A Sit Down with Commercial Real Estate Luminary Willy Walker

Thanks for having me, Robbie. Nice to be here.

Oh, you don't want to hear all that. You really don't. It's long and convoluted. It is different in the sense that I didn't grow up in the commercial real estate finance industry and did a lot of stuff for about a decade out of business school before joining the company that my grandfather started in 1937. I would say that whenever people are hearing the intro and then all of a sudden they hear the firm was started in 1937, they're sort of like, hang on a second, how does that work? I remember when I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award back in 2011, and I think Walker and Dunlop at that time was a 75-year-old company. In my acceptance speech for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award, I said it's almost an oxymoron that someone could win an entrepreneur of the year award for running a company that's 75 years old, because everyone thinks of entrepreneurship as you wrote a business plan and Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were in the garage in Palo Alto and created this great company. I think one of the lessons that is very important is you can be entrepreneurial with any company, with any job within a company, with any group inside of a larger company. A lot of people sit there and say it's hard to make a real difference or act in a very entrepreneurial way. I would counter that dramatically. There are lots of ways to be entrepreneurial no matter where you are, whether it is a business plan on a piece of paper or being part of a major global player that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees. You can still be very entrepreneurial in those settings. The other thing for me, Robbie, is that I never thought I would join the family company. Before going to business school, I lived in Latin America and worked in Latin America. When I got out of business school, I went back down to Latin America. I spoke fluent Spanish. I think my dream was always to run some big global multinational business and had no interest or focus on going to the family company. After having run some businesses and started some businesses that were far bigger than Walker and Dunlop, there was a moment in time where I was living in London and we just had our first child. After basically spending most of my adult life feeling no sense of being at home, wanting to go out and see the world and adventure and take any job that seemed exciting and would give me the most opportunity to learn and to earn and to grow, all of a sudden this kind of homing device went off and said, 'Hey, it's time for you to get home. It's time to get back to your roots.' So I said to my dad, I was on the board of Walker and Dunlop at that time. I'd just done a strategic offsite with the senior management team and it looked like there was lots of opportunity for Walker and Dunlop at that time. So I turned to my dad and said, 'I think I could help you.' And my dad said, 'I've always known you could help me. I just didn't think you had any interest.' I said, 'I really haven't, but at the same time, I really feel like I want to get back home and maybe I come help you.' The key to that working as well as it did is that my father had suffered from having a father who didn't relinquish control of the company probably as early as he should have. My dad had to really earn his chops to be able to take over Walker and Dunlop, having gone straight from the University of Virginia into Walker and Dunlop and never had any other work experience. Because I'd gone out and done a lot of other things and run much bigger enterprises, when I showed up at Walker and Dunlop, my dad literally handed me the keys to the office and physically moved out of his corner office and gave it to me on my first day. He didn't want to only give me authority, he physically wanted everyone in the company to know who was running the company. While I walked into my first Monday morning production meeting knowing nothing about the way we actually did our business, I think there was a certain amount of bona fides that I brought with me into that role where people said, 'Hey, he was just running a company with 3,500 people and a $250 million P&L. I think he knows what he's doing,' even though I knew nothing about how to sell a piece of debt to a local owner operator in the Washington DC region.

I'll tell you there were two things. One is that I realized early on that when I was working at Morgan Stanley, I was a summer associate at Morgan Stanley in the summer of 1994. When I was at HBS, 300 people applied for a summer internship at Morgan Stanley. Six of us were lucky enough to be selected to get a summer internship. Out of the six of us, two of us got full-time offers coming out of the summer. So I felt very lucky and honored that not only did I get the opportunity to work at Morgan Stanley for the summer, but that they offered me a job full-time. But what I realized that summer was that I looked around the associate bullpen and there were 25 of us. I think 24 people were better at Excel modeling than I was. 24 people enjoyed Excel modeling more than I did. I would go to meeting after meeting with companies, and what I found myself drawn towards was talking to the CEO about strategy and about leadership and about where the company was going, not the DCF. So after having that experience and not gone back to Morgan Stanley, when I was working in private equity with TPG, the exact same thing happened. There were all these people who'd been at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and other places who'd gone to TPG, and I would see them running models on financial structuring of companies. I could do it, but I knew that their passion and interest was in being in that role of saying we can do an LBO of this company and put this amount of debt on it. I was always on the 'where are the growth opportunities, what's the strategy to grow the company, how do you manage it.' So I found myself in two specific instances saying I want to find a leadership role to be able to take my talents and desire to lead more than either finance or necessarily any specific industry. One of the other things that I laugh about is my father to this day still loves the built environment. My dad, when he drives down the road, if he sees a building being built, he wants to know who's building it. When my dad drives down the road, he sees a beautifully designed building and he wants to know who the architect is. To be perfectly blunt with you, I don't care who's building it. I don't care what it looks like. That's not my passion. My passion is building Walker and Dunlop to be the best company it can be, and we just happen to do a lot of things in the commercial real estate space. So I think it was that marrying up of my desire to come into a general management role and grow a business where I had a significant equity stake. When I joined Walker and Dunlop, my dad didn't give it to me. I actually had to earn it, but that's a whole different story for another day. My point is that I wanted to marry that up. The final thing I would say on all of that is this. One of the great advantages I had from going and working in other industries and all over the globe prior to coming to Walker and Dunlop is that I'd been able to see what we could do with Walker and Dunlop. I'd worked at Morgan Stanley, TPG, started an airline in Argentina, worked for a big global outsourcing company publicly traded. So when I arrived at Walker and Dunlop, imagine that I'd gone straight from undergrad to Walker and Dunlop. What my dad had done and built was all I would have known. The goal would have been to get a little bit bigger in the DC market. There's a Denise DeLorey who's on this podcast listening right now. She worked for a wonderful firm called Spalding and Sly in DC. There was another company in DC called Carey Winston, which was a local mortgage brokerage firm, bigger than Walker and Dunlop. When I joined Walker and Dunlop, my hope and dream probably would have been if I'd never worked anywhere else, let's make Walker and Dunlop a little bit bigger than Carey Winston. Instead of that, I was able to sit there and say, why can't we be Morgan Stanley? Why can't we be like TPG? We are nothing like Morgan Stanley nor TPG. Those are great firms, much larger than we are. But at the same time, I think it gave me insight into what the realm of the possible was. So when I came to W&D, it was not let's incrementally change. It was let's make change at leaps and bounds to really grow this company. Quite honestly, I would have never won the EY entrepreneur of the year award had I gone straight from undergrad to Walker and Dunlop because I wouldn't have been able to have that vision of where I wanted to take the company.

But Robbie, if I can jump in on you for two seconds, because I think one of the things that's very important is that it is helpful to have the sort of chip on the shoulder that I had when I joined Walker and Dunlop. In other words, I would go out to the Mortgage Bankers Association conference and have people say, 'Who's Walker and Dunlop?' I'd be like, 'We're a really great firm.' They'd be like, 'I have no idea who you are.' I had people who would say to me, 'Oh, your last name is Walker. Now I know why you have the job you have.' You want to talk about getting Willie Walker pissed off? Say that twice. It was an insult to me that someone would think the only reason that I was in the seat was because of my last name. That kind of chip on my shoulder is what drove the desire for growth and for innovation and for expansion. That was very helpful. So while I appreciate greatly that you sit there and say when you come through Bethesda there's the Walker and Dunlop marquee and we've grown across the country and now have 45 offices and 1400 people and we compete every single day with the largest services and lending firms in the world. It's an incredible thing. If I had said to you when I joined Walker and Dunlop, one day we will go head-to-head with CBRE and JLL on every single engagement and we will go head-to-head with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo on every lending engagement and we will win, you would have laughed me out of the room. But you don't show up and say we want to just go create that. That happened over 20 years of every single day being in there, growing it methodically. I would also say not swinging for the fences. We took some major risk at important times, but at the same time, it was never, 'We got to get there tomorrow. Let's step up to the plate and try and swing for the fences and hit a home run and take undue risk in the process.' It was done with very methodical five-year business plans that establish bold, highly ambitious goals for the team. We put the team to it, and to the team's great credit, we accomplish those five-year business plans on a very systematic manner.

A lot in there. So on day after tomorrow, I've got John Gray of Blackstone joining me for the fifth anniversary of the Walker Webcast. The reason I raised that is that it was 5 years ago, this coming Wednesday, that the world shut down due to the pandemic. It was actually last Friday, if you want to be concise about when it was. That was when the world shut down. On that Friday, I called our head of marketing, Susan Weber, and I said, 'We really need to talk to our clients. Let's put together a webinar for next week.' She said, 'Great. When do you want to do it?' I said, 'It's Friday. We don't want to do it Monday or Tuesday. Maybe we get our act together on Monday and Tuesday and we'll do it on Wednesday.' She said, 'Great. What do you want to talk about? Who do you want to have come?' I said, 'I ought to get some Walker and Dunlop bankers and brokers to talk about what we're seeing, or our trading desk to talk about what we're seeing on spreads or treasury rates, but why don't I see if I can get an outside speaker to come on and give some outside perspective?' So I called a gentleman named Shrikumar who is a great macroeconomist who has been very prescient on rates in the past. I called Shrikumar and said, 'Hey, would you like to join me?' He said, 'Sure.' So Shrikumar came on that Wednesday and I think we had 3,000 people live on the Walker Webcast and it was fantastic. I said, 'That was pretty neat. That kind of worked.' So I said, 'Let's get another outside guest.' So I called Peter Linneman who started the real estate program at Wharton and is an old friend of mine and a luminary in the commercial real estate space. I said, 'Hey Peter, you want to come on next week?' Peter came on and we had 5,000 people. Remember everyone was locked down and the only thing they were doing were looking at Zooms and trying to understand what was happening in our world. So that was pretty great. Then I said, 'Let me see whether Barry Stern will join me.' So I called Barry and he said, 'Sure, I'll come on.' All of a sudden, we only had 10,000 Zoom licenses at Walker and Dunlop at that time, and we had 15,000 people who pre-registered to hear Barry and me talk on that third week. I said, 'I think we've got something here.' So the way it took off was because everyone was locked down at home watching Zoom and wanting every bit of information. But there are a couple things that were really important about how it got legs. Because if you remember, everybody and their brother and sister had some type of podcast at that time, some kind of webinar. Our big competitors, all of them had, 'Hey, listen to our experts on where rates are going, where cap rates are going,' etc. We stayed consistent to not talking our own book, but bringing in outside people. That was a key strategic difference between us and the competition, which ended up winning. The second thing is our competition would move their webcast around. One week it was on a Tuesday, the next week it was on a Thursday. It was at 9:00 AM, it was at 3:00 PM. We stayed at every Wednesday at 12:30 East Coast time. So the second thing was being consistent so that people knew, 'Oh, Walker and Dunlop has one next week, they have one the following week,' whereas even Goldman Sachs with all their great branding and everything that they have much better than Walker and Dunlop, they banged around and their podcast series fell away. The other thing that was super important to it is that while it really is focused on commercial real estate macroeconomics, I said people are going to get bored of listening to Peter Linneman and Willie Walker talk about commercial real estate and macroeconomics. Let's make sure we go out and get new, different guests. So I went out and got athletes, CEOs in other industries, musicians, a lot of different people to come and interact with me to play into you're not just going to hear the same thing every week. The final piece to it is that it has required a tremendous amount of my time and attention. But I will tell you that there is nothing we could do as a company, nothing as it relates to building the brand the way we have behind the webcast. We have never paid a guest. I paid one guest who was Katie Ledecky who at that time was training for the Tokyo Olympics and the US Olympic Committee paid her a stipend of $4,500 per appearance. I said I would pay for what the USOC was doing. But other than paying Katie Ledecky's per diem of $4,500 to be on the Walker Webcast before going to Tokyo, we've never paid a guest. That's really hard. I can't tell you the number of people who have tried to outsource the attraction of guests to the Walker Webcast. It's all my network. It's my friends. Now that it's grown so much, I can go to people and say, 'Look, Mohamed El-Erian was on the Walker Webcast in January, and so far his webcast has been watched by 525,000 people on YouTube. Would you like to come on?' There's not a person who has a valuable voice who doesn't sit there and say, 'Whoa, half a million people listen to your conversation with Mohamed El-Erian. Maybe I want to go do that.' Believe me, when we were much smaller and I was just trying to get it going, it was really off of my personal relationships to say to someone, 'Hey, can I steal an hour of your time?' The final thing is as it has grown, we have a great team that works with me on all of the recording, pushing it out, taking clips, putting those on Instagram, putting those on LinkedIn, etc., which has grown the kind of viral marketing around what people are saying when they're on the podcast. Now quickly to your other questions. What's the vision for it? It's so much bigger than I ever thought it would be. What it does is I believe we don't make money off of it. We make money off of our brand growing. While YouTube pays us for advertising on the YouTube piece, we get a couple thousand dollars here and there from our advertising on YouTube, but I don't have advertisers. We don't promote anything on it. It's just for W&D and for people to sit there and say, 'Hey, that's what W&D is bringing to me. I might want to work with them at some point.' So it's doing exactly that. It's a top 1.5% — it's funny, I should just say top 2%, but it's not in the top 1% of global business podcasts. Do I want to be in the top 1%? Sure. It'd be nice if we picked up 50 basis points off of our rankings. It'd be nice to be in the top 1% of global business podcasts. The final piece to it is that it makes me so much better because I do all of my own research. While I have plenty of people at W&D who help me here and there, I have to go and research my guest to really understand my guest and what makes him or her tick. I do really deep research and it takes a ton of my time. But invariably, I'm doing research on John Gray right now. I guarantee you that as I'm doing my research, I'm learning something about what John Gray is doing at Blackstone that Walker and Dunlop will do sometime in the next year. I guarantee you. So I'm in this every week trying to learn something new, read a new book, do research on my guest, which invariably just makes me a more informed, better CEO. I will tell you, my management team probably gets a little tired from time to time of me saying, 'Hey, I've just done this on this person. Let's think about doing that.' I just had the head of KKR on a couple weeks ago, and I learned so much in my research on what KKR does. Just this past week, I had Joanna Zabriskie of BH, talking about why she sold to Pretium and what BH is doing with Pretium as the big alternative asset manager behind them and how they're playing. As you can imagine, that plays into my thinking about does Walker and Dunlop need to partner with a big private equity firm? Do we need to become part of a big private equity firm? How do we play to compete against that huge capital aggregation machine out there of Blackstone, Apollo, Ares and others? All those things are so insightful and helpful, and having the discipline of researching it on a weekly basis invariably makes me better at what I do.

Well, I will say one thing, Robbie. The reason he keeps coming back is because the sales of his letter have gone through the roof since joining the Walker Webcast. Peter and I think just did our 16th or 17th Walker Webcast. Believe me, there is a direct correlation in sales of the Linneman Letter and the Walker Webcast growth. So it benefits us both. Let's put it that way.

Yeah, it's interesting because I think that as I view the world of social media, I view LinkedIn as a business channel, if you will, and I view Instagram as a personal channel. Yet, the two are sort of melding across each other. There's a lot of business going on on Instagram and there's a lot of personal going on on LinkedIn. I have far many more followers on LinkedIn than I do on Instagram. And yet there are a lot of things that I post on Instagram that I think would be applicable to LinkedIn. I have a great team, as I said previously, that manages all that stuff and makes sure that things are getting tagged appropriately, that we're creating clips that are easily digestible because not everyone wants to sit around and watch an hour of the Walker Webcast. I would say that there are bankers and brokers at Walker and Dunlop who are extremely good at using social media to promote their brand and our brand and make sure that they're putting data and insights out there for their clients and do a very good job of pulling from what's publicly available out in social media or other things and posting them up to make it so that their clients can come in and see them doing that. There are others who either don't see the value in it or have missed the opportunity to create value there, which quite honestly I think is a huge missed opportunity for anyone who is trying to sell their services, whether it's financing, selling, appraisals, whatever goes on inside of Walker and Dunlop or outside. It's become a very powerful medium. As you can imagine, I get a lot of unsolicited business opportunities to Walker and Dunlop through LinkedIn where people write and say, 'Hey, I've got an asset to finance. Would you have a team to go on it?' We used to have to go to a convention with lots of business cards and walk around and meet all sorts of people to get someone to say, 'Hey, I'd like to work with you.' The idea that that can come in organically just because you put things onto social media, it's a gift from heaven, quite honestly. Some people just don't get that. Obviously we try to promote that internally and we say, 'Hey, this came out of nowhere.' The other piece to it is that as you asked previously, the growth of the Walker Webcast and the growth of both Walker and Dunlop's online presence and then my own personal online presence makes it so that I also get invited to speak a tremendous amount. But the thing that we've figured out, the reason the last two Walker Webcasts were me interviewing people at conventions, is that if I go to a convention to speak, and in both of those instances, they invited me to come speak, I go to the convention, I speak in front of a couple hundred or a couple thousand people, and for all practical purposes, that speech dies there. I go speak, the people who are in the room get it. It's great. Done. But they've asked Willie Walker to come speak about what Willie Walker wants to talk about. What I've done is I've said to them, 'I'll come, you get my brand, but I want to interview somebody else.' So then what do we get to do? We get to videotape my interview with Michelle Herrick of JP Morgan two weeks ago or my interview with Joanna Zabriskie of BH last week. We do it as a Walker Webcast. Not only do the people in the room get that one-on-one personal engagement of — I hope people would think that my guests were great, which they were, and that I asked good questions — but then we also get to replay it and get all the additional branding around that. So that has become something that has again evolved from just starting with the webcast, then going and creating a really good online presence around the webcast and making it highly digestible, and then taking speaking engagements and converting them into an ability to use those speaking engagements as a platform for the Walker Webcast, which also helps them. Both of those conferences I went and spoke at wouldn't have gotten the halo effect of the Walker Webcast because I would have gone and spoken to just their people. I come

Everything. I honestly, Robbie, I don't think that there's... Look, I've managed through a lot of challenging times in my now unfortunately lengthy career. I was working in Latin America when the Brazilian they devalued the Brazilian real, which then turned around and had Argentina devalue their currency, and all the investments we'd made in Latin America basically went to zero, right? I've lived through that. I've managed through that. I was clearly around just talking about it the other day about, you know, where were you on 9/11? Because I was out at USC speaking at USC last week, and one of the things I said was, you know, most of you in this room were either just being born or were not yet born when 9/11 happened. So when I talk about where you were on 9/11, it's kind of a foreign thought for all of you, but it was not only a day to remember and a tragic day in American history, but it changed the economics of our nation and the stance of our nation and all sorts of things materially. And I'll never forget a great mentor of mine that day where I'm still trying to process it said to me, 'The future has changed dramatically today, and you will have no idea how profoundly it's been changed until you look back upon it.' And I was like, 'Wow, obviously today was a shocking, awful, horrific day, but I didn't know that it was going to have that much of an impact.' And sure enough, it did. I was around during the GFC when Fannie and Freddie, who we do a ton of business with, were taken into conservatorship. And I was also around in the GFC when our 60-day delinquencies got to a level where it started to put a little bit of sweat behind my collar, and then all of a sudden, bang, the economy started to heal and things started to get a lot better. And on the pandemic and when we all shut down and the advent of the Walker webcast amongst other things. But there were a lot of business issues going on at that time, like President Trump mandating forbearance on all federally guaranteed mortgages guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie, and HUD. Well, as a Fannie Mae DUS lender and a Freddie Mac seller/servicer and a HUD's second largest commercial lender in the country, that meant that the responsibility to advance payments to bondholders sat firmly with Walker and Dunlop. If our borrowers said, 'I want forbearance,' that was about $5 billion of liability that showed up at Walker and Dunlop overnight because President Trump said, 'Forbearance for all mortgages.' Fortunately, most of our borrowers, almost none of them showed up and said, 'I want forbearance.' The rest all continued to pay their loans and kept moving forward. But had thousands of borrowers showed up and said, 'We want forbearance,' that would have caused a really big issue. So, without going on too much longer, I've lived through and managed through a lot of different challenging times. What I find particularly challenging right now is it feels like the Trump administration wants to change everything all at once. And so it's not just one piece of the equation, it's everything. And as a result of that, and by the way, I have great hope that this all works out into some fantastic master plan where all the things they're doing come back together into this perfect thing and that everything comes back and rates go down and the stock market takes off and rental occupancy stays high and all the fundamentals of commercial real estate get in there and people start going back to the office more. And I mean, I can riff on this thing for quite some time. It feels right now very disjointed. It is what it is. I think both the Treasury Secretary as well as the president have said, 'We don't mind that it feels disjointed, and we don't mind that we might go through a transition period now.' But honestly, when you first hear that, you sort of say, 'Wow, well, that's not great.' The president and the Treasury Secretary are saying we might go into a recession for a period of time to get to a better future. And now all of a sudden this morning on CNBC, Jim Cramer and David Faber are sitting there talking. They said, 'You know what? Maybe we need a little bit of that talk. Maybe, you know, in the past every president and every Treasury Secretary has been like, 'Oh, it's going to be okay. We're going to throw a little more money at it. We're going to get the Federal Reserve to ease a little bit more and whatever else.' And actually now we might have to get moving and we might actually have to move through some difficult times to get to some better times.' And so again, I would reinforce there's so much going on right now that it's very hard to track. I wish there was a little bit more of a game plan out there that said we're going to do this, this, and this to get to that, but we're not getting it. So, it's up to us to try and be nimble, to react, to move effectively. We are fortunate to be a relatively small company. So I can move our 1,400 employees a lot quicker than many of my competitor firms who have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees. Also, what we sell is a service, and so I don't have big manufacturing costs. I'm not going to go and put money into a plant that is either in Mexico or in the United States that is going to be there for the next 50 years. So you need to make a decision today. Are you going across the border? Are you staying here? Do you think policy is going to stay in place? Do you think it's going to change? So, we're very lucky in the fact that A, tariffs don't impact us, and B, we recreate our product every single day. It's a challenge because you got to have people who are super bright and know how to recreate that product daily. No deal is the same. No structure is the same. The cost of capital changes every single day. So, you by nature have to be entrepreneurial. Once you've created it, you can't just go rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And at the same time, it provides us with great flexibility as it relates to a macro environment that's moving very fast. But one perfect example of that, Robbie, is this. We announced six weeks ago that we were opening an office in London. And when we announced it, I said, you know what? Everyone's going to come in and say, 'Why are you investing in Europe right now? Europe's flat on its back. Nobody's invested in Europe. Europe's growth is done. They're over.' And now all of a sudden, lo and behold, six weeks later, everyone's saying, 'Europe's the place to be.' It's like, I mean, that shows you how quickly the narrative is changing today. And I do believe that President Trump is gleeful about that. In other words, I think that's his strategy. I think that's where he wants to be. I think that's where he wants his administration to be placed. And I clearly believe that that's where the president personally wants to be placed. He wants everyone to wake up every day and say, 'What's the president going to tell me is happening?' Because that's going to dictate the way that the markets go. That's going to dictate the way that Americans go. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who hate that aspect and there are plenty of people who love that aspect. I'm not going to opine on that one. But as a business leader, it makes it a very challenging time. So, back to specific things that I'm focused on. Obviously, the cost of money. So, where do rates go? Where does the 10-year go? Theoretically, tariffs should be inflationary. Last week, we got a really good CPI print, and guess what? Rates went up. That's not good. Okay. But then again, today stock market's up, rates are rallying. I mean, what hurts is when the markets don't go in the way you think that they're going to go. So, equities are surging. You would think there's a sell-off in fixed income and therefore cost of capital goes up on the debt markets, but we've been the exact opposite of that. We've had the equity markets going down and the cost of debt going up, right? So those types of things are very difficult, and they're not only difficult for us, they're difficult for our customers. And that's where it's really painful. What we have consistently said since the great tightening began now two and a half years ago, almost three years ago, is what we need is consistency in rates. Because our borrowers can't establish a cap rate when rates are banging all over the place. You get consistency of rates, and no matter where rates are, you're going to be able to get to a cap rate, and then you're going to create a market, and people are either going to be a seller or a buyer at a given cap rate with a given cost of capital. That's what we need in commercial real estate to have transaction volumes come back. So rates bouncing all over the place is what creates inconsistency and a very difficult market for people to make investment decisions. You get consistency on rates, and people again can determine a cap rate, they can determine a cost of capital, and they can say I'm either a buyer or I'm a seller at this pricing. So that's what we are hopeful for, and that's what we're watching. And then the final thing I would say to you is timing. We have had most people delay big investment decisions for the better part of two and a half to three years. And what ends up happening is that loan that was supposed to be refinanced last year that got, well, two years ago that got kicked to last year, the question is do they kick it again? Does the bank allow you to kick it again, or does the bank say, you know what, we want our money back? A fund that had a fund life of seven years that matured in 2024 and they went to their LPs and said we're going to extend it in our extension period for another year or for another two years. When do they have to start selling assets to repatriate capital back to their LPs? All of those things are happening right now where last year or the year before people said, 'I'm just going to sit on my hands and not do anything.' We very much feel and are seeing in 2025 that sort of the clock is running out for people as it relates to either selling an asset to repatriate capital, buying an asset to deploy capital before they have to return it to investors, or refinancing an asset when the bank or the debt fund or the CMBS lender says, 'I'm not giving you an extension.' And so all of that is going to get transaction volumes going. I would say since January 20th, the market has been anything but what we thought it was going to be, which is back to inconsistency in the capital markets, which makes it very difficult for our clients to make decisions of refi, buy, sell, etc.