Ross Perot Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and real estate developer, talks about his varied businesses, inside and outside of real estate, including the development of the giant Alliance project in Fort Worth, developing public private partnership projects in the US and abroad, and about his father’s legacy. 

Legacy comes up right away as Ross reminisces about his father taking him to work, being the first to fly a helicopter around the world, and being a business partner with his dad. They acquired, over time, the land for Alliance in Fort Worth and, of necessity, became a developer of the project themselves during the S&L recession.

Ross talks about Hillwood’s work in public private partnerships across the country, including the airport project at Alliance, conversions of military bases, development of the Victory project in Dallas and his company’s work in Poland. He talks about this all coming together in their development of the Air Force Memorial project.

Resources:

• LinkedIn | Ross Perot Jr.
• Hillwood Development

This week’s podcast guest is Byron Carlock, the U.S. real estate leader with PwC and the primary author of the ULI/PWC annual survey, “Emerging Trends in Real Estate”. The podcast centers on the current market downturn in the real estate transaction market within the context of the longer term, very positive, fundamentals and trends for the real estate business. 

Byron predicts a 1-2 year timeline for market stabilization and talks about the next cycle where the longer term trends are generally quite positive for real estate. He discusses the deep, ongoing need for housing affordability, the retooling of the industry about decarbonization, continued challenges in the office market given long-term changes in remote work, and the resilience of great cities as well as opportunities outside of the big core urban environments. 

Byron and Matt also talk about the negative image of “landlords” and “real estate developers”. Byron sees work to do on public perception of our business and reframes the industry’s work in the built environment as a “community betterment business”. 

• Byron Carlock | PWC
• LinkedIn | Byron Carlock
• PWC | Emerging Trends in Real Estate Magazine
• Up For Growth
• Beauty
• Trammell Crow: A Legacy in Real Estate Business Innovation
• Trammell Crow, Master Builder: The Story of America's Largest Real Estate Empire
• Christopher Alexander - Pattern Language

This week’s podcast guest is Tyler Morse, CEO of MCR Hotels, the 3rd largest owner-operator hotel in the U.S, with a large range of hotel options. He discusses several aspects of the hotel and travel business, pointing out the differences in what business versus leisure travelers need and desire. He gives advice on accumulating and using points for reward programs. He especially emphasizes how people can rack up points on business trips and use them for family vacations.

He discusses the impact that the COVID pandemic had on the hotel business. He especially focuses on the post-pandemic reaction, where people are traveling more than they did before the pandemic. Business and leisure trips have increased due to people’s desires to experience new things and interact with others. Tyler expects this to last for many years, calling it the “Roaring Twenties,” and comparing it to similar reactions people had in the 1920s after the 1918 pandemic.

He describes his experience starting the TWA hotel, right by the JFK airport, which was his first hotel. He admits that it was a risky investment, but it paid off. The hotel draws in a lot of people who pass through JFK, as well as those who work at the airport. He talks about experiential hotels and how they differ from other hotels, especially in the fact that they are meant to draw people and to provide more opportunities and activities than other hotels provide.  

Resources

• MCR Hotels Website

This week’s podcast guests are Carl Shannon of Tishman Speyer and Larry Baer of the San Francisco Giants. The pair discuss the opportunities in the land surrounding the Giants’ stadium. Together, Tishman and the Giants are building the Mission Rock mixed-use project, a new neighborhood adjacent to the Giant’s Oracle Park. The space is 28 acres with 1.6 million square feet of office and retail, 1,100 residential units, and eight acres of public open space — all on the waterfront.

Larry explains that the baseball kedIn

• Mission Rock
• Tishman Speyer
• Baseball Reference

Matt speaks with Mark Preston, Executive Trustee and CEO of Grosvenor, on this week’s episode. Grosvenor is a 340 year-old family office and commercial property business in the UK, owned by the Grosvenor family. Their young patriarch and Chair, Hugh Grosvenor, is the Duke of Westminster. 

Matt reflects that this kind of business longevity is nearly unrelatable in the real estate investment business, where the time horizon is so often three, five, or at max, fifteen, year holds.

Mark delves into what long-termism means from Grosvenor’s perspective, particularly around the issues and responsibilities surrounding carbon and community benefits for property owners.

He emphasizes that while there is growing opportunity to invest in environmentally sound real estate, it is imperative to do so, if investors and developers are going to be responsible citizens. These long-term real estate investments and developments have the potential to make a significant impact socially and environmentally — as well as financially. Mark emphasizes that long-termism is less about planning to buy and own a property for 350 years than it is about building a positive and durable reputation. 

• Mark Preston | LinkedIn
• Grosvenor
• AFIRE

This week Matt sits down with Alex Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Juniper Square, a real estate technology company that is providing major backbone infrastructure for real estate investment managers and how they interface with their LPs. Juniper Square has gained tremendous market share over a short six years. Now that it has significant scale, it has the opportunity to play a major role in helping to create a more transparent and low-friction marketplace for GPs and LPs to bring capital and investment opportunities together in the real estate investment business. Juniper Square’s next level of work in its capital marketplace could be truly transformative for the industry.

Alex’s success with Juniper’s Square’s resonates deeply with Matt on a personal level. Matt shares that years ago, when real estate was still the domain of the mom-and-pops and the deal cowboys, he was the Executive Director of the Multifamily Housing Institute. One of his jobs was to compile and share property and loan-level data and create an industry-wide database that supported moving multifamily from a secondary asset class into a primary asset class for real estate equities. His data project was 20 years too early, but it fills him with pride to see Alex start to make headway in that area.

Alex and Matt drill down into accounting, reporting, transparency and capital markets. For Matt, this conversation has been timely given his recent work with CFOs and CEOs — the capital markets are the core driver behind every action taken in the capital intensive real estate business. 

• Juniper Square
• LinkedIn | Alex Robinson

This week’s guest is Tim Schoen, President and CEO of BioMed Realty, a Blackstone company and an industry leader in life science and technology-focused real estate. 

Tim is a deeply experienced real estate and capital markets professional, and he is a true business leader within the biotech field. In this episode, Tim drills into the dynamics of the biotech real estate space, which has such a different business model, unique customer base, and range of specialty skills within the team to make it a market leader.

Tim shares his passion about the real estate business overall as well as the intellectual engagement in focusing on the biotech field. Tim is fascinating to listen to because he is “always learning,” as evidenced by his leadership at BioMed, serving on the Salk Institute Board, and the challenges and opportunities for both the bio tech and real estate businesses to contribute to carbon reduction. 

• BioMed Realty

Mikael Colville-Andersen | Author & Founder of Copenhagenize Design Company

This week Matt’s guest is Mikael Colville-Andersen, speaker, TV host, author of “Copenhaganize”, and founder of Copenhagenize Design Company, a global consultancy firm that helps cities understand best practices and implementation of bike infrastructure for their communities. Mikael has a Canadian public TV show called “The Life-Sized City” and also hosts a podcast of the same name. Mikael and Matt talk broadly about urban bicycle infrastructure in-person from Copenhagen, one of the most bicycle friendly cities on the planet, in which 60% of commuting is done by bicycle.

Matt is an avid cyclist, often cycling 30-50 miles on a given weekend morning. He reflects that bike culture in Denmark is not so much about riding for exercise as it is transport. Riding a bike in Copenhagen is casual — seeing people in suits coming home on their bikes, moms and dads bringing their kids to school, bikes with full baskets of groceries, people young, old, out of shape and in shape all just pedaling on their clunkers to get where they need to go are normal, everyday sights — and the protected bike lanes make it feel safe.

Mikael is an urbanist and a deep believer in creating bicycle infrastructure and getting people out of their cars. He explains that a more intentionally-designed urban infrastructure will improve our cities, health outcomes, quality of life, and carbon footprint. This conversation provokes an important question: How does the real estate industry help promote this change on a larger, more consistent basis?

• Mikael Colville-Andersen | LinkedIn
• Bikes 4 Ukraine | Cykler til Ukraine
• The Life-Sized City | TVO Today
• “Copenhaganize” by Mikael Colville-Andersen
• 2019 Copenhagenize Index
• “Best Bike Cities in America 2018” by A.C. Shiltron and the Bicycling Magazine Editors
• “The Best Cities for Cyclists” | The New York Times
• “Why We Shouldn’t Bike with a Helmet” | TEDxCopenhagen 
• “The E-Bike Skeptic” by Mikael Colville-Andersen
• The Life-Sized City Urbanism Podcast: Vancouver, Tall Buildings and Brent Toderian | Episode 09
• Matt’s Strava Feed

Matt’s guest this week is Sara Neff, Head of Sustainability at Lendlease Americas, a globally integrated real estate and investment group specializing in creating strong cities and connected communities. Sara dives into all aspects of sustainability in real estate, emphasizing that materials, construction practices, and management need to support carbon-neutral goals.

Sara inspires business leaders to raise the bar in their companies on decarbonization and encourages young people interested in sustainability to join the real estate business. There is huge work to be done and this is an opportunity to move the needle on carbon not just in the industry, but nationally and globally.

Sara believes that a business’ level of commitment to sustainability is a good indicator of its overall management quality. Leadership that cares about sustainability has a long-term vision for their company and can see that carbon-neutral, sustainable buildings are the future of the market.

August kicks off a month of podcasts dedicated to climate change, beginning with this conversation with Sara. In two weeks, a conversation will be recorded live in Copenhagen with Michael Colville-Anderson, author of the book “Copenhagenize” and the host of the podcast series “The Life Sized City Urbanism Podcast.” Join Leading Voices all month for these crucial conversations on how real estate is changing the conversation around climate change and sustainability.

• Lendlease’s website