The Insider's Edge To Real Estate Investing with Colby Durnin

Yeah, let's do it. Welcome everyone to the insider's edge to real estate investing. I am your host now, co host James Nelson, head of U.S. investment sales for Avis and Young. And with me is Kim Troller. Kim, hello. How are you?

Hi everyone. I'm great. Happy to be here.

Wonderful. Today we have with us Colby Durnan, who is founder and CEO of Creed, which stands for Commercial Real Estate Development Enterprises, a nationally recognized real estate development and project management firm specializing in value driven, full spectrum and real estate solutions. Colby, welcome.

Well, thank you. Good morning.

Good morning. So we had, we connected through our friends at BizNow so have to give them a shout out. We spent some time in Miami. They've got a great conference ascent for the younger upper comers and the Escape Flight, which is kind of more the sea level. Both great groups and a lot of great ideas that and connections that came out of it. So really wonderful to connect through that. So Colby, just for our listeners, maybe you could give them a little background on Creed and your approach and your footprint and a little background on the firm.

Sure, happy to. But I would like to plug BizNow one more time. I mean it's an up and coming conference but I truly believe in what Asynt is doing for kind of upper middle management and then escape for senior management of not just real estate development, private equity, but family offices. Their concept of Tribe is something that's special and seems to carry on throughout the year, you know, on par with a ULI Council or YPO and others. So definitely kudos to those folks, but thank you for the, thank you for the introduction. So Creed is a 24 year old national project management and real estate development company. We're different than some of our competitors because we are sponsors. So my business partner Thomas Ryder runs our GP or sponsorship company where we're predominantly focused on Shallow Bay light industrial in Texas. So multi tenant industrial parks. And day to day I run our national footprint for project management, owners representation and construction management. And that ranges everywhere from upfront due diligence to underground and vertical cost estimating, risk management, dry utility coordination and design. Design management, labor compliance, cost accounting, project management, including boots on the ground all the way through turnover to our clients, asset managers or property managers. We work on that side of the house and all asset classes with projects ranging as small as running capital projects for self storage REITs to as large as doing staff augmentation for Altera for the new expansion of Deer Valley. And a lot of fun and a lot of talented folks that I get to work with every day. Great.

So. And Colby. So is this kind of akin in some cases to even be third party development? So I'm kind of thinking about maybe how Heinz or maybe a Trammell Crow will sometimes partner with funds. I notice you've got some impressive partners. I saw Oak Tree Westport. So are you actually helping them with their execute on these developments or is it more just again the project management and getting these developments teed up?

No, you're 100% correct. So you know, we're akin to a Hines a Lincoln. You know, we compete against the Cumming, we compete against the PMA from time to time. But you know, our bread and butter really is that, you know, is fee development. But we're truly an outsourced real estate shop. We're on an a la carte basis. So I started the company 24 years ago at the request of Russ Bernard when Oaktree was much much smaller and we were called Sentinel because we for. We forgot we for went part of our fees in exchange for carried interest in deals and acted as the guards of the equity. We changed our name to Creed in 2018 when we became large enough to have an office in New York and found out that figured out we weren't trademarked and butted up against Sentinel Group and quickly changed our name to Creed. But yes, we can act either as a ala carte project management group or a full service true fee developer partner with the likes of Westport or A10 capital or Castle Lake, you know, or others.

So Colby, I, I know your kind of your real estate development arm is mainly focused on Shallow Bay industrial, light industrial in, in Texas. Is that what are the main signals that you look for when picking your geography for. For this asset type and is that a location that you feel you, you want to stay for the long term or are there any other markets that you're looking at for the. The light industrial.

So on the light industrial side we really like the Texas market just because of the continued onshoring and the build out of cross dock and larger 3 PL and logistics. We focus truly on the smaller bay, shallow Bay for service providers to service Mid Bay and then Cross Dock. We see it as a true long term opportunity. We plan to continue to expand into the Southeast. But our model has always been as we act as a developer to get into a market whether it where we can see a long term theme and you know and build multiple million square foot footprint before we move on to another location.

What is your typical hold period?

It depends on this strategy, it's 50% merchant build, 50% long term hold. When we've built in other markets and other strategies, it really depends on who our capital partners are. The shallow bay so far we've, we've been capitalizing it, you know, more with family office investors versus pure, you know, opportunity funds or private equity capital. Historical developments where we've had more institutional LPs that has been more of a shorter term hold based off their investment criteria.

Colby, if you don't mind, just for our audience, and we've certainly had industrial investors. Chris Powers of Ford Companies was on the show, but I think it might be helpful for our audience. I've been hearing a lot about shallow bay industrial and not to again to kind of bring this down to a 101 level, but would you mind just explaining to our audience what shallow bay is, what constitutes it and you know, maybe the different levels of industrial as you would talk about the different ways that you can invest in that asset class.

Sure. So I mean we used to just think industrial was industrial. Right. A pure, a pure warehouse. And then you got light industrial. And then we use the term flex. And somewhere along the timeline there, I think a lot of us turn flex into the term shallow bay. So I constitute shallow bay is, you know, a building that's sub 26 foot clear height. So you're really, you know, building buildings that are 24 to 26 foot clear, typically around 24 or what was in the, you know, 1980s, 1990s, you're 16 or 18 foot clear. You're typically seeing a 10 to 20% office. Most of these have know on ground roll up doors. You're not doing a lot of docks or a lot of sunken truck docks. You're typically, you know, 100,000 square foot and less. And you know, you're, you're targeting folks that are really in my mind either the suppliers to rooftops or the suppliers to other industrial. So you know, a typical metric you'll see here is somewhere in the kind of, you know, depending on the city and what the Overall makeup is, 25 to 30,000 square feet of this space per thousand rooftops or you know, roughly 35 to 45,000 square feet of million square foot of larger industrial. I consider your mid bay kind of your 100, you know, 150,000 square feet, you know, 250s. And then you really start getting into your, your larger or your cross dock, you know, really 500,000 square foot enough.

So the notion of shallow bay so you don't have as Much of the requirements for loading and freight and docks. Right. That's, that's part of the equation. And I guess the follow up question is you said some of these you're doing merchant build. So when you're doing that, do you have the tenant in hand? And so these become more of like a built to suit or how are you approaching these developments?

We do some build to suits. Some of our parks are larger like where we'll actually go through and build some, you know, build the buildings back but then tenant them up and sell them off to reduce our basis and then continue put a POA or you know, a association on the overall park will stay as the declarant or the master developer on the park and then as we reduce our bases, hold the balance of the buildings.

Got it. So I know you also separate from the development arm, you have the third party owners rep, project management, feed development company. Tell us more about that. The kind of markets that you're focused in your partners, where you're seeing the opportunity on that side.

Sure. So we've been, we've expanded greatly so that over the last years, especially since 2018. So our footprint ranges from Hawaii to what we consider the Smile Belt, which is basically the Pacific Northwest through Rockies West. So we have people in Pacific Northwest, Northern California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, down through Texas, up through the Carolinas and the Eastern seaboard. We're currently executing on a national roll up strategy where we're buying best in class, local boutique, other project management and owners representation firms that are allowing us to diversify both our client base and our projects geographically as well as asset class. So moving up to a blend of about 60% private and 40% public or infrastructure. Work or work. That's an asymmetrical compared to interest rates or your typical real estate cycle. So our. Go ahead.

I was going to say Hawaii isn't a market that you hear as often. What's the story there? What kind of ties you to Hawaii? I think we saw that you went to University of Hawaii. Is that true?

It is. So yeah. My family on my father's side started moving us over to Hawaii in 1967.

Wow.

So grew up with a lot of my aunts and uncles in Hawaii and there were teachers at Kamehameha and Iolani and my cousins, a lot of them went to Punahou. And I actually my big break was when I was working at Keller, CMS and Urban Partners. We were contracted to go to work at Turtle Bay back in the late 1990s for oak tree Capital Management. And took that over from a gentleman by the name of Bill Mills. And that was my first very large institutional project. So I. I got to live on island for five years and. And help lead the redevelopment of Turtle Bay. Converted from a Hilton to a benchmark and finish out the master plan and got to do every. Got to be part of building everything from redevelopment of hotels to the cottages to the ocean villas to golf courses to tons of infrastructure. So it was truly a great master's program for me. Not just University of Hawaii, but Turtle Bay itself. Wow.

I'm sure you had project managers fighting over who got to do the be on site for that. I didn't even know that was an option for college. Kim and I were both, you know, attending colleges in the Northeast, battling the sleet and snow. I didn't even know that was an option.

Well, I did get to spend, you know, three years in places like throughout Central America before I got that assignment. So you don't. It's not all upside.

Okay, so, Colby, you're covering a very broad geographic range. So whether you're developing for your own account or for. On behalf of a client, one thing that we talk a lot about on the show is specialization. Right. And especially when you're talking about building in a city and understanding, you know, who are the players and how you get the right professionals. So for our audience, who they might be thinking about. Look, I. You know, maybe I'm based in Irvine, California, like you are, and I'm thinking of investing in Texas. Right. So how do you get that insider's edge, that kind of local advantage and figuring out who the players are? Because I would imagine every time you go to these new markets, and I'm sure some of the service providers that you deal with are national in scope, but I'm sure you're having to try to figure out the local landscape as well.

Yeah, 100%. And that's, you know, we don't try to be everything to everyone. You know, as an example, my partner who runs our development company is extremely focused on the i35 corridor. And, you know, and that's because we have boots on the ground there, because we have deep market knowledge. And, you know, you always. I always say if you're. If you're. If you're out of market and you're being brought a deal, you know, are you. The first question is, are you getting hometown? You know, why are the local players, who are very smart, not doing it for us? We focus really on helping clients where we have local expertise. For years you know, I would fly people into different markets for some of our fund clients. That really started to shift in the GFC and then shifted a lot during COVID where we were still listed as essential workers, but it limited our travel. So our focus became finding the best local talent that had the relationships with architects, engineers, building inspectors. And then if that project manager doesn't have the expertise, say they're multifamily, but they don't have, you know, we get asked to work on an industrial project, we'll tee them up with a project executive that has 30, 40, 50 million square feet of experience in industrial. And we balance the hours out of what we're building a client. So it's effectively the same, but you get the expertise on the design and the layout, but you're getting the local knowledge so that you can ask for the favors, you can ask for the best, you know, the best civil, the best whatever it is that the, you know, the project needs. And we pair them up that way. You know, our job typically starts once our clients find a deal. We're predominantly focused on helping them come up with either their investment committee memo or their capital expenditure budgets and working through kind of the nuts and bolts from the entitlement and design management through execution. We're not typically doing third party financial modeling, et cetera. We do it for ourselves. So a lot of our folks have that insight and the perspective to focus on. Well, what does it mean if we're late? What does the IRR need to be? What's the preferred return to the client? But we're being handed that project typically at inception and then helping a lot of our clients take it through from there and even presenting to lenders or LPs.

Wow. I don't know if I've heard that. I don't know if it's a verb or an adverb. Being hometown before.

Yeah, it's a good word.

Yeah, I could definitely, I could see that. Yeah, it's such a great opportunity. Why, why isn't someone local there? Although, you know, I think you can also take the, you know, the flip to that. I was just in Dallas yesterday and looking at a project with Tanya Reagan who we're going to have on the podcast and in the future. She was talking the West End of Dallas and some of the kind of, you know, long term investors in that market. I said, oh, you know, that's the West End. There's nothing, you know, it's always going to be the West End. There's nothing really happening there. And then you know, sitting there and saying, oh, well, a couple blocks away, the city is spending several billion dollars on a new convention center and a school. And like, clearly the area is changing. So like, sometimes, you know, the outsider's perspective, I mean, I would imagine, you know, again, you're looking at all different markets, so you're seeing what works, you know, in the Rockies and you know, can you apply that to other markets? So I think it's, it could be helpful to have both perspectives.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, totally, totally agree with you. And that's, I'd say part of our perspective is not just the market but what we're able to bring is if you look at, as an example, you know, multifamily years ago we started, you know, we started seeing what trends were in other markets and brought in the simple idea of extra parking spaces for Uber Eats or extra electrical and water connections to our podium in Salt Lake City because we had seen it down in Austin where we could then bring food trucks into our multifamily projects to be an amenity for that specific project. So you're able to see market trends or amenity trends or things that, you know, your tenants, no matter what asset class are looking for. You know, we, we covered back when the redo of office was hot, you know, five, 10 years ago, we were seeing, we were able to tell our clients like what we were seeing in Seattle and help bring that to Denver on things that didn't cost a lot of money. But you know, a local architect or designer might not have seen yet.

I'd love to hear more about who your, who your clients are, like kind of their profile. And I'm curious to know from a more macro perspective if there are any trends that you've noticed with your clients that they're all sort of following together in terms of asset type, market hold, period, profile, or does every client have a very unique profile?

So our clients range from non vertically integrated developers. So I'll start there for a second. A lot of times when, well, we go to work for a private developer, what I try to explain to them is if you're a market expert or you're an asset class expert and you're working within effectively a 90 minute flight. So let's say you're based in Orange county and you're covering Orange County, Phoenix and Salt Lake City and you have four to six projects going on a repeat basis. If that's your business model, you should hire two project managers in house. If you're more diversified than that or you're working in different areas. That's where we come in because I try to run our team to about 92% utilization, meaning if you look at how many hours there are in a month, you know, we get them to 90, 92%. A lot of developers and shops don't think about, you know, how often they're using their team or they don't really run their project management or development management teams as a P and L which you know, we try to show them that you can. And so that's on that side. If you're outside of that, that's where we really can come in and augment and help and even help, you know, our clients have their development fees or their construction management fees be more profitable to them. It's a similar thing, you know, for private equity funds that are running a 2 and 20 model. If we're able to come in and be a project expense and help them along, then again we can help show them how we can make their asset management more profitable and more effective for them in house, whether we're acting and helping them on an LP basis or if they're direct investing. So what we're seeing right now is the last, I'd say 45 days. It's been told to me by a bunch of different folks is, you know, the gut feeling is the market's bottomed out. You're starting to see a lot of the lenders come in on spreads and seem to be a lot more active and start to get more aggressive. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure why. I don't know if it's the CLO CMBS market has opened up a little bit more, but they seem to be wanting to put more money out and less stringent on underwriting, which to me is a great sign. About a year ago we started to see our more aggressive, very well capitalized family office clients really dig in on entitlements, land banking and getting rolling on a lot of their soft costs. I'd say our public home builder clients, we do a lot of forward planning, a lot of estimating for single family for sale and single family and btr. You know, our nationally, our project management for that boots on the ground, actual execution year over year was down about 22%, we're down about 15%. But our forward planning groups for those firms are actually booking ahead of 2025 through 26. And so you're starting to see a lot of up in the entitlement and the planning ready to deliver, you know, through a lot of different markets. You know it's and you have. So if you look at where you are multifamily in Austin, it's different than in Nashville, but is different than Phoenix. You're seeing that, you know, Austin is already starting, Dallas has started. Dallas on large scale industrial hasn't quite started yet. But we're starting to see land banking and entitlement work going in the Inland Empire as an example for industrial Phoenix has absorbed a lot of their vacancy. So having the interest rates higher and having land costs not come down over the last few years has sucked up a lot of the vacancy just through natural absorption.

Like it sounds like a lot of your, your clients are starting to maybe free up some capital with the interest rate cuts and being a little bit more optimistic on that front because I mean as we all know, typically the equity follows the debt. But a lot of groups, I mean will only use financing opportunistically and won't be overly reliant on the financing to make it a deal. Pencil, have you, have you seen that your private capital groups or clients versus your institutional clients have had sort of a like has there been a misalignment between these two groups over the past few years given where rates were like where the private capital clients may be a little bit more ambitious than the the institutional groups?

Absolutely. I mean and it, you know, it's also about double promote. So you have a private client that is self funded or is under the capital stack, especially if they're buying land in soft cost versus a traditional GP or operator and you're trying to figure out how you're going to make a promote as a GP and then your institutional investor is looking for that as well. And frankly for the last couple of years preferred equity, if you look at what the returns were or even more high octane debt, a lot of the institutional investors were able to come in and place money there and not have to take the equity risk and have similar returns on the spectrum. Luckily that's come in I think a lot of it. You know, I was told by a large private lender last week that you know, their book was up 150% year over year for lending and but that 75% of the loans they did were recaps which tells me that they're putting a lot of money back in the market that has freed up capital through the recapitalization of sponsors and or different partnerships that put capital back in the market that now is allowing people to redeploy one because they have the cash back but two, it just. Uncertainty is always a scary thing. Whether it's economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, debt uncertainty, rate uncertainty, you know, or even in my space, we had a ton of construction costs uncertainty for a long time. That settled out. People are still concerned about tariffs, but frankly, the tariff scare has been around 3 and a half percent cost increase on an entire job. So a lot of that's even gone away in the last nine months. So we're starting to see a lot of stabilization, which is great for our industry.

Hey, Colby, I wanted to go back to something that you said earlier that really amazed me when you said that your team is achieving 92 to 94% effectiveness, I think was the term that you. Or utilization. I mean, I think for all of us who work with teams and figuring out, okay, where are we getting, how are you maximizing utilization? Curious how you even track that. And then, you know, maybe as our listeners are thinking about, you know, how do I scale my business across the country? Again, I don't know how many professionals that, you know, work within your organization. And if you're, if it's all project based, so they're just basically showing up on site, or do you have satellite offices? But how do you even start to manage an operation like that that stretches so far geographically? Obviously, if you've done that, if you're tracking utilization rates, well, first and foremost.

Let me, I'll go back and say that's my target. So I wish I could say I get there every single day. But we don't. I mean, we're no different than an accounting firm or a legal law firm or frankly, even in, you know, an architectural engineering firm. Our business is people and it's, you know, and we're in the business of figuring out how to staff them hourly, weekly, monthly. So we use a time tracking software. We estimate for every single project through different phases. So the due diligence phase, the entitlement phase or design phase, the construction phase, and we'll break that, the entire team down. We come up with an estimate of how many hours we think they're going to spend per month per person on each project that they're on. So again, if you're, if you take a big step back in our business, a project executive or someone that's kind of higher level, if they're truly active, can oversee about 10 to 12 projects at a time. A senior development manager or project manager, depending on the sophistication or the complexity of a project here, really looking at kind of four to seven projects at a time. And then an assistant project manager or project engineer that's helping on a lot of the technical RFIs, the paperwork, you know, the follow up. You know, again, they're typically three to five projects at a given time. And you look at a project load based off of we have some metrics of how much a quote unquote project is billable and then you know, in hours and you're balancing that out. So I give a lot of credit to Mark Fergus, who's our COO Mark. And Mark is great.

And I think we're going to be on the. I think we were talking before about heading out to ULI in San Francisco and Mark's in my product council, so I'll be seeing him there.

Give him kudos. He spends a ton of time on utilization and making sure both where our people are and then quality control because a big thing for us, and I'd say this is, you know, it's a difference as you scale a small project management firm, you know, really it's all about like when I started it was you had an Excel spreadsheet, maybe had Microsoft Project and you had a notebook, but you didn't have a standardization of systems of how are you reporting, what are the KPIs, what are all the project managers looking for and where there's nuances of different projects and different assets, a lot of the things are the same. And so we try to systematize and standardize that across the entire company. So does that help answer your question?

Yeah. No. Look, you're clearly on top of it.

I'd like to shift gears a little bit to talk about multifamily and housing because I know that's a space that you are involved with. We've just noticed on our end the oversupply kind of across the country and multifamily, which I think a lot of people weren't really expecting at this level. What markets are you sort of betting on in terms of population growth and rent growth and other kind of demographic demand drivers?

Sure. So. Well, I'll tell you, you know, what are what we know from our clients. So one, you know, and again, this is always where I look and say we think from real estate a lot of times and this is where as real estate gets more involved with Wall street or even 401k investments or different things, it shortened the horizon for a lot of investors on what real estate is. But from the moment in my mind, the moment I look at a multifamily project, start to finish from inception or underwriting through Lease up. You're realistically, if you can get it done in three years, you're humming. Four to five years is not unreasonable depending on the size of the project. If we go back historically, I mean we were at eight years of an economic cycle. So you're saying one project is effectively half of an economic cycle. So it's what are the fundamentals? One, overall as a country we're still extremely short on housing that's multifamily built to rent or single family. And I don't see that being fixed anytime soon. And that's from affordable through mid market up through your echelon or your, you know, your class A there. There's just a need for it. We've seen a lot of our clients are starting to move back into Phoenix, that that market has continued. We saw really the peak of lack of contractor demand in Phoenix was about February of this year. And that's where our guys started getting calls not just from gcs but subs where they were looking for work and looking to fill the pipeline. Phoenix is already starting to pick up. Q1 2026 Salt Lake City, you know, had that, it sounds like it was overbuilt, but you have 10,000 building permits built, you know, per year pulled in Salt Lake City, you know that the whole state is effectively the size of Orange County, California. Downtown Espino, Salt Lake was around 400,000 people. That's predicted to double in the next 10 years. DFW similar. You look at Fort Worth, you're seeing a lot of expansion in Fort Worth right now as well as north, North Dallas, up Frisco, Plano, McKinney and people moving out to where the businesses are going. So my number one thing I always say is, you know, used to be track the rooftops, but it's track the jobs for us, you know, the unknown is what, you know, what are data centers going to do in regards to the need for housing, the need for retail. Ten years ago we had roughly 20 to 30 people for 150,000 square foot data center. Now it's 150 employees. So where are those people going to work, live and shop?

So Colby now would like to talk about how you continue to grow your third party business as opposed to your own account. Right. And I think we have certainly investors, developers who listen to the show. We also have service providers, you know, and so there are many brokers who like to invest as well. So you know, because you're, you're in the space, you obviously see a lot of opportunities. You know, how to execute on your own project. So how do you think about growing your third party business while growing your own account as well? So do those kind of just grow kind of in tandem or, you know, five, ten years from now? Would you like to see you're working on a lot more of your direct investments?

Well, so my day to day is really running the service business. And so we're trying to double where we are today through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions over the next two years, which is a fairly aggressive growth model. But, you know, we see that as an opportunity, as I mentioned, and you hit the nail on the head. It's a very local business. And so for us, we're trying to find those best in class folks that, you know, the old adage was, gosh, I could grow my business if only I had people in other cities or if only I had other expertise. And so those are the folks that we look to truly partner with and purchase. We love working with brokers both as a service provider where that broker might not feel comfortable using their own PDS team because it could be a conflict where they don't, you know, either they're not seeing the incentive or that client might be looking for, they might want not to risk the relationship with the client if something goes wrong. And, or they might find deals that they want to invest in with themselves and we can provide them an entire outsource real estate solution when they want to invest, you know, for themselves personally. So, you know, that's, that's really my day to day focus. And it's, you know, people forget that it's real estate. They're all large numbers and our team gets trusted to be the tip of the spear and really execute on. And so that's, we focus on making those relationships so that, you know, if you're, no matter if you're investing or hiring us to do something small or large, we look at ourselves as a fiduciary to you along the way.

To shift gears a little bit for our maybe more student viewers. I'd love to hear what gets you up in the morning, why you love what you do. Why do you do what you do. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Sure. So my doctor will laugh at me when I tell you this, but my blood pressure is typically lower at the end of the day than it is in the morning. My entire life, I felt like I was born almost two months premature, which there's a lot of jokes that could go along with that, so leave me alone on that one, please. But I wake up with a racing heart and my mind going every morning because I feel like I'm late. And I love solving problems. I love doing the impossible and really looking at it and thinking about it, you know, as you sit and go, how are you going to create something that's not the normal? Or how are you going to fix a problem that, you know, can just. That's that everyone else has already kind of said, hey, we're just going to leave it alone. And we're going to, we're going to go with the norm. You know, project management is, it's one of those things that you can do it by the numbers, but if you do that, then you're no different than everyone else. So I like coming up with what's the next innovative thing? Or how are we going to do something that when a client or an architect or really a tenant looks back and goes, gosh, I'm really proud to be in this space. And we're a small piece of that.

That's awesome. For listeners who want to get into the project management space or get the technical know what was, was this learning on the job for you? Was it higher education? What was it that you needed to do to build out your hard skills?

Mine, mine was a lot of on job training. You know, I had a varied path to get to where I was starting out, funnily enough, in the aquaculture industry, building fish farms.

Wow.

Throughout Central America and on the show yet.

What'S a fish farm look like? What are we talking about here? These aren't koi ponds. Right? We're talking about.

Yeah, we did both offshore underwater fish farms with, and raceways for abalone to oyster farms for pearls to, you know, on base, onshore large ponds for shrimp. And it's, you know, it's effectively one of the riskiest businesses in the world because it's farming and you're, you're trying to put live animals into a confined space to, to make a profit. So it's not for the weak of heart, but it, it was a great education space because it taught me to go into new markets, adapt and, and work in different languages and. But my suggestion would be there's great, there's great undergraduate degrees with civil engineering, engineering, construction management now, but it really depends what that student wants. Jumping from being a construction manager to a developer is a little bit of a unicorn. You know, you're kind of pathed that way. If you, you know, it's, you're easier if you come up and you work for Davis and young as a runner or you're doing, you know, analytics and really understanding the numbers. So what I try to tell everybody on our team is first and foremost, learn as much about the overall projects, like don't just understand what an estimate is, but understand how to read the plans, understand ceqa, understand investment docs. If you want to be in the business, never stop being inquisitive because if you ever stop learning, there's, there's going to be something that's going to get you.

Wow. Well, Colby, this has been awesome. We really appreciate your sharing your story and all the incredible things that Creed is doing and also on the investing side with what you're doing in Texas with Shallow Bay. So we really appreciate your joining us today.

Well, I appreciate it. And yeah, feel free to follow up with any questions and it's always good to talk to you. And I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco at the Urban Land Institute.

There you go. Want to thank my co host, Kim. We're on a roll here and thank of course, our listeners. And there was a lot of specifics and technical details discussed today, which I think is awesome. So if you have someone who's interested in the space, forward the episode to them. That's a great thing for you to do. And as always, you go to james nelson.com the site is not about me. I built the site for you to help you give the insiders edge to real estate investing. So you can find the podcast there, the show notes, you can find useful articles featured on Forbes. So a lot of other resources. So until next week, thank you again for joining.

Great. Thanks so much, Colby.

Kim, James, thank you so much. Talk to you soon.