Why are you still buying stocks instead of more property? Real estate, it's so much harder than stocks in terms of negotiation of deals, time spent, the involvement of multiple parties in the ownership. Usually when real estate gets in trouble, then you find out you're dealing with more than equity holders.
But there have been times when large amounts of real estate have changed hands at bargain prices, but usually stocks were cheaper, but they were a lot easier to do. So Charlie did more real estate because Charlie enjoyed real estate transactions. And he actually did a fair number of them in the last five years of his life.
But he was, you know, he was playing a game that was an interesting game, too. But I think if you'd asked him to make a choice when he was 21 and he had to either be in stocks exclusively the rest of his life or real estate the rest of his life, he would have chosen stocks in a second. And there's just so much more opportunity, at least in the United States. There's so much more opportunity that presents itself in the security market than it does in real estate.
And in real estate you're usually dealing with a single owner or a family that owns maybe a large property. They've had it a long time. Maybe they've borrowed too much money against it. Maybe the population trends are against them, but to them it's an enormous decision. When you walk down to the New York Stock Exchange, you can do billions of dollars worth of business and it's totally anonymous and you can do it in five minutes. And the trades are complete when they're complete.
In real estate, when you make a deal, a big deal with a distressed lender, you know, when you sign the deal, then you go into another phase. I mean, then people start negotiating more things and more things and it's a whole different game and a different type of person to some extent enjoys the game.
We did a few real estate deals that came our way in 2008 and 2009, but the amount of time that they would take us compared to doing something intelligent and probably better in securities, there was just no comparison. I mean, in a real estate deal every sentence is as important as the person, and in stocks, if somebody needs to sell 20,000 shares of Berkshire or something and they call us and the price is right, it's done in five seconds. And it closes all the time.
People who you certainly wouldn't want to have marry your daughter or that they behave well, actually. And in stocks, partly that's because their wires or phones or whatever it is are recorded as to what they've said and everything. But the completion rate for working out anything in stocks is, assuming you've got a meeting of the minds on price, essentially 100%. In real estate, it just begins when you agree deals and then they take forever.
And then for a guy of 94, it's not the most interesting thing to get involved in something where the negotiations could take years. And we have the capability. There have been some huge failures. In fact, if you go all the way back to Zeckendorf in the 1960s, he was going to change the world in Century City out in California. His product of his, and if you go to Eros, he was sitting on top of the world with the Eros buildings. So people tend to get in trouble in that business.
The banks usually don't want to recognize it, but that takes a long time to go through the bank processes. They just got through redoing the Musk loan that he made when he was buying it three years ago, the company that's now X. And you know, it took three years to work out a transaction where you've got parties on both sides that aren't ready to act.
But we find it much better when people are just ready to pick up the phone and you can do hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in a day. I've been spoiled. But I like being spoiled, so we'll keep it that way.
