Bob Knakal - RK Real Estate | Selling $21+ Billion

What does it take to sell over $24 billion worth of real estate? I absolved 2,327 properties in New York City. You didn't originally want to go into real estate, which is always an ironic origin story. It's New Jersey, a town called Maywood. It's between Akentsack and Peremis in Berkwick County. Third summer, I got my real estate license in New Jersey, and I was the assistant for an industrial broker 26 years later. In 2014, that's when you sold Pushman Awakefield, $400 million. It was like a ghost house, not unbelievable. No stores were open, there were no people on the street, there were no cars moving. The second after they think, hey, I need to sell. You want the next thing for them to think of is, hey, let me call Bob. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. They supported the show for over two years now, and I've used HubSpot for the majority of my professional career. 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There's 1,300 integrations and a ton of valuable add-ons customized it exactly to your needs. With SalesHub, Closing Deals is no longer a big deal. Go to HubSpot.com, slash sales, and try it for free. Bob, thank you for joining me. I appreciate you a lot. I'm very excited to dive in. I always like to ask a question that's going to be able to kick off the conversation in a meaningful way. The one that I thought of for you was, what does it take to sell over $24 billion worth of real estate? Well, it's got first of all great to be with you today, and look, the real estate brokerage business is not a flashy or glitzy business, and most of it is just very basic blocking and tackling, we call it. So I think to sell, and I'm up to just under $22 billion now, but I have sold 2,327 properties in New York City, and the way we did that was just one at a time, and it's just a focus on doing fundamental basic stuff, but doing the right stuff, the working really hard, getting lucky, and just keeping at it, having the discipline to just do those very basic, fundamental blocking and tackling type things over and over and over. I tell people, but can you come up with a formula, implement that formula, and do it day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, in my case, decade after decade, we're now in year 40, but just absolutely love it. And it's just, it was, doing some very fundamental things, always give the client advice that you think is in their best interest. The easiest way to do that is just pretend that your clients, your mom, or dad, if they own the property, what would you tell them? Give people good advice, create value in yourself in terms of being an expert in a segment of the market that you can clearly articulate to the client your expertise and that you can really help them and do the right thing, and just get up every day and get on top of the rock file and swim away, and you just keep at it for a long period of time, and before you know it, the numbers kind of add up. You know, it's funny. It's just, it's just like age old advice that can apply to any entrepreneur ever. You do it for long enough, you build your systems, you build your processes, you incorporate your learnings. It's going to end up being impressive over 40 years, which is absolutely wild. And yes, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to add an extra two billion on there. I'm just, I'm just forecasting out. I think that happened early on. I had at the end of one of the years we were counting. It was 20.4 billion somebody said, oh, 24 billion, but over 20.4. Now it's, now it's exactly as of the end of last year, it was 21.8. So closing it on 22. So you didn't originally want to go into real estate, which is always an ironic origin story. So maybe just walk us through that and how you got into it. Because I mean, you know, you accidentally fall into something, but then you're successful on purpose. So where did you come from that? I don't know. I push you. It is in northern New Jersey, a town called Maywood, which is nobody's probably ever heard of Maywood, but it's between Akinsack and Pyramus in Bergen County, northern New Jersey. 1981 as a freshman at the Wharton School, wanted to be a Wall Street guy like every other Wharton kid. I thought it would be great to have a job at a commercial bank or investment bank on my resume. So I went around with my resume spring break freshman year, dropping it off at commercial banks and investment banks, came out of a paintwebber office. So a cold little banker across the hall thought it was a bank, dropped my resume off. They called me later that day. I set up an interview, go to the library, look up this bank, see it's a real estate company, almost don't go, but they were the only ones higher in college. You get to the summer, took the job, loved it, actually had a really interesting class my sophomore year. It was entrepreneurial management, and we had a guest speaker that came in and he said, I know all of you probably want to be investment bankers, because 20 years ago I was sitting where you're sitting today. And I got to tell you, I sell dog food for a living and I'm the happiest guy I know. And he went into this whole thing about how we got into pet food and pet supplies, he just found something he was really passionate about. He says, look, don't worry about the wanting to get a job that you'll make a lot of money at. If you're getting in the business world, if you achieve anywhere near the top of that industry, you're going to make a ton of money. So do something you really love. It hit me and I said, you know what, I really long what I did last summer. I want to do a real estate. And I took real estate classes, went back, I had done market research that first summer with CB. Second summer, I ran the market research group. Third summer, I got my real estate license in New Jersey, and I was the assistant for an industrial broker. And I was driving around Morris County, showing industrial space to tenants and buyers. It was just a great, great job. And then that third summer, the guys in Hacken Sacks said, hey, we'd love for you to come work full time here after you get out of school. And I said, well, thanks. You know, I appreciate that. But, you know, can you set up an interview for me with the guys in New York? I think I might want to go talk to them. Went to talk to the guys in New York and they offered me a position also. And I thought, you know, like the song says, if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. So I wanted to go to the big apple and try my hand at it. And that was 40 years ago. So just an amazing run. How, you know, how different was real estate in New York 40 years ago, compared to the environment that we have right now? Oh my gosh. Well, in environment, the environment in terms of deal making was, was a lot better in 1984 and the vibe that it is today. But the world has changed so much. Scott, it's just unbelievable. When I was sitting at my desk in 1984, I had no computer on my desk, no laptop, no fax machine, no cell phone. We used to carry rolls of quarters around in our pocket. So that we could stop at phone booths out on the street and call people if they didn't show up for meetings. It was, it was a very, very different time. And interestingly, you know, I think that even with the way the world has changed over the past 40 years, I think the extent to which the brokerage world is going to change over the next five years is going to blow away the change that we've seen over the last 40 based on AI and new technologies that are being developed. It's really mind boggling what's going on today. And the rate of change is going to be much faster than it's occurred previously. And I'm also curious about, because when I look at the real estate market, now it seems, it seems like there's a lot of real tours out there that are just getting started. Was it as competitive back then in the 80s as it is now? Has it always been that competitive just to understand what the dynamics were for like you getting that job and you making your mark and how successful you were? Yeah, I think the world has changed pretty dramatically. If I take you back to the 80s, commercial real estate wasn't really a mainstream job category. A lot of the folks who were active in commercial real estate back then, it was the second, third, fourth career for them. They had done other things, got into real estate somehow. Today, a lot of colleges have real estate majors, kids getting interested in real estate at a lot younger age. Real estate has become a much more mainstream asset class in terms of institutional investment. So I think it's changed very dramatically. And interestingly, folks have said to me, well, gee, now with all the new technology you have, the deal process is so much quicker, there must be so much more business going on today than occurred back in the 80s and 90s. And the interesting thing in New York is that each successive decade, there have actually been fewer properties sold. But what technology has done is it has allowed an individual to do significantly more than they could have done in the past. There are years in which I've sold over 100 buildings. There's no way I could possibly do that in the 80s or 90s with the technology the way it was then. So I think what's happened is it actually has allowed fewer people to do more business because you have more horsepower with the strength that technology gives you. But it's probably a slower industry today than it was previously. It's interesting. I think people are getting into it a lot younger today. It was very unusual for me being a college kid to get into real estate as a first job at a school. Back then, today it's very, very commonplace. We have hundreds of thousands of folks applied for our summer internships on very, very competitive and I know it's like that at every shop. And it's really it's great to see that people are getting into real estate at such a young age. And when you, as you sort of progress in your real estate career, in New York specifically, what pushes you down the route of doing commercial? Because that's that's a behemoth that you're taking on. I'm assuming that it's hyper competitive. The best of the best take it on is where you've built your career. So what, what was the passion in commercial real estate? Because that sounds a little funny, right? Like passion for commercial real estate. It's something that passion for making money, passion for solving a certain problem. How do you get a passion for commercial real estate? Yeah, it just, it was always fun to, you know, that first summer driving around looking at the buildings, you know, and don't forget the security in commercial buildings is very, very different in the 80s. I mean, you basically could walk into any building anywhere. You know, the way leasing brokers used to canvas big office towers, you just got in, took the elevator to the top floor, got out and walked into every office and said, Hey, let me talk to the guy who makes real estate decisions here. I mean, that's how lack security was back then. And, you know, I just, I was driving around looking at these buildings and, you know, one building would be an office building. And the next one is a retail property. And the next one is an industrial building. And he's looking at all these commercial properties. And it was so cool to walk inside them, see what was going on right now. Experience it. Experience the money that just goes into some of these organizations and these buildings. It must be wild. Yeah. So it was just something that I really liked right off the bat. I mean, I always was very statistically and numbers oriented. It all stems from being a baseball card collector as a kid. I was probably one of the few kids that spent more time looking at the backs of the cards than the front of the cards. You know, always, always like to look at stats and kept track of my own stats. I was a baseball player, a pitcher, as a kid. And, you know, always kept track of those. And then when it came to real estate, that first job was very, it's just really oriented, figuring out the sides of the building, the square footage, writing down a lot of data. And it just really resonated with me right off the bat. I never, never considered getting into residential real estate. It actually is a, there were some fundamentals that are similar, but it's a vastly different business in residential than in commercial. I am, I am very curious about sort of your entrepreneurial route that you took and you built your own brokerage and then obviously you sold it. So like very, very entrepreneurial mindset. I want to go down that road and sort of unpack some of the learnings that you that you obviously figured out as you were building. But I would love to understand just what for people that are listening that are not in real estate or not in commercial real estate. What does a commercial real estate transaction look like? What does it look like from finding the land selling the land, buying the land all the way through to when they start to build? Like, can you just walk us through sort of like a typical transaction and what that looks like so they understand the scope of work that you would do? Sure. And I'll start with just kind of an example to give folks a sense of what the business is. And I always try to simplify it in a way that you really can, can very transparently understand what it is. So let's say I was going to leave New York and I'm going to go to Iceland and I'm going to sell rocks for a living. What I would do is I make up a list of everybody that owns rocks. I then study the rock market, understand what different types of rocks sell for how many there are of each type. Look at sales trends and really become an expert on the value of rocks. And then I'd make up a list of everybody that wants the buy rocks. And I would try to develop relationships with the people who own the rocks. And when they want to sell the rocks, I'd ask them to hire me exclusively to be their agent to sell them. And then once I got hired, I'd call all the people that want to buy rocks. And that's the brokerage business in a nutshell. So basically, I have a list of folks that I'm trying to develop relationships with at own real estate in New York. I'm trying to explain to them that, you know, I've done it before I have the capability, I have expertise in the subject matter. And then if they hire me to sell their building, I'm likely to get them a higher price than if they hire somebody else. So I get hired to sell it. And then we send the information out to the thousands of people that have expressed interest in buying properties here, get folks interested, answer questions for them, give them information about the building. Who would attend and how much are they paying? How long are the leases? What are the expenses? What kind of return will this investment provide? And then you go through the process of getting people to make offers on the building. And then you deal with the top two, three, four people at the top of the back. And ultimately, you know, sell to the one that's willing to pay the highest price. So it's a fairly simple business. It's just really hard because it takes a lot of discipline and doing a lot of very basic fundamental blocking and tackling every day. A lot of relationship building. I'm assuming it's yeah, with that with that, it's enough. The key is to beat top of mind with somebody because if you think about the New York market and use Manhattan as a microcosm south of 96 street, which is the prime part of Manhattan, there are 27,649 buildings. The average turnover of that stock of buildings has been about 2.6% of the total stock in any one year. So building sell only once every 40 years on average. So the idea is to be there when that owner decides, Hey, I need to sell. Whatever the reason might be death, divorce, taxes, partnership disputes. There may be a compelling strategic reason why somebody wants to sell. But you want them to the the second after they think, Hey, I need to sell. You want the next thing for them to think that is, Hey, let me call Bob. And the way you do that is by constantly developing and nurturing a relationship with that owner, sending the market information, calling them, speaking to them all the time, answering questions that they have, always staying in front of them so that you you remain on top of mind for them when they decide they need to transact. So I mean, there's a long tail to building a successful brokerage. Like you said, it's a lot of blocking and tackling, but there's a lot of there's a lot of relationship worth that goes into it up front and has to be maintained. I'm just curious because you work with a whole bunch of young people and young realtors and people that come into the interim program. Do you find that even the the personality of the individual is a little bit different than when you started and the need for immediate gratification is hurting people's real estate careers. Do you see that? Um, not so much. I think that may be a part of the way folks are built today because everything happens so quickly, you know, you get your deliveries same day. You I know you need information. You just you go Google a lot of Google a topic and within seconds, you have the information. Everything happens much quicker today. But I think, you know, we always tell folks in real estate, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You have to build those relationships. You have to take the time to do things properly and not take shortcuts on it. I think the folks who do well in our business that three, three main things that really stand out and lead to a high probability of success. One is being a true market expert in one niche of the market. The markets are generally so big, so many building, so many possible transactions, so many buyers, sellers, tenants, that you want to pick one niche that's a manageable size that you really can become a true expert in and develop that expertise. Second, you have to have passion for it. You have to love it because no matter how good you are, the market is always cyclical. They're going to be ups and downs. And invariably, somebody is going to run into tough times. And if you have passion for it, it's going to give you that intestinal fortitude to fight through the tough times and stick around and be there for the good times. And then the third part is discipline. The discipline to do these things. I love quoting Abraham Lincoln who said that discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. And if you keep your eye on the prize, understand what you want most, where you want to get to, what your macro objectives are. And you're not dissuaded from from maintaining focus on those things. You know, you're able to do the the nuts and bolts things that you have to do day in and day out to make sure that you achieve that little term objective. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now, the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. So if you like this show, you'll love some of the other shows in their network. One of my personal favorites is the hustle daily show. It brings you a healthy dose of a reverent offbeat and informative takes on business and tech news and you guessed it every single day. Some of their recent episodes that were my personal favorites, how AI is making fake IDs, how to meet your favorite CEO for a few thousand dollars. And also how TikTok is turning into an online mall and starting to replace QVC. If you love business, if you want to get it daily, let's into the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast. Very, very smart. What prompted you to start to build your own brokerage? And that's that that was a very successful exit. You sold that. You sold the the the Massey, NACO, Realty services for over a hundred million. So wildly successful by any, you know, business standards, entrepreneurial standards. So where did that come from? Where did you start that? How did you grow it? How did you differentiate from all the other brokerages to to get to that level? Yeah, well, at CB back in the 80s, we were we were trying to implement a territory system. And a couple of years in one of the senior guys who had been there for a while came up with a transaction in Paul Massey and my territory and went to the boss and said, I'm not going to bring these kids in on this deal. I've known this guy for a long time. I'm not going to do it. And the boss said, okay. And we're like, hey, that's not fair. We was supposed to be operating on a set of guidelines and principles. So we're like, hey, man, we're out of here. And so we went down to chemical bank at the time and saw our bankers that, hey, we need 500 grand as a business loan. We're going to start a business. Where do we sign? And of course, the banker laughs at us and say, hey, guys, that's not the way it works. Go out, start your business, come back after you've been in business for three years and have a track record. And maybe we'll talk about giving you a revolving credit line. So we would depressed, went back to the office, and you know, we for the next two years, we saved money out of every transaction we did saved up enough. We had about 400 grand to start the business. And went then in November of 88, started our firm. We were absolutely dead set on having an operating platform that we would not deviate from in any way. So that another young guy wouldn't feel like he was not being treated fairly. So the rules in our platform applied to us just as it did to somebody's and their first day on the job. And that worked out really well for us. So we implemented a geographic territory system that were rules and guidelines. It incentivized expertise. It incentivized collaboration. And was a key ingredient in the success of the tournament. How long did it take you to get it off the ground? Like tell me some entrepreneurial story of just a long time. How about that? You know, 88 was a good, you know, stock market had crashed in October 87. 88 was still a good year in the real estate market. Things moved more slowly back then. But 89, the volume of sales started to dry up by 1990. We were in the eat of these savings alone for ISIS. We had one plate in 1990, had $15,000 in the bank. Our burn rate was 15,000 a month. And we said, you know, what the heck do we do? Do we do we pay all the bills next month? And then hope that we close a deal. Do we pay 5,000 a month for the next three months of the most important bills? Keep the phones on and keep the lights on on. And it occurred to us that we had really good credit. So we went to every bank in town and said, Hey, we'll get a $2,000 credit card at this bank and a $4,000 credit card at that bank. And between two of us, we had about $60,000 in credit card lines. So that was four months of operating the business. So we ran for a couple of years on those lines. And then we also ran out of money again because the banks at that time were going through what was a two or three year closure process. They would then get titles of the property and then started selling. And that selling really started in 93 as I recall in a big way. And we had the credit cards maxed out out of money again in 92. So we went to one of our super rich clients and said, Hey, we need a $75,000 loan. We've done some business with you that seems like you like us. Would you give us $75 where it? And he said, You know what? I really like you boys. I'll give you the $75,000, but I want 50% of the stock in your business. Oh, that's pricey. Thanks. Thanks. Well, let us think about it. And of course, we were depressed. And we didn't have any family members that we could go to directly. But ball had a stepfather in law that was in the mortgage brokerage business in New Jersey, that guy by the name of Jack Holler. And we went out to see Jack and we said, Hey, Jack, we need 75 brand. We'll give you 25% of the stock in the business. And you know, people often ask you, what was the kindest thing anybody ever did for you? This was it. Jack said, guys, I'm going to give you the 75 brand. Don't don't want the 25% of the stock. Someday you're going to be very successful and you'll be upset that you gave me the stock. So I'm not going to not going to do that. And you know, it was a it was a great great thing got us got us through until the market started or revolving again, you know, volume started to happen. And you know, it was a it was a great great thing you did for us. So the company started to to make money by 93 94. And but personally, I lived on credit cards from 1988 to 1998. And there's my net worth fluctuated between zero and minus 180,000. Because I had gotten my own personal lines up to 180,000 on credit credit cards. And you know, it was it was a wild ride, but worth every minute of it. Most people I don't think would stick it out that long. That's that's tough. That's a tough 10 years. That's but that's sometimes what it takes. So that's sometimes what it takes. And then you hit the when the markets turn around. Because that's the thing too, right? Like, I'm assuming, you know, you can be the best broker. You can be a great marketer. You can have good relations. But like market impacts in a major way, even if you have all those things. Yeah. Then we just we we believed that, you know, someday it would work out. We believe in what we were doing. Always loved the job even during the tough times. So, you know, we stuck it out. Fortunately, everything worked out. And like you've you've made some you made some really bold moves. I mean, I think after the September 11 9 11 terrorist attacks, everybody was downsizing. You were hiring aggressively. So you have a certain style of leadership that's worked out. But you don't walk me through that decision because that's like a small example of how you lead and how you built a thing is very, very important. Yeah. That was that was a big inflection point in the history of the company. Up until that time, I think in 9 11, we had 21 people. And up to that point, all and I had done all the hiring ourselves, all the interviewing, hiring, etc. And we saw every company downsizing. A lot of companies were were scared and great quality people were were out on the street without a job, you know, brokers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, and like this great quality people out there in New York is tough. We're going to bounce back from this. And we went out and hired a director of HR and said, you know, let's go hire all these great people. And two years later, we had 150 people. We had opened offices in Queens and Brooklyn. And if we did that at a time when, you know, most men had and brokers start their shoes would get too dirty if they went across the river to the out of boroughs. Now, it's very cool to be in the out of boroughs. But we had those offices open and fully staffed. And so when the markets really started to to do well in the out of boroughs, we already had tremendous boots on the ground. And really had a very dominant market share in investment sales in the out of boroughs, particularly at that time. And it would look, that move Scott could have just totally put us out of business. But we believe in New York City. We believe in our platform and had a bunch of great people come on board. And it was a fun ride. So did you do something similar during COVID with a lot of people losing their jobs? Did you pick up talent? I know it's not your company anymore. But it was at the strategy. Yeah. Well, it's a different situation now. JLL is a huge company. We have 102,000 employees worldwide. And you know, the group that I run in New York is the private capital group. And the folks who are the main producers in that business were all folks that I've been working with back to the Massey Nackle day as we probably have an average 10 year or about 25 years together. So that we didn't increase our head count all that much during the downturn. But still as much fun as it used to be. I love it. Tell me as you're building out, as you're building out the firm, that was one bold move you took. What was one of the worst decisions that you made? One of the shit hit the fan moments when you're building it out. Oh gosh, probably many. I'll tell you the one very early on. It's not really a big one, but just emblematic of the fact that you had two guys running a business that didn't really know what the L.A. We're doing. We went to a printer to get report covers done. And they were black report cover with a white box in the middle and then our green logo in the middle of the white box. And these were going to be the covers that went on the reports that we gave to clients and that kind of thing. And we get them back from the printer and pick them up and all of a sudden our thumbs are black. And we're like, what the heck is going on? And we went to the cheapest printer out there. You know, not somebody that was really that good. They didn't put varnish on them. So we called the guy up and said, Hey, man, you didn't put varnish on me. He said, you didn't ask for varnish. It would have been more if we would varnish them. So like we can't use these. So what we did, you know, we're small. It's just me, Paul Edwin's love who was the first salesman. We hired Jim Ventura who was the second salesman. We hired as a kindergarten friend of mine and a secretary. And we send the secretary down to the Dwayne Reed drugstore. We said, go buy five cans of hairspray. So we take a newspaper spread it out on the floor of the office, put these report covers down. They were spraying them with hairspray so that when it dried, you could touch it and not get black ink all over your fingers. So, you know, that was that was one of the things. Another thing we we said to our our secretary, Hey, we want you to keep the bus and write the checks and take care of all that stuff. Not knowing that she didn't know how to balance a checkbook. And she came to us one time with a couple of years in. It's like guys, by the way, you know, and she was just stuffing bills in the draw and forgetting about them. We, you know, our burn rate was 15,000 bucks a month. We had $60,000 at unpaid bills that we had to deal with. So I know that a lot of trial and error. And I will say that the biggest mistakes that we made were made because we didn't think enough to ask people who had been there and done that for advice. So we did way too many things like that by trial. And we didn't make any really giant mistake that really caused it. But as serious hundreds and hundreds of these these small mistakes that that added up. And I think we could have avoided many of them if we had just thought to ask senior people for advice and and that kind of thing. And then in later years, we actually had an advisory board of very senior people in the business world and the real estate world that helped us tremendously and learned our lesson about trial and error. And now that's not the best is the best way to do things. So I guess the answer is a lot of a lot of small paper cuts. We got along the way, but fortunately, nothing big. So then, you know, 26 years later in 2014, that's when you sold pushman awake field for 100 million. So incredible, incredible exit. You went back to work the next week, which I think is hilarious. Good for you. Listen, I like your attitude. I like I like how you look at work. I think it's important. Fast forward. You you always are a hard worker. I think that's something that's sort of the permeate that you know, it's been throughout your entire career, very hard worker. In 2020, you walked every block of Manhattan to document all these development sites. So you always do things. The best way I can put them is a little bit outside the box and a little bit analog in the world where everybody's trying to optimize and do things in a digital way. Nothing wrong with that. It helps people work quicker, faster, but you still do things and get your hands dirty. Like you do. So what was the point of that project? Yeah, well, that was that was actually something I had wanted to do for about 10 years. I sell a lot of development sites in New York. Those development sites are typically made up of a bunch of little small buildings that can knock down to make way for a new big building. And in order to value land properly, you really need to know what the supply pipeline looks like on similar properties that your new property that you're going to build is going to compete with. So there's very opaque information about the pipeline of new development in New York. The best data set that's available is in the residential space for condominiums, although all the big residential firms produce reports that are all great, but they're very different from each other. Some count things that others don't. And it's really hard to get a sense of what's really out there. So for years, I wanted to go out and actually tell the buildings that are under construction. You're standing in front of a site. You know whether there's a building under construction or not. You can save whether it's there or not. And doing it on Google Earth or something like that, that may be six months old or nine months old. I'm not up to date with regards to today. So I wanted to get out and actually do it. And during the pandemic, I had gotten out of town. There were some rumors that they were going to quarantine the entire city and shut all the bridges and tunnels. So I took my wife and my daughter up to our country house in Connecticut. We left kind of an hurry when we heard that rumor. We didn't want to be stuck in the city. And a couple of years, we were told, go home, go over two weeks and then come back. Everything will be fine. And so it was very clear two weeks later that we were going to come back and everything wasn't going to be normal. So we left in such a haste that I had to go back into the city to get some stuff. And I'm driving down the FDR drive and get into Manhattan. And it was like a ghost town. It's got unbelievable. No stores were open. There were no people on the street. There were no cars moving. And I'm driving to my apartment and it occurred to me. You know what? If I'm ever going to walk around the city, this is the perfect time to do it. So I called up the folks I worked with. I said, hey, it was make copies of that sandborne tax lot map. I'm going to go out into the field. I brought one of them with me each time. We dried up cards to point A, get out, walk around for half hour, drive the point B, get out, walk around for F hours. And we colored coded everything on the map for buildings that were under construction, buildings that had been demolished, buildings that looked like potential development sites and assemblages where you're putting the other multiple properties. And then came back since we did that, it was about 220 hours in the field. Every street of Manhattan, south of 96 on the east side of 110 on the west side, have done thousands of hours of research after that, figuring out what the pipeline is. And so now in terms of the pipeline of new construction, we've broken it into five buckets, residential, rental units, condo units, hotels, offices, and then a miscellaneous bucket. We have it down to the square inch for everything that's being done in the city, the deals that are actively under construction sites that are in the planning stage, potential sites that we're prospecting to. We're doing all of that stuff. And it's been great. It's allowed us to value properties very accurately. It's given our clients great insights into the market. Since we did the field work, we've been tracking every demolition permit, foundation permit, and building permit that has been filed. So it's completely up to date when I have clients come in, we're constantly modifying the map with the inside information that they're giving us about deals they're working on. And it's been a great thing. It's interesting. You just got to, like you said, you got to niche down, you got to be an expert in your field, you got to do the hard work. These are just good tenants of building a strong business. Now you have the map room, huge competitive advantage because you walk the streets, you've done the work, you've done the research. It's actually funny that even in 2024, the map room you built by walking the streets is still a competitive advantage and it's not sitting on the internet somewhere. It's very interesting. If people have said, hey, Bob, I do digital stuff. I can digitize it for you. Don't want to digitize it because looking at it on a computer screen is very different. I mean, you see behind me, yeah, shins of the map on the wall. I say this table has the big, big map. Yeah, yeah, they're individual and it's nothing new. I'm going to show you a picture from I'm not sure exactly what year, but this is the early 90s. And that's me, you said, my desk with maps on the wall. So as much as works, much as the world has changed the world has saved the same. Amen. All right. To finish this off, I want to just, I want to get a website, social, where do you want to send people if they want to connect with you, sort of learn what you're working on? What's the best place to go? Sure. You could always email me at bob.necle at jll.com or I'm on all the social media platforms, very active on LinkedIn and Twitter. I'm happy to have you DM me or email me and be happy. Anybody has any real estate questions? Happy to answer them. Amazing. All right. Last two questions, rapid fire. First one, if you could look back and tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would it be? Don't do things by trial and error and ask older people who have the experience and have been there and done that for their advice and you'll save a lot of time and effort. Good. And then if you look forward now, what is success being for you in the future? Yeah. Well, I think success really has to do with the sense of peace that you ultimately get to in your life. And I think that's something we're all striving for. We talk about work, life, balance. We talk about things that are important to us. But I think the extent to which you can sit down at the end of the day and feel like you have peace within you that you've treated people right. You've done the right thing. You'll live a good life. I think that that's a me of success.