Leading Voices in Real Estate

Amy Rose, President and CEO of Rose Associates , joins Matt for this week’s Leading Voices in Real Estate interview. Rose Associates is one of the largest, most storied apartment owners and managers in New York City with over $15 billion of assets under management and over 17,000 units owned or operated. Amy is a third-generation leader of this company originally founded by her grandfather and gre...

This week’s episode features a real estate legend: Leonard Wood, the Founder and Former CEO of Wood Partners , one of the nation’s leading apartment builders. Since Leonard founded Wood Partners in 1998, the company has developed over 79,000 homes with a combined value of more than $14.1 billion. Additionally, he is the Founder of the Leonard Wood Center for Real Estate Studies as a part of the Ke...

As we enter the second month of the Covid-19 lockdown, Matt met with longtime industry colleague and friend Doug Bibby, President of the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), the leading trade association for the apartment industry. In addition to discussing the implications of the national crisis on the multifamily housing, Matt and Doug unwrap the significant evolution of the apartment in...

With so much uncertainty in the world due to Covid-19, Matt sat down (virtually) with Spencer Levy, Chairman, Americas Research & Senior Economic Advisor at CBRE , on March 24 to discuss the impact this crisis has across all sectors of commercial real estate. This is a special episode focused on Covid-19, versus our ongoing conversations which are geared towards leadership and the business of...

This week, Matt interviews Maria Hawthorne, President and CEO of PS Business Parks, where has been for over three decades. She started at the ground floor in a temporary position at Public Storage, the company’s parent, and moved up the ranks at PS Business Parks from running the East Coast, to Chief Administrative Officer, then President, and now to her current role as CEO in 2016. PS Business Pa...

Recorded in front of an audience at a ULI Young Leaders event in Los Angeles, Matt sat down with Ricardo Pagan, Founder and CEO of Claridge Properties, a 100% minority-owned real estate investment and development firm. Born in the Dominican Republic, Ricardo emigrated to the U.S. when he was nine and is now a self-made entrepreneur in real estate under the age of 40. His path to success is differe...

This week’s episode of Leading Voices in Real Estate features Alex Mehran Sr., the Chairman of the Board of Sunset Development Company and the immediate past Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Sunset Development was founded in 1951 by Alex’s father who had emigrated from Iran, and today it is in its third generation of leadership, run by Alex’s son. Under Alex’s leadership, the...

Ben Harris, CEO of Link Industrial Properties , Blackstone’s industrial sector operating platform, joins us for this week’s episode of Leading Voices in Real Estate. In this episode, we dive into the drivers of the robust industrial sector, especially how the overall secular changes in retail, logistics, and distribution are driving a re-make of the industrial real estate business. We also discuss...

With almost 40 years under his belt at Wells Fargo, Mark Myers is the bank’s Head of Commercial Real Estate. Under his leadership, Wells Fargo has been the #1 commercial real estate lender for the last 10 years. As a longtime leader in this space along with his upcoming retirement in February 2020, Mark shares his perspective on the vast changes in the real estate capital markets over this period...

Our first episode in 2020 features Amy Price, Managing Partner and Co-Head of the U.S. business for BentallGreenOak . After the recent merger between Bentall Kennedy and Green Oak, which she helped orchestrate, the company has grown to become a $48B real estate investment manager with a global footprint. Amy is a senior leader in the real estate investment management business. We talk about overal...

David Brickman was appointed CEO of Freddie Mac in July 2019. He has been with the company for over two decades, previously serving as a longtime leader of its multifamily division. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Freddie’s sister GSE, have both been in government conservatorship for eleven years and there finally seems to be a feasible pathway back to private status. In this interview, David dives de...

As we wrap up Thanksgiving and head into the 2019 holiday season, we wanted to re-release an episode about hope, empowerment, and giving back with Cedric Bobo, Co-Founder of Project Destined. Project Destined is a social impact nonprofit that trains inner-city youth and military families to be active partners in sourcing and financing real estate investments. Students then receive a percentage of...

Disruptors in real estate, particularly in the PropTech sector, are topics that Matt has tackled on several Leading Voices in Real Estate episodes, including with guests like Clara Brenner, the co-heads of Lyric, Jamie Hodari, and Chip Conley. He expands on this conversation with Brad Greiwe, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Fifth Wall , the largest venture capital fund focused on the global rea...

Leading Voices in Real Estate has tackled the full spectrum of the real estate industry: multifamily, office, retail, hospitality, and now cannabis? That’s right. This week, Matt speaks with Paul Smithers, CEO of Innovative Industrial Properties, the first and only NYSE REIT serving the cannabis space. It’s hard to imagine that this type of business would exist even a decade ago, but with the chan...

It’s no surprise that coworking spaces are shaking up the business world. Many companies are abandoning their traditional offices, selling assets like desks and rolling chairs, and downsizing square footage to move into modern outsourced workplaces, like Industrious and WeWork. With this growing trend, competition is increasing , though no two models are identical and profits can be hard to achiev...

The late 1980s saw massive changes in the real estate industry. The passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and then the S&L crisis that followed transitioned the industry into a modern, institutional business. During this time, Dr. Peter Linneman had just started reworking the real estate program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Dr. Linneman was an outsider economist who saw...

Season Four Teaser | Where We’ve Been + Where We’re Going After our summer hiatus, Leading Voices in Real Estate returns for its fourth season. To kick it off, host Matt Slepin shares the current trends of listeners and the direction for the new season. He also reflects on some of his favorite moments from the series that include: The episode with Lisa Picard, CEO of EQ Office, and how she demonst...

This is Matt Slepin and welcome to Leading Voices in Real Estate. I just read the sad news that architect Phil Freelon, a guest on the show back in June 2017 , just passed away. This is a rerelease of that interview. In the interview, we spoke about his life, his work, his family and his battle with ALS, which he approached as another mountain to climb. Phil is best known for designing the Smithso...

Larry is the founder and CEO of The New Home Company , a West Coast focused public homebuilder founded in 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis. Prior to forming The New Home Company, Larry was the CEO of John Laing Homes, where he was instrumental in growing that business from a small, two market company to the second largest private homebuilder in the US; he sold the firm in 2006 in the lar...

Bobby Turner, the Principal and CEO of Turner Impact Capital , and previously the leader of Canyon’s real estate investment platform, is a passionate force for good in the real estate industry. His career began as a money maker and pure wealth creator in the private equity world, particularly in real estate at Canyon. Gradually, he eased into impact investing through an early partnership with Magi...

Gene Golub is the Founder and Chairman of Golub and Company , a family-owned, international real estate developer and owner based in Chicago. Now in his eighties, Gene discusses the discipline and passion it took to build this commercial real estate business from the ground up in the ‘60s, and how his family values and culture have shaped its impressive trajectory. Gene highlights the projects and...

In this episode of Leading Voices in Real Estate, host Matt Slepin engages in a sort of joint interview with Chris Rising, CEO of Rising Realty Partners, an LA-based vertically integrated real estate firm, and host of The Real Market Podcast. Chris and Matt talk about the lessons they’ve learned while hosting their podcasts and their experiences interviewing leaders in commercial real estate. They...

Today’s interview is with Bill Bayless who is the co-founder and CEO of the only publicly traded student housing company, American Campus Communities (ACC). Bill co-founded the company in 1993, literally just down the hall from Michael Dell who founded Dell Computers—that’s right, two of Austin’s biggest companies founded just a few dorm rooms apart from each other. This company is one of the true...

Today’s interview is with Ed Walter, who was named Global CEO for the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in June of 2018. Ed has had a 35-year career in the industry prior to joining ULI, the headline of which was his 20 years at Host Hotels & Resorts, formerly known as Host Marriott, of which the last 9 years he spent as its CEO. Now as the leader of ULI, Ed discusses the changes and challenges that...

In this episode of Leading Voices in Real Estate, Matt Slepin interviews Gilda Perez-Alvarado. Gilda was recently, in September 2018, named the CEO for JLL’s Hotels and Hospitality Group, Americas. In the interview, Gilda shares her career story — from growing up in Costa Rica, to hotel school at Cornell, then working across the globe on hotel transactions, and now her leadership in the business....