long-Term Owners vs Transient Capital
Chapters:
3:48 - Family Dynasties, Nepo Babies, and Low-Basis Advantages
Chapters:
5:30 - Information Arbitrage, Broker Relationships, and Deal Flow
Chapters:
7:27 - Political Juice in Mega Projects (Beverly Hills, Hudson Yards)9:04 - Negotiating Tactics vs Outright Corruption
Chapters:
10:59 - Appraisals, Incentives, and Gray Areas
Chapters:
12:09 - LA vs New York Kingpins: Quiet Wealth and Cultural Niches
Chapters:
16:51 - Private Credit Evolution with Insurance Capital
Chapters:
19:08 - Sub-Institutional Trends and Fraud Scrutiny
Chapters:
19:33 - Market Sentiment: LA vs New York Asset Classes
Chapters:
22:50 - Political Risks and Narrative Shifts
Chapters:
25:53 - Starting Ten31 Media: Bridging the Industry-Media Gap
Chapters:
28:39 - Building a Niche Media Business for Specialists
Chapters:
31:07 - Paywalls, Premium Content, and Audience Monetization
Chapters:
32:04 - AI's Impact on Media and Quality vs Slop
Chapters:
34:39 - Institutional Players Courting Retail Capital via Social Media
Chapters:
39:49 - Future of CRE Media: Counterpoint and Swagger
Chapters:
42:01 - Building Clout with Exclusion and Quality
Chapters:
44:01 - Expanding Platforms While Keeping the DNA
Chapters:
45:52 - Podcast Growth and Chemistry
Chapters:
49:19 - Writing Craft, Inspiration, and Editing
Chapters:
52:44 - Balancing Business, Content, and Life
Chapters:
55:06 - Favorite Stories and Idea Generation
Chapters:
58:49 - Media Impact on Markets and Industry Opacity
Chapters:
1:02:05 - Maintaining Integrity at Scale
Chapters:
1:05:50 - Interviewing Techniques and Co-Hosting Dynamics
Chapters:
1:08:31 - How to Ask Great Questions
Chapters:
1:10:23 - Preparation vs Natural Flow in Interviews
Chapters:
1:12:37 - Building Relationships Through Conversations
Chapters:
1:13:30 - Closing Thoughts and Future of Ten31#CommercialRealEstate #CRE #RealEstateInvesting #PrivateCredit #RealEstateMedia #Ten31Media
Real estate is a fascinating nexus of everything that people care about. Money, power, celebrity, finance, urban planning. It's all kind of packaged together and comes out in this cocktail that we call commercial real estate. The real estate people are there through cycles. They call all the shots all the time and they're always in the background. They bought it at such such a low basis. Such a low basis. They can do certain long-term things that a lot of the newer investors can't. I think the evolution of how private credit is working with insurance money is going to be a massive
story. All right, guys. Before we get into today's video, I want to give a huge shout out to Loan Titan, the exclusive lending partner of this channel. Loan Titan has been the number one lender in the Los Angeles area for years. Consistently trusted by both brokers and borrowers. They offer mortgage solutions tailored to just about any situation. Whether it's Fanny, Freddy loans, nonQM programs, construction loans, multif family financing, or even land loans. They also offer in-house private money financing solutions for fast closings, distress sales, or if you just need access to your equity quickly. And here's a bonus. If you work alone Titan and you mentioned that Taylor of Aken referred you, you'll get $500 credited towards your closing costs. Their team is highly responsive, transparent, and genuinely easy to work with. Head over to lonetitan.com and make sure you tell them Taylor sent you.
Huge thanks to Calazani at Lone Titan for supporting today's video and supporting the channel. Now, let's jump back into it. Welcome to the episode. My name is Taylor Avakian and I'm here with my esteemed guest Simani. What's up, man? Thanks for being here, man.
We've been we've been wanting to do this I think uh even before you started your podcast and then we connected maybe two years ago, year and a half ago um at a little event that we were both at and I think we connected on the fact that commercial real estate and media has been something that's adapted and changed a ton correct over the last 5
You were at the real deal. You started your own media company which is exciting. Um, what did running the the real deal through like multiple cycles teach you on how power actually moves
in commercial real estate? It's such a fascinating nexus. I think real estate is a fascinating nexus of everything that people care about. Money, power, celebrity, finance, urban planning. It's all kind of packaged together and comes out in this cocktail that we call commercial real estate. So to understand who runs a city, a lot of people look at like okay who who's, you know, who's the richest person in the city, who are the political people who are in charge, etc. But a lot of people tend to miss that the real estate people are there through cycles. They call all the shots all the time and they're always in the background, right? So, you really understand that these guys and and these people are shaping the future of these cities and they're so invested. Unlike other assets like Ken Griffin can take Citadel
and move it to Miami, it's very hard for a New York real estate titan to pack up and leave, right? That just doesn't happen. So, they have invested a lot into building out their kind of civic infrastructure as well. They're politically juiced on every level, city, state, and you know, they really have those things in place. So, I think that real estate is still a great man business. And let me explain that. You think of these people, they talk about having institutional shops and stuff, and there are some exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, it's a guy and it's generally a guy in charge who's going by gut who who makes a decision and then everything kind of runs after that, right? You've seen that. And it's not only true for I think real estate is interesting.
100%. It's um being in the industry too because I didn't come from a real estate background at all and I'm from a small town called Sacramento. So, uh that was like not LA, New York, these big epicenters of of money and politics and Hollywood and these things. When I got into the business and when I realized who the actual market movers were, the players in this space, especially in LA, and I don't know if it's the same in New York City, but like everyone is related. There's this cousin with this. They came over at a certain time. They started buying everything and now they really run almost the
whole entire city when he comes to it. They bought it at such such a low basis, right? Such a low basis. They take certain they can do certain long-term things that a lot of the newer investors can't. And also, I think if you think about you're familiar with the PayPal mafia. Yeah. Right. So, so many companies came out of PayPal that now dominate our landscape in technology, etc. I think real estate operates quite similarly. Like if you look at the principles outside of the family, Nepo babies are all over the business for good reason. But if you outside of that family business, if you look at the institutional shops, who runs them, who's controlling the money, who's the number two or number three at XYZ, they all kind of flow back to the originals. Yeah. So Traml Crow is a great example of this.
Related companies has now birthed so many different people as well. And and that's an interesting thing like once you learn the business, once you have the financial connections and the knowhow how to underwrite a deal, how to go raise money for it, how to rally the council people and whatnot to your cause, you can go do it for yourself.
Do you think that because real estate is this kind of shadow business I like to think of in terms of information? The way that that um my understanding of back in the day was information was very hard to come by in real estate, right? It was this this closed door and the way that you made money was because you either had a lot of money so you can buy stuff but there was this edge this alpha like information arbitrage information arbitrage right and it seems like now at least most of that arbitrage is is lost or it's it's not even clearly as big as what it was once was. Do you feel like with where media is headed, with where the the current state of real estate, there's still that arbitrage or do you think that there's it's going to be democratized?
I mean, it's it's definitely easier to access information about stuff you need to know. That's absolutely true. I mean, before you would wait for uh someone might know something about a certain site that's going to hit the market or but but I think there is still an edge in understanding. I think the most successful people in this business are the people who have really really good connections with the brokers on the ground. That still matters so much, right? And there are certain and this applies everywhere from your like small 5 to10 million multi-deal all the way up to the skyscrapers that define our cities. Like if you know the right people, if you're not in the middle of the deal flow, you're not getting anything. So I think there is a lot of talk about media democratizing real estate etc. I don't think fundamentally it's changed so much.
Now the capital structures of the business have changed dramatically and there's been a big transition from what I like to call the cowboys, the couple of people who know a couple of people to the suits which is very much it's become a game of structured finance and the Blackstones and the Carlos and the Apollos run that show. Yeah. But you still need to know the right people in the market. You still need to have good relationships on the ground and you still need to be able to act very quickly when you find out about a deal.
What has media taught you about the inner workings of of real estate? Like what what um I guess what has been a surprise to you through this journey of you covering real estate and the media business that prior wasn't even a consideration for you?
I think I underestimated the level of power that real estate people have uh in in kind of shaping our cities. I think no one can really understand it until you see it play out. A really good example now is in Beverly Hills with one Beverly Hills uh the mega project coming up. So it's Kane International uh Oko Group which is Vlad Donin, Benny Alagum, all of these guys and they're able to they just set up a special tax district for that project. They're raising bonds. They're going to get MUN bonds and it's incredible. and they they've promised $140 million in incentives to the city of Beverly Hills, but those incentives are nebulous. I'm not I'm not saying there's anything like wrongdoing, but we don't exactly know what those are. They haven't really specified what the 140 million community benefit is
and they're getting this tax district that's like a bespoke tax district and they're going to be able to raise mun bonds which obviously come back to the taxpayers. So to have that level of political juice Yeah. in a city as wealthy and powerful as Beverly Hills is pretty
incredible. How much do political ties? You we talked touched a little bit on relationships, but do you still think that there's uh under under the table dealings you still feel like there's this kind of unspoken movers and shakers of
hey, I don't think like outright, you know, paytoplay is that big a deal. It obviously happens. There's a major case in LA from a couple years ago with Whoar. Yeah, remember that? That was I mean as clear as it gets. Former Carmel Partners alum. There was some shady thing there. Those are one-offs and I'm glad they're one-offs cuz that would that that's like straight corruption. This is more lining up your political ducks in a row to get the things that you want done, right? A great example in New York is back to Hudson Yards and what they did. They were able to get uh I think it's a they're building a rail yards above the project. the second phase of the project and now they're going to be able to finance that through a new uh tax bond. So, it's two billion dollars, I think.
And check my math on this later. But it's a huge huge savings for the company for related uh because they got the mayor, the current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, to put his weight behind this plan. And they had this casino chip. They were they were going to have a casino component to this thing.
And casinos obviously come with quality of life issues and are politically quite unpopular. We feel like they dangled that just to get this. this is what they wanted, but they were able to like offer this casino thing as a as a smokeokc screen office, right?
They're they're they're um it's all I mean, everyone's moving and and doing certain things to to make the outcome of what they're hoping to achieve achieve, right?
Um, I'm curious and I think at the smaller level and this is sort of under the radar because we no one's really tracking what's happening on let's say half a million dollar deals or billion dollar deals on stuff like that.
kosher. Correct. And then there's other things that you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't say are under the table, but they're certainly not over the table in a sense like appraisals. Appraisals are a crazy crazy part of the real estate business, right? You buy a property, nothing has changed in your NOI or financials or anything. And suddenly this property is worth what 30% more in 3 years or like how do you get there?
No one quite knows. I don't quite understand. Yeah. How that's still a thing. Like how are And the funniest part about appraisals is many times the appraisers call us, the brokers, and like, "Hey, so what do
I'm like, "Wait, so you're getting paid $3,000 to basically ask me what I think the building is, and you're just going to put it in a, you know, 60page document." It's like, I get it from the bank's perspective and whatnot,
but I think it's a lot of ass covering or getting winning business. If your if appraisal firm A is going to be very very tight and conservative in their appraisals and appraisal firm B is going to be a little more generous, guess who's going to have a lot more business in the long term, right? So, there's a bit of a there's a bit of a mismatch in incentives
LA Kingpins are a lot more quiet. Yeah. You you barely hear of them. Like I've been here quite a while now and the dynasties here are completely under the radar. Super quiet. There's so much money in Los Angeles. It's an incredible amount of money, but they're not out there in the same way
as the New York Kingpins. No. And the and the crazy thing is too when you start to look at the dynamics of their portfolio, it's like an office building here. It's 48 to 24 unit buildings here.
you like start to start to put the pieces together and it's not the big towers in New York City because obviously New York is a smaller footprint, right? LA is massive and so we don't have the
skyscrapers. I think the sprawl creates a sense of opacity, right? And you only find out about these things when things get either really really bad. So a great example, do you remember the is it in the valley there's these Indian this
17,000. You know how astonishing that is? Insane, right? And these are like former diamond guys who started buying things in the 70s, I want to say, or 60s. The story of that built an empire and then there's this brotherly feud playing out in court and the the portfolio is probably worth conservatively5 or 6 billion. I had never heard of the Draganis. Everyone in the business kind of knows them, right? But they're not in the in the national psyche or the city psyche until something big happens. I think, and this is the thing about I I think this is also I'm gonna I'm gonna theorize here. There is a little bit of frontier mentality in California, right? In New York, when we've done our jobs, you know, we're calling, "Hey, I heard this is trading blah blah blah." They will get pissed at you. They'll swear at you.
They'll want to come at you. All kinds of stuff. They'll be upset, but they understand that that's part of the game. In California when I moved here, one of the big things, one of the big insights people used to get frustrated that how are you writing about this? This hasn't closed yet. I said that's the job. No, that there's almost like a this is our business. Don't mess with our business and we're doing this and then we will come to you when it's ready. There's like a there's a frontier mentality there like don't don't don't ask questions. Here is the package when it's ready.
I just think New York is a lot more face like what you see is what you get as a city as a as a business culture and LA is a lot more quiet wealth behind the scenes influence all
that. I think if someone actually did like deep research into the players of of LA I would almost bet that the money in LA from a like a pure power perspective is bigger than New York
I I wouldn't bet against you. Like it's ridiculous. And the craziest thing too is there's like three cultures that basically run run Los Angeles, right? There's the the Orthodox Jewish culture, which a ton of small small buildings, but they own a [bleep] ton of them. Volume shops. Exactly. Volume shops. Then there's the Indian culture, which there's actually four Indian families that own a combined 50,000 units in Southern California that no one knows about, right? these billion billion dollar corporations that I guarantee you like if anyone heard
show. Oh my god. Like Yeah. Exactly. And then there's the the Persians. And the Persians are a super interesting niche that I was never exposed to previously here,
Yeah. Well, I don't know it. I've just heard it. Uh but I think the Persians are super interesting. Again, it comes back to the culture. Most of them left Iran in the 70s. Uh primarily Jewish families. There are some non-Jewish families, but they left in the 70s. And one of the things that and there were of means they had money back in Iran as well. So, one of the first things they did when they came to America, quote unquote, is they bought land, right? They bought properties. is there's something tangible, real, having been exiled or having been forced out of where they were from. They said, "The first thing we're going to do is buy property." So, guess what? Soho and New York, same story, right? All these guys who now live in Great Neck bought up like prime prime
Mhm. Same story here. They came, guess where they ended up buying? Freaking Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills, right? And so the Persian families have tremendous influence and wealth in the pockets that matter in
LA. The most the most influential pockets of Los Angeles, they own everything. Yeah. What um what are you most excited about or what's the most exciting story that you think is going to be the next 6 to 12 months people are going to be talking about or maybe that will come out in 6 to 12 months but is not being
talked about today. I think the this is an ongoing story, but I think the evolution of how private credit is working with insurance money is going to be a massive story. So all these companies, Apollo, Blackstone, Blue, uh Blue, they're all well, it's more Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, they're all looking at using their insurance companies, their subsidiaries. So KKR, I believe, has Global Atlantic. Blackstone has a partnership with legal in general and Apollo has a company called Athen. Now insurance spits out a lot of money in premiums and so they've basically structured these businesses to take that tremendous pool of capital and then filter it into private credit. And so a lot of the deals that are being done, RXR, which is a big blare out in New York, uh just bought a tower called 590 Madison Avenue.
They paid 1 something billion, 1.07 billion. Okay. So about a th000 a foot. Uh-huh. And the money is coming from Athen. Athen is providing the the financing for this thing, right? So, they're moving up the stack for a while. Uh, insurance money is now very competitive with CNBS as well. For a while, if you had a massive building, you're the shot is it's probably going to be financed as a SASb CMBBS. Now, insurance money is way way more competitive in that space. So, they've moved from funding, let's say, two $300 million deals higher up. And you're going to see more and more of that because Apollo all these guys are obsessed with creating structures that can take that cash and funnel it into these like fee generating
as well? Absolutely. 100%. Because the capital there there is going to be banks have pulled back from a lot of this commercialing, right? I don't think that narrative is going to change anytime soon. debt funds because of where they can get their capital are getting more and more competitive and then they go and back leverage with with
So, I think the capital dynamics will play out in New York and play out here. So, you're going to see insurance becoming a much much much bigger force. That's on the institutional side of things. On the subinstitutional side of things, I think that we're going to be taking sort of hanky banky and fraud a lot more seriously. We're already seeing that play out in the agency lending space, right? Sure, you've been following all the stuff that's happening in multif family. I think the more and more they look under the hood, the more they're going to find stuff they don't like and it's going to have a major major major impact on the market.
I don't know the sentiment as much in New York, but it doesn't feel like it's as negative as it is in Los Angeles from like a investment perspective. People feel like California is this like devil, right? It's like they're the worst for being for business.
Right. Exactly. And in New York, I know the laws are like very draconian as well, but it doesn't feel like the sentiment of investing in New York is as negative as in Los Angeles. Do you feel that?
People are bleeding millions of dollars just keeping these things going. And we're seeing portfolios trade at like 75% discounts, 65% discounts all the time, right? You can't give rent stabilized buildings away at this point. Wow. Yeah. Like people will not take them. There are a couple of people who are making a really nice business out of snapping them up at bargain basement prices. But in general, a massive slice of the market. We're talking about a million uh there's about a million rentstabilized units in New York. It's severely severely compromised. Okay. Uh I would I would think of New York almost as a there are some asset classes that are roaring. So top flight office. Oh my god. You you are if you own one of the class A++ towers in New York, you're killing it right now. Really? You can get massive rents.
It's like Century City here in LA. Exactly. Again, so even LA I hesitate to kind of paint it with a super broad brush because Sentry City is a thriving market. downtown LA very hard to give buildings away again, right? Yeah. And and I think there is a a feeling in both these cities that like you guys are two of our cradles of capitalism.
And and in New York, we have a very very important mayoral election on the way, right? And there are some extreme stances in that election as well, right? The front runner is a guy called Zoran Mamani. forget his outside, it's not even relevant here, but he is someone who believes in democratic socialism, right? That's his that's his like stated
belief system. Uh that would you know that's fine for maybe Portland, Oregon or a less important city, but you're talking about the most important capital city in the world. Yeah.
And they're going to turn it socialist. Yeah. Right. That that's a little scary for outside money to come in. Now, New York has the saying never bet against New York. I completely believe in like it's just it's too dynamic. There's too much going on. There's incredible deals to be had. And people who bought I don't know who built office into this cycle have done incredibly well. Right. Right. So, Los Angeles is tough. Los Angeles is tough. Like, I think Los Angeles is losing the narrative.
It feels from a business perspective. Yeah. feels like at least in the conversation that I have I'm having it's just there's this kind of depressed gray cloud over the city and I think
because people feel hopeless and I don't know if it's because it's like you walk down one block of downtown LA you'd feel hopeless too. Yeah. So if you're an LP, if you're a major capital allocator, if you're a big investor planning to plant your flag in LA, it's hard. The optics are bad and optics do matter.
They really do matter. Do you think that there could be because we we beat it LA um they were going to do something like the uh rent stabilized or trying to do something like vacancy control. Right. Clearly that's not a good way to go about it. Are they do you think New York is going to reverse that andor do you think that that possibility could come to Los Angeles if we continue down the path?
Hard to speculate on where the political winds will blow. I I would say that in New York the the tenant movement has grown stronger and stronger and the reason that it got to that level is that landlords got away with too much. Right. I think I think something broke. There is a fascinating tale that I remember not sure if it's of importance to LA viewers, but I think it might be. There was a New York Times reporter called Charlie Bagley. He was a real estate reporter. He once gets a call from the head of the biggest trade group in New York real estate, a guy called Steve Spanola who runs a company runs an organization called Rebney. He gets a call from him as he's rewriting the the laws in the Senate chamber. He gets a call. He's like, "Hey, I'm talking to He's like,
it wasn't surprising that he was involved in the mix. It was surprising that he was so like so out there that he decided he could call a reporter and almost brag about it. Remember the scene from the Big Short where they're like they're bragging. Yes. There was the amount of political clout that landlords had in New York and the kind of [bleep] they were getting away with and not all landlords again but the bad actors were getting away with some really really bad stuff. And the way that I think about narratives in general is that narratives go by flash points, things that stick in the memory as opposed to what is happening dayto-day, right? You hear about a landlord sending dogs outside a tenants's unit, that's what sticks with you. And if you're a politician or a tenant organizer, etc., that's what becomes the fuel. Yeah. Right.
So think about a very very famous midnight demolition in the 80s. A famous developer called Harry Mlau went in and tore down these SRO's like minutes before deadline. Really crazy illegal. Godfine. Those are the kind of things that people start thinking like big tobacco. They think bad landlord, right? And those are the kind of things that take years to fight against. So, the majority of landlords are doing the right and responsible thing, running their buildings in a in a responsible way and making money for themselves. I think both things are important, but when that doesn't happen and when that breaks, right, you end up with extreme laws like the 2019 New York rent reforms, right? And we've gotten really close here in LA as well, right? So I I think what makes LA a little bit immune from these political pressures is like there's less of a sense of one
I think overall it's a bunch of different neighborhoods. Bunch of different little things that have their own, you know, Boil Heights has their own coalition, Echo Park, Silver Lake, um South LA. there's these these it feels like they're individual groups which for coming together and actually having a big swaththing change. I think it's a little bit harder to actually get done. I want to talk about um 1031 and why you started it. What was the impetus like the thought process and and how you are expecting or wanting it to to go in the future?
Yeah. So I ran the newsroom at the real deal for many years. This is the largest uh real estate publication probably in the country. Yeah. And I was exposed to this astonishing world of characters and storylines and money and power. Addicted, completely addicted. I went in not knowing anything about real estate, right? I came from a background. I was covering school, the school system before that.
And then I came into this real estate newsroom knowing nothing and instantly I got it. I got very lucky with that. I was in the right place at the right time. New York real estate got to see everything. Um, I ran that newsroom for a long, long time. And the one thing that I saw and this is less a criticism of the real deal and more where I wanted to take my next enterprise is that in general there's a very very big gap between the way that you guys operators, brokers, investors, people who are professionals in the industry think and talk about the industry and the way that the media does. The gap is this big. Right? My entire thesis for 1031 was
That's it. Right? the tone, the nuance, the things that people care about, the the vibe of the thing. Forget about what the popular general media wants to say about real estate.
Mhm. Right. And if you can do that and create something truly interesting and valuable to an audience in a niche like that, I think can be a very very fun and rewarding journey. So that's why we decided to start.
I want 1031 to be the ringer of B2B media, which means a collection of properties that have rapidly dedicated audiences that are very, very wealthy, powerful audiences. So, for example, The Promote, which is our flagship publication, is a commercial real estate insider publication. We've built a pretty great audience. We have about 18,000 subscribers now. We have we're launching our YouTube. Our podcast has really taken off, right? So, we're building all these properties, but all of them have the same mission. This is not for a general audience. That's actually our slogan, right? This is for specialists only. If you're a general audience wanting to kind of get a bit of a lay of the land, commercial real estate, there are 50 different publications. All the best. I don't want you. But if you're someone who lives and breeds this business, I want you.
this thing come alive. What are the economics of a media business like that? Like how if you're thinking about it? I know most of the revenue from that comes typically it was magazines, right? So you had subscriptions, stuff like that. Now it's um advertising.
I would say advertising is a big part, but it really depends how you play it, right? I think there's a couple of ways to think about this. Advertising is a big component of that and as the as the distribution grows, advertising becomes a lot easier. However, the more specific the audience, you don't need giant scale to
So, we're going to launch a premium tier. We're going to have a paid subscription thing. If people find this product valuable enough for their business or interesting enough for their business, the price points, the thresholds are higher, right? So you can do with a niche highquality audience what it would take a BuzzFeed 500x that audience to to do. Got it. Right. I think that's the that's the play here. And then when you collect kind of a a constellation of these niche obsessive readers, right, or viewers or listeners or what have you, the sum total of that becomes really interesting because okay, hey, you want to reach people who's, you know, who are on average making a quarter million dollars a year and it goes, we have about half a dozen legitimate billionaires who are either reading or listening to us, right?
don't have the fly by nighters. We have hardcore people in the business, right? So that's a wealthy, very plugged in audience. You go to an advertiser who wants to hit that niche, your rates are a lot higher, right? You can charge a higher subscription as well. And you can say, you know what, you you want to reach very wealthy professionals in four different walks of life. I've got the private equity people in this publication. I've got the CRA people in this publication. We've just launched u we're co-publishing a mortgage insider, residential mortgage insider publication. That's a two trillion dollar TAM market, right? I'm I'm just talking about resi and there's very little real coverage in the space. So someone I know who I really respect their stuff has launched it and 1031's going to be co-publishing that right and so that is a portal into this
giant world of oh my god UWM Rocket Mr. Cooper, all these technology companies, massive, massive market, historically very undercovered and there's a lot of money in that space as
well. How do you differentiate or I guess how do you segment what is behind pay walls? Yeah. And keep it valuable enough for it to be paid versus the free stuff. How do you think about that?
Oh god, that's a that's a real challenge and we're still working through that because we haven't launched the payw wall yet, right? You want enough people to be interested
And the and the thing about you're always playing a game of clout versus revenue, right? The more open or the bigger your distribution is with the right people, your clout grows, right? But cloud doesn't necessarily translate right away into dollars, right? So that figuring out like okay if it's an exclusive thing with super high value maybe that goes behind the payw wall but maybe once in a while we tease a snippet of it etc or maybe our recaps or overviews the things that people love reading we don't take away from them but there is an extra little sauce in the in the premium
edition what do you think AI and um the exponential growth of just content out there what do you think Is that going to be a benefit to to publications like you because you go so in depth that AI is you're you're getting information from people right from sources inside information versus I guess what is your opinion on how AI is going to be affecting the media business?
I mean it's already decimated a lot of the media business cost of production with AI comes close to zero. Yeah. Distribution has already been broken a long long time ago right? Yes. Before a magazine could rely on having its subscribers and then a website could be like, "Okay, people are going to come to my website." That's all been fractured, right? So many people are getting their news just off WhatsApp in our industry. Just off WhatsApp, right? Then there's Reddit. There's for a while, I think the starkkest one was maybe eight or nine years ago, I was watching one of my colleagues and she was on Facebook in the morning. I said, "What are you up to?" She's like, "I'm reading the news." I said, "What do you mean?" The way she read her news was only on that Facebook news feed, right? Never read anything else.
And she was a journalist in the business. So I said, "Oh, this is a problem. This is going to be a problem." Wow. So the it is very hard with the volume of content that's out there to distinguish between quality and
But I think that AI will decimate the middle of the pack. Completely decimate them. Because if you're an okay reporter who could put something together, you know, you call a couple of people, what not. Yeah, I can Yeah, I can scour the same sources as you. Yeah. The extra quote is not really needed. You know what a lot of reporters do, it's very templated. Okay, I'll go pick up this block from here and pick up this block from here and then I'll call Taylor and Taylor's going to give me a quote about the multif family market. That kind of reporting is very low value reporting, right? And doesn't do very much.
I feel like people like the FT Financial Times will always be fine because they have the resources and the capability to do things that really move the needle, right? And then there's people I think like us who can nail the framing and the tone to a level that is so specific to people in the business that they appreciate it. They're like these people, they're like inside my soul somehow. They understand what we're talking about and they know that a deal is not only about the headline number, but about how it's structured, who's getting paid, what the waterfall looks like, what the equity distribution is, like things like that that really get the juices flowing these guys get. So, I'm going to give them my money and more importantly, I'm going to give them my
attention. Interesting. So, are you seeing because this has been a shift that I noticed first when John Gray started getting on social the running LinkedIn the running LinkedIn videos and I'm like wait a
And so because um what was interesting to me is in starting this media stuff that I've been doing from the brokerage side, it's it's hard to get some LA guys to want to come and talk.
They want to keep their information or they want to keep low profile because they don't want to go, you know, that's an LA thing a little bit I would say.
like we're comfortable. We've got like a couple million square feet. Exactly. They don't need to do that stuff. But you see these these big companies and they're they're embracing social media. Are you seeing more of that happen or do you think it's going to lead to more people are going to have to do social for these for for their companies to grow for them to get investors for them to actually get deals sent to them?
So there's a very very fascinating reason why this is happening at the very big companies the Brookfields the Blackstones the running video which is John Gray's thing there's now swimming things that I'm seeing there's a reason this is happening is that your traditional pools of capital which are institutional LPS I mean sovereign wealth funds insurance companies endowments etc who would typically pile into deals or funds that Blackstone Courtland all the big guys manage that pool is drying up. So I think they raised globally private equity and not talking just real estate raised about 600 billion last year which was the lowest figure in 7 years or so. Wow. Okay. So that pool is drying up. However, the pool of retail capital that is available is suddenly like they're they're like you can see the floodgates.
We're talking let's say there's 401ks are now being able to invest in alternatives which includes real estate. That's a $12 trillion pool of money. Okay, so that dwarfs any kind of like why why go to Abu Dhabi and do road shows and do all this stuff if you have this 401k money sitting here? And guess what? These LPS, your new LPs, your wealthy doctor, lawyer, dentist, etc. are not going to demand the same terms from you. The fee structure is going to be a lot more generous for you because they're less sophisticated. They're not banding together. They're writing you smaller checks so they have by definition less leverage with you, right? So we're talking about a $600 billion pool of private equity money and a 12 trillion pool of this like retail money, right? And then there's so many other parts of that.
So courting retail investors needs you to have a front-facing public brand, right? So John Gray becoming like the kindly uncle on LinkedIn is a great absolute genius marketing tool and also has humanized one of these companies that is thought of as like this opaque fortress, right? And so people in those positions who want to tap into those relationships. So Blackstone has has a tie up I believe with Vanguard, right? Because they're they know this money is coming and they want to basically plug into the API, let's call it, right? Got it. Distribution is everything, right? And distribution is everything in my business in media is everything in the fund manager business as well. If you have access to the right capital, you can move faster, you can make bigger bets, you can do a lot more than you could do if your hands are
tied. So, are you thinking about that from the power that you're going to have with media? Because if you have the distribution as well, right, and those people want your distribution, everyone's saying attention's the the oil. Yeah. attention attention is the oil everything that drives the economy. Clearly the laws are shifting for that to be even further down the line. Are you thinking about that in terms of the value that you're trying to create from How are you thinking about your value in the community?
So I think let's talk broadly and then we'll get into what we're doing. So I think broadly media companies are in a lot of trouble because of what's going on with John Gray and his LinkedIn videos etc. because now they have their own channels. A lot of these people have hundreds of thousands of followers on LinkedIn etc. I remember once seeing a very very stark one which was I saw I think side by side on my LinkedIn panel there was commercial observer which is a big publication in the CR space and on LinkedIn it had like let's say 75,000 followers and right above that for whatever reason was strip mall guys followership and it was like a few notches above that. I said there's one dude, not even a big investor. No. And already has that clout. Now get rid of that. Go to the institutional level.
People like John Gray, etc. 4 or 500,000 followers. If you have your own distribution channel and you can control your messaging from A to Z, yeah, why go and do, you know, once in a while you give an interview to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, you don't really need to do more than that. No, you can break down your thesis, etc. VC and Silicon Valley have figured this out, right? They will put out their deal memos on Twitter and they'll say whatever they want in them and they don't need to give interviews because it's right there.
Interesting. Right. So there's I think in general media is going to be severely compromised by the rise of individual distribution at a social media level. So powerful social media for the principles in charge means your mouthpiece or your voice is less important. However, if you are specific enough, if you've built a highquality
audience enough that trusts what you're doing, then you can serve as a as a valuable counterpoint to all that. So, we talk a lot, I think on the podcast, we did a we did a segment on this whole institutional money or a fund manager courting retail and we talked about all of this like and I think people will respond to that kind of conversation. respondse to break down the content but the style. Yeah. I think swagger is missing for and I think more media should have swagger kind of like in the 80s with Vanity Fair etc. Vanity Fair had something where I'm obsessed with old Vanity Fair right there was something when Vanity Fair put out a story it meant something. There was color, there was detail, there was a sense of fun and playfulness that is completely missing from media now.
It feels like a corporation wrote it. Correct. And it'll be like, you know, this deal was highly accreative to both parties and I want to I want to thank the collaborators on this end. Like, dude, what are you talking about? Talk like humans. Right. So, there's a lot of access journalism, which means like I want to get the right interview. So, I'll print whatever you say because I want that interview. For a lot of publications, it's more important to sit down with the right person from the right company than it is to get the right story
for it to actually make sense. Yeah. So, it's so interesting because um being even even being a part of what I've done and seeing you and other people like the access that it gets you
he the the billionaires are still reading this kind of stuff. They're still on Twitter. They're still on LinkedIn. Where do you think the biggest arbitrage is in terms of uh opportunity to connect with those audiences or or I guess grow part of that influence?
I think the strategy that we've chosen is a dual strategy of exclusion and quality. So exclusion means we're so focused on people that matter. I would rather have 25,000 people that follow me into battle than a million people where I can say I have a million people, but I'm not really moving the needle with anyone, right? So, I think focusing on them and then they'll follow you into anything. They'll buy your premium subscription, if you start a paid community, if you have a referral network to do deals, etc. These are all things that we're thinking about. There's tremendous value to be had there. So the media business sometimes is a good business in of itself and sometimes it's a portal to another business that's more lucrative and both things could be true, right? So what we're going to find out we're very early in this journey.
We're only about a year and a half in the life of this. That's crazy. So the first goal was to like build an obsessive audience with the right content. I think we're I think we've proven that out. We have the highest open rates in B2B media, right? We're in the high 60s for our emails. That's insane. Yeah. At a at a distribution of about 18,000 people. So that that is really powerful. Now comes the I like to think I like to think I'm in the hard phase now which was like the beginning was like I'm going to go out there and really hit people with the best stuff, the funnest stuff, most interesting stuff, the most nuance stuff, etc. and just see that grow, right? Yep. And hopefully the next phase is the promised land where we've consolidated our clout and made a revenue generating machine.
This is the phase where we have to be really smart about what we do next. We have to keep growing, but obviously we're not growing 30% month over month anymore. We're growing and we have to keep growing, keep delivering for the OGs who signed up and are there for a reason and then figure out the smart ways to to make our business
work. How do you think about keeping the vibe that you've created when you are growing and because sometimes when you get too big, you kind of lose that spice, that flavor. Exactly. How do you think about keeping that within the culture or as you expand to different verticals?
Yeah, I think the you keep the DNA but you adapt to the platform that you're on. So the DNA of the promoter 1031 media is insider fun and very specific, right? That those are the three kind of things I think about all the time. Right? We're not deviating from that on any platform that we're on. But you you sort of expanded that a little. So we're launching our YouTube channel which should be hopefully live and thriving by the time this is coming out. And we're gonna have explainer videos. We're gonna have mini narratives. Let's call them seven to nine minute videos breaking down things. And we're these were copying or taking from popular media. They don't exist in B2B media or at least in commercial real estate media but they exist in sports media right like to soccer explains the athletic. They do these things in those broader fields.
I think that we can create something like that in B2B or the podcast. I think the podcast has been a huge success story for us, right? We we broke into the top 100 podcasts in business and investing on Apple.
Yeah. So that that happened and that was really cool. And we're only talking about CRA. So I think there is an audience for people. I think in general people respect audiences respect when you're really focused on something and you really care about it. So me and my my co-host Will Kranne who's a who's an investor in the business uh not in my sorry Will Kran who's an in a multif family investor real estate operator I think we both have a real passion for CRA I come at it from a former journalist standpoint a media standpoint he comes at it from like I am writing you know I'm underwriting this deal right now I'm buying this right now I just lost my capital partner on this right now like I can talk about it in real time u
we come at it from that side and we've found an audience on the internet. This is not even like we found an audience that cares about this enough to make
us, you know, a leading podcast. Mhm. Is is the podcast growth coming from the newsletter? Like how are you thinking about funneling cuz I've experienced this too and uh we talked about this before like YouTube for me has been growing like crazy, right?
Very impressive. Thank you very much. But the the audio side because I don't have a newsletter to then get people to then go listen. How are you growing the listenership of the podcast or how do you think about podcast growth?
cuz it's it's kind of hard to to grow that. I think we started because we had a thriving newsletter. We could funnel our you we're saying we said this is coming out, this is coming out, etc. So, we got probably our like first 10,000 true fans through the podcast, I would say. Now, bizarrely, we're getting more referrals into the promote newsletter from the podcast. Whoa. Because a lot of people are like, "Oh, I love this podcast.
They're like adding. And also it's funny uh we're in a pretty crowded space in in the email newsletter print distribution standpoint. As a podcast we're really stand alone. We're one of one. There isn't anyone doing anything close to us. Like there are interview shows that are out there in CRA as well where they'll be like tell me about your life and career. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about like weekly tell me and okay sometimes the guest will be wonderful and you're listening and it's great the next week you'll have a random syndicator in the in Texas no one cares about them right so there are those podcasts and I think we made a very deliberate decision that it's not going to live and die by the quality of the guests so smart it's going to be on us yeah it's so smart
and I think a good have you heard of the town by Matt Belly the podcast no it's about Hollywood look it up really good insiders talking about the business of the business. Fantastic. Really, really interesting. But we said, look, we have between Will and I, we have a very strong
Yeah, we can probably get very heavyhitting people on the podcast. And we have it. We had Mark Ganzy from Digital Bridge. We had someone I'm going to mention in a minute. But if we do that as our instead of a like a little sweetener, a little sugar on top, if we do that as our like main bread and butter, it's going to live and die by the quality of the guest. And some guests bring it and some guests do not bring it. And some guests people care about and some guests people do not care about. So we said, let's have it live and die by us, our chemistry, what we care about, the topics that we naturally gravitate to over the weeks. Right. And then once in a while we bring in someone for the right segment. Yes. And so we've had a lot of growth
through the newsletter, but I was astonished. I had a message from a guy, Mike Comparado, who runs Benefit Street Partners, major debt fund in the space, big on the syndicator lending side, but also very major player in all kinds of all kinds of lending. They just bought agency lender New Point. They just they just really So very big player in the space. DMs me on LinkedIn and also DMs Will at the same time, unbeknownst to each of us, and he says, "I don't know who you guys are. I don't know how I found you. Someone sent this thing to me. I love it. Can I be on?" I said, "Okay." And this has happened over and over and over again where I think there's such a lack of quality storytelling in podcast form that very very heavy hitters in the business have been like messaging us test texting us etc.
I want to be involved in some capacity. I'll tell you something off air about about that. But that's so funny. What is your uh what's your inspo from writing?
How do you think about writing? because clearly you have a voice. You found your voice. Um I get super nerdy about trying to improve the craft. Like I love trying to improve whether it's my cold calling techniques or the way that I ask questions. It's great. Yeah. Like I I love trying to just improve whatever that is. So how do you improve? How do you get where do you get inspiration from when you're writer's block? Like where do you go to to actually make your thoughts come and sit on that page?
complicated than that. I think if you write consistently enough and keep pushing the bar for yourself, you will get better. Uh, obviously I was lucky enough to be an early reader. I was went down these deep rabbit holes of the great ' 80s magazines, Esquire back in the day, Vanity Fair, Spy Magazine, which was an incredible short-lived magazine that used to really poke at like kind of New York money and power. Mh. Um, those are a lot of the inspirations I have. And then I take I what I try to do is I try to take my inspiration. I don't let trade publication set the bar for our quality. Cuz if that were the case, the quality would be quite low. Totally. The level of detail, spice, voice would be quite low. If I judge myself as just being the best product in this space, I have already failed.
Got it. Right. So, I think that's the big thing. I'm obsessed with craft, too. Uh, one of the most fun things I've been doing recently is I will generally take the first pass at editing our podcast. We have a very talented producer who's actually cutting and editing. Yeah. But on Dcript, I will look at it and that feels like I'm not a musician. That feels like playing music. You have the raw tape that's set up and you're cutting and listening and thinking about what ambient, you know, production you're going to get in there. And we have so we had um we were we were talking about a a company called BH3. They're a distressed debt investor. Their equity on many deals etc. And their name came from their name came from a Scarface line which is who do you think we are? Baggage handlers. It's a very famous Alpuccino line.
And apparently in a meeting one of these days, they were on Zoom with someone or one of their partners was in a room with some people and those terms were being they were getting on terms and someone back in the in the in the the partner and who was not there is like who the do these guys think we are a bag of Chandlers and that's where the name came from. So when we're doing the podcast about them, I'm listening and I like splice in the audio from Scarface etc. That's just joy and that's like yeah I think it's very hard to keep getting better at the craft as the business is growing and as you're you know focused on the operations and in business etc. But I think you do have to because audiences like to be challenged. Audiences like to be pushed.
There is a comfort level you want to give them. You want to give them some standing features like we have something called unquable quotes which is like the most bizarre thing that people in the industry say and that becomes like a security blanket for our regular you know readers who are coming in but they do want to see that we're moving and evolving and growing etc. So you have to keep pushing yourself you have to keep writing there's no other way to do it.
Mhm. What does your uh week look like from Cuz you haven't you're now you're publishing a lot of stuff, right? Like give me give me what your week looks like. How are you getting this [bleep] done?
I have a six-month old son. So, and you have a new baby. That is that is the wild card in all this is I have a six-month old son. Uh honestly, juggling juggling him and trying to be a good father and a good partner and all that with the business has been extremely hard. I don't think I've quite figured out the right balance. So there will be some days where some weeks where I feel like I'm a six on 10 dad and I'm a six on 10 business operator and those weeks have kind of happened multiple times in the last few months, right? So that part is really really hard but I think you have to focus you have to be ruthlessly focused on the only the things that move the needle and then try to delegate everything else.
So I focus on content because that is the soul of this whole thing. I focus on distribution, right? And then I focus on monetizing this thing correctly. Everything else I've been able to delegate, right? And we're not quite there yet. Like Taylor, anyone who's a year and a half into this their first business and tells you they figured it out, they're either lying or a genius. I'm neither. I'm just a smart guy who has a passion about something and I'm going to figure it
out. It's been really incredible uh to watch cuz I I love it. I get inspiration from you and the way that you write and and the way that people are attracted to what you're doing because it's so unique. It's so flavorful for for I can tell it's you behind the
system. And hopefully you can tell that even as we grow and the podcast has the same soul of it and the YouTube will have the same soul. But I think this also comes back to personality a little bit. I'm 39. I have one life. This is my first business. I wish I started 5 years ago. If I'm not going to have fun in the act of creation, I'm putting in so many hours. Yeah. You know, I could go probably make a lot more money upfront doing something else, working for someone else, but if I'm not having fun, then what is the point? Like I still struggle with people who go in every single day, not to jobs because tremendous pe you know tremendous respect for people who are supporting their families, supporting themselves, but how do you go and do something that has no flavor that doesn't get you excited?
This is a very small story. Um, we heard about a a building in Williamsburg. Building is very generous term. This was like a twostory walk up brricked up thing that was home like every pretty much if you were a renter in Brooklyn in Yepy Brooklyn in the mid2010s, you were sending your rent checks to a building called 199 Lee Avenue. Okay. Tiny ass building. yet it was sort of a it was the mailbox for all the hidic landlords who control that slice of Brooklyn. So we did like a profile a character sketch of this building. You know we we looked at how it operated who was connected to the building. We we traced that LLC's that had their addresses at building uh were connected to more than $2 billion of acquisitions in the last decade etc. Right? And this is like again calling it a building is super generous.
All right. So it just somehow became kind of the go-to shipping and delivering center for these guys. So I commissioned that story. I edited it and as we were going through the process I said okay if this is a story about orthodox landlords and they had a Twitter oh they had a Twitter account that used to say mail is done every single you know day of the week they would tweet mail is done except for which day?
Friday to Saturday. On Shabbat they were dark. So Twitter account would send out a tweet every single day except for that day. Wow. Right. And it's such a small story in the grand scheme of things, but it's my favorite. So good. Right. Because it brings together a few things that everyone is obsessed with, not just real estate people. It brings together like the scale, the quiet influence of these things down to the very, you know, the men and women who live in our cities, the Brooklyn renters who've moved from wherever are living in these like yepy buildings and these elevator buildings and whatnot, but they all send their rent checks to this like random building deep and orthodox Brooklyn which tweets out to their client list and then is dark on just amazing.
Lee. How do you continue to get ideas for what to write? How how do you know what is I mean you're not going to know what's going to hit but I mean you got to come up with new stories every week. Yeah.
So half of it is curation. I think there is a as we you know we talked about AI slop and just tons of content as as content production becomes more and more prolific and easier you're going to see a exponential growth of slop and slop I don't just mean AI slop I also mean nonsense content yeah because a lot of these bigger publications have to feed the beast they'll put out 30 stories a day right Jesus so even if you're a subscriber how you only have limited attention so I think one of the big value proposition positions for 1031 for the promote for whatever we do besides that is going to be curation. We're going to be the definitive read. I don't care if Bloomberg broke a story or Real Deal broker story or commercial observer. I will distill it down to the most important interesting things for
real estate pros. So that's about half the content. Got it. Right. Yeah. And the other half is like we're talking to sources all the time. People are feeding us stuff. We have a sense of where things are going. So we we were sort of the I would say the front line on this whole traveling HFC story. That's crazy. So if your listener or your viewers might not be familiar, there was this incredible tax break in Texas which has just been shut, but it basically gave you a freebie on property taxes in exchange for design designating your units affordable. But the affordability thresholds were higher than the market rate thresholds. So you didn't have to give away anything. And in exchange, you got your property taxes. wiped off your rolls, which made even bad deals okay
Right. Yeah. And the and the the the extra kicker where they were called traveling HFC's. So anywhere in the great state of Texas, a water district or some kind of municipal entity could form an HFC that actually operates in in uh is formed in that thing, but is for a deal in Dallas or in Austin or in Houston, right? So you're like stripping the rent rolls out of these cities and you you're getting paid. Consultants are making millions of dollars. Syndicators are over the moon because suddenly they have a deal that works, right? And then there's takeout financing from the agencies or MUN bonds or what have you. Amazing story. No one was on it. Like there had been a story here and there in the local papers,
but like we covered the hell out of that thing. Totally. And everyone across our audience nationally was fascinated because it's like a window into something fun that's happening.
That's a little egotistical, but I think we had a major impact because our coverage was picked up by everyone from major local, Houston Chronicle, etc. nationally, radio, etc. And a lot of our work was later cited by these publications which were then cited by politicians and it went from there. I don't want to say that we closing the loophole, but I mean we had an impact. Media has and definitely in the industry we had an impact 100%.
I mean you are having an impact. I think you probably realize that too. The the power of what you're able to uncover because I think real estate is still this opaque industry. It's this hidden kind of like the Yeah. Like you said earlier, the Blackstones of the world like no one knows really what's going
on. Yeah. or they have their, you know, they have very good relationships with the media. So once in a year, once a year, John Gray will sit down with um I think her name is Miam Friedman at the Wall Street Journal will give an interview to the Financial Times will sit down with a publication called Perry. Like they have their portals in. They know how to play this game. They're some of the smartest people in the world at every level, especially at the comm's level
They know how to do storytelling really well. Uh they have those things set up. So, if you're going to be the upstart and say, "Look, I I respect that game, too." Right? I think one of the things that we are a little bit different from a lot of media is like we love and support capitalism. We have a healthy respect for capitalism. We want people to make money. We don't want people to be communists. Like, we're not in that business, right? Yeah. We think that it's important that people make money in their businesses, too. But what we are allergic to is the like the received wisdom, the mouthpiece media. And I think a lot of trade publications, their business models create that kind of content, right? And that's what we're allergic to.
How do you keep your integrity when the bigger you grow, right? When you're small and nimble, and again, small is a relative term. I think you guys are big in the commercial real estate space, but they're powerful people start to want to influence when you have influence against the market. How do you keep your integrity when a John Gray eventually comes and says, "Hey, Heathan, I want to sit down with you and let's talk about this, but hey, I want you to run the story a little bit like this or
you know, we're going to How do you think about keeping your integ?" I mean, that's going to be I was listening now on on the drive up here. I was I was listening to Pablo Toré, the sports journalist who broke out on his own, and he had Mark Cuban on, and they're talking about this whole Steve Balmer scandal that's unfolding right now. And it's a really really fun interview because I think that the people at the top of their game, right, the John Graves of the world, etc. at some level, they respect someone talking to them as peers as opposed to talking to them like this. Yes. Right. And I think I've always maintained that part of my that is my pigheaded personality or whatever you want to call it. But I'm like, I'm going to engage with you. We're both players in a game.
Your game is a hundred times bigger and a million times more lucrative than my game, but we're both players and I'm going to talk to you with that respect, but also with that respect for myself. So, everything we do in the promote in 1031, there is a great deal of respect, not only for the audience. This is your time. You have 7 minutes to read this email. I'm going to make the [bleep] worth it for you. I'm not going to throw in nonsense. Like, if it's a rabbit hole, it's going to be a fun, relevant rabbit hole. but respecting the audience's time and then respecting what we're putting out. We stand behind our stuff to the level that I can defend it. I can defend it factually, but I can also say, "Listen, John, you're talking about this, but you just wrote off this."
You know, so it'll be stuff like that. I am a little bit jealous of your ability to have that. And I probably can, too. Maybe it's a self-limiting belief that I have, but from I think you can break through that, right?
because people are here because you're a personable smart guy who wants to move up in in his business, right? And I think bring that energy. People want to root for people who are doing fun things. It's as simple as that. And that's at every level. Yeah. The people who are going to try to bring you down are your competitors. [bleep] them. Right. But like people in the business who see that you're a smart, passionate person doing something a little out there, a little interesting, they're going to be behind you. Yeah.
I like to put I like I think pushing through the actual uh realness of the situation, not this broad brush like what the the canned phrases, right? The canned stuff that you're about to talk about. I want to know what's actually happening. What's really behind this move, right? No. Okay. So, you're getting a tax break here and you're underwriting it here and and like
tell me about that. And everything you're doing is legal. So, it's it's it's part of the game. I want to know about the game, right? I want to know about the actual game. We had Mark Ganzy on. Mark Ganzy, pioneer in the digital like infrastructure, cell towers, data center space, etc. Yeah, Mark Ganzy is a silver tonged ginger-haired devil. Like he's incredible with his words. He's a great pitch man. So we knew when we had Mark on that we would have to break through that. We knew. So like I know Mark have, you know, interviewed him a couple of times, have a warm relationship with, but he got on his like thing and went. At some point I said, "Mark, we said we were not going to do this. You're really good at this. I know this. We all know this. The world knows this. Tell me about this." Yeah.
Right. And so there is a moment of friction in that interview. He gets a little flustered. He gets a little angry. But guess what? The next 10 minutes, next 20 minutes of that interview are a lot more valuable for us, for our audience, and for
Mark. Got it. Yeah. Do you think about how do you improve those because you're you're great at speaking as well, right? How do you think about improving the auditory side of the business? Writing is one thing, right? But interviewing someone and or co-hosting something, right? How do you think about that aspect of your skills and what people want?
That was a completely new language for us. So, I was very comfortable being interviewed and I was very comfortable interviewing. Those are my two skills. Yes. being uh interviewing someone is my favorite thing in the world. It is like you see them light up, you find ways in. It's like it it's magic. Yes. And I wish I could do more of it. In fact, I need to do more of it. I haven't done enough of it recently just cuz there's been a lot. But it's my favorite thing in the world. It is a when an interview is good, it it feels like it's something else, right? Co-hosting is a completely different dynamic, right? And so Will was used to being interviewed. I was used to interviewing. So, our first couple episodes, that's the dynamic that happens. It's me asking Will questions and then Will responding.
And then by episode 3, we said, if we're going to make this work, we need to have equal equal moments of like breaking through, you know, like the guitar solo guitar riff, whatever. So, we really had to reshape our dynamic. And luckily, I had a producer who's a good friend, radio journalist, coached us through a lot of this stuff. Mhm. Now, when you listen to an episode of the Promote podcast, you will hear both of us bringing our own things to the table. He's speaking from like a you know, Mo IR. Yeah. Inside the deal, hariness, I'm speaking from like this is how they spawn the narrative. This is how they went about this stuff, right? Like when they're talking about this, this is what they actually mean. Here are some of the things that are happening behind the scenes. It's like we're bringing our
own expertise to bear and and learning that on the on the docket and then learning that in the tape. There's a few like I can give you uh co-hosting is also about giving like an extra beat for their thing to really land before you interject. Right? So, I'll have a great joke. In the beginning, Will is smiling, so he's listening, but we had to turn that smile into There's a little bit of tricks that Interesting. Yeah. And if Taylor's saying something really smart, I'm in sync with him, like we're so connected by now, Will and I, that we're finishing each other's sentences. But in audio, you almost have to let him take the limelight for one second before I come in. Finish that. Yeah. So, we're like we're learning all that stuff as we go. So, we're evolving and we're changing our style as we
I think that you ask good questions by genuinely caring about what's going to come out of the person's mouth as opposed to having it in your head already. Right. If I actually care about what's coming next, the question's going to be good. The other thing about a question, it should be very pointed and very short.
A question that is always asked is like what's your biggest regret, etc. The that is an invitation to a guest to take it wherever they want. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's [bleep] sometimes it's a selling point. Right? The more specific the question is, the less alleyways they can get out of that and they can answer that specific question. What is your biggest regret about forming? What is your biggest regret about forming the company in the way that you did without a co-founder?
Very specific. Now I'm forced to think about all the things I left on the table by not having a co-founder from uh the operational expertise which I did not have to the moral support which I did not have, you know, things like that. Now I'm forced to think about something specific, right? I've also noticed in CRA when you ask you know we're dealing with people who are very successful often hundreds like often many
multiples of our net worth right we've been in this situation correct uh you're you're asking them questions they tend to go into life lessons and stuff which is nice in a way but to get into specifics you have to drill into one deal one moment one thing like that so looking for that pivot point is very important
when you're interviewing someone. Do you think about the narrative that you're trying to like there's a combination of listening and being able to take the conversation to the next natural point like following up on something, digging a little bit deeper and then there's the before where you're thinking about, okay, what am I hoping to accomplish from an interview? Because we've had those dead interviews. We've had those situations where someone took it. Hopefully, this isn't one of them. No, no, not not even close. We've had that generalization of where people have gone. But there's also this like I need to make sure that we get this certain aspect of this out. Not the need, but you want every interview to be as good as possible. Yes. Right. So, how do you think about not being able to craft something, but also having that natural flow?
Yeah. I think the the preparation should be very intense for the interview, but I don't think the interview should be uh laid out on paper script. So, you need to have a really good understanding of what this person's business is, what their motivations are, what they're thinking about, how they've operated in the past. That serves as like your scaffolding for the interview. But like when I do an interview, for example, I will have 8 to 10 bullet points. That's it. Y right. And I know all the rest of it. I'm going to trust two things. I'm going to trust that my knowledge and preparation is going to come out in the interview because it's going to feel so much better than me saying, "Oh, great answer. Okay, next." uh what is your XYZ? You know that audiences on audio and video, they pick that up, right? Oh, so right.
They just know 100%. So that's part of it. The other part is this is harder. This is harder and takes you have to trust that the interviewee wants to be there in that seat, right? You're not wasting their time. They're here for a reason, too. You're adding value to their life as much as you are to, you know, as much as they are to yours. Correct. So them sitting in this chair is a privilege. I find, you know, I think it's a I, you know, was out last night. I drove I I'm privileged to be here, right? Yeah. And I have to give you the respect as well. So, if you trust as an interviewer, if you trust that the person in that chair wants to be there as well. Yeah. There's a comfort level in your questions and your tone and your vibe that translates.
How do you take because this relationship obviously we've been friends before but I've had people on here and you've probably interviewed people who you met for the first time or have not communicated with. How do you take that relationship because again this business is relationship driven and think about that from okay this is the starting point of our relationship. How are we going to nurture that? And how do you think about the post?
So I think the incentives for our business and your business are a little bit different but I think the principle is similar in the sense that people respect a good conversation. So if you have a good conversation with them in my case it translates maybe into a long-term relationship on the ad side or on the source side or whatever. Yeah. And in your case you're looking to you know win business in the long term whatnot. But I think if you've had a good conversation with someone in person, they can't really, you know, they can't really fault you for it.
I'm glad we did it, too, dude. I've been wanting to do this forever. I'm I take inspiration from you in terms of of what you've been able to do in media. And then it's such a unique point in commercial real estate that is so refreshing to be to see and for you to just create something out of really nothing, right? I mean, you had experience, but you in a year and a half you built I would say one of the most dominating forces in commercial real estate media that I've
seen. Yeah. I think I think where we're going to go with this is going to be super exciting. Right. I think that we want to have we want to be I don't even think we want to be the place where the news breaks because once in a while that happens. We've had major scoops and whatnot, but I don't think that's the alpha. I think we want to be commercial real estate's water cooler. I think we want to be the place where something goes down, something happens, good, bad, ugly, whatever. And I can't wait to read this in the promote. I can't wait to listen to what the boys at the promote podcast have to say. Like that is the second order of value that we provide that I think is scalable better than having like building
a newsroom from scratch because there are a lot of great news rooms out there already. I came from one of the great newsrooms like that works that model works. I don't want to go and reinvent that and just make it a little bit better, right? I think being the place where people the ringer is a great inspiration for me. It's like it's the place where people talk about sports, talk about pop culture, bring different things to bear, you know, and that is, I think, more valuable and also more meaningful in the long term. So, putting that together with another industry that has the same dynamics, which means undercovered, high impact professionals who are high earning and important in that industry care a lot about that coverage. You put together properties like that, I think it could be a very powerful