Ep.10 - Communities at the Core: Multifamily Tech, Strategy, and Staying Ahead-with Susan Gerock

I am so excited to be here. This is a real honor to be joining you all today.

It is so funny because I am truly the accidental technologist, and I'll tell you why. I was working for a manufacturing company in Central Virginia, and I had done some different jobs there. I had started out working with them on a very large bid that we were doing for a government contract. And when we did not get that bid, I probably should have lost my job, but they had been very pleased with the work I had done, so they said, 'You know what? Let's stick her somewhere else in the company, just to kind of keep her around.' So they put me in our engineering department. My background is in political science and economics, so I have really no business in an engineering department for a manufacturing company, but there I was. And so I thought, 'Well, you know, if I'm here, I really need to find a way to contribute.' I was pretty young, I was probably 23, 24 years old at the time. So I started doing a lot of technical writing for them, really because the engineers were really, really good at the technical stuff but not good at the communications type of thing. So I started doing technical writing. I actually went to school at night to learn AutoCAD so that I could start doing some drafting and some online drafting, and that was one of the things the company noticed: 'Wow, she really picks up computer programs very quickly.' I did not have a computer background at all, but any time new software would come in that they wanted somebody to look at, they'd throw it at me and say, 'Figure out how to use this.' I think I started out on Microsoft Project 1.0 or something like that, so I'm really aging myself desperately at this point. But when the company was preparing for the year 2000, they had all kinds of custom code that was very old that needed to be retrofitted, and they took one look at it and said, 'We can't do that. There's no way on this earth. We're going to have to get an off-the-shelf system.' So they bought JD Edwards, which crosses a lot of different disciplines, and they were implementing JD Edwards at the company. They asked me to represent the engineering department and the sales department in the implementation. So I was on the project team. Once again, it was something like, 'Wow, I really get this. I like this.' Our president noticed that and he said, 'You know what? I need to move you to IT.' So before I knew it, I was in an IT job, which also involved me being responsible for payroll, which is not something I ever would have wanted to sign up for, for a manufacturing company that had multiple shifts and multiple types of shifts. So I had to be able to explain to people who'd come in and say, 'My paycheck doesn't look right,' and I had to be able to explain to them, 'Here is how we calculated your paycheck because you were on these different shifts.' So I certainly had a lot of interesting times, let's put it that way. During this time, I had met my husband and we were getting married, and he lived in the Washington, DC area. And so since my job prospects in DC would be much better than his in Central Virginia, we decided that I would move to DC when we got married. Well, when I started looking for jobs, here came a recruiter and said, 'We're looking for somebody who knows JD Edwards, and oh by the way, it's a real estate company.' I said, 'Okay, that's fine.' So as I was going through the interview process, they said, 'You know what? We know you know the technology, so we're comfortable with that. We feel like you have good customer service skills, good people skills. We can teach you the real estate.' And a real estate technologist was born in 1995. And really from that point on, my career for the most part has been in real estate technology, whether it was in consulting, whether it was in serving from more of a vendor standpoint and servicing companies that were in real estate. I've spent a lot of time, especially coming up on the application side of the IT business in real estate, so really having to understand all of the business applications, understand a real estate company's processes and requirements. I've spent most of my career in public companies, so understanding that dynamic as well. That's been the journey. And people keep saying, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' And I think that is still yet to come. Who knows what the next career might be?

I think it was called a program coordinator. It was part of like government program management sort of thing.

Okay, I have to say Elm. A couple of years ago, Elm transitioned from WashREIT, as you said earlier, and we became a pure play multifamily company. I have to tell you, all my job has been so interesting and so exciting since that change. I love multifamily.

One of the things that's a lot of questions, Ryan. I don't even know where to begin.

Let's see. I feel like a lot is asked of the CIO role today. There's a lot of discussion: are you a CIO, are you a CTO, are you a CISO? What are you? I think in many ways we are expected to be a little bit of everything. And I think there's goodness in that, in that I think we really have to understand the business of the company. We have to think of it through multiple different lenses. The good news is I guess I'm not fighting with a Chief Information Security Officer or CISO because I am the CISO. So it's one of those things where you are constantly having to think about how do I move the company forward, how do I take advantage of the latest and greatest, but oh by the way, how do I keep it secure, how do I make sure that it is reliable and accessible, how do I manage cost, how do I make sure that we are data driven and we're collecting the right data and our data is clean, but oh by the way, are we training people in the right way? It's just you have to think about all of the pieces of the puzzle as a CIO today. And I feel like that is very much my role at Elm, is that I have to be thinking about our technology and our data from every different angle. And that's not only the things I talked about, but how does it impact our employees, how does it impact our residents, how does it impact our potential residents? How do we make sure that we are able to be successful but also meeting the requirements of all these different constituencies? And if you were to ask me, my mind is just turning those things over all day every day and trying to stay current with what's happening in the world, what's happening in our industry, what new technology is coming out that we need to be thinking about and considering if it makes sense with who we want to be as a company. I think all of those things are just constantly front of mind for me.

One of the biggest things that we like to do is make sure that our residents know that we're available to them, that we're there for them, that really our mission of providing them with a wonderful experience in their home is paramount, that it is part of everything we do. One of the first things that we always think about is what is that experience like? How is interacting with Elm? What does that feel like? Is it hard? Is it annoying? Does it make you want to pull your hair out? Or is it something you'd say, 'Wow, that was easy. That was really easy to do.' And those are the sort of things when I think about how does technology make a difference for them that we want to put in place. One of the things that we had been looking at as a company is we really end up only connecting for the most part with a very small number of our residents when they are living in a home with us, meaning we meet them during the leasing process and when they move in, we meet them when they move out. But during that time they're with us, we may not be really connecting with them. And what are those things that we can do to better connect with them? And we have done a lot of work around resident engagement and reaching out to people, making sure that they can communicate with us any time of the day, any day of the week. And we do that through a text messaging program where they can ask us questions, they can put in a work order, they can give us a kudo, they can give us a complaint. But it's really an opportunity to connect with people that we may not otherwise hear from and let them know that they're important to us at Elm and that making sure that their experience is a good one is really important to us.

I think that it is something that is important to people in that they want to know that someone cares. I think we all want to know, whoever we're doing business with, that somebody cares about us and wants us to be happy, wants us to be comfortable, wants us to be successful. And having a good experience in your home, let's face it, that is a big part of your happiness day to day.

I heard someone speak at a conference a couple of years ago, and they were very honest about this. They said, 'For the longest time, a landlord looked at a resident as you give me 12 checks a year and I'm fine. I don't need to talk to you. I don't care.' That is not the attitude anymore. I think that we as owners, as operators, we really value our residents. We would like for them to want to stay in our community, or stay in one of our communities, for as long as it meets their lifestyle needs. Meaning if you are going to have to be somewhere for five years because you're saving up for a house or because you're living in an area temporarily, we want that to be a great five years. We don't want you to just be a check that we enter into our systems. We want you to feel a sense of community where you live, a sense of belonging where you live. And I think that is something that's really sweeping the whole industry, is that people are seen as so much more than just the 12 checks a year. Thank God, at least in my opinion.

It's a lot. Naneen, you captured it perfectly. There are so many solutions out there. It is like wading into a never-ending lake of solutions and trying to figure out what makes most sense for what we are trying to do as an organization. I think one of the challenges, and I would say a lot of people in my role and in the marketing leadership role are really grappling with, is there's no one solution that does everything. There are a lot of niche solutions out there, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But then they start adding on other capabilities, and now you're looking at, well, these five things that I'm using that all used to be different, now they're all starting to look the same. And are they really that good at these other things? Who do I work with to be most successful? And you really have to be able to measure and monitor the success of those different applications and service offerings. And it's not something you can do once a year and make a decision. It is a constant monitoring. And kudos to our head of marketing because she does an incredible job of understanding where does this work? Does this work in a certain market? Does this work in a certain property type? Does this work in communities that need this level of occupancy? She really digs in and looks at how is the world changing on a very regular basis because you have to be able to measure the return on your marketing spend. And it's getting more and more challenging to sort through all of that. I had her come in to my weekly IT meeting this past week and do a presentation on all the ILS, the internet listing services that we use, and why we use them, and how we measure them, and how we think about them. And I mean, I feel like all of our minds were blown as to the level of specificity that we get into when we are choosing where are we advertising, where are we spending that money, and what works, what doesn't, and how do we make those decisions. Our COO called it 'martech,' and there is just a tremendous amount of martech that we are sorting through right now. And I think the formula for every different company is different. Like there's no one-size-fits-all. I can't go to somebody else and say, 'Oh, what are you doing?' because it might not make sense for Elm.

I do think it would be great to have a martech category. When you first said that, the first thing that came to my mind was, you know how they have the nutrition labels on food? Wouldn't it be great if something like that could be come up with?

Oh, we want you involved. Why are you dropping out so fast? What's wrong with the idea?

Honestly, it's tough because I think every technology company is trying to figure out how do I grow, how do I offer more, how do I become the go-to. And I get that. But that doesn't make it any simpler for the rest of us. And a lot of times you'll look across your portfolio and you'll say, 'Wow, there are three pieces of software that now offer X. Which one do I use? And do I really need these other two?' We are honestly probably having a monthly consideration where we're looking across our application stack and saying, 'What makes sense? Who has leapfrogged? Who's doing this the best? Who do we think is viable?' I think that's something you really have to think about with a lot of the new technology: are they going to be around a year from now? I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket and then find all of a sudden that this company is gone. So a lot of those considerations. It is, in many ways, a shame they can't just really focus on being good at what they're good at instead of trying to be good at everything.

I do. I really believe that over the next 18 months, not just in marketing technology but really in property technology as a whole, you're going to see a lot of consolidation. You may see some of the bigger players gobbling up some of the smaller players. I do think that the industry goes through these phases where there are thousands of players and then they shrink down a little bit as people drop by the wayside, as they get acquired, then it balloons back up again. So I think we're really in one of those places where in the next 18 months we're probably going to see a bit of a narrowing of the field.

Yeah, I would say there are several. I would say first of all, simplicity is key. We talked about for our residents and our potential residents, we want to be easy to deal with as a company. We want it to be as simple and seamless as possible, less friction. It's the same way for our employees too. When I am thinking about technology, and it's something that I think we've done a nice job here of getting others in that same mindset, when we think about technology, one of the first things we think about is what is the experience going to be for our employees? What is this going to be like to work with? We hear all the time, 'I don't want to have to log into a lot of applications. I don't want to do duplicate work. I don't want another app on my phone.' I mean, these are the things that when we are looking at technology, we're thinking about how well do they integrate with other solutions that we already have? How simple is it to move from one system to another? Do we have duplicative entry? We need to make sure that we're not doing things like that. And let's not ask them to have yet another app on their phone to try to do their work. So those are the sort of things that we're always looking at: how simple can we make this? Also, when we think about the industry as a whole and you think about people moving around in the industry, they'll move from company to company. How common is what we're selecting to what others in the industry are using? Are there opportunities to say, 'Hey, you know what? A lot of people use this program, so if somebody's coming into this role, it's very likely they're going to already know how to use this program. They just need to know how Elm uses it.' So it's thinking about things like that as well when we're looking at technology. That doesn't mean we're not always looking for the latest and greatest, and we've implemented a few things over the past couple of years that I'm really excited that we were probably more on the leading edge because we really saw them as a difference maker for Elm. But for the most part, we're really looking for that easy, seamless experience for employees as well.

Oh, put you on the spot there. Tough one from Ryan. Oh, man. Let me think about this a little bit. I think there's always, no matter what you do, you always look back and you think about what could we have done differently, how could we have approached this in a different way. I'll give you a great example. This is back from more of the commercial days of implementation. One of the things that I always insist that we do, especially with a significant implementation, is we talk about what does success look like? So when we're done, what do we expect it to look like? What is the experience going to be for the people that have to use the product? What is the experience going to be for anybody that has to interact with the product, perhaps if they're on the outside? Do we expect time savings? Do we expect cost savings? Do we expect greater accuracy? Like we have to know before we get into it what do we expect success to look like. And we did that for a project on expense participation. And anybody on here who is on the office or retail side knows expense participation. They know what a complex web that is that is woven in some of these leases, which I know Naneen knows and Ryan is grinning. It's pretty amazing some of the things that we agree to, but we have to then figure out how to make all the accounting work right. So expense participation is always that sort of bugaboo in the system, I would say. So before we started on this project, we did a great job of putting our success story together: when we are done with this, this is what we're going to be able to do. And I feel like as we went through the project, we just tossed that in the trash can. We completely forgot about it. And we found ourselves probably close to a month late in our implementation saying, 'Where did we go wrong? What happened here?' And I finally dug that out and looked at it and said, 'Because we didn't keep our eye on the ball of what we said we were going to do.' Now, that ended up being rescued and eventually being implemented and resulting in those success factors that we had laid out. But we could have saved ourselves so much time, so much headache, so much internal strife over all of that had we not forgotten what we were trying to do in the first place. And I look at that to me: if I'm doing a major project, I have my success metrics on my desk every day, and I'm looking at them and thinking about am I being true to what we said we were going to do. And I think it's the only way to keep constantly reminding yourself, 'This is what I've got to do,' because I hate being part of projects where people are unhappy, where they're having to work a lot, where everything's painful. That's not a great outcome for anybody.

Oh, I think so much of it depends on the priorities of your company. And I always say I'm interested in knowing what others are doing. We talked about that already. Are there industry standards? Are there interesting things that peers or even people that are much larger than Elm with a greater footprint, what are they doing? But I always have to come back to what's right for Elm. And somebody asked me recently, 'If you were picking for my company, would you pick RealPage or Yardi?' And I said, 'I can't tell you that because I don't know your company. I don't know what's important to you. I don't know your employees. I don't know what you want to do for your residents.' I think you really have to know your company to know what the right fit is. I will say that I always think about when I think about how I'm going to staff and the kinds of things that I want to be really good at at Elm versus the kind of things I'm going to let somebody else be good at. I always think about what makes sense for this company. Great example: I think it's really important to have some really strong business intelligence, data analysis skills on staff. Like I believe that. I believe that there is a great marketplace for it out there, that if you need to hire those positions, you can find people. There are other things that I would say, 'You know what? I'm not going to staff 24/7/365 to have somebody analyzing my network for cybersecurity threats. I'm going to work with a managed service provider. I'm not going to try to buy that software and run it myself.' So it's really deciding those things: what do I want to be good at and what do I want to let somebody else who's much better at it do for me?

It's a very personal choice. It is a very, very personal choice. Even small software packages that you select, once again you have to think about who are my residents, who are my employees, how does this integrate into the enterprise architecture that I already have, what's it going to be like to support, do we feel good about its cyber posture? Like there are so many questions you have to ask yourself big and small when you're making these decisions. And sometimes technology is not the answer at all. And sometimes I have to tell people, 'I'm like, you have a process problem. You do not have a technology problem.' Oh, that's another podcast episode too. That's definitely another podcast episode too.

I think we are fighting a really good fight. I think there are a lot of great organizations out there that are really helping us, not only in the real estate industry but the financial services industry, so many different industries we can learn from. And so I not only like to learn from my real estate peers, I like to know what financial services is doing, I like to know what the utilities are doing, because everything touches us. We're part of critical infrastructure, and so are those verticals as well. And we have some really great organizations. I can just speak from the multifamily standpoint: the National Multifamily Housing Council's RSE, which is really focused on technology, doing a lot around cybersecurity. We have a cybersecurity working group that supports our Real Estate ISAC, which gives us a lot of wonderful information about everything going on as far as not only technology threats but physical threats as well. We have to remember we are infrastructure in towns and cities, and when there are threats in locations, they're threats to us and they're threats to our residents as well. And we have to be able to think about those physical kinds of threats too. I also feel like the Real Estate Cyber Consortium is a great mix of real estate companies and academia and vendors that are constantly pushing forward not only in IT but in OT, our operational technology, because that is a big area of risk when you look at all of the operational technology that we need to run a community. It's a pretty sophisticated map. That's one of the things that I've had my team do: we have gone through and mapped every community, every kind of technology in use at the community, who are the vendors, what did we know about this technology, is it connected to the internet, is it not connected to the internet, how do we make sure that it stays up to date, how do we look across our portfolio and say, 'Wow, great example, you're looking at security cameras.' Last year it came out that Hikvision was a camera that was manufactured in China, there was a lot of concern about that brand of camera. Well, very quickly we were able to look across our portfolio, and you have to remember our portfolio has been bought over a period of years, it's been managed by other companies. We were able to look across our portfolio and say, 'Oh, we have Hikvision cameras here, here, and here. Those need to be replaced.' And it's really important to understand your operational technology from a cyber standpoint as well as everything we're doing with resident data, with potential resident data, and keeping that safe and private.

One of the things that I've been doing probably for close to the last year is our CEO said, 'I'd like for leadership to get out to our communities more.' And I started thinking about what would be the best way for me to do that. So I actually work with my team that services our communities, and once a month I go with them to the community on a health check visit. And so my team will go out and take a look at everything that is part of that operational technology world: everything from a TV in the gym, wireless access points, package lockers, business centers, you name it. All of that is part of the technology of the community. So once a month I go with a member of my team to one of our communities and we do that walkthrough of all of the operational technology together. It's really great. It helps me see the community through my team's eyes. It helps us stay on top of, 'Oh by the way, how long has it been since this TV in the common area didn't work?' Those kinds of things. And also get to spend time with the community staff as well, especially the engineering team, the leasing team, the management team, and just really see them interacting with residents, see from the ground up how the community is operating, and what successes and what challenges they might have.

Oh, there's so much data. There's so much data. Come on, start throwing people under the bus, Susan. Wow, there's just so much. How about top two maybe glaring ones? One of the things that we have really been digging in on is understanding what's important to our residents. And I think there's a lot of data that sits very nicely in databases that you can see. I would say one of the areas we're really focusing in on that I think has been fairly neglected in our industry—I think a lot of consumer products are doing really well with this, but I think unstructured data, the data that you are getting in emails, in text messages, on social media, how are we really mining that information for things like sentiment, for things like indicators of positive and negative things going on at the community, or thoughts about how the company is performing? I think we're really missing out as an industry on unstructured data, and I think that is a huge opportunity for us. And one that we are working with some of our vendors on right now to be able to capture more of that and to be able to parse it and understand it and also be able to combine it with structured data to tell us even more about what's going on at our communities.

Absolutely, it has. Absolutely.

Right, absolutely. That sort of thing is just sort of bread and butter type information.

So this is something that some people know about me. I believe that quick resolution of problems is one of the most important customer service impacts you can have on a resident. So I am really big on a lot of the maintenance technologies that are coming out. And this is not the bread and butter of the world. Yes, you can enter a work order, you can enter a turn of an apartment when somebody moves out, you can do preventive maintenance, you can do all those things. That is not the maintenance tech I'm talking about. This is the technology where you are able to communicate with a tech within an application, you're able to take pictures, you are able to get ideas for troubleshooting on your own, you are able to help the tech. 'Hey, if your apartment is hot, has it been hot for 48 hours? Has it been hot for two hours? Have you tried this on your air conditioning system? Have you tried that?' Because a lot of times things take a long time to resolve because our technicians don't necessarily know what the problem is. So they may come to your apartment and just find, 'Oh, the filter needed to be changed,' or something like that, rather than, 'Oh, this is a major breakdown,' or, 'Oh, you know what? This apartment gets really warm from 3:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon. What are some things that we could do to mitigate this?' And calling and saying you're too hot, those are all solutions to being too hot. But really being able to solve the problem like we all want on the first touch not only makes the resident a lot happier, but it really helps the tech be so much more efficient and effective. There are a lot of really interesting maintenance technology that's coming out along these lines that I think is really going to be impactful for companies. I would say probably, and once again I'm saying in the next 18 months or so, that's what I'm most excited about.

Exactly. And you know, it's funny, my husband comments about Amazon. He said it's too easy because you honestly can have bought with one click. And I mean, there's goodness and badness in all of that. But when I think about sometimes, you're sitting at the dentist's office and you think about, 'Oh, I need to order that,' you go on your Amazon app and honestly it's click, click, and you're done. I really want the experience of dealing with Elm to be that simple for our residents. Like if that was my ultimate goal as a technologist, is that their experience is that they can work with Elm wherever they are in the world, whatever they're doing, and not have it be a difficult experience.

Exactly. Regardless of what you think about Jeff Bezos or the company, the experience is, they've nailed it. It's amazing. It's honestly amazing. And it's so simple. And that's, I think we all should strive for that. I think they have figured it out.

Absolutely. So Real Talk was the brainchild a few years ago of several of us that are in the real estate industry in technology. And we were talking about, we'd been thinking about having like a women's breakfast or something like that at an upcoming RealComm conference. And the more we talked about it, we said, 'You know, that's not really what we're all about. We don't want to sit in a room full of women and talk about women's things, like how did we all get our start, how did we navigate our way in real estate to become technology leaders in real estate?' We started talking about the people that had impacted us through our lives, and we said, 'We need to talk not only about mentoring or sponsoring, we need to talk about those people that are lifting us up when we're not in the room, the people that have helped us along the way, that have really been our partners in doing all of this.' So we are inviting anyone who has experienced or helped someone in the real estate industry to come to this breakfast, and we're going to have speakers tell their stories of how people helped them in their careers, and really open it up for people to think about how do we need to go out and do more of this, how do we need to bring in more diverse and unique voices into real estate. Nobody out there really outside of the finance track is talking a lot about, 'Oh, you should get into real estate.' I mean, you hear it a lot on the asset side, but how many people are really talking about it on the technology side? How many people are really talking about it on the accounting side? All of those different sides. And so we really wanted to bring voices out and also recognize those people that had been the sponsors and the mentors throughout careers and thank them and ask everybody to do more. And so we started with that first breakfast at RealComm, and since then we have spread to many other meetings that go on throughout the year: the REtechCons of the world, the National Multifamily Housing Council's Optech Blueprint, we did a session at CREtech. So there have been a lot of different things that we've done that have varied from meeting with students and graduate students that have an interest in real estate and talking to them about all the different kinds of careers that are available and what our experiences were. We have done mentoring pairs. Last year at REtechCon we had four or five pairs of mentor-mentee that told their stories during a session. So we have really been wanting to show people how important it is to bring people along and show them that there's opportunity for lots of different voices in real estate and in real estate technology. So that is a huge passion of mine that I love to see. We really have seen an increase in diverse voices over the last couple of years. I think if we were to look at our success metrics, I think that we would say we are getting a lot more great people involved, whereas normally it was this very small cohort of people. 826 DC is one of my biggest passions because I love writing and I love expressing myself through writing, and I think every child should have a good skill set in expressing themselves and writing. That to me is something that sets someone up for a lifetime of success: if you can express yourself in writing. 826 DC is part of a sister group of chapters that are overseen by 826 National. We're in a lot of major metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, spread all over the United States. And in each jurisdiction that we're in, we focus on enhancing writing skills for children ages 6 to 18 in the schools in that particular area. So we are focused on students in the District of Columbia only, and we do that through a variety of different ways. We have an after-school writing lab in which students are given prompts, they're helped with homework, they put together books of their writings. We have in-school work that we do, so we go to different schools and work with specific schools in specific classrooms. This varies from elementary school to high school to middle school. We may help them with their school newspaper, we may help them put together a short project where maybe over a period of two weeks they write a book. And the cool thing is these kids are published authors. We publish these books, and they are available for people to buy and people to read. Right now we are doing our Young Author's Book Project, which is our major book project of the year, with a technical high school in DC. So these students at this high school, it's a charter school, so they're really focusing on things like architecture, engineering, construction, a lot more what I'd call STEM-type focus. They are writing our book for the year. It is going to be amazing. It's going to be our largest book ever. It's going to be publishing in May. That's when we normally do our publishing. We do a book launch party, and these students are just knocking it out of the park. It is amazing to have the opportunity to read what people write. I always wonder what happens to us as adults when we forget to be creative and we forget the things that excited us when we were young. We always start our board meetings with student readings, and our director of programming has picked readings and she gives us the context, and we go through them, and it always sets the most lovely tone for what we're going to talk about because we know why we're doing this. We know why we're involved: because we're giving these students this great opportunity. Could there be any greater gift to a child than the ability to express their authentic voice? I don't think so.

Oh, we appreciate that. That is so wonderful.

You know, I'm a big reader. I love to read. I'm doing better this year than I did last year. I always set a goal of books, and I did not even come close last year, but this year I think I'm a little bit ahead of the game. I try to switch off between reading fiction and non-fiction, so mix it up a little bit. So that is a big favorite of mine. My husband and I are what I call OG Peloton owners. So we've owned our Peloton since 2017 and are still huge fans. I love to ride and take advantage of some of the strength classes, the stretching classes, they have great yoga. That's always fun. I have not gotten to ride live in the new New York studio, although when they pre-pandemic, I used to try to combine trips to New York with a ride in the Peloton studios. I've actually gotten to meet some of the instructors. And I have the cutest dog in the world. It is a beagle. He is nine years old, and his name is Forest, and he makes me happy all the time.

Right now it is Hannah Frankson. She is in Peloton Studios London, and I keep telling my husband, 'You know, I'm gonna have to go to London and ride live with Hannah.' And he sort of gives me the look like, 'Really? Really?'

I would love to do that. I would love that. That would be awesome.