Episode 2: What Everyone's Missing in Real Estate Right Now | Willy Walker, CEO of Walker & Dunlop

So first of all it's great to be here this morning. I started my day in the Hollywood Hills and drove down here and it took me about two hours and I realized that I can get here almost as quickly from Denver, Colorado. And I'm quickly getting used to traffic patterns in Southern California. Which aren't great. But it's really fun to be here and great to be here with my son Charlie who was up in LA yesterday and we went to see a doctor about his knee and we ended up having lunch. And to everyone in the room who has kids who moved out of the nest, the opportunity to see your kids on a frequent basis is a real joy. I got one in Boulder and one in Dallas and one here and I fortunately because of work get to see all three of them on a very consistent basis and so that's a real joy and it's great to be back at Chapman. Chapman has been an incredible experience for Charlie. It's a phenomenal university and it's great to see what's going on both in the real estate program as well as more broadly at the entire school. To your question, John, about W&D, I mean, when I joined the firm, it was one office, 46 employees, and we were really a regional debt brokerage firm in the Mid-Atlantic, one office in McLean, Virginia. So, we would work with local developers in the DC area who own commercial real estate to go out and broker loans to life insurance companies, to the agencies, to CMBS providers. And over the last 20 plus years, we just sort of expanded out and expanded out and expanded out. So the Mortgage Bankers Association rankings came out day before yesterday. We were the sixth largest provider of capital to commercial real estate in the United States and that includes JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, CBRE, JLL, and us in sixth place. So we were the second largest provider of capital to the multifamily industry. We're the number one Fannie Mae DUS in the country. We're the number three Freddie Mac seller servicer in the country. We're the fourth largest multifamily investment sales platform in the country. So we've just added scale and continued to grow. I will say that when I joined the firm and we were one office of 46 employees, the concept that we would compete for deals on a day-to-day basis with the likes of those four companies I just talked about, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, CBRE, JLL was sort of a dream. It was like wow what it would be like to be that big and now we're kind of that big. And so that's a real both joy as well as a privilege. I think one of the interesting things is to see how when I first joined the firm, how hard it was for a banker or broker at Walker & Dunlop to win against those firms. Like we'd go in and meeting with some big owner operator in the DC area and they'd be like, you know, CBRE was just in here with 20 bankers and brokers and they do the leasing in our building and this and that and you want us to like work with you? Like who are you and why would I work with you? I'll never forget when we did our first acquisition. We bought a company in 2009 called Column Guarantee from Credit Suisse and I went down to Dallas to meet with one of the Column bankers who was coming across to Walker & Dunlop and he had no idea who we were and he sat there and he said and Column was owned by Credit Suisse. So he had a Credit Suisse business card and he said do you have any idea how much business I get from this business card? Says is Walker & Dunlop a banking company or a law firm? Right? No, it was my favorite. Glad that I did. And but to be honest with you, I looked at that banker and sort of said, if your business card is what sells you, you're not going to be around here that long. And to be blunt about it, he wasn't around that long because he did rely on the brand rather than his own capabilities to sell what he did. So, anyway, it's been a fun journey.

So you think about the competitive landscape and who we go up against. They all have bigger brands. They all have bigger balance sheets. They all have tens and in some instances hundreds of thousands more employees than we do. So to be as big as we are from a capital deployment standpoint and as relatively small as we are of only having 1500 employees is quite something right. We've acquired 18 companies since 2009 to today. We haven't acquired a company in the last three years, but we've been a very acquisitive company. And when we've been acquiring other companies, it's been acquiring human capital. And that's I think one of the things that we realized very early on was that this business is all about the people and it's all about the human capital that we're bringing into Walker & Dunlop. So, we would go and acquire a company by we've written checks for as little as $25 million and as big as $700 million for acquiring these companies. You write a $700 million check and you think you're just buying assets and not the people, those assets aren't going to have the value that you bought them for. So, we've been very good at bringing people in and making W&D. We were just yesterday, actually, we just made the big list, which is the 100 best workplaces in the United States by Fortune magazine. We'd never made that list before. We made small company, we made medium company, and now we just made the big company list. And so to be a company of only 1500 people and make the Fortune top 100 workplaces in the country and it's not really top 100 workplace in the country, it's top 100 companies to work for in the world because there are lots of international companies that are on there. They're listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And so to make that, it really goes to kind of the culture we've tried to create at the company. And I got a lot of notes yesterday that said to me that's the most important award we could ever get. Period. Like we can be the you know Alex named a couple things that I have won and the company has won all sorts of different rankings and this and that. But to be a great company means that your people think you're doing the right things. You're listening to them. You're trying to improve every single year. When we first applied for that honor in 2009, I turned to our head of HR and remember we were a company of 150 people back then and I said, let's apply. And she said, oh, we'll never make that. And I was like, well, okay, but why do you say that? She's like, oh, the companies that make that are like so good and they've got like huge benefit programs and they do all these great things for their employees. And I said, well, let's apply. Do we get feedback from them? And she's like, oh, yeah. You apply and then they give you the feedback on like how you don't break out. I'm like, well, let's apply. Let's get the feedback and let's improve. And so we applied in 2009, didn't make it. She walked in my office, I told you so. And I was like, okay, well, let's apply again. So we applied again in 2010. Again, we didn't make it. And then in 2011, we made it. And then we made it for six consecutive years as a small company. And then we graduated up to medium-sized companies and then we couldn't break through with the big-sized company. And so it took us seven years to continue to apply as a big company. But think about it. I mean the companies that Salesforce and Hilton and Google are all companies that are on that list of the top 100.

I just think that there is a friction between that kind of grow it at any speed and at any cost to what makes you successful in maintaining that success formula. I definitely learned in my career that, you know, one bad scene can metastasize and really pollute the rest of the culture.

So there's clearly some stress in the market. I think the thing John to it is that many people who have been around at least through the pandemic but also through the GFC sort of view crisis as these absolutely cataclysmic events, the pandemic, the GFC and sort of view that as their pain meter if you will. There's been plenty of distress over the past couple years. Go talk to an office building owner in Denver Colorado who had a tower in downtown Denver that was worth $100 million in 2017 and is now worth 20. It's pain. I mean, they've lost massive value. So, there's plenty of distress. What we're not seeing is the distress goes into the banking system, banks fail, etc., etc., right? So, but I mean, think about it. When you had the run on Silicon Valley Bank that bled into PAC West Bank that was then acquired by Bank of California. That almost became a run on the banks. That could have turned into a massive contagion throughout the banking system. We were really lucky that the banking system got showed up there and they didn't have that run. But that was a pretty strong test of the banking system there. You have lots of redemptions going on right now in the private credit space. That's, you know, the derivative effects of redemptions in private credit, I think, will be that a lot of the capital that goes to some of the high growth companies is going to pull back. Software companies is one that a lot of people are kind of stressing as it relates to AI and the impact on the software companies. If you get big defaults in private credit portfolios, that will have a big impact on a lot of the capital that's going to these high growth companies. I think commercial real estate is a net beneficiary of that because the people who are in those private credit funds need the yield that they're getting from the private credit funds and by de facto we move over to something like commercial real estate. But I think what's really different today is that from spending a ton of time with our clients, at least having fun right now. And I mean that everybody here who's an alum who's in the business is sitting there. I just heard that. They all Yeah. It's not a lot of fun being in the business right now. And I think there's also I met with a client yesterday who's out there and said, God, I'm just not having fun. And I asked him, I said, but are you doing what you want to do? And he said, oh, yeah, 100%. I said, are you in the industry you want to be in? He said, 100%. I said, do you control everything in your company? He said, 100%. I said, then what are you complaining about? Like, you're living your dream. Yeah, it comes with ups and downs, but this is what you designed. This is your fun. You built it. And while your returns might not be what you had designed them to be or your own personal net worth might not be at the level that you wanted it to be by 2026, you're doing what you want to do. And I think, you know, it's sort of the whole to the students who are thinking about this brave new world of graduating from Chapman and going out into the, you know, a lot of people aren't getting the job offers that they thought they were going to get. Unfortunately, it's like, so what are you going to do about it? Complaining about it isn't going to get it any better. You got to figure out about what are the tools that you have that are going to allow you to get a job that allows you to learn and grow and then earn. And so the consulting job with McKinsey might not be there. What are you going to do? The thing that I think that we're all kind of caught on right now is it feels like AI is a zero sum game. Like AI takes and it doesn't give. That's what we're seeing. AI just like takes. And at the end of the day, AI is going to start to give. Not exactly sure where it's going to give. I'm not exactly sure who's figuring out how you create some business that just spools up off of AI that does actually create jobs. But AI is either going to create new industries or it's going to make all of our lives so simple and easy to make money off of the AI that you got to go on vacation. Well, if you go on vacation, you're still staying at a hotel. You're still having someone clean that room every day. You're still buying the food in the hotel. You're still going out and playing golf. And there is humans that are needed throughout that supply chain. So then you say, well, yeah, but a student graduating from Chapman doesn't want to go clean rooms at the hotel. Understood. But there's something in that value chain of people spending more time on the golf course that has the opportunity to make money. And that's the challenge right now because I think we're in this sort of transition period where people can't see the direct opportunity. They don't see the dollars coming back. You see some startup company that has 10 college grads who have created a billion-dollar enterprise with 10 of them sitting around. You're like, wow, there's no employment there, but there are investors there who are benefiting from the billion-dollar startup who are going to take that money out of the billion dollar startup and go do other things. They're going to build their second home. They're going to go somewhere. So, I think that we're just sitting there saying it's zero sum right now and it clearly is going to add to the economy. Economic theory would tell you it's going to add to the economy. We just don't know where it's going to be right now.

The worst. Yeah. No, I lean in. And you're right on it. You look at we do a quarterly buy, sell, build sentiment sort of with our clients. And you look at the sentiment in 2021 and every single person was a seller. Why? Because cap rates were low, values were high, and it was like, I will sell everything I have right now at these prices. Incredible market. Guess what? There was a buyer on the other end to go, I'll suck all that stuff up. Today, the sentiment index is the complete inverse. There's nobody right now who's a seller. Last survey, end of Q4 of last year, 4% of our survey days said, I am a seller today. Why? Cap rates are too high. Values are too low. They don't want to be selling into this market. But there are all these buyers sitting there saying, I'd love to buy. I'd love to buy. Well, guess what? You can't buy because the seller's not going to put it on the market. You want to be a buyer when nobody wants to sell and you want to be a seller when everybody wants to buy, right? And so, yes, you're exactly right. Not, believe me, I'm not trying to poke at any of our clients who did big buys in 2021, but that's a tough vintage to have made any money off of right now. Cap rates were too low. Leverage was too easy to get. And if you happen to put the wrong capital structure on it, that's an asset that has problems. So, you know, I have a very dear friend of mine down in San Diego named Danny Gabriel, who runs a company called Cridge, and we were at the National Multifamily Housing Council meetings up in Las Vegas 2 months ago together, and the mood at NMHC was awful. Everybody was walking around hand in hand just going, man, this market's terrible and my fundamentals are terrible. Danny was like, this is the greatest opportunity ever. And Danny's been buying. You know, there is what's amazing to me is the amount of institutional capital and to anyone in the room who is a big institutional investor, please, I'm not poking fun at you, but the institutional capital, the lending effect in institutional capital is unbelievable. The roadblocks come up on commercial real estate. Government's like, I won't look at anything. And all the core capital flows away and there's no capital to do deals. Everyone's out and then all of a sudden it's like, hey, party's on, let's go. Everyone comes flying in. There's more institutional capital than they had to deal with. And that's not when you want to be in I mean, if you're a seller, that's when you want to be in the market, but that's and so right now is not a lot of fun, but there's no doubt there will be huge money to be made.

It's a lot in that question and it's very insightful in a lot of different things in the market. One thing I would take issue with is sale price versus valuation price. I don't think there's as big a delta but not a ton of money. Those valuations better be market valuations. But to your point, in many instances, there isn't a whole lot of transaction data points to sit there and say, okay, great. My 5.2 cap on that valuation is an actual market-based 5.2. I was just on the way down here this morning on the phone with one of our investment sales brokers. We lost a mandate to sell an asset in Charlottesville, Virginia this morning. I was just told by the CEO of the company that we came in second, that we had killed it, blah blah blah, but they're going with the competition. And I was talking to my team about it right after I got the news and I said, you know, where was our BOV on a per door basis? And they were like, we were at 320 a door, 320,000 a door. And I said, where do you think the competition was? And they said, we heard 350 a door. And I said, well then do you think that they're going to actually be able to sell it at 350 a door? They're like, not a chance in the world. And I said, well, then should we go back to them and say, Brian, sorry we lost on the sale, but when you don't get the proceeds at 350 a door and the market's actually closer to 320, we'll refinance it for you. And they said, we've done it twice with them in the last year, we'll do it three times here. In other words, they went to sell, they didn't get the proceeds they wanted, they backed off, and then let it similar to a data point on that that's been impacting our financials at W&D. If you look at our 2020 lending volumes, which was a record year for us, with Fannie and Freddie in 2020, we did 20 billion of lending. In that 20 billion of lending with Fannie and Freddie, we did not do a single 5-year loan. Not one. All of our loans were 7-year and 10-year and 95% were 10-year loans. Okay? 2025, we did $17 billion of lending with Fannie and Freddie. 63% were 5-year loans. Why? Because a ton of our clients are coming to us. They're going to market. They're saying, I want to sell this asset. The market isn't there for them to sell at the price they want. They then turn around and say, my financing is maturing. I need a loan, not a bridge loan. I just need new financing, but I don't want to do a 10-year loan that has prepayment penalty up to 9 and a half years. I want to go shorter duration of 5 years. That gives me kind of a stub financing to get to my window to go sell the asset in the next 2 to 3 years. And so that's why we're doing so much shorter term financing right now. At the same time, nobody wants to float quite yet because everyone still has PTSD from what happened to interest rates in 2022-23. So it's interesting because we're doing so much more 5-year financing right now. But at the end of the day, that is what's making the debt markets run is that people are willing to put out 5-year money at relatively low rate and people don't want to sell right now at the current cap rates. The problem that's happening for many of the owner operators is that their LPs want their money back. So, you're getting this pressure on operators that they had a fund that was supposed to have a 7-year fund life. They've now extended for two years and they've got to go sell an asset to return the capital because the LPs are saying I won't go into your next fund until I get paid off on my previous investment. And so that pressure is very much there. So when we're seeing sales today, there are some because it's a great asset and a great market that's getting a great cap rate, but there's a lot of forced selling right now where someone's sitting there saying, I was hoping the market would get better. I was hoping that cap rate would come down. It hasn't, but I've got to go. And oh by the way, the promote in this fund is done. I'm not going to get into my promote, but I need to raise my next fund to keep this firm moving forward. So sell those assets, recycle the capital, and let's go live for another day. There's a ton of that happening in the market.

The one in February, Blackstone's BREIT actually had its best month in I think it's 5 years. And so as money was being pulled out of their private credit fund, there was actually inflows in the BREIT in February. I haven't seen much numbers because we're only two days into April but you are seeing the tide turn I think on things like the BREIT. Don't know about the Starwood SREIT. I know for February the SREIT had not turned the corner to your question about the Odyssey funds I would think that in many instances there are going to be forced sellers of some assets. Core has been a tough place to be in, it's all been value-add money. And at the same time, you know there's 6 to 7 trillion dollars sitting in money market accounts. If the short end of the curve comes down and that's a big if right now I think that was pretty much there until the war in Iraq. I think everyone sat there and said Wars is going to come in he's going to cut. If you had three cuts in the short end of the curve all those people in those money market funds would sit there and say I need yield. Where am I going? I think commercial real estate would have been a cool great play. You would have seen fund flows 6 to 7 trillion you get a trillion, two trillion that moves out of that. One interesting thing on those money market funds even when interest rates were at zero in the mid teens you still have $3 trillion of money parked in money market funds. So the idea that that 6 to 7 drains to zero if rates come down well a bunch of the market just wants to be parked in money market funds and you'll get three or four trillion parked there. But you got, you know, when you're talking trillions, it used to be billions, now it's trillions. When you're talking trillions of dollars, that's real money. That can really affect a market and it can certainly affect the commercial real estate market.

Well, if you get the short end of the curve down significantly, it gives someone who has a refi the opportunity to go and refi it without having to do a cash-in refi because they can go. You might say that's stupid because they're taking the risk of floating rate debt, but you know you're going to be forced to buy a cap and if the short end of the curve gets down low enough, I mean, we just did a very large transaction. We haven't been able to publish on it, but a trade publication pointed it out two weeks ago. Commercial Mortgage Alert announced it, but we haven't been able to because we haven't delivered the securities yet to Freddie Mac. But that was a 10-year floating rate transaction. It has a cap on it and they got a very very attractive rate and that's one of the being sponsor groups. One of the main reasons that was a floating rate deal is because they needed all the proceeds. They needed to go with floating rate debt to be able to stay level on their proceeds on the financing. So short end of the curve comes down and gives people the option to go and refi and float. The other issue which you're getting on right here is obviously the spread between short-term floating rate and long-term 5, 7, 10. You'll see the steepening or the flattening of the yield curve and we've been in a relatively flat yield curve. One of the things that and as that steepens it will make it more attractive for people to go on shorter durations and that's what we've been seeing. That's why so many people are doing 5-year financing right now. They sit there and they say there's a 50 basis point difference between a 5-year Treasury and the 10-year Treasury. I'm going 5 because I need every dollar of proceeds I possibly can. The issue there in the market today is because spreads on 10-year paper are so much tighter than 5-year paper because there's so much 5-year paper going out there. You can actually borrow 10 years from the agencies right now and the all-in coupon is only between 10 and 20 basis points higher on a 10-year instrument than on a 5-year instrument. And a lot of people don't know that. And so we're trying to educate our borrowers a little bit to that because what you're going to see in 2030 is you've got all the 2020 maturities that are maturing in 2030 and then you've got 2025 maturities that are going to mature in 2030 and you're going to get a huge wall in 2030. And so one of the things we're trying to advise our clients is if you don't have to go short, think about that 7 or 10 year maturity that put you into 32 or 35 to be able to avoid that refinancing wave or wall that's going to come up at 2030.

Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, for a long time, I would sit there and say to people, at some point the debt's going to be the asset. Hasn't really happened. I mean, yes, there are assets that we've been able to sell at exceedingly low cap rates because they've got a 3.25 fixed rate loan on them and they've got seven more years of term left on it. They did it. That's one of those ones where you did a really really, you know, you bought an asset in 21, you put in 3.25 10-year financing on it. Now you're going out to sell it. It's performed well. And you've got that 7 years of duration left at 3.25. That's going to get a great cap rate. That there the debt becomes the asset to some degree. But, you know, we do a lot of HUD financing and I've always said like these long duration HUD loans, people just come in and buy them. We have one client who did a HUD D4 in probably 2018 at a 2.2% interest rate for 40 years. And I turned to him and I said, Tim, you have got an incredible deal there. He says, well, my great grandkids are going to be thankful for that. But you know, yeah, sometimes the debt becomes the asset, but not as much as I would think.

Well, that's actually a kind of a good segue, John, into single family versus multifamily and why multifamily isn't operating as it should right now. If you look at the cost of home ownership, there's relatively low there's almost no existing inventory on the market because everyone's got a locked in low interest. I've got a 2.2% mortgage on my home in Sun Valley, Idaho, and I've got a 2.6% interest rate loan on my home in Denver. And I got five more years of term on both of them. I'm not selling. I mean, you know, as Charlie knows, my home in Denver was big enough for Charlie and all of his brothers. I don't need that house to be that big today. And at the same time, I'm going to go sell it and get rid of a 2.6% mortgage to go get like a 5.8% mortgage. How much smaller home am I going to buy? And how much more financing cost is it going to be to go do that swap? So, I'm one of those trapped owners, right? I'm going to keep holding it. One thing to keep in mind there is when all that starts to burn off, how much is that 30-year mortgages versus 10-year mortgages versus 7-year mortgages? That's super interesting. If all of a sudden everyone start to come to market at the same time because they got these mortgages that are expiring, that could have a big downward pressure on values in the single family. But right now, multi should be performing exceptionally well because the supply curve went like this. But then at the end of 25, the demand curve also went like that. And that has to do, I think, with immigration policy and the fact that we don't have as many legal immigrants coming into the United States and the illegal immigrant pool has been cut off. And as a result of that, when you've gone from you can pick whatever number you want as it relates to total immigration to the United States during the Biden administration and the Trump administration. I've heard as big as four million inbound during every year during the Biden administration to the Bureau of Labor Statistics has it at about 2.6 million in the final year of the Biden administration. Okay, that dropped down to 1.3 last year. So you got 1.3 million people, that's probably a conservative view, but 1.3 million people, legal and illegal, coming into the United States. That has a direct impact on people needing to live somewhere, single family, multifamily. And so I think one of the big questions that I have is when does the Trump administration focus on increasing legal immigration and making it so that we're getting that flow of new household formation in the United States because right now with our birth rates where they are and with our immigration policies where they are, we're not going to grow. And that's super concerning.

Charlie's brother who's graduating from Colorado last night we were talking about what he's doing and where his first job's going to be and he's got some interviews coming up next week and I said when's your rent when's your student housing through at CU? And he goes August 15th. And I said, well, I know a nice house in Denver that you can come live at if all of a sudden you don't have a place to live because you don't have your job when you first come out of college.

I'm really pleased and somewhat puzzled to say no. I just looked at our pipeline for Q2 and I would have thought the last month would have done more damage to it than it has. The sales market sales volumes have taken a hit but not on the financing side. And so it's interesting because obviously we added almost 50 basis points to the 10-year and you would think that that would make a lot of people back away from the financing markets. But they haven't. Spreads have stayed extremely tight. Spreads have not gapped out at all since the Iran conflict. And so your base rate is up but your spreads have stayed in. They haven't gapped out which you would think that they would gap out to your point about the VIX and other things influencing cap costs. The question I think everybody is trying to look through and say, okay, we're not going to be in this for that long. I got to kind of keep moving forward with the president's speech last night. We obviously I got a thing from somebody that said the market sold off $520 billion of value within five minutes when the president came out and said we're going to be in this for a while longer. The thing that I take some solace in is that the president clearly watches the markets. He watches them like a hawk and he's probably more influenced by the markets than any president we've ever had. And as a result of that, he's not going to keep running into the midterms with inflation high, gas prices high, and everything else. He's just not. There's just too much to risk there. So, I would think that at some point he backs away. The only thing that would happen is if I just saw somebody last night on Bloomberg who basically said he's going to lose the House, he's going to lose the Senate, and hopefully he realizes he's going to lose both and he's just going to put his head down to do what needs to get done.

I was with a significantly Walker & Dunlop client who's an Orthodox Jew up in LA two days ago and he was, you know, had his head in his hands basically saying, we can't back out of this early. We've got to finish the job. We've got to go. And I said, I don't think that's happening. I don't think from a foreign policy standpoint they're going to do what it needs to do to finish this. Which says that a lot of people are sitting there saying, oil's going to come back down, rates are going to come back down. Got to keep moving forward. But you know it's a really difficult time right now to have huge confidence about the next sort of 3 months and that's hard. But if you listen like Peter Linneman, Linneman's always like buy good real estate, put low leverage on it, hold it for a long period of time.

You're going to make money and that's a, you know, yeah, that and go to a good college and get out and you'll get a great job. You know, in normal times, that's what happens, except for the fact that things go like this.

Exactly. But I think we get out of this sooner rather than later, which means that things will normalize. And look, to your point previously about where the equity markets are and how they run so hard, commercial real estate is dependent upon the health of the economy. Multifamily is 50% of the commercial real estate market. If you can deal with the demand side of things, if you got good multifamily and a growing job market, you're going to do well. The problem is some of the oversupplied markets over the last several years have still yet to burn off the supply. So, I would go to Austin rather than going to Cleveland. But boy oh boy, if you own in Austin right now, you're still sucking wind. And if you're owning in Cleveland, you're loving life. You're loving life. So, that's the, you know, supply and demand equation right now doesn't quite work for those high growth markets. But that's where the jobs are going. And at the end of the day, jobs are what create renters and renters are what create great multifamily properties. Office is obviously the big question mark as it relates to returned office usage. Boy, oh boy. If you made a bet on San Francisco office 18 months ago, you were loving life today. Loving life. Like that market is going like that. Denver office, not so much.

DC office, not so much.

Retail has been incredible. The US consumer has held up. Retail sales are somewhere like 560 to 580 billion on a quarterly basis right now. Crank it.

That's exactly right.

I thought it was easy to ask. Quickly go to except for the fact that remember the private credit scare that's going on right now is all due to software companies that people believe are going to have AI do away with the value of their software. One of my really good friends runs a company called Take-Two Interactive that makes Grand Theft Auto and a bunch of other really great video games. Take-Two's stock has been under a lot of pressure. It's still around 200 bucks a share, so it's doing great. But at the same time, it's been under a lot of pressure recently because it was like, what if AI can just create the types of games that Take-Two does, and it doesn't need all these great programmers to go do it. So how that plays through the economy and who that student from Chapman who can go and create a great video game with a fraction of the investment that Take-Two does to be able to build the video game that could create real value for that student and take real value away from Take-Two. So I would just say it's easy to say technology but there are clearly pockets in technology.

Yeah. No, I'll go to real estate in two seconds. Just one other quick one though. I'm an investor in Whoop. Whoop just, I invested in Whoop five years ago at a $2 billion valuation. They just raised money two days ago at a $10 billion valuation. Okay. So that's 5x in 5 years.

Yeah. Right. No, I'm not trying to talk about that. I'm saying but let me give you another one though. Allbirds had a $5 billion valuation 5 years ago and my understanding is they were just sold for $36 million. $36 million just, okay. So, you know, you sit there and you're sort of like, well, should you be in, you know, the outdoor apparel or exercise space? Well, if you're an investor in Whoop, you're doing really well. If you're an investor in Allbirds, you're not doing well. So, as you know really well, John, it makes a big, I mean, there will be winners and losers in all of these. As it relates to real estate, look, people got to live somewhere. And so multi has always been sort of the, you know, we went through the great financial crisis, multi held up better than any asset class. We went through the pandemic, multi held up better than any other asset class. So multi's always been like sheds and beds is what I was just in our London office. Sheds and beds is all that anyone is investing in in Europe. Industrial or distribution and housing, that's it. And so I think there's a little bit of the sheds and beds in the US. The one other thing that the US has on multifamily is the presence of Fannie and Freddie which is just such an incredible, it's just an incredibly valuable component part to the multifamily industry in the United States that no other asset class in the United States has and no other country around the globe has. So you get in there and you know there's always going to be capital through good times and bad times. And we can talk about the privatization of Fannie and Freddie if you want to. But I think office, you know, Peter Linneman when we did our quarterly webcast a year ago January I said okay if you want to stay rich what asset class? He said multifamily. I said if you want to get rich what asset class? He said office. I said if you want to get poor he said data centers. So I think to some degree Peter's view and again Peter doesn't look at a quarterly view. He's like, this is, you know, a 5-10 year view. I think Peter directionally has been pretty right. If you're buying good multi, you're being able to stay rich, but not probably get a whole lot richer. Office, if you made the proper bet back then on San Francisco office, you're doing fantastic. There's some office in the States right now that's going to do really, really well. There's other that's going to continue to languish. And then on data centers, we're going to be oversupplied in data centers. Maybe not tomorrow, but you have to ask yourself, why are all these huge companies that have limitless balance sheets putting all this stuff off balance sheet? Just as a question, if you've got $300 billion of cash sitting on your balance sheet and this is a strategic investment, you need this stuff strategic investment and you've got $300 billion sitting on your balance sheet and you put it off balance sheet. I mean, you could say, oh, they've got a really, really sophisticated CFO who like knows how to do like great financing off balance sheet. There's something here that they say at some point you're not going to want to own that thing. Maybe it's just because the technology is going to advance so much that it's going to move beyond them and they're saying, you know, quantum's coming and I'm going to have to move out of that data center into some quantum computing data center. I don't know. But you just have to sit there and say, why are all these massive massive companies with unlimited capital going off balance sheet with all this stuff?

They'll be fine. They're not going to lose money there. But on a collocated, Walker & Dunlop's going to take some server in your data center.

It's where the growth has been. And people have said, you know, look we don't do nearly enough data center financing or sales. Eastdil Secured, it was just sold to Savills, they still did 15 to 20% of their revenues last year in the data center space. Newmark did my understanding 20 to 25% of their revenues in the data center space. Those two companies have been in that growth curve on that place and they're bringing capital to it. They're bringing transactions to it and you know capital flows are what make cap rates come down and therefore values go up and then proceeds go up and there you are in your bubble cycle.

Right. Yeah. So one last question just on today's environment that I would love to just spend a minute on this career advice for the students in here. Basel 3. We talk a lot about it in round table etc. Recently, you know, there's a new proposal for some modifications in the commercial real estate world where it's from my understanding less formulaic if you will and a bit more based on implied loan to value. So a little more dynamic as you will is it a big deal not a big deal in your view good or bad for real estate? Not a big deal only in that commercial real estate isn't that big as it relates to the total loan volume on the big strategically important banks. It's not that big an asset class to make it so it could materially move it. But I will put one caveat to that which is if you look at gold and gold going over 5,000 an ounce at the end of last year, I don't know where it is today, but it's up around there. Go back and look at a chart on gold and when it really started to move, started to move in July of last year really moved. It had started to move up. It backed off a little bit but then watch it from July until the end of the year and until present day. Why? Because the Basel 3 Accords changed the bank regulatory capital rules that said that you could hold gold and not hold capital against the gold that gold was as good as cash. And that change in Basel 3 and the bank regulatory capital rules had every bank in the United States go out and start buying gold. And it's that pressure that pushed gold up. There are plenty of other macro things to it. But it is uncanny when you go look at the graph. It starts the day that that rule changed and it just goes up and to the right. The reason I raised that is because if you'd been on top of that, if you'd seen that regulatory shift happening and you'd sat there and said, huh, that means that banks can go buy gold and they've got an asset that could appreciate. Whereas dollars are losing value every day, they could go and be a big buyer of gold. That could actually put upward pressure on gold. If you'd seen that, which it was out there, it was passed in Basel 3, you could have made a lot of money on buying gold. So on that, I would just put forth. I don't think it has that big an impact on commercial real estate. Banks right now are way way back in the market. I don't think it says to them go further. Banks have gone from being out to being fully in. I don't know how much further they're going to go.

Yeah. I mean you obviously trade in it. Great. Well, stepping into just career advice and then we'll turn it over to questions. Obviously again a lot of students here are looking in the industry or thinking about where they want to go. For those who are interested in real estate finance or private equity if you will working for an institutional shop what advice would you give them just based on your vantage point? I mean you mentioned the past for example but they are getting bigger in that regard. I think first of all, don't be concerned about where your first job is. It can be at Blackstone or it can be at Bob Jones, Inc. What's really important is to get that job and start to learn. The second thing is if you get to that job and the job doesn't seem to be a great fit, you got a terrible boss, you're not learning a lot, whatever, realize that you're still learning and that there is no bad job. Doesn't mean you want to stay with that firm forever. But if all of a sudden you get there and you say, man, I made a wrong decision. I'm at the wrong company with the wrong boss. You're learning what makes a bad boss. You're learning what makes a bad company. You're learning what not to do in business when you become a manager or potentially an owner of your own business. So, just keep learning. Keep focused. Don't say, man, there's nothing left here for me. I got to get out. Fine. Don't get out, but keep learning while you're there. I worked for a company for five years that had a very talented CEO as it relates to a visionary, but one of the worst managers I ever could possibly work for or wish anyone would have to suffer working for. But I learned so much watching him of like, I'll never do that in business. I'll never do that. He used to show up perennially late to meetings. He'd have all his senior management team around the table and he'd walk in 15-20 minutes late saying sorry but he sent a message to everyone in the room my time is more valuable than yours every single time. So one of the things we do at Walker we always start meetings on time. If I'm like a minute late to a Zoom call I'm like I'm really sorry I got caught on something else. It's that mutual respect for people's time that's so important and it just sets the culture at the firm. So if you're in a job that's not great, keep learning. I think the other thing to it is where are you going to find a mentor, someone who really takes a vested interest in you and your career? You can go to some of these big big firms. The thing about the big firms is big firms have established training programs and so you can get into one of those and you're going to learn a ton. You go to a Bank of America for an analyst training program and you're going to have business school professors come in and teach you, you know, finance and you're going to have all these tools that you learn because they've got a system to do it. That's a great first learning experience. You might learn more at a small private firm if they have someone who's going to put you under their arm and teach you things. But if you go to a smaller firm that doesn't have the capability to train you, you're not going to get up that learning curve as quick as someone who's gone into one of the big training programs. That's in no way saying don't go to the smaller firm because people who joined Walker & Dunlop when we were a firm were 48 people. We tried really hard to give people the capabilities to grow inside of Walker & Dunlop and we had people who joined the firm when we were a teen company who have been with us for the last 25 years and have crushed it. Absolutely crushed it. So, I'm not saying don't go small, but if you do go small, make sure that there's someone there who's going to mentor you and take you under their wing. And then the final thing that I would say is that, you know, so much of our world today is we use computers for so much and at the end of the day, it still takes that EQ. It still takes that, I mean, commercial real estate is a people business. It is. It still is. Does it really move forward quickly to become more technologically driven? It can. It might, but up until now, it's really a people driven business. And so, focus on those softer skills. You're going to have to know. I mean, Argus probably goes the way of the buggy whip. It probably does because AI is going to eradicate the need for Argus. And so you need to know how to use Argus or whatever AI brings to you as it relates to the analytics behind evaluating an asset and understanding all the component parts to it. But watch the people who are successful inside the firm and try and figure out what he or she is doing that makes them successful. I just talked to our tech team two days ago and as you can imagine, we got all sorts of AI going on inside of Walker & Dunlop. We've got a controlled environment lens with it. But on the production side for bankers and brokers, we got all these work streams, all these points. And I said to my tech team, create something that levels up every banker and broker at Walker & Dunlop to the very best banker and broker at Walker & Dunlop. And they kind of looked at me like, what do you mean? Because we got all these point solutions. I said, go find a great banker and broker and find out what makes him or her so unique. What do they do? Like what do they do when they go engage with a client? And I've got bankers and brokers who dot every i and cross every t and they're known for that engagement. I've got other ones who have the gift of gab. Take someone out to play golf. They follow up. They send them a birthday card. They know where their kids go to school. All that kind of stuff. They got the kind of the personal relationship. And then I got other ones who are just technically the best banker you will ever get. They can sit there and figure out a deal that nobody else can figure out, but they're all equally successful. They just have a different way of showing their expertise. So identify which kind of cohort you would sit in. Are you that person who's just meticulous and will sit there and if you get a deal, everything's going to be perfectly done on time, eyes dotted, tees crossed. Then how do you do that? How do you create tools to make it so you're really that type of a person? If you're the gift of gab, boy oh boy, you might want to get a membership to a country club and you might want to have a great rolodex and work that and work it all. To be honest with you, we have plenty of successful bankers who do that, but that's a tough one. That's a tough one. There's just not that much value there. And as the value gets stripped out of the market, I'm not trying to say those types of bankers and brokers aren't great. But that's a tough one. And then the final one is just the I can create something that nobody else can figure out. The issue on that one is you got to know the right questions to ask. You got to know the right questions to ask. And that is a knowledge base that allows you to sit down with your client like Alex and say, tell me how I can help you. Most clients don't want to tell you how they can help you. They don't. You walk in, you say, hey, I want to sell you a loan. I want to sell your property for you. I want to lease your space for you. I want to do this. I want to do that. And I'm talking just from a services standpoint. But few people will just sort of say, my problem is X. You got to know how to be analytical to ask the question to get them to show you where their pain points are. And then when they show you the pain points, boy oh boy, you better be capable enough to come in and say, I can solve that problem for you. Those are really good service providers. And then if you go on the principal side of things, it's sort of like private equity on the company side of things. My business school roommate had done three years of investment banking. He'd worked at a private equity firm. He is sitting there and all he wants to do is go do private equity. And he applied to every single private equity firm in the entire world. And it was rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter. It's super difficult to break in on real estate private equity or company private equity. A, you got to know you want to do it, and B, you got to find some way to get the core skills. Most private equity firms in commercial real estate will require that you've gone and worked at one of the big banks before coming to work for them. So, you do need to go do the analyst training program at Bank of America to then turn around and try and get into one of those firms because they want you to have that 2 to 3 years experience. And then the question is, do you do business school or do you not do business school? And commercial real estate, quite honestly, doesn't have a whole lot of MBAs out there. Just doesn't. It's not an industry that is sort of put you go consulting, you got to have an MBA. You go in some tech areas, you got to have an MBA. You go in various industries, they've got a kind of a heavy weight on investment banking. MBA is upside down and backwards. In commercial real estate, there not that many people have an MBA. Does it help? Sure. But you better be going to one of the top schools to make that investment of 200,000 bucks in two years pay for itself. Yeah. And being out of the gate for two years. Correct. And being in the gate. Yeah. Excellent. Look, I think music or years. Go ahead. I was just going to say that's why we have a one year, you know. And the one thing on that that I would say is that the, I mean the one-year program is fantastic. The biggest value that I got out of going to HBS is the relationships I made. Period.

Exactly. And so, you know, the alumni network at Chapman and meeting people and going to events like this is, you know, worth its weight in gold. And at the same time, if you go to, I'll just pick on somebody, NYU in a night MBA program and you're not making any relationships on that, I would clearly challenge the value that that degree is going to give to you. And again, if anyone's gone to NYU and it turned into the greatest experience in the world, I'm sorry.

No, but that's how I would view something like that as it relative, like take the CFA. Our head of investor relations wanted to go back to business school. And I said to her, Kelsey, why don't you just go get the CFA and do it while you're at W&D? Kelsey now runs investor relations at W&D. She went to Wharton undergrad. She's got a CFA. She can do anything she wants, but she did it while she stayed at W&D rather than going back to business school. As much as I'm a proponent of business school, I'm not trying to fool business school. Well, that was tremendous. Thank you. And I think we echo all of your advice there. So, thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

So, first of all, thanks for spending the summer with us. And if you'd said it was the worst place to work, that would have been tough after became a great place to work. I appreciate your comments. Look, it's a big friction. I talked previously about this team that would have brought huge volume to us and we were a hard pass on them because of the cultural issues. Do I want to move up in the league tables? I sent an email out to every single banker and broker at Walker & Dunlop with details on we were the second largest provider of capital to the multifamily industry last year. What do we need to do to be number one? We were the 21st largest provider of capital to the hospitality industry last year. We should be bigger. Like what do we need to do from 21 up to 15? And it is amazing to me how much measurement and management matter. These big firms I have massive massive respect for my friend Bob Slatnik who runs CBRE and Christian Ori who runs JLL. I know them both really well. I meet with them not quarterly but I meet with both of them at least once a year. We talk about the competitive landscape this and that. Okay. They're great CEOs. Neither one of them spends almost any time with their clients. They manage these incredible platforms, but they don't spend time with their clients. So, we just brought a broker across from CBRE who happens to be up in Seattle, Washington. His name is Mark Washington. Mark Washington comes across to Walker & Dunlop and in his first week at Walker & Dunlop, I go on two sales calls with him. And I asked him after the first one, did Bob ever go on a sales call with you? He said, Bob, like five levels down below Bob, I finally got somebody to come to a meeting with me. We can differentiate ourselves by me coming onto a call and saying to somebody, your business is really important to Walker & Dunlop. That's not a criticism of Bob Slatnik. He's got a $40 billion market cap company that has 220,000 employees across the globe. Bob doesn't have time, but we better be able to differentiate Walker & Dunlop on that factor. Like your deal is important to Walker. Will really Walker showing up? I did a call with Mark last night. The closing statement was our CEO came on to this to show you how important your deal is to us. Now, someone might sit there and say, I don't care. I like the CBRE person. CBRE's going to do a better job. They got more access to capital, whatever the case might be. But that's how we have sort of differentiated ourselves in such a wildly competitive market. And it's not just me, but it's making sure that every member of our team knows how to sell that like the after service, the after sales service of you do a loan with us, we're not shipping it off to India to service it afterwards. It's here. You do a deal with our affordable equity team, it's in Calabasas, right? There are a lot of our big competitors that take this stuff and send it off to the ends of the earth to cut cost and then all of a sudden you got some, you know, release provision in your loan. You want money out from an escrow account to rebuild your driveway and you're sitting on hold to somebody in Bangalore who you can't understand. Okay? It's just that's you're going to get the answer from them at some point, but that might not be the service that you want. So, it's hard because you can't want to grow at all costs, culturally, management, all that kind of stuff is super important. And at the same time, look, we sell money and our money is no greener than anyone else's. A dollar from Walker & Dunlop is exactly the same as a dollar from CBRE. So, what differentiates it? The people. That's it. How creative are they? What's the service like? How good are we at doing what we're doing? So, that's why the league tables are so important. When we show up and say we're the largest Fannie Mae lender for seven years in a row, that means something. People are, whoa, you've done more volume with Fannie Mae than anyone else and this is a commodity service. Who do I want to go with? The people are doing the most volume. Charlie's going to have his knee operated on in a couple weeks by a surgeon. We want to go to the surgeon's the most reps possible. You don't want to go to the surgeon who does three surgeries a year. You want to go to the doctor who does 600. Why? Because they're in there every single day. They know exactly what can go wrong and they see everything. So league tables are super important. If we go up, I said literally to my team two days ago when I was going through the league tables, I said if you're going up against Eastdil Secured to do a hospitality financing, I said it on the call, good luck. I mean that because they're number one at a volume that's so much bigger than Walker & Dunlop that if we're 21 and they're number one and you're going head-to-head with them, good luck. You don't have the experience, you don't have the access to capital, all that kind of stuff. So then the question to me is, okay, Willie, what are you doing about it? And that's where we got to put the people and the resources and all that to grow into it to become more competitive.

Yeah. So, I was in a meeting yesterday in LA and this gentleman has a son who's a junior in high school up in LA and he was just doing college tours and he went to look at TCU and SMU and then I went to Boston and looked at BU and BC and a couple others. I was saying to him that there's a big difference between BU and BC. And he said, oh yeah. And I said, but you want to know the really hot college in Boston, Northeastern. And he was like, oh man, yeah. Like my son was looking at the acceptance rate on Northeastern, and it's like nothing. It's like it's tighter than BC or BU. And I said, why do you think that is? And he said, I don't know, but it's a really hot school. I said because they've got one of the best internship programs at Northeastern of any school in the country where students, so whoop, my friend Will Ahmed who started Whoop, Harvard grad squash player class of 2012 at Harvard. I went to visit Will four years ago. I'm in his office in Boston looking out at this bullpen and I think all the kids out there went to MIT or Harvard because Will's a Harvard guy and like oh we've got like some big thing of going after these really smart kids. I go, where do most of these people go to school? He said, 90% from Northeastern. I said, why? He said, because they got the greatest internship program where kids come in here, they work for me, they go back to school, they take what they learned here, back into the classroom, they push, they pull, and then they come back here and they're amazing employees. I think that engagement with the business community to learn skills and be able to push and pull in the classroom where you're getting the technical capability. You can go ask the question, but then you're getting real life practical experience is hugely valuable. It's one of the reasons why I think two-year MBAs are valuable in that you get that summer experience to like I was going to be an investment banker. I went to work at Morgan Stanley between years at HBS and I said glad I tested this one because this isn't where I want to spend my life. That was hugely valuable to me. That's back to my advice of like go try things and even if it's not what you want to do, you learn something from it. So I think anything to get practical work experience during your time helping the kids get a real summer job between freshman and sophomore year or sophomore and junior year. Charlie's brother, Wyatt, who's at SMU, is going to go work in New York this summer for a real estate private equity firm and it's going to position him incredibly well. Everyone there worked at Goldman Sachs and AllianceBernstein before going into this firm. Wyatt's going to have this summer and then he goes back and forth and junior year at SMU, he's going to be able to, you know, step up. He was going to go mow lawns for the summer and I mean that with that's a great job experience of learning what it's like to get a paycheck. He hasn't done that. He needed to do that. But boy oh boy is he really well positioned now doing that. So anything that Chapman can do to help these kids get really good work experience during their four years and then when they're doing the masters I would think is hugely beneficial.

It's a really good question. And so really sort of first of all I'm not going to lie down on the floor and start talking as if I'm in a shrink's office but there's plenty behind it as it relates to first of all a core, a core at the beginning it's a chip on the shoulder that I got from a lot of different experiences growing up where for whatever reason I didn't think I was getting, you know, recognition as to with a father who basically looked at a glass half empty rather than a glass half full at pretty much everything that I did. And that then corresponding into this incessant need to like prove that I was good enough. The problem with that is that carried through to points of like going to extremes to try and do endurance athletics and our business to a point of like, you know, burning out.

The, you know, so the 236 number is an interesting one because I mean, yeah, that's 559 miles for 26.2 miles. It's pretty quick. But it's also in a previous life. I mean I but I think the one thing about that is to Steve's point we really do focus and Aiden said it as it relates to having worked at Walker & Dunlop last summer, you know, a healthy mind and a healthy body make a healthy person and you really can't, you can be like the fittest person in the world but if your mind isn't healthy you're not going to be that productive and capable and vice versa you can have like the greatest mind in the world and if your body isn't allowing you to engage and work and move and interact, you're not going to be that productive and capable. And so, I'm a big believer that you got to spend time in both. So, when I talk about wellness at W&D, it's not everyone has to be a triathlete. Not everyone has to go run a marathon, go do a yoga class, go on a walk with a friend so you can clear your mind and have good mental health, but it's that. And so I think, you know, I traveled I probably spent 250 to 275 days in hotel rooms last year. Pause for a second on that one. Somewhere between 250 and 275 days in hotel rooms last year. And yet every single day I went to the gym. So I got to figure out travel, checking into a hotel, getting up for a meeting, going to the airport, and still finding that time to take care of myself. And by the way, I've got assistants who make sure that all that stuff happens and I've got the ability to pay gym fees at Equinox and various places. So yes, it's easier because I can afford it. But at the same time, it's just blocking it out every single day, hell or high water. And of all the things that I take great joy in, I was just with Bob Hart. Some of you in the room might know Bob Hart. Bob Hart runs True America, extremely successful multifamily developer. And Bob, as we were leaving the meeting, he goes, God, I listen to you talk about your health and wellness thing, and I went and I lost 13 pounds, and I've done this, and I feel better about myself today than I ever ever have. And it's all thanks to hearing you talk about doing something every day, doing it like you brush your teeth. And some people sit there and say, get off that stuff. It's fine. But what typically happens is if you don't have it structurally built into your day, something else is going to come out. It just is. There's no way if it's not. And the other thing is the ease of use. So like this morning I was going to pack my bike in the car and come down here and bike this afternoon with some colleagues. I wake up and I stupidly didn't find what my bike shoes were last night. And at 5:45 in the morning in the dark crawling around, I'm trying to find my bike shoes. I can't find them. I'm going to be late here. So I give up on that. But what did I do? I grabbed my gym shoes and my gym shorts and my shirt and I threw them in a bag saying, I'll see if Charlie wants to go to the gym this afternoon because I know I've got time for my bike rides and now I'm going to go to the gym. If my gym shorts and all that stuff isn't there and I'm not thinking about it to grab it in the bag, I've missed the opportunity. I'm in traffic going back up north. I'm not going to get in the exercise. So, I think more than anything, it's been able to stay on that that gets me at, I'm going to turn 59 on Sunday. My Whoop age is 50.8. So I'm about a decade younger by Whoop than I actually am in chronological years. That gives me a lot of energy to do a lot of stuff. Final final thing I would say which I think is super important for the kids to hear and you all aren't kids, you're young adults and men and women. So excuse me for using that term, but my son Jack and I had dinner a month ago and he's sitting there and I go, how you doing bud? He said, Dad, I'm pretty stressed. I got like, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do from job standpoint and college is coming to an end and this and that. And he said, but then I think about all the stress that you manage. And I'm like, what's stressful in my life? Nothing compared to what dad has. And I looked at him. I said, first of all, Jack, I've had 35 years to figure out how to deal with the stress. So don't worry about me. I've got my own ways of dealing with it. But I then said to him, think about this. You're living your dream. You wanted to go to the leadership of Colorado. You went to leadership Colorado. You wanted to study business and finance. You studied business and finance. You wanted to work in the outdoor apparel industry and you've been doing that at college and you're now going out of the world. As long as you're living your dream, it's going to have ups and downs, but know that it's the world that you want to be living in. And that's a great gift. And he kind of looked at me and he was like, that kind of puts it in a different perspective. And so to all of the students at Chapman who are thinking about the stress of getting a job and finding a place to live and what you're going to do with your career, your life, and all that kind of stuff, as long as you are on the path that you want to be in, it's going to have ups and downs. I guarantee you that. There's not a single person who I was in that classroom with at Harvard Business School who'd had the best educations in the world, had never failed an exam in their life, were getting offers from every great firm in the world. There's not one of them over the last 30 years who has not had some massive down spike and up spike in their life. Nobody went from bottom left to upper right with no change in it. Nobody. And oh, by the way, the ones who seem to be right on that path were the ones who got absolutely knocked at the knees with something that is unimaginable. It's just going to happen. But I'm not trying to scare you, but you got to have the resiliency to just stay on your path and do what you're going to do because this world is going to throw curve balls at you left, right, and center. And it's that tenacity. It's that desire to continue to move forward that's going to serve you well as you move through your career.

Thank you very much. That's all. It's been a pleasure. All right.