Navigating the Capital Stack with Andrew Stewart, CEO of Cronheim Mortgage

Andrew Stewart, CEO of Cronheim Mortgage, takes a deep dive into the most surprising trends in commercial real estate debt financing. 

In this latest installment of The Dealmakers Edge, Stewart sits down with host Aaron Strauss to provide an insider’s view of the hottest asset classes to watch for in 2023; managing the unrelenting pressure of making deals; and his keys to success in business and in life.

Courtesy of Cronheim Mortgage:

Andrew Stewart began his real estate career at age 19 renting apartments to help pay for college in Boston, Massachusetts. As someone who has learned the business from humble beginnings, he has gained a wealth of experience at all levels of a real estate organization. He has used this knowledge to consistently rank among America’s most productive mortgage bankers and has evolved into an owner/sponsor partnering with real estate developers in numerous projects nationwide. His investment track record has generated excellent returns due to his creative problem solving, focus on market dislocations, and the ability to evaluate a project from various viewpoints as a mortgage banker/broker, property owner, and a CMBS B piece investor.

In June 2020, ICSC tapped Andrew to assist in the ongoing Congressional negotiations to provide additional capital for COVID impacted impaired real estate owners. His most recent article, ‘A Match Not Made in Heaven, Securitization and the Commercial Mortgage Industry’ was the September 2020 feature in Institutional Real Estate Investor and was submitted by ICSC to the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to illustrate the problems inherent in CMBS loan modifications.

A September 2006 article “Managing Expectations” correctly forecast the subprime and mortgage bond issues that impacted the market a year later.

Prior to working at Cronheim, he worked from 1987-94 at Donald Zucker Company, one of NYC’s top multifamily developers, and at Donaldson, Lufkin, & Jenrette, later acquired by Credit Suisse, from 1984 to 1986.

He is a member of the ICSC, MBA/YMBA, IOREBA, NMHC, REBNY and NAIOP.

Enjoy the show? Have a guest in mind? Email us at podcast@aystrauss.com to let us know your feedback and who you want to hear on the next episode.

Connect with Aaron and the A.Y. Strauss team:

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Transcript

A.Y. Strauss: Hello everyone. Welcome to The Dealmaker’s Edge. Today we're joined by a terrific guest, a friend of mine, Andrew Stewart. We've known each other for quite a while. Andrew is the CEO of Cronheim Mortgage, one of the oldest privately held financing shops in the US where he's been for just about 30 years. He's the CEO and also he is the managing principal of channel Real Estate Funds, which is an equity investor that invests alongside real estate sponsors, [and] developers. Andrew, I'm really excited to have you on, I know you know so much; we want to try to get out your story for everyone today.  

Andrew Stewart: Well, I'd like to think it's better to know what I don't know than to pretend to know things that I don't know and talk about the things that I do know to the extent that I can help. 

A.Y. Strauss: Terrific. Well, you've had a wonderful career to date. Maybe we can try to go back to the origins a little bit. [Your] current role [is] as CEO, but I know you started at a different firm. Maybe you could talk about, I know even in college you were involved in real estate, but maybe give a little bit of your overall arc of your career to get… 

Andrew Stewart: I'll try and give the gist of it. I mean, when I was 19 years old and trying to find something to do for a summer in between, years of college, I got my real estate license. I used to, back then, teach tennis and I saw all the folks walking in and out of the rental office that I ended up working at and I asked the boss there, I said, "Would you consider hiring me?" And I was actually, I think, teaching my landlord's entire family how to play. And he helped me get a job there as a rental agent at 19. And I started renting apartments for two summers, which was a very interesting start to my career because I was constantly making deals. I averaged about 40 apartments a summer, and then I went to college full-time during the school year. Made quite a bit of money, enough money to cover basically all my expenses for the school year during just three months, which seemed amazing to me at the time. I had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and it was just the idea of every rental apartment lease is still making a deal and a transaction between two people. I learned a lot about how to get two people to agree or group of people to agree on something and [how] landlords, they had their own ways of thinking of which tenants they would accept. It was a small, localized business, [and you] are dealing with property owners or maybe, you know, 40, 50-unit buildings. I got to know a lot of them and it was, I would say a better education than … school. And I went to work in New York City at DLJ at the investment bank, later bought by Credit Suisse. I feel like I learned more renting apartments than I did at the investment bank, but that was the second part of my career when I moved back to New York in 1985 and I worked for seven years at Donald Zucker Company, a major real estate developer of multi-family housing. They were at … 55th and Sixth in New York City, and I got to learn a lot there. I was in finance there. And in 1994 after the SNL crisis, I joined Cronheim Mortgage. And the rest I guess is history. But my career has certainly evolved dramatically in the 29 years or so that I've been at this company. And I've been running it for 23 years and I really enjoy what I do. I enjoy the people I do it with. We have a great team. A lot of our people have been with us for many years and I think that's part of what makes all the institutions that have us service mortgages for them. And there are many. Major institutional investors who have us originate and service loans for them. I feel that that develops a certain amount of trust and just faith in what we do and what we say and the fact that we've been doing it for so long and we have such a track record of managing their money properly, not losing it, and hopefully going forward, not losing it. 

A.Y. Strauss: You have a good, good track record indeed. And also to that point, you've maintained a wonderful culture having met and interacted with a lot of your colleagues. All terrific people, terrifically talented, and they worked together as one unit, which is pretty rare too, to [] really [get] that camaraderie going so clearly onto the right thing. 

Andrew Stewart: Well, when I worked in New York City at Donald Zucker Company in particular, it was [as] a mortgage broker and it was a commission-based position and everyone was sort of, zero sum game out for their own selves. And I found that it did not create a culture that made it, at least for me, fun. But, we do not have commission structures. We have something where everyone works, where it's a common goal at the end of the year, everyone shares in the money that the firm makes. And I don't want to, you know, a 26 year old to think that, "Oh, if this deal closes I get $30,000 in my pocket or something, or a hundred thousand dollars". We lose a deal, that's fine. I just want them to do the right thing. But the key is we're hiring smart people out of college, generally teaching them the way we do things. Because I don't think our business is that complicated. And so we're molding them into a different type of person than say, hiring folks that already work at other firms doing what we do. We try to create our own culture and several of our top people have been with us right out of college and they're still with us 20 plus years later.  

A.Y. Strauss: And doing very interesting deals as well. And I know you've had a specialization in a lot of different asset classes. The hotel business has been really strong for you guys over the years too. 

Andrew Stewart: David, Charlie in our shop has evolved into a superstar in the hotel industry and he has a team that he runs that is extraordinarily talented in my opinion. I'd put them up against anybody in America and we have … fun doing it which I think is important and the most important thing of all I think, is that we let each person evolve to become the kind of executive that they want to be using the skillsets they have. Not everyone has to be the same thing. For instance, you have a football team you need someone to block, you need someone to catch, you need someone to throw their different skillsets in a firm like ours. If we all had the same skillset, we probably wouldn't be very successful. So we have people with varied skillsets, and we let them grow into whatever it is they want to do, so long as they contribute. 

A.Y. Strauss: Amazing. And I think that's magic. If you can create that, and you've certainly been created it for a very long time. Maybe you could talk a little bit, I mean, everyone's talking about the financial markets, rates, all the standard stuff. I mean, I knew you just got back from Miami, the big conference. And you're talking to every banker in the world, every lender, every borrower. Maybe you could give us just a short sort of state of the market a little bit. I know it evolves, you know, day by day in this type of times, but what are you seeing? Where do you think things are going, that type of thing? 

Andrew Stewart: Well, look right now, there's going to be a lot of maturity defaults where people who have loans coming due are not going to find ways to take them out without injecting new equity. Not everyone has new equity to put into deals, so I think you're going to find … like for instance, office buildings, they're so hard to finance right now that if you have an office loan coming due, you generally, you have no takeout. So, we've seen borrowers, people who own real estate come out of pocket for many millions of dollars to pay down their loans to get the right type of financing going forward. And we've seen other people have to go out and dilute their equity, raise fresh equity, … bring in preferred equity mezzanine financing, which can be very expensive. And some of these people that used to borrow money at three and a quarter percent, now they're looking at their overall cost of capital eight, nine, 10%. And safe to say that they're not too happy these days. So we've been delivering a lot of unwelcome news to people and it's unfortunate. It's not, obviously, our fault. We just function within the marketplace that we live in. But I do think that this year there is a tremendous amount of capital seeking a home. However, on the long-term side, there's a lot of borrowers who believe that rates may come down in the future, so they don't want to borrow 20-year financing in today's rates. And as an observation, it seems like people who lived through the early … the older folks who lived through the early eighties and, even the early nineties, and saw how high-interest rates were then, they don't seem to mind borrowing long-term money in the fives. Someone who's 35 years old, who's never seen anything like this. They're like 5 percent, you know, “I'm going to wait till they're back down to three.” And maybe they're right. None of us have a crystal ball to know that. There's just the people who don't know. And the people that don't know that they don't know. No one knows, obviously, which way interest rates are going. 

A.Y. Strauss: Exactly right. Maybe you could talk a little bit how you've evolved as well. You created Channel Real Estate Funds to invest alongside sponsors and real estate developers as another vehicle opportunistically. I know you've had some really nice success with that. Maybe you can talk about how you thought to form that, how it got started, and maybe a little bit of its success. 

Andrew Stewart: Well, we traveled the country in 2008 and [200]9 trying to raise capital for a fund. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life because nobody wanted to invest in commercial real estate. And I was like trying to tell people this is a great time to do it. “I've got liquidity. I'm willing to put in my own money. I feel very strongly about this.” And what happened was we started seeing deals because we were getting some press that we were raising a fund. And I saw some of the deals and I said, “look, I'm not going to wait around. I'm just going to take advantage of this.” And we started syndicating equity and raising capital. And the first couple of deals were extremely hard to do because we didn't … hadn't done it before. And once we started getting going and people started to realize the kind of IRR they were making on our deals, it became easier and easier for us to raise equity. And because we're an opportunist, we're kind of a contrarian. I'm a contrarian thinker by nature. We're not out there in the market at all times in the economic cycle, investing in all kinds of real estate. We're looking for dislocation. And I joke that I don't have to be very smart to know when to invest in equity in real estate. All I have to do is look at the P&L of my mortgage company. If the P&L are strong, it means there's a lot of liquidity or maybe too much liquidity, and that means that maybe it's not a great time to buy real estate. When our P&L is poor, that probably means that liquidity is constrained and because of that, asset values are under stress and that probably is a good time to buy real estate. Now that's a gross generalization, and I wouldn't say that's right in all circumstances, but it's certainly a good barometer for us. And in 2000, 2008, 2009, 2010, our P&L was not strong. We did … we hung in there. We did well enough to get by, but we were able to take the same folks who are in our team doing debt and convert them effectively into an equity shop where we were focused more on deploying equity than anything else. We were still doing debt deals, but there were a few of them to be on. There was less capital out there. We were keeping our folks productive. And I think in reality, The efforts we made in those years at some level were probably the most successful of my career because we got ourselves in equity investments at a very modest basis on some really good real estate, and some of that we still own to this day, some we have sold because we've been the last two, three years we've been a little on the bear side, and we've been liquidating some and taking, harvesting some gains, taking money off the table, waiting for whenever that next true opportunity comes. And I don't know when that opportunity necessarily will be here but I do know that the risk-reward ratio for some of the real estate investments we've been seeing are such that I'd rather keep our money in relatively risk free assets. Assuming that the U.S. Treasury doesn't default and that all that money we have in treasuries is in safe. 

A.Y. Strauss: That's a big assumption for everybody, right? If that happens, and we got much bigger problems than cap rates and IRRs, right? Obviously, you've got a lot of clients buying deals. You've got lenders making loans. You have your own personal views of the state of the market and where things are headed, et cetera, et cetera. But, if somebody were to show your transaction today, what would be sort of the saving grace or what would be appealing? Again, I know talking to somebody who's very conservative in this market, but what would you have to see happen in the market to start to get excited again? And by excited, I don't mean overwhelmed. I mean, relatively interested.  

Andrew Stewart: Look, the whole premise for what we do, and it kind of evolved organically and it took me a while to realize exactly what we were doing, but it seemed like every deal ended up being similar in one sense. And we started with something. We re-tenanted, changed juice, renovated, built, and what have you. And by the time we were done, we had achieved an alpha return. So, just buying a stable asset and running it stable like running a 95% lease apartment building in a market that doesn't have a lot of upside, that, that's not really what we're going to do. Buying a defaulted mortgage and, you know, taking it to a decrepit property, fixing it and renovating it and releasing it and or maybe changing the type of property it is. That's right up our alley. And buying a shopping center that has been run poorly and maybe can use some TLC and maybe again some re-tenanting and rebranding and renovation, sometimes we've invested even in land deals where eventually they became properties where our sponsored partners ended up building. We're not a builder, we're not a developer. I don't want to pretend to be something we're not. We're strictly investing equity and trying to make smart economic decisions. But it's not, we're not generally the type to just be buying stabilized assets and running them. That's, that's not what the premise of our equity platform is about. 

A.Y. Strauss: A hundred percent. Maybe you could talk a little bit about … you've seen so many deals over the years. You've seen so much in as far as just general markets, cycles, rates, etcetera, but there's a lot of intangibles that the best sponsors bring to the table as they're buying deals. What are some of those you've seen the best sponsors sort of have to be able to be successful? Forget timing because timing is obviously luck driven, but if you're investing alongside a principle, you like the economics, but what are those intangibles you're looking for as far as a partnership with somebody? Those are something I think somebody listening would appreciate. 

Andrew Stewart: Yeah. The key … listen, that's a very good question. The key to me is that every developer by nature is optimistic. Meaning they look at a situation, they believe it's going to turn into gold, and they think it's going to, they're going to triple their equity. To me, the best sponsors are the ones who are thinking, "Okay, if this works out, I'm going to do great and I'll have a 6:1 multiple"; whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. And then if they're able to do that then they're going to succeed in a, in a big way. Right? But the ones that I like the most dealing with are the ones that actually think about capital preservation at the same time. That they feel that in the event that things don't work out, at least they won't lose their equity. Right? So many folks are just so focused only on the upside, and they don't focus on the downside. And that's not what I at I want to see. I want to see someone who thinks clearly about what it is they can accomplish in a safe way where like even in the worst case, they'll probably get their money back. 

A.Y. Strauss: Outstanding. And I know that's been your thesis too on the principal investing side, you have a wonderful track record. And by the way, I shall say anytime I've gotten an email about a potential deal and try to email you back, the equity subscribed in about 30 seconds, so people should line up faster. 

Andrew Stewart: Well, we're also … I mean, I feel like we probably played it too close to the vest at times and so we probably could do more deals than we've done. So we've been fortunate. But you know, we probably sometimes … because look, I've been trained to manage money for insurance companies who are very conservative investors. They don't care about doubling and tripling of the asset value because they don't get sharing that. They only get their interest and their principal back. That's all they care about. So we're constantly looking at deals and, you know, try and … we're picking them apart, saying, “how can we lose our money? How can we lose our money?” And if we do find something, then we generally are not going to do it. So, I have friends who say, we're too conservative times. But having said that, we have done a lot of deals over the years and we have done some even recently. The last deal, although the last equity investment we actually made was second quarter of last year. So it's not like we're not rushing to do them right now. And right now the finance, the capital business is good. Although at [], certainly one of the things I learned was a lot of people are very slow right now. There's not a lot of sale transactions taking place cause the bid ass spread is very wide. and people who own properties are not acknowledging the fact that higher interest rates and the potential recession that might be looming, might impair values a little bit. at the same time rent inflation has been incredibly, you know, incredible in many markets in this country. It's frightening at [] how much rent has gone up for so many folks. And I … that clearly is not sustainable. It also makes me think that maybe inflation, ‘cause rent inflation is such a big part of the core inflation that, you know, everyone's been afraid of. I don't think rent's going to … inflation's going to stay that high, which probably will mean core inflation probably will drop, but I, again, don't want to make predictions about these things.  

A.Y. Strauss: And were there any, from your take on … obviously you speak to so many lenders every day and borrowers every day, and you're servicing a lot of debt. Any sort of, optimistic mindsets that you think have a lot of credibility and any voices of optimism throughout all the different… 

Andrew Stewart: I think there was a lot of pessimism there about certain things, but I don't think anything anybody believes we're going through another GFC for instance, or an SNL crisis. I don't think anyone believes that. I do think there are over-levered properties and there's going to be plenty of situations where debt gets turned into equity or just like in the early nineties, you know, the formation of many of the REITs happened because they had all these loans coming due and in order to recapitalize the companies, they went public and raised equity to replace debt. In some manner that may happen. I mean, I believe last year was the first time in many years, maybe 30 years, that there was not one public issuance of a new re, which I found surprising, and will that change? I don't know. But I do know that there's going to be, recapitalization going on, and I think there's plenty of money out there, and it's not like the economy is in terrible shape at all. So, I feel like people who feel like the sky is falling, I don't see a lot of that. So, I don't see that kind of pessimism. I just see a little bit of short-term pessimism saying, you know, some of these loans coming due, there's no takeout for, and that our volume's going to be lower this year. And we want to lend or do this much in business and we're not going to be we may not get there.  

A.Y. Strauss: Wonderful. If you had to focus on one asset class in the next year, are you still more sort of market agnostic as far as markets are, asset classes, or do you feel like you're more bullish, one versus the other or a certain geographical points in the country? 

Andrew Stewart: Well, you can look where the population is growing in parts of this country, you know? And there are other concerns that I've started to think about, like availability of water, for instance, right? You know, like, do I want to invest in somewhere where maybe they're not going to have enough water 30 years from now? But we've invested all over the country and all asset classes. I mean, not in senior living. We have no investments in that space, but we have big footprint in industrial, in retail, multi-family, and some hospitality. Very little [in] office. We never really did too much office … a medical office, but not office has never been something that we've invested a whole lot in. But I believe that right now certain asset classes are doing quite well. I think, for instance, neighborhood and service retail is doing great. I don't think it gets any attention. We're seeing activity across the board servicing mortgages. We get lease approval requests constantly. The properties we own, we're constantly seeing activity with new leasings. We we're happy with that. Industrial is still, I mean, it's almost indescribably good and I think it's some of the deals we did and the premises, the premises we bought them under a few years ago and when, what the rents are coming in now and the kind of deals we're doing. If you told me that 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago and we bought these things, I want to laugh at you, but now we're the beneficiary of some of that. I'm happy about that. But I am concerned are certain markets just overheated? You look around, there's so much apartment construction in so many markets and I think apartments are doing really still quite well. It's not going to continue probably, but I mean, will it continue at this rate and this kind of rent increases, as I've alluded to before, I really don't think that. I think rents, there has to be an elasticity between people's ability to pay their incomes and how much they can pay in rent when it comes to things like apartments. And when it comes to other asset classes, if your costs are going up for everything else, like you're running a restaurant and the cost of labor goes up. A lot of people still have trouble getting labor. The cost of cheese, you run a pizza place, the cost of cheese and dough and everything else to the mega pizza goes up. You know what gives, at some point, you can't raise all your costs at once. You can only charge so much for a pizza before people aren't going to buy it. So, I mean, a lot of supermarket chains I know they're seeing less people focused on some of the higher end goods and you know, but more people buying ramen noodles or something like that, where they're focused on the lower end goods because they, the other paychecks are being squeezed. And I think eventually that's going to squeeze real estate of all types.  

A.Y. Strauss: Well said. Maybe talk a little bit, you've been through cycles, you've been through so much in your career, you're still doing a ton of different things in your career. It's a stressful business, right? You win deals, lose deals, there's just, every day there's fires all over the place. How do you maintain your laser-like focus in these past 30 years, staying the course, keeping on the highway as it were? What kind of things do you tell yourself in the worst of times and the best of times? Some of that mental edge I think would be very valuable for people to hear about. 

Andrew Stewart: Right. Well, I mean, I guess that that hearkens back to some of the adversity I faced in my career, which is significant. When I first went on my own, I had to figure out how to pay my own rent and pay my own bills. I didn't have and my parents like, you want to move out buying, you're on your own. And I was determined to like, not have to go back. So I had to figure out how's it, I'm gonna pay my rent, you know? I remember one time I got my phone shut off at the same time I got my electricity shut off in my apartment when I was like 20 or something. It was really stressful at times figuring out how I'm going to pay away bills. The worst time, in my career, was certainly the SNL crisis, 1990 to 93, where I wondered, my wife, wondered, what are you doing in this business? We're having a child. You couldn't make a living. There was absolutely no liquidity in the marketplace. I went two solid years making almost nothing. I questioned, what am I doing with my life? That was truly stressful because I was trying to figure out how am I going to support a family? How are we going to, you know, pay for anything? I'm a young kid on the way, like, what, what am I doing? So that was extraordinarily stressful and since that ended, say in 93 and starting 94 things started really getting much better. I've been very appreciative of what I have. I am, you know, how do I put it? I, I like … I'm very proud of what I've been able to accomplish, but I remember every day, every single day what it was like when I was … I thought of myself as a failure. Like me and one of my buddies, we used to work at Lehman in the 80’s. We used to wear-shirts in 1991, around the Upper East Side where I lived. Said YUFI and stood for “Young Urban Failure”. So that was kind of a joke. I felt like one, I'll tell you that. but the point being that I think now that I don't have to worry about putting food on the table and I'm comfortable. It's not gonna ha work any longer. The comfort I get from that is, is more than most people. Cause I remember what it was like not to be comfortable. So I appreciate that every day. And I appreciate what I'm able to accomplish. I don't take it for granted. I love life and I feel like I have an infectious energy that runs off on the people I care about my clients, my friends, my coworkers, my family. I feel that's part of what makes our business go is you know, that I still, after all this time, love what I do. So a 22 year old kid, like the one we just hired, he is here a few months and he sees that I'm totally into what I'm doing and I'm having fun doing it. I think that makes him more excited to be here every day. And it doesn't make him scared on Halloween to dress up as me and sit at my desk and, and imitate me when I'm gone. But the point being that I've been through a lot. And I'm, you know, and I feel very fortunate that I made it through. At this point, I don't take anything too serious. I tell everyone, there's no such thing as a commercial real estate emergency. What we're doing … we're not saving lives. I think we are providing a great service by helping create environments and different types of real estate that people want to shop at live at. Logistics, places to stay. Like I feel like we are helping direct capital in, in important ways that helps society. But, I don't take seriously that seriously what I do and when I'm dead and gone, it's not gonna matter whether I made one big deal in 2023 or not. And I always try to think of that. It's just a deal. Like, so what. What am I stressing about. As long as my family and those close to me are happy and healthy. Those are the things that are important. Deals are important, and I love what I do, but it's not, it's not everything. So I, I try to do that. And the other things I do, I do a couple of things to keep stress. I just don't really feel stressed in this business at all. And I haven't for a long time. And part of it is I exercise regularly. I'm certainly not a great athlete, but I find that keeping in shape is a huge part of what makes me feel good about. Feel good physically and good mentally. I find I do some of my best thinking after I run, when I get my heart rate up for a period of time. I think that that just. I don't care how stressful situation I'm in, I run a few miles when I'm done. Nothing can hurt me, you know? And I have a, I have plenty of hobbies and I play guitar and write music and I enjoy that. And I find writing music and playing cathartic. and it's probably a good idea live in the suburbs cause I can sing and play as loud as I want and not bother anyone.  

A.Y. Strauss: Well said. Yeah. I've seen some of your playing. Legendary. I think you've provided a wonderful sort of arch of your career, state of the market, the way you've built a culture. You have a company brand of integrity, but a personal stamp of integrity. People trust you and that doesn't come easily it comes after many, many years of doing the right thing, even when it's very tempting in this business to veer left or right over time, the greatest value will compound when you build really a good name for yourself, which you've done and should be extremely proud of that and your team members. 

Andrew Stewart: I am, but I don't see where it's beneficial to try and do the wrong thing to hurt someone because if you really take the long view on things, you want people to come back to you and say, "Hey, I like that person. I like that team. I want to do other things with them". I'm a huge believer in what goes around, comes around. You're nice to people, they're nice to you, right? You do good things for people. Now, is it always that way? No, of course it's not always that way, but life is not perfect and … and there are certain people who maybe, you know, are, are people I'd rather not associate with, but we generally stay away from those folks we believe are not the people we want to be around. And we've been lucky enough that we at some level get to choose who we do business with and the institutional investors we've represented for many of them for more than the 28 … 29 years I've been at the firm; they definitely trust us. Cause they've seen us through, you know, what we went through during COVID. I mean we, I think we negotiated 75 workouts in three months. Got paid nothing. Because our servicing agreements are not like special servicing agreements with For CBS loans, we're not expected to run into trouble, but no one knew COVID was coming and we had to execute dozens of workouts and loan modifications. And that was, That was tough, right? Our investors, because of that, they trust us and the people who borrowed money from us also they, I think almost every single person believes they were treated fairly during covid and given at least a break where we could give one, but remember, the institutions represent the debt service payments that are going to them are paying annuities for folks who are collecting on those annuities. And I can't exactly, I can't call, grandma and say, "Sorry, we can't make your annuity payment  “cause this guy's not paying his mortgage". It's tricky. It was very tricky. But we got through it and we had, that was, those were not the easiest days of our life, our lives either. But we made it.  

A.Y. Strauss: For sure. You certainly have made it. Anything else I could have asked you that I did not, that I should have asked you that I didn't cover here?  

Andrew Stewart: I just feel like the keys to this business, probably to any business; I only know this business really by having a broad array of skillsets and most important probably being what, you know, emotional intelligence and being able to read people. That's not a skill that you just learn. It's something that some people just have and some people don't. A couple of my family members, my wife and my children, you know that they have high, you know, emotional IQs and they can see what, what people are doing and how they're doing it. That gives you some insight into what might happen going forward. So I feel like that's an underrated part of what we do. Just the ability to make friends with people. When you finish a meeting with someone and they're looking forward to the next time you call and the next time you see them. That's a huge benefit, right? Because they forget about the fact whether or not you're gonna do a deal with them or they … you're gonna provide a service that maybe we have a competitor who's smarter or better than us can do. If they're looking forward to hearing from you, that is going to give you a competitive advantage. And I think that's important. I think, you know, too many people these days have gotten addicted to doing things via text, email, [and] not doing things in person. I still think … I always joke that you know the value of doing things. If a text is a two out of 10 and an email is a four out of 10, and a Zoom [call] is a six out of 10, being in person is a nine out of 10 in terms of value. And if people who think that they can do everything without getting out there and meeting with people, I think are kidding themselves because the most important things in life still happen in person. And I also noticed that a lot of the kids we hire, they did not learn how to write in a complete sense. A text is not a complete sense. Sometimes, [I] get a little frustrated with that, but maybe I'm just showing my age. And the ability to even do things like math without having an Excel spreadsheet in front of you. I mean, I'm still used to doing math in my head and can estimate what, during a meeting very quickly, what's going on in terms of a lease negotiation, a financing negotiation. I feel like if I were a teacher these days, I would teach kids to learn how to think more than how to do. And I feel like that, you don't want to teach people what to say. You wanna teach people how to think and that is to me, a little bit lacking in the educational system these days. And we try, when we take people on at 21, 22 years old, we try to help them learn how to think for themselves. And there's no such thing as one right answer in a business like this. This is not a science, this is an art, so to speak, where, you know, there's many ways to probably solve the same problem. 

A.Y. Strauss: Well said. Andrew. It's great to have you on. I'm sure listeners have learned a ton. Always amazing speaking to you, continued success, continued doing all the great things you're doing day to day. And be continued my friend. Again, [I] really appreciate you taking the time.

Andrew Stewart: Yeah, no worries. Aaron, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.  

A.Y. Strauss: Of course.