Mission Driven with Sujohn Sarkar

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This is Real Estate Investing Live from New York with James Nelson, the principal and head of Avis and Young's Tri State Investment Sales Group. In this program, you'll learn about the world of commercial real estate and find out why it's one of the largest investment opportunities in New York and around the world. Now here is your host, James Nelson.

Welcome to episode number 96 of Real Estate Investing Live from New York. This is your host, James Nelson. I am principal and head of Tri State Investment Sales at Avis and Young for this show. We're back live in the studio at WMYC Studios, that's New York City Public Radio. Really excited to be here with Sujan Sarkar. We're gonna have a really incredible conversation for you today. We cover so many topics. Sujan's got an incredible story. Having started off as an analyst at Deutsche bank, he then spent time at Broadway. He went on to work as a investment sales broker, Cushman and Wakefield. He worked for a family office working on a whole host of incredible assignments. And now he is the managing director of Asset management at Trinity Church, Wall Street. And I'm entitling this episode Mission Driven because it speaks so much to Trinity's work here in the community. So Sujan and I discuss the importance of community and creating a sense of place. We get into a lot of interesting topics here ranging from the return to office ground, leasing, sustainability. But he also gives some really practical advice, especially to many of you who might still be in college looking at where to start out. So this is a great episode. We're gonna have a brief word from our sponsors, but before we do that, I wanna make sure and invite if you have not already, please sign up for my mailing list@james nelson.com. this is now where we are originating this podcast and sending it out. There's a lot of useful tools where you can go to that site and gather whether it is our video series, whether it's keywords, recommended podcasts and books. I have built this site for your benefit to give you the insider's edge to real estate investing. So we're going to have a brief word from our sponsor and then we will be right back with that interview with Sujan Sarkar.

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So now it's time for our Investor Spotlight. And with us today, I'm with Sujan Sarkar, who is Managing Director of Asset Management at Trinity Church, Wall Street. Sujan is helps oversee 7 million square feet of commercial and residential property. His responsibilities include leasing, development, capital projects and asset management. Prior to Trinity, Sujan was a director at the Rubin Companies where he led asset management, development and leasing efforts on their 4 million square foot portfolio. He also has brokerage experience, having worked as a director on Cushman and Wakefield's New York investment sales team. And he's been incredibly involved in the community in giving back. He serves on the Real Estate Board of New York's Board of Governors and its Sustainability Committee, as well as on ULI's mixed use council, Hudson Square Business Improvement District, just to name a few. So Sujan, wonderful to be with you here today.

Thanks for having me, James. Excited to be here.

Wonderful. So I want to get into your story and where it all started. But before we do that for our audience, I'd love if you could tell them a little bit about Trinity Church Wall Street. It's got a very rich history, a huge commitment to New York. This isn't the typical investment vehicle that our listeners maybe have heard from. So tell us a little bit about Trinity's history.

Absolutely. Well, as I like to say, Nowadays it's a 320-year-old history and I'll give you the TikTok version because we don't have a ton of time to go through all the centuries. But I think what's really relevant is who Trinity is today as a community organization, as a faith based organization that's really a pillar of New York City. And I like to say that Trinity's future is as bright as New York City's. We're inextricably linked. The health of New York City as a whole is of ultimate importance to Trinity Church. So we spend a significant amount of our time rooted in our mission and strategic initiatives, which are to improve and better the lives of New Yorkers, and how the commercial portfolio and how our investment portfolio fits into that, is that that funds a tremendous amount of our financial capacity to help community organizations.

I love that you all are mission driven. And we've had a lot of incredible speakers on the show, and sometimes we kind of reduce it into the dollars and cents, and that's what defines success in a real estate investment. But the fact that you serve a bigger cause here and certainly the community, and that was certainly evident. We saw each other at your open house party at 107 Greenwich street and we were talking about it before the show, about how you've really linked the old with the new, you've welcomed in the community. So maybe talk a little bit about how that project embodies what Trinity stands for.

Absolutely. First of all, it's a beautiful building that was designed by Pelli Clark Pelli. It's 27 stories. We completed it in late 2019. So right before the pandemic. The significance of that location and that building is that the first five stories of the building are a community space that is fully built out and designed to welcome our community partners, the residents and congregation of Trinity Church. And so it really is going to be the cornerstone of Trinity's mission and how we engage with the community, starting with Lower Manhattan. But it's going to be a springboard of all of those organizations and community partnerships out into all five boroughs in the New York metro area. So it's going to be the focal point. It's going to be the centerpiece for Trinity's mission, both physically and spiritually, for decades to come. It's a beautiful building, as you mentioned.

I would definitely welcome our audience to check it out. I've got to say I was really impressed with the attention to detail, but how you've really reinvigorated the area there, especially in these times. So, Sujan, what I'd like to now do is now that our audience has a sense of your organization, is to go back and talk about your story. And we've had some guests on our show before who've also started in real estate investment banking. If I'm not mistaken, you started your career as an analyst at Deutsche Bank. But maybe walk us through how you got to that point. I know you were also a Princeton graduate. So, you know, is this something that you were always wired for in school? Is this something that you knew that you wanted to pursue?

Yeah, it's a great question. So I was an economics major. And so I really didn't sort of choose a track until I was sort of into my senior year. But the real estate bug I caught the summer before my senior year when I was interning at Merrill lynch in their investment management division, which was right next to my hometown in central New Jersey. And we had a lunch and learn from the REIT fund manager at the time, Jay Willoughby. And I just remember it being by far the most interesting sort of lunch and learn that we had. And realized that his office was near my cubicle and he came early in the morning. So I decided to pop into his office from time to time in the mornings and learn a little bit more about the REIT industry and get a little bit smarter about that as a potential track. When I started to talk to some of the investment banks, I started to focus on real estate as a possibility. It's interesting that I didn't know at the time how little I knew, but I think I quickly figured out how little I knew when I got to the analyst class at Deutsche. But I do remember my first on campus interviews with Lowell Baron at Brookfield Now. And it was one of those. It was a late afternoon, I think I was his last interview at 5 o' clock on campus and I was sitting outside the room waiting to be called in. And I said I could either put him to sleep or make this interview very interesting. Hopefully it was the latter. And I was able to get the offer from Deutsche bank and start in their MEZZ program and their MEZ fund, which was very active at the time. So it was a really good intro to real estate. I caught the bug, fell in love with it. And as you mentioned, I've worn a few hats in the industry over the years, which we can talk about. But yeah, got my start in investment banking. It's been a really great training for an entire career in the industry.

So a lot of our listeners to the show are college students and they're trying to figure out what they want to do. And I mean, for me, I didn't even know what real estate was. I got very, very lucky. I don't know if that could have happened today, but at least you had some direction there. But. But I've got to ask, because you mentioned you said you were going to have some fun with this interview and I mean, what were the questions? I mean, did you. How were you able to convince Deutsche that, that you would be a good bet?

I think it was really just studying up on, on the REIT market before and then just Talking, we had to write a senior thesis at Princeton. So talking a little bit about that topic, I wrote Persistence within the Hedge Fund Industry, which at the time was still emerging. Obviously now it's significantly mature, but at the time was still a pretty new topic. So really just having that sort of passion for what I was doing at the time and conviction around it, I think were the keys. And then just knowing enough about the subject matter to be dangerous. But like I said, I didn't know how little I knew until I got to Wall street and started my training program. That was honestly eye opening.

Well, certainly they knew that you had the smarts and the work ethic because if I'm not mistaken, that Princeton. I've heard about this senior thesis and you always hear about the length of it specifically. I mean, this is not just a couple pages, I mean this is a, what, hundred page plus? I mean, I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into that. So clearly you can deliver. So you're there as an analyst and you said you're working in their mez group. So how long did that last? And then take us through next steps because I believe from there you ended up on the brokerage side of Cushman and Wakefield. So maybe talk about that transition.

Sure. Started under a partnership between Paul Tarofsky and Dick Gunthal, who were kind of pioneers in the mezzanine fund business and the high yield business back in the 90s through Bankers Trust. And you know, the business fundamentally changed as CMBS started to take hold. You know, the loans that they were underwriting in the late 90s, early 2000s, just the yields compressed so much that, you know, the fund, you know, just wasn't, we weren't able to sort of take the same economics. So I was there for three years, which is pretty typical for an analyst. But I realized I wanted to get closer to the, to the properties, to the assets. So I ended up actually joining an owner operator for several years called Broadway Partners, which was headed by Scott Lawlor. And that was definitely a unique experience. It was quite a sort of meteoric rise in terms of the properties under management. I think at our peak we got to about 16 million square feet across the US but of course it was a pretty calamitous fall as well, along with Lehman who supplied our financing at a very high ltv. So there's a lot of lessons to take away from that. But the biggest one for me was just the transaction volume. It was just that type of volume that I was able to work on. You just can't replace. I think of that as a lot of my education in real estate. Right. Not to say that you want to do highly levered, high octane deals, but just the financial engineering aspects of it and just the ability to process all that information quickly is still there in my blood today.

And what was your role? Were you actually out looking at the properties? Were you doing the underwriting? Were you trying to figure out how to structure these investments and make them work?

All of the above. And was able to do some of it actually out in the West Coast. From 05 to 07, I lived in LA, my only stint outside of New York, even though I do consider myself a hardcore New Yorker. I did spend a couple of years in Los Angeles and worked on acquisitions and those deals actually performed quite well. And we're very proud of the track record there. And it was pretty intense underwriting and some really nice wins that we had in that portfolio.

And you did say that this was learning on the job. So I've got to imagine you're there, the portfolio is, you said 16 million square feet. So you're out there. And I gotta imagine at certain times there was someone at the other end of the table and you're saying, all right, how am I gonna, you know, figure this out or know what to say? So did you have other people around you who were mentors at the time, or were you basically trying to figure it out as you went along?

It was a really strong leadership team. Very sort of interesting. You mentioned mission before. I think that was an organization where we were extremely mission oriented to grow the platform, to really strive for excellence in underwriting and due diligence, creativity. And a lot of that came from Scott. And then we had a really solid team around us. Our coo still a mentor to me, John Schrenker, who I worked for at Rubin later. Absolutely. It was a really strong leadership team and a really talented team that we had. And out west it was a gentleman named Scott Sorenson, who's very active in la, that I worked under in acquisitions.

Oh, that's great. Wonderful. So you said that then this is 2009, I guess you've got the collapse of Lehman. So we know what happened there. Was that when you said, okay, well, if there's not deals to be done, I'm going to go to the other side, I'm going to get in the middle of these transactions. Was that the thought process when you moved over to brokerage?

Yeah, absolutely. We talked before the show about sort of the. I moved Back to New York and sort of the DNA of New Yorkers, right? It's the hustle, right. It's pounding the pavement. And that was the allure of investment sales. It's that you gotta, you know all too well you're a leader in that space that you gotta establish yourself, establish a book of business along with your team and execute. And it was a really good sort of, you know, reminder of, you know, that you really have to love this industry at your core to be successful in it here in New York.

Yeah, I love you have that experience as a broker because I think, and you mentioned earlier just the deal volume that you were doing in Broadway and having that exposure and you know, as a broker you might not get the in depth experience of actually operating a deal and going from, you know, start to finish. But you know, you see so many more opportunities and you get a sense of what works and what doesn't work and how to put something together. So, you know, maybe talk about. And you were on a team with, with our friends Helen Huang and Nat Rocket, who I worked with back in the Massie Nakal days. So talk about what you were doing with them. Were they out finding the opportunities? Were you helping underwriting them? What was your role?

Absolutely, it was a really collaborative team. Helen and Nat are very strong leaders and have great access to the investor community. And absolutely, we worked on every aspect of every deal. The pitch, preparation all the way through execution. It was really, we drilled down as you know, into the finest sort of details in order to try to compete in the space. And I think that's another sort of piece of advice I would give to those starting out is that I have a good memory of a pitch that Helen and I were preparing for late into the evening and we went in the next day. We had this great marketing and leasing strategy, beautiful package and brochure. The interesting thing was the owner, who's very large institutional owner, looked at the model and said, well, why are the taxes increasing so much over the first couple of years? And turns out that they had an ICAP that was coming due and coming up. And to have that answer at your fingertips, you just never know where the question is going to come from and what's going to get asked. But you better know the answer pretty quickly. Unfortunately, we didn't win the pitch, but it was just a that reminder to go the extra mile for every piece of information to leave no stone unturned, no matter what. Whether you're on the sales side of the business, the investment side of the business to go through investment committee on a transaction. These are very complicated transactions with a lot of moving parts. It's not that what we do is rocket science. It's not complicated in that sense. But there's a lot of variables, a lot of moving parts and to stay on top of all of them, to be organized and say, okay, let's as a team drill down on every little piece. So Helen and Nat are great at that, have been doing it for a long time and I certainly learned that aspect of it and continue that on as well today.

Yeah, I love that story because the importance of really getting under the hood and understanding what you're dealing with. And this is a details business and each market's different and you're talking about a tax abatement program and understanding how that works. And you know, we've all been in presentations where, you know, there's a hundred page deck and you've done all this sophisticated financial analysis and you know, the client might only ask two or three questions on your assumptions and you don't know what they're going to pick out. But the fact is that, okay, well, if you can give an intelligent answer for two or three of these data points, then I'm going to assume that you've done everything else right because you've crossed your T's and you've dotted your I's. So I think that's really great that you were part of that because I think a lot of the times, and look, there's plenty of brokers out there who probably don't even know how to run a 10 year cash flow projection. And they're going, they're running around, they're hoping, throwing things against the wall and hoping that they stick. But for those who really want to differentiate themselves, to do thoughtful work I think is really, really important. So you were there and I guess at what point were you saying, okay, I want to go back to the principal side. You know, interesting that you joined Reuben companies. So this is, you know, family owned, you know, very substantial New York owner at the time. And I know you worked on some really interesting assignments there. So what was it that prompted you to go back to the principal side?

Absolutely. And a wonderful family. Richard and, and his family are really just great people and really enjoyed sort of working in that family office environment. I think, you know, when you combine the transaction volume that I did at Broadway and then at Cushman, it was a lot of deal churn. Right. It was a lot of just, you know, executing you take on an assignment you are with that property for a certain number of months, and then it, you know, goes off to the sort of either you sell it and it goes off to the owner or at Broadway. We didn't have a lot of tenure with our assets. So for me it was, let me try to understand how to add value over time. Let me understand how that process works as an investor. And that's really, as you mentioned earlier, this is a podcast and broadcast about investment philosophy. So that's really the piece I was missing is the operating and the value add over time. And I knew that the Rubin family had done it well over decades. The proof is certainly in the pudding there and what they've built from scratch. And the COO at the time was my old COO from Broadway, John Schrenker. So he brought me on and Richard brought me on to work with the team there. And it was the family office. You know, principles and values, you know, are really irreplaceable. To have that sort of mindset and thought process that the awareness that business cycles are a reality for us in real estate, but to know how to not only navigate through them, but to anticipate them, to prepare yourself for them in advance and to structure deals in a way that, you know, you're going to have that safety net that you're going to preserve your assets and then grow the value over time. There was just a lot of really great learning from Richard and the team there that I use, obviously in another generational partnership here at Trinity. Every day I'm always thinking to myself, well, what would a family office investor do in this situation? Because there's a lot of guiding principles that you can't replace.

When we've talked about your time at Rubin companies, what's really impressed me is that they were open to creativity and new deal structures. And, you know, there's a lot of generational holders who say, you know, look, this has always worked. This is the way, you know, my parents did it, this is the way my grandparents did it, and why mix it up? And it really seems like you worked on a lot of interesting repositionings there where you were doing new things. And whether it was ground leasing or whether it was co developing an apartment building with the related companies, I mean, it's great that you had a family that had this track record, but they were also willing to try new things.

Absolutely. Richard is one of the most creative people I've been around. He's lawyer by trading. And that was another piece of it is that I really dove into contracts when I was there, really sort of reading every page of every lease and every contract and really learning the negotiating side of that from Richard and our in house counsel, Suzanne Lou. It was a really creative and smart team and I think it culminated in our acquiring the land under 1700 Broadway off Market in 2016, in January of 2016. And it was a pre negotiated price with Shubert foundation. And we had a 90 day close. It was completely off market. It was at the time, as you probably recall, when if the market knew that a fee position in midtown Manhattan was available, it would have been a bidding war. And we were able to to acquire it off market and consolidate the fee and leasehold, which was highly accretive. The one thing that Richard's father, Lawrence Rubin did structure back in the 1960s to our benefit was a right of first refusal on the purchase. So that was certainly helpful in our negotiation to give us the ability to acquire the fee position. But that was something we had to do and 90 days to recap and refinance and close that transaction. And it was really a landmark for that family. And we're really proud of the ability to own the fee and consolidate the two on a building that Lawrence had built in 1968, really on bootstraps. It was a great moment.

And I just want to take a step back because for our audience and you know, maybe some of this terminology is new to them, but, but we are starting to see a lot more of these ground leases and the bifurcation. And so maybe we could just take a little bit of time to talk about how this actually works. So you know, if you buy a property fee, simple, you're getting the land, you're getting the improvements, you get everything. I mean that's probably how 90, 95% of the sales take place. But you also have the ability to purchase the land and you could separate that from the building. You referenced the leasehold. So talk about how that all happened. I don't know why Lawrence Rubin decided to do it in the first place. I mean, I guess he said I want to keep the land, this is a secure position, let someone else run the building. And so I'm going to give them a lease, maybe talk about how that works. What are the advantages? And then why would you want to put it all back together if you split it in the first place?

Sure, traditionally. And how he used it back in the 60s was as a form of financing to develop the building above it, because to line up the entire capital stack at the time was not possible. So he knew he wanted to develop the 40 story tower that sits there today, but utilize the ground as a form of financing. And that's very common. I think the risk there is way down the line. Right. Is when you have either a pending maturity of the ground lease or a rent reset, which we were looking at in 2023. That's when the leasehold value starts to diminish. It starts to, you know, a lot of people refer to as the melting ice cube. So how do you then go back and put the pieces together? Because now the land value is outsized. But we, you know, our familiarity with the asset at the time, you know, gave us, you know, a little bit more confidence in the leasehold value. And then we were able to, as I mentioned, negotiate the transaction off market, which provided a little bit of a discount to a fully auctioned fee position to put the two back together in a way that was highly accretive. It's becoming more popular now to split the two positions and invest in one or the other. That I think is a market that's relatively new and it's being tested out there. And there's certainly some public companies that are in that space. And I think, look, financial engineering is always going to have a good place in our industry. Fundamentally, it's not going to make the asset either perform better or worse. That comes down to operations and a lot of other factors. But I can certainly see the attraction of having efficient capital own either piece.

I love to talk about this now through your work at Trinity. So if I'm not mistaken, Trinity has never sold any fee position. So they were one of the original landowners. And if I'm not mistaken, Trinity is one of the largest, I mean, certainly put you up as top five here in the city for sure. You probably know exactly.

I think the organization has certainly granted and sold off a lot of the sort of. We call it. The 205 acres that were granted were down to call it 15 now.

When was that though? We got to probably go back a couple centuries for that. All right, well, but you clearly held onto the good stuff.

Some was donated over time and sold off. But yeah, our portfolio now is still fortunately sizable. And to your point, we've learned that Manhattan is supply constrained. The land is very intrinsically valuable. So we're not selling the fee anymore.

So if you have a development site and maybe you say this isn't something that we want to execute on, but we're going to let another developer take a crack at it, you would own the land and then you would give them you a ground lease. You would say, okay, you've got rights to this land for the next 99 years. So that's, I imagine that that's something that you're able to do. I know you also have some of the biggest tenants here in the city. You know, Disney, you know, among some of the names here, Google. So maybe talk about how you structure a deal if you have a huge tenant like Google. Is that kind of more of a traditional lease or are you giving them long term rights? How does that work?

Yeah, so the Disney transaction was a 99 year lease and it was structured as an upfront payment. So that was unique. And they're in the process of constructing their full block headquarters at 4 Hudson Square which will be over a million square feet. So very excited about seeing that come to fruition in a couple of years. It's going to be an amazing design SOM is doing and Silverstein is the developer. It's going to be a tremendous building, all electric, really state of the art. So we're very focused on that coming into the neighborhood. And then big announcement of course from Google today putting down 2.1 billion to acquire 550 Washington is there headquarters as they're building that out. So they lease traditional office space in one of our buildings as well as one of Resnick's buildings in Hudson Square. And those are traditional leases. But I think from our perspective, what we're happiest about with both of those tenants is that they're good neighbors. A lot of what we think about now as Trinity and Norges are our partner as well as Heinz our operating partner is to be a steward of the neighborhood. You see the headlines, but I think the people that are New York leaders within those companies are committed to being a part of the fabric of the neighborhood. That's what we love to hear is that they want to promote green space, to promote bike utilization, to think about organic food waste, and to think about how we can collectively help solve climate change and create more operating efficiencies in our buildings. These are companies that below the headlines, really care about where they're housed, where their employees are working, and that the employees are happy. And the way to have employees be happy is to be part of a community, be part of the fabric of it. And that's what really heartens us about both of these organizations and all the other companies that we have in our neighborhood. That they're sort of below the headlines but are still have been in Hudson Square for sometimes decades and have run Their headquarters out of there, have created their companies and have created fantastic brands out of Hudson Square. It's really something to. It's really an ecosystem that we're very proud of.

Wow, I love how you put that. And so true. And it's an incredible community that you have created and are a part of. So with that in mind, let's talk about the return to office because as you said, there's these incredible buildings being built and yet some of these return to offices are still being pushed back and yet you have this commitment. So talk about why those companies are still making these commitments. These are long term commitments and they're still kind of wrestling through some of these short term decisions on the return of the office.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, generally, I think even with a hybrid model, what we're hearing from a lot of our tenants is that the, the amount of space per worker is going to remain relatively constant. I mean, there's going to be a need for physical space. I think where the overall market is in, you know, a bit of a, you know, a challenging time is that. But we don't have a lot of net absorption. That's what we really need from a leasing perspective to grow rents and to improve economics from the landlord side is that we need that influx of companies. We're starting to see green shoots of that. In fact, I'd say we have probably half a million square feet of requirements that we're negotiating and about 40% of that are companies that are based in Europe that want office space. They want to plant a flag in New York City. We're certainly seeing the green shoots of inbound expansion, but it's still early stage. I think we really need that net absorption from midsize and small companies. I think the anchor tenants have really planted their flags and they're saying we're going to need this footprint at minimum. And over time I'm sure they'll continue to grow. But at this time, most of them are saying, okay, let's work with what we have from our standpoint as an organization. We find Trinity. We're naturally a convener and a connector. It's a church at its core. The houses of worship are convening places and sanctuaries. So that's sort of in our DNA. We are better together when we're in person. We have a lot of different, within our staff of 300, a lot of different types of departments and skill sets. Everything from liturgy and leadership training to music programming to advocacy grant making, housing and homelessness support. We're A very complex organization with very few people. I think about it as a campus model when you have a certain number of undergraduate and graduate students that have to do all these things to keep a campus functioning, and that's Trinity. So for us, those cafeteria and hallway conversations are important to catch up with your colleagues that are working on advocacy around racial justice or around criminal justice reform and say, what's going on in your space? What are you guys working on? What are you doing? How can I learn more and be helpful and be a part of that? So we need to have those hallway conversations and those lunch table conversations in order to be really thriving. We are certainly have been creative and have certainly sustained through the pandemic and have grown our efforts in a lot of areas in the community. But we're certainly better together and we're looking forward to returning back to our building as soon as we can.

Wow. Wonderful to hear and could not agree more about being better together. It just, you know, zoom. You only get really that superficial level of communication and there's just so much more that happens in person and you also have to give people a reason to want to come to work and be there. So I think it's amazing to see what Google and Disney and the companies that are really growing and using this as an opportunity to expand their presence here. So we only have a couple minutes left here and I want to cover a couple topics here, but I know sustainability is something that's high on your list. So maybe talk about, besides the obvious of why it's important, maybe talk about how you accomplish this in a practical matter.

Yeah, I think you hit on it. Right. Is the implementation piece, because I think we're all seeing the direction from, from leadership and just all aspects of our society that the urgency is there. So then it's how we all know we need to act. So what do we need to do as commercial landlords? The good news is that, well, from Trinity's perspective, we have exceptionally aligned partners in this. Norges and Heinz are global leaders in green development and sustainability, not just at a building level, but really at an infrastructure level. So we're learning a lot from that partnership and it's really informed how Trinity is thinking about implementation. The tools are largely in our hands and market ready or nearing readiness. So some of the technology is still a bit emerging sort of three to five years out, but a lot of it's there. Whether it's sensor technology or heat pump technology or thermal storage or better material sciences, a lot of the things are at our fingertips Another component of it's financing. So green bonds and sustainable finance is also emerging, so that's getting tested now in the market. And then another aspect of it's the regulations. How can we balance the regulations to be a little bit more responsive to market forces without diluting the targets that we've set, which are important? So I think between the technology, the finance and the policy, the tools are coming into focus for us. The good news is we're committed to it as Norges and Trinity and Heinz as stewards of this neighborhood. So our agreement with Norges is 99 years. So we're really committed to retrofitting these buildings, electrifying these buildings, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and bettering the overall operations, bettering the indoor air quality and the overall climate, and then also greening up the neighborhood. Some of it's going to be small projects. I like to say we have to tackle this problem at both a macro level as well as the micro level. It's small things like pocket parks, greening up the streets, creating a cooler sidewalk from a temperature standpoint, lowering the urban heat index, which we know leads to quality of life issues. All of those things are important. There's no project that's too small. No one should say, well, why should I bother with this planter bed in the sidewalk? No, absolutely, it's important. Every street corner, every project that we work on in greening up this city is going to be important. And the last thing I'll say where I get a lot of urgency is around making sure that the next generation is empowered with the tools to not only be part of the green economy, but to lead the green economy, take ownership of that technologies. That's three to five to seven years away. It's the young New Yorkers now that we need to empower with those tools. So I spent a lot of time both thinking and working on taking internships and putting internships together for young people and giving opportunities to the next generation. It's super important that, that not only we do it at the leadership level, but organically. Young New Yorkers need to take ownership of this economy.

Wow. Well said. And I love how you took a very complicated topic and you really distilled it down and included some great action items there. So thank you for your commitment to that. So with just a minute or two left, would love if you could give advice to our aspiring investors out there, maybe looking at your path and where you are today, that college listener right now, who maybe they're looking to make an impact and they would like to, you know, get involved in sustainability, for example. Where, where would you advise someone start out and advice to succeed?

I think that's it's an interesting time to be coming out into the industry because in the old days you had a couple of scripted paths. You could go to law school, you could be an architect, you could go to investment banking route. And now I think it's wide open. There's everything from prop tech to working on climate change to fintech. There's a lot of interesting ways to touch real estate. So I think be creative and as long as you have conviction and passion around that aspect of it that you want to work on, I think the one piece of advice I would say is that whatever organization you go to, first of all, surround yourself with good people. I've always talked about that you want to surround yourself with good leaders. But in addition to that, there's still fundamental principles to learn from those that have been doing it for several decades, which I've had the opportunity and to be mentored by a lot of really respected leaders in the industry. I think you have to sort of listen to their perspective. Right. It's good to come in with fresh ideas, but there's also sort of a fundamental approach to learn. So to be open to that, you know, it's certainly, I think the diversity of ideas and thought I think is really exciting. Right. I love hearing from young people, hearing that energy and enthusiasm. I think if you couple that with mentorship, I think that's when someone can really take off.

That's awesome. And that's a great way to end. And I know, Sujan, that you so embody that because not only have you benefited from mentorship, but you're giving your time and also coming on the show today and sharing your experience is incredibly helpful. So thank you again. This was really exciting to do this live and in person at the WNYC studios here and so can't thank you enough again.

Thanks, James. We'll have to give you a walking tour of some of our improved assets and roof decks that we've created here. So maybe we'll do that after the show is over.

Look forward to it. Thank you again.

Thanks, James.

Thank you for tuning in this week to real estate Investing live from New York. Please join your host, James Nelson for another program next Tuesday at 7pm in New York, 4pm Pacific Time on the Voice America Business Channel. All shows are rebroadcast on Wednesday mornings at 7:00am Eastern Time and 4:00am Pacific Time, as well. As always on demand. We'll talk again next week.

Sam.