Data Insights with Lonnie Hendry

Welcome! This is the Insider's Edge to Real Estate Investing with James Nelson, the principal and head of Addison Young's U.S. Investment Sales Group, and his co-host Kim Trohler from his Investment Sales Team. In this program, you'll learn game-changing strategies to outperform the market. James will teach you how to source, execute, and capitalize on the best real estate opportunities in New York and around the world. Now, here are your hosts.

Welcome everyone! Welcome everyone to a special episode number 245 of The Insider's Edge to Real Estate Investing. Today you have just me as your moderator. I was just doing this interview with Lonnie Hendry, who is Chief Product Officer at TREP. He's also co-host of the TREP Wire podcast, which is a must-listen, and a professor at Texas Tech. Uh, we were doing this interview for this course that I will be rolling out with Adventures in Commercial Real Estate. On, uh, real estate investing. And I said, Lonnie, this is just too good. Uh, and so you're gonna find a lot of great market insight on how to go in and analyze the data. First of all, where to find the data, how to analyze it, how to make the best investment decisions based on it. But then we get into discussions about the market and demand drivers. We talk about how to level up in your career, how to build networks, Uh, so it was too good not to share in the podcast. So we're gonna have a brief word from our sponsor and we'll get right into that interview with Lonnie Hendry.

Avisen Young's United States investment sales platform executes on multifamily, office, retail, development, and specialty asset transactions across top US markets. As experienced leaders in the industry, our integrated national team is here to help you make informed investment decisions. Whether advising on your current holdings or identifying new opportunities nationwide. Our one unified platform is built on unparalleled collaboration and connectivity across 120 full-service offices around the world, giving clients direct access to the deepest pools of capital. We put our clients first, delivering tailor-made strategies to achieve superior results.

Welcome to course number 2. Uh, today we're going to be Talking about increasing your real estate IQ. With us, my friend Lonnie Hendry, who is chief product officer at TREP. He is also co-host of the TREP Wire podcast, a must-listen for you all, and a professor also at Texas Tech. Lonnie, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, very happy to be here, James. Great to see you again.

Great. So for our audience, maybe you could explain to them what TREP is, what you do there, and then maybe tell them a little bit about the TREP Wire podcast for those who haven't heard about it.

Yeah, sure. So TREP is a company that's been tracking the commercial mortgage-backed security market for the last 40-plus years. So when, when the markets created a syndicated or securitized bond and sold off to the investment community, they needed somebody to provide transparency to the underlying collateral that was contained in those bonds. And so TREP was actually written into the reporting structure for those, those tradable investments. And so we get underwriting analysis at origination. Ongoing financial property performance and surveillance at the asset level for the life of the loan, and we keep all that data. So we have data at this point going back to the mid-'90s that's surfaceable, and at the line item level— so income and expense, repairs and maintenance, property management fees, uh, CapEx expenditures, etc.— we have all of that info. And then we commercialize that. We built products and suite of services on top of it and help inform the market on where trends are going and where properties are pricing and what's happening with expense ratios and cap rates and occupancy and everything else.

Amazing. And how did you get into this? What were you doing before? Give our audience a little more background.

So I spent the last 25 years or so in commercial real estate in various capacities. I started off, uh, my early career was in property management, multifamily. So I worked for a local developer. We bought land, we got entitlements, we built apartments, we leased them up, we sold them. We then got into some Low Income Housing Tax Credit, LIHTC, and so I got some experience with that. Moved into valuation, spent about 14 years doing valuation and appraisal. I started teaching some college courses and then through the valuation profession got introduced to TREP and was able to come speak at one of their events, told them how much I love the product and wanted to work with them. And I've been at TREP now about 7 years and it's been really, really great.

Amazing. And what do you teach at Texas Tech?

So, I've taught real estate appraisal, real estate fundamentals, a property technology course, which is something we rolled out a couple of years ago, which is really kind of AI native, trying to push people to understand that real estate is more than just underwriting on a spreadsheet in an old traditional fashion. There's all these tools and capabilities now. So really, those are kind of the primary courses. I also teach at a community college where I teach real estate investment, real estate property management, and real estate appraisal there as well. So, I live, eat, sleep, breathe commercial real estate 24/7.

Well, this is awesome. And I know how busy we're both on the conference circuit. I see you everywhere. So we really appreciate— I know Adventures in Commercial Real Estate, that whole community, we, you know, we appreciate sharing your wisdom here. So, Lonnie, maybe, you know, talking about, you know, the data that TREP receives that's publicly available and maybe just to kind of set the stage about the type of data that you have access to as opposed to, you know, data that might only be privately available. And I know you've got some tools, uh, as well on how you can kind of aggregate that information. So just maybe for the benefit, uh, of, um, our listeners here, talk about the type of data that you receive that is publicly available, and then kind of what is, is not available, so to speak.

Yeah, so, you know, the, the markets are kind of bifurcated into public deals and private deals. So just think about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. They securitize a bunch of multifamily mortgages. Those are public deals. So those are available on our platform for anyone and everyone that needs to get access to the underlying data. So when I say underlying data, you know, if a property, a 250-unit apartment complex in Dallas, Texas, takes out a Freddie Mac loan that gets securitized, which just means that they bundle a bunch of loans into a security and then trade that on the market as a bond. The underlying property data gets sent to TREP. So, you'll know who the owner is, you know if they've paid the mortgage, you'll know what the outstanding mortgage balance is, you'll know is it a fixed rate or a floating loan, floating rate loan, is it fully amortizing or is it interest only or is it partial amortization with a balloon. So, that's all the type of data that we track. And then on the performance side, you'll know, you know, what is the rent in place at the property, what are the vacancy factors, what is, other income, parking income, laundry income, etc. And then on the expense side, you get all of the line item expenses. And so in addition to that ongoing surveillance at the time of origination, so whether it's an acquisition or for refinancing, you get the appraisal information that was done at the time of financing. So on every transaction, we're going to have an appraised value. So if I have an NOI and I have an appraised value, I can impute a cap rate. For Fannie and Freddie, as an example, we'll have the underwritten reserve for replacement allowance, etc. And so you can extrapolate that beyond Fannie and Freddie to just the public CMBS market. And that's all property types. So if it's an office building, we even have parking garages. We have— we had talked on our podcast recently where we have a golf national— like golf resort with 99 different golf holes and 32 two-bedroom villas and, you know, entertainment space. If it's income-producing, we probably track it— self-storage, senior housing, etc. And so all of that data, the same property-level data, the same loan performance data, all as part of the reporting package. So we get all that information across the spectrum. And then on some of the private deals, like some of these really large transactions, like One Vanderbilt as an example in New York, Class AA office building. Those get packaged into what we call SASE bonds, which are single asset, single borrower. So usually it's a really large building, so billion dollars plus. They don't need a consortium of loans to be packaged into a bond. Like, the property itself is big enough to create a bond, and then they tranche the loan. We can get into that in another discussion. But the reality is, for that, that's a little more private. That's institutional grade. And so if it's $1 billion SASE deal. There are people that can access that on our platform, but they have to be qualified institutional investors in order to access that. That would be a private, but same underlying reporting package, same property-level information. And what's really cool is you take that at a property level and then you roll that up to a zip code or to a city or to a county or to a region, and you can start building all these really great aggregate insights around what's really taking place, not just at an individual property level, but in that marketplace, submarket. And so we have the ability to give market insights and perspective on what the trends are at any of those levels. If you wanted to see what's happening in this particular submarket, we can tell you. If you want to see what's happening in this particular region, we can tell you. And so, you know, as well as I do, I mean, right now you have Sunbelt multifamily that's, you know, gotten a lot of negative headlines. So a lot of people are interested in that. Well, we have a bunch of aggregations that show exactly what's happening in the Sunbelt. You look at the Midwest, you look at the Northeast. And so, you know, with that data coming in monthly, daily, quarterly, depending on what the reporting frequency is, we have real-time insights to what's happening in the marketplace.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I guess it's such a great discussion is how do you leverage this data to make the best investment decisions? So if you're listening to this and you're an analyst and you're trying to do a pro forma on where you think rents are going to go or where are the expenses in relationship to market. You have a lot of data where they compare and say, you know, how do the rents compare? But also, you know, let's look at the expenses. I mean, what are some of the other things that you can glean from this information that might help give you that advantage to do a better underwriting and look at the future potential or issues for a property?

Yeah. So I, when I was doing the valuation work and when I teach my classes, I tell people Um, it's easy to argue with my opinion. It's really hard to argue with the data. And so if you're an analyst or you're trying to underwrite property, you should always focus on what the data is telling you. Like, we all have a gut feel, we, we have a, an inclination based on what we see or perceive or what we drive by as to where the market is at currently in the cycle. But the data tells the picture. And so like, you should be making data-driven decisions. And in today's marketplace The availability of data has never been easier and better and more robust. And the tooling that's available through some of these AI tools and other things, like, it's no longer what can I as an individual pull down and turn into insights. It's how do I get all of this data, use a, a platform or technology capability to aggregate that at a level that I couldn't do on my own and see exactly what's happening real time. And We're living in that time right now. I mean, like, as an analyst, there's never been a better time to leverage data than there is right now.

Yeah, the— it's amazing that a lot of these conversations we still have are more anecdotal. I mean, just take Florida insurance costs, for example. Oh, you know, I'm not investing in Florida anymore because insurance costs have doubled or tripled. Okay. You know, today I would imagine you could really almost nail that down to a penny.

I mean, sure.

I mean, talk to an insurance a broker as well. But, uh, how, um, and maybe to lead to the next topic that I want to get into, uh, AI, how would you— I mean, you have so much data there, I would think it's probably difficult for one person to analyze everything and to know what to look for. So, uh, you know, how would you recommend that someone leverages AI to take all this data and make better informed decisions?

Yeah, so it's, it's It's amazing just to see the transformation in commercial real estate going from— and I think it will forever be a relationship business. Like, you're still going to have to get out, handshake with people, eat lunch, get to know them because they want to transact with people that they know and they trust. But on the data side, it's— you don't have to do that anymore. Like, you can just plug in the tools. So like, as an example, at Trap, we just released what we call an MCP server. It's an AI server. Model Context Protocol. It's effectively like an API. So an API was like cutting edge a decade or two ago where you could basically no longer had to log into somebody's interface on the front end. You could just pull the data directly into your system using this connection. Well, now you can do that with AI through these MCP. So if I'm an analyst now and I'm using Claude as an example, as my LLM of choice, I can connect my Claude instance to the Trepp MCP And I can literally in plain English type, what are the insurance trends in Miami, Florida for the last 5 years for multifamily? And it goes out to our data and it pulls back for you exactly what's happened over 5 years in multifamily in Miami.

Wow.

And then you can iterate on that. You can say, can you turn this into a table? Can you do something else with it? Can you compare this market to Orlando or to, you know, Tampa? And it'll do that for you in your chat instance in the LLM. It's amazing.

Yeah. As a layperson, you know, again, whatever GPT that you're using, when you're asking the question, you're wondering, okay, well, where is this data coming from? So, so what I'm hearing from you is, is you already have, you know, you have a moat around this data and you know that it's reliable data that you can leverage from it and ask questions.

Yeah, it's the Trepp data, so it's 100% factual and there's no hallucinations because they're not pulling it from sources that are unreliable.

Yeah.

Now With the MCP, you can still bring in the, the open market data. So if you wanted to bring in some economic demographic data or some population trends, you can still go to third-party sites and pull that in, in addition to the TREP data. Yeah, but for the data results that come back from TREP, it's going to be just as if you had logged into our system and pulled that data down yourself and done the analysis like you did 5 years ago, right? Except now it's instantaneous and seamless. And you don't have to click through a bunch of search engine boxes or navigate slide bars. You literally just type in a question and it does the analysis and brings the data back for you real time. It's incredible.

Amazing. Unbelievable. So, Lonnie, obviously you have access to the best data out there. And again, you know, when you report on Trepwire, I mean, you're kind of going down the list. You're talking about Green Shoots. I mean, it's again, a must listen. For investors, brokers alike. How else do you stay informed, right? So, I mean, there is so much, you know, media out there. I mean, it's— and there's tons of aggregators. I mean, it's so hard to stay on top of everything. So, and that's just in the real estate space. At the same time, you got to be looking at the macro pictures. So, I mean, are you reading, you know, 10 different publications every morning? Like, how are you getting your information and the scoop on the market?

So I'll tell you, it's been an evolution. If we had had this conversation 10 years ago, I would have pulled up my web browser and showed you my favorites folder, and I had about 200 shortcuts saved in a folder where I was right going through daily, weekly, monthly, depending on what the cadence was, and pulling down reports and reading them and trying to stay up to date. But today we live in a society where information just is free-flowing, and if you, if you're a commercial real estate analyst, broker, if you're in the business, you have to be on social media. I think Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, like that is the primary source of information flow. And let me give you some examples. If you're a, if you're a commercial office broker in New York City and you just closed a huge deal, what's the first thing you want to do?

You're gonna post it.

You want to tell everyone about it, right? Because like, that's accretive to your business, right? So you're going to say, hey, did you know we just closed Building X at a price of Y? Yeah, the borrower is this person. I just took out this, this loan. Well, if I'm someone trying to get my hands wrapped around what's happening in the city, like That's real-time insight from people that are doing deals real-time, and they're sharing their insights with me for free.

Right.

So I have—

how do you vet it though? Because I mean, obviously not everything you read on X is 100%.

Yeah.

So how do you know what's fact and what's fiction?

And that's a great question. And I think what you do now is you combine the technology tools. So you pull in some of this data from these third parties, you run it through your LLM, you ask it to verify or validate. You as a human, like, listen, AI as an example, it's great, but it's still human in the loop. Like, there still has to be a human component to AI. I don't trust AI broadly to just pull a bunch of data in and go present it to clients, as an example. Like, I'm gonna vet it. This is the same thing. You pull in what, you know, I think for most people, you're going to focus on a particular property type or particular market, at least at first, and you need to know everything about every property that transacted in that market. So it's not as difficult as you think in the sense that you're not going to be tracking all 50 states and all the markets. If you're focused in New York City, you're going to find the, the social posts that talk about New York City. You're going to have some repository of buildings that you know about already, and it just becomes a process now of vetting, validating, verifying. But once you do that, then your, your internal data set becomes much more valuable and your knowledge then grows. You talked earlier about the IQ, like You want to learn more about the business, you got to track the business and you got to, you got to live in the business. And it's never been easier. You can be in bed at 10:00 at night, open up your social media, do a search for a keyword, find a bunch of posts about it, plug that into your LLM and wake up in the morning and you have a really nice report that tells you what's taking place. Or a podcast. Or a podcast.

Yeah.

And I appreciate— I didn't talk about the Tripwire Podcast on my intro, even though you asked me to, but we have Haley with us today also.

So we got to give it a big plug.

If you haven't listened, we would, we would ask that you listen. We started in March of 2020. Kind of as a COVID project. We're, uh, we're now 400+ episodes in. We've never missed a week. It comes out every Thursday.

Amazing.

And it's a week-to-week show, so we're tracking the market nationally. We try to be where the macro and micro meet, and we bring data to supplement that storyline, and we just tell people what's taking place in the markets real time. And if you're a novice to the business, it's a great place because we do, um, some one-on-one segments We have some digging through the data segments where we're really like getting granular. Like, we've done some on ground leases as an example. If you don't work in a big city, you might not know what a ground lease is. You might not have experience with it. We break it down and explain how that works.

Yeah.

And why it's a viable option in high-cost barrier to entry kind of markets where land is expensive.

Yeah.

Um, and so, and then we, we just track the markets day in, day out. So in addition to Twitter, it's not just our podcast. There are a bunch of— I mean, you, you have a great show. There's, there's several shows where Again, pull all those into an LLM, have them synthesize the transcripts, and that becomes workable knowledge for you as someone in the business.

Yeah, yeah. We so appreciate the color that you have on the data, right? So it's not just presenting the facts, it's then just kind of your interpretation and, you know, yours, Stephen's. I know out of our first quarter report, we announced that Chicago had the number 2 multifamily selling market. And you had your thoughts on this, just kind of a blip on the on the radar, or is this something more, you know? So it's always good to kind of understand the backstory behind it and to put it into context. Lani, what I want to talk about is demand drivers for a market. So you're an investor, you're thinking about where do you want to invest, not just geography, asset class. And, you know, there's so many different, you know, demand drivers, you know, take, let's take Charlotte multifamily as an example. On the surface, the vacancy rate there is over 10%. There's a lot more multifamily coming to market. So, if you just looked at that, you say, wow, oversupply, a lot of still concessions in the market. But then on the other side, you say, well, wow, this is a top 3 market for job growth. It's a growth market. So, how do you reconcile all this? We have our thoughts on how to do it. I mean, we have 50 different adjacent data sources where we're actually trying to we're now looking at a scoring model on markets, asset classes. But what— how do you figure out what, what are the most important metrics, uh, when you're analyzing a market, uh, or an asset class?

Yeah, so I think for me the two primary drivers are job growth and population growth. Um, if you don't have jobs, it's really hard to have a sustainable CRE market. Place, um, because you don't have people that are going to shop in those markets. They don't have disposable income. The rents are going to be suppressed on the residential side. And so jobs are, are a huge economic driver for CRE, in my opinion. We've seen a lot of demographic trends around people moving from high-tax, high-cost-of-living states to more affordable states. You have some political pressures in certain states around rent control and other things where developers are now incentivized to go to some lower-cost states. And so To me, net in-migration combined with jobs are pretty strong indicators of where a market's going to be. Now, those can be a little misleading. We saw a huge exodus from New York in COVID, and people went down to a few states that maybe after 3 or 4 years they found their way back to New York. So it's not a— it's not black and white or done in a vacuum. I think just like the real estate market, it's a dynamic industry. It's a day-by-day business, month-by-month, year-by-year business. So you have to continually update it. But job growth, sustainable jobs, and where are the jobs at? Are they all government jobs or are they private sector jobs where there's upside? And then to your point on supply and demand and some of these dynamics, a lot of those things are short-lived. So like supply cycles get remedied. Like that's, that's part of the, the commercial real estate ecosystem. You get a lot of supply in a market like Charlotte. So guess what? Vacancy goes up. Concessions go up for a short period, but the reason there was supply in the first place is because those underlying fundamentals determine that this is a market that's investible. So I think for us, you know, we've kind of gotten accustomed to this over-engineered PE approach to CE where people's hold periods are 3, 5, 7 years. If you go back 30 years, people bought assets and held them for a long time. And I think if you kind of approach real estate from that perspective, you're looking for long-term fundamental growth, drivers in markets where supply and demand imbalances in the short term can be remedied. And if you have a long-term horizon, then you can weather some of those downturns. And, you know, multifamily is a perfect example. We've had about 1.5 million units delivered across the US in the last 3.5 years. If vacancies have only gone up 5 percentage points, all things considered, that's pretty strong still. So like, I'm still bullish on multifamily, even though the national narrative is like we've had 3 years of no rent growth. But I would say if rent growth is hovered at -1% to 1% positive, depending on who you read, with all of the new supply, that tells you how strong the market is broadly. So I, you know, hopefully that answers the question.

I mean, there's obviously other things, but yeah, we could spend, you know, hours on the topic. But I do have to ask a follow-up because it does, I think, impact the landscape. But how do you think about kind of the political regulatory environment, you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, pro-business states. So, you know, if we want to stay on this multifamily thread, right? So, you know, Texas, you probably be hard to find a state that's more, you know, pro-development, you know, pro-business. And so, as a result, you see a lot of construction, right? And you could say that Austin was probably one of the most oversupplied markets. So, okay, that's, you you know, too much of a good thing, right? And there was no barriers to entry, if you will. Whereas New York, uh, San Francisco, Chicago— I mean, these are really tough markets to build in. Um, you know, they have different levels of regulation. Once you do, that might, uh, deter others from, from building new, new product. But how does that factor into the calculus when you're investing?

I think it's becoming more important than it has in the past, just because You know, part of the, the social, social media construct is positive. We talked about earlier where you can see when brokers trade or you can find data, you can do all these things. Some of the negative consequences of social media is that some of these items get a lot of publicity and they take on kind of a life of their own. So like New York City as an example, rent control, rent stabilization, 2019 law that passed has made a huge impact on social media where people are like, have a negative connotation about that. So it's part of the decision-making process. But at the end of the day, to me, it hasn't reached a level where people are not investing in New York because of that. Now, maybe if it continues. So for multifamily rent stabilized, I don't know how much longer there's, there's a viable investment opportunity for those assets that are subject to that. Even with the barriers to entry, even with whatever, you know, the benefits are, it's the math just doesn't work. You— when you can't raise rents to cover the cost to repair, and you have units that just go dark, and then you have lenders that have loans that people can't pay back, and that's a problem. Yeah. But on the flip side, like in Texas, if you're a developer or investor, you know, having pretty much zero constraints on building, that creates its own set of problems. As you mentioned, Austin— if you look at Austin multifamily rents today, they're down about 25% from the peak. Now, if you were an investor that broke ground and you've been on the downward part of that cycle, it's gonna be really hard for you to hold on to that asset until rents recover. If you're a renter, it's great. You're saying, look, this is exactly how supply and demand is supposed to work. They built too much. Now I get the benefit of lower rent. I'm still bullish on, on Austin. It's going to come back. It has too many great things going for it. I like LA, I like San Francisco. I think all these cities, gateway markets, Chicago, New York, they're going to have these political challenges, they're going to have some other stuff. But those underlying economic drivers to me still way outpower the political backlash. Texas and Florida are the clear winners. They'll continue to be. But I don't think you're going to see a seismic shift away from these other megacities in my mind.

I agree.

Yeah.

So, Lani, we could talk about the current market. I know for hours, but to bring this back and really advise me. You sit in such a great position, uh, to mentor, uh, our listeners here. So I think what I would say is we can kind of give advice for, for different people in the various stages of their career. So I mean, first, you know, for maybe someone's, uh, listening to this right now, they're in college, right? And, and maybe they've taken a couple of real estate courses. What would you advise for them to growing the career? Is it going and getting an MBA? Is it going and getting some experience? You know, what's some good advice on how they could level up?

So I think the— there's, there's some— I'll give you a couple of answers to this. Like, the, the primary one is have confidence to interact with people. We can talk about the data, we could talk about the technology, we can talk about all of the tools, but at the end of the day, real estate is and always has been about relationships. And so if you want to be successful in commercial real estate, you have to be comfortable talking to people. You have to be comfortable sitting in a room sharing what you know. I tell my students all the time, um, you know, just because you know something, that doesn't automatically transfer to someone else. You have to articulate what you know, and it has to add value for them to pay you.

That's a great way to put it.

And so knowing isn't doing, you know, knowing isn't saying. You have to be able to communicate what you know in a way that people find value in that. And they find value in it, then they will pay you for your service. Yeah. Um, and so you have to get confidence. So like, for at a baseline level, getting comfortable around people, being uncomfortable, and, and finding your— yourself confident enough to go out and talk and share what you know, I think is kind of fundamental. And for a lot of college students, the reason I harp on that so much is in this age of social media, and now in a post-COVID world, so many students, their education was disrupted where they were taking classes just online for a year and a half. And that social interaction is just not the same as it was when you or I were going to school.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I have students in class and we go a whole semester and never say a word in the entire class. Like, don't be that student. You want to be someone that you have an inherent advantage as a student where people like you and like me, if someone reaches out and they're a student, I'm inclined to give them some time because I want them to come and be successful in our industry. The minute they graduate and they reach out, I'm probably not going to take the same level of care in talking with them because they're not a student. Yeah. So take advantage of being a student. And then the second thing would just be find some opportunities in these niches that we're talking about. A lot of us that have been in the business a long time, we grew up in an industry that was completely different than it is now in terms of tools and technology and capabilities. So if you can bring that skill set and then find a mentor that will help you with the communication and the knowledge and all of that stuff, like, that's a perfect combination. So If you're young and you're graduating from, from college, learn how to leverage LLMs at this point. Learn how to know what an MCP server is. Know how to plug and stitch together data because there's probably some brokers in the office or there's probably some appraisers in the office that don't know how to do that. There's a lot of them, you know, and so you can immediately be accretive to them without having a deep background in commercial real estate. And the trade-off is you help them and guess what they're going to do? They're going to reciprocate and impart their knowledge in you and That's how you get the win-win for both the experienced brokers and participants and the young guns coming up out of school.

Yeah, Lonnie, you said so many great things there, and I love the advice. And whether you're new to the business, you're looking to take that next step in your career, showing up, being vocal, engaging, you know, you can't just stay behind the desk or just, you know, be texting, DMing back and forth. I mean, this is very much still an in-person business and the value of those relationships. I was speaking to a graduating senior, a friend of my son's. And, you know, we were kind of going back and forth, and he was looking for some career advice. And finally I said, look, you know, if you want an opportunity here in New York, you got to just show up. I said, you know, come here, come shadow me for a day, come hang out. And we went to like 3 events and like working the room, you know, he came back with, you know, 20 business cards. And again, it's not transactional, go into a room and get as many business cards you can. It's like having conversations. And what I think a lot of what, what, um, younger professionals might not understand is like, you go to an event and sure, if no one knows— if you don't know anyone in the room, I, I get it, it's a little, uh, daunting. But if you go up to someone and say, I'm just, you know, graduating, I'm looking to do this, I, I'd love to just understand what you do and if you'd have any advice, I mean, who's going to say no to that, right? So, but, but the point is that kind of engagement's not going to happen over email, right?

No, no. And then not to the level that they need to be successful. And to your point, showing up is, is the biggest part of, of the challenge. If you can just show up, shake someone's hand, look them in the eye, smile— I mean, I think people don't give enough, uh, importance to just being the person that smiles in the room. Like, people want to work with people that are friendly and optimistic and outgoing and, and want to do great things. And Be that person. Be someone that shows up and makes an impact. You know, I tell— I've given some talks internally at TRAP. It's like there's a difference. We live in an impression-filled world right now where like your tweets or your posts get measured on impressions, but impressions are short-lived and impressions are usually self-serving. Like we like impressions, likes and loves and whatever, because that makes us feel good. Try to be someone that makes an impact, because by definition, if you impact something, you change the trajectory of it. So if you come in and you want to impact somebody, you're going to approach it differently than if you're just trying to impress them, right? And be someone that makes an impact. And to your point, anyone that's successful, they love telling other people that they're successful in a, in a positive way. So someone says, hey, have you closed any big deals lately? Yeah, you're gonna say yeah and tell them about the deals that you're closing. Or do you have any war stories about, you know, deals that gone bad or whatever? Like, yeah, you're going them about it. So if you can just get in front of people and communicate, I think you have a huge advantage. And there's never been an easier time to make that happen. Like, at this point, we have a computer in our pockets every day. You can just record yourself online and post a video and say, hey, I'm a graduating senior, here's some classes that I've taken, I really want to work in this market, can you just make some introductions? I'll fly in and meet with them. That's simple.

I love that. And oftentimes, you know, someone who's newer in their career, they don't think that they have value to share, but just that whole process of what they're going through. I mean, they have peers that wanna see that too. So Lonnie, as far as leveling up hard skills and, you know, ACRE does such an incredible job with their accelerator program and learn how to model and now programs on how to leverage AI, but, you know, you have the time, you can also go to a Texas Tech. I mean, where do you go to continue to improve your hard skills?

Yeah, so I mean, you listed a couple of them just off the cuff there. I mean, like the guys at ACRE, It's never been easier. You can like go on their website, find the courses, sign up, get access, and start working today, like in 10 minutes. Um, YouTube, Twitter, all of these places that have videos for free where you can just pull them in. So, you know, I try to tell my own kids, like, they don't, you know, they don't fully appreciate it yet. One, I'm just Dad, and two, they're not quite to the age where they can. But, you know, we've never had it easier to, to gain knowledge than we do today. Yeah, because it used to be that you had to go to a library or find an encyclopedia or Xerox copy something and bring it back to your house and study it, uh, go to college and go to the university library. Now you literally have a knowledge base with these LLMs and other things like in your pocket 24/7, right? Tap into those things. I think for most people, the, the challenge we're going to have is not the availability of information. It's going to be like having the discipline and focus to What do you really want to do? And then just leveraging the tools to make sure that you're getting what you need out of it. But people should— you don't have to go to an official certification course. You don't have to do any of those things. Just leverage what's available. Read a bunch of stuff online, plug them into your LLM. You know, like Google has NotebookLM. I don't know if you've seen or used that, but you can basically paste a bunch of stuff in there and then it'll create a podcast for you.

Right?

So if there's not a podcast that fits your, your niche, find some stuff that you like about a certain market or industry and put it in there, and it'll create it for you.

Hopefully, we won't be out of business in the next year. But Lonnie, as we start to wrap, and just think about the other end of the spectrum. So we've kind of talked about those starting off, those looking to kind of grow in their profession. Let's talk about mastery and talking about those relationships. So I mean, I don't know how you do it. You're everywhere, right? But, you know, when you go to these events and you're trying to figure out who do you want to meet with, how do you cultivate these relationships? Like, how do you keep up with all this and continue to grow and strengthen your network?

Well, so I think for me, it's easy in the sense that I love what I do. I mean, like, my seat at TRAAP is perfect for what I love doing. Like, I get to meet with everyone across the industry, dealmakers, lenders, appraisers, underwriters at all spectrums of the ecosystem and hear from them and then use that information to inform how we build things that make them more efficient and better at their job. So like for me, it's, it's a passion that I have, so it doesn't feel like work. So like that's a huge advantage I have is that conference season, traveling, all of these things that you— some people from the outside might say, this is like, how do you do that?

I love it.

This is what I want to do. It's perfect. But I think it's like anything else in life, you have to find people that are like-minded, people that want to challenge the status quo, people that want to get better. So you don't want to waste your time on people that are always just trying to take from you. Um, you don't want to be object— you know, so, so disconnected from people that you, you just say no to everyone. But you got to be— you got to say no sometimes, and you got to prioritize the people that you can help and can help you. From a personal, professional standpoint. And so for me, it's trying to balance that of, you know, who can I plug into that's going to make me better, and who can I plug into that's going to make them better. And if you love what you're doing, it kind of finds its way pretty naturally. It's kind of an organic process.

Well, Lani, I knew this was going to be amazing. You could definitely feel the passion. So we're great, so grateful for you sharing your wisdom. And I've really enjoyed our friendship and collaborating. So thank you again, everyone, for joining, and we look forward to being in touch.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening to The Insider's Edge to Real Estate Investing. We appreciate your subscribing and sharing with your friends. If you haven't already, please connect with James at James Nelson NYC on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. Please also visit JamesNelson.com where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, find the show notes, other episodes, exclusive video series, and other helpful resources so you can gain the insider's edge to real estate investing. Until next week.

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