#382 - Hiten Samtani - Founder @ ten31 Media - CRE is the Ultimate Business Bloodsport

Chris Powers: Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me this morning. 

Hiten Samtani: My pleasure, Chris. It's fun to be here. I've seen some of my friends and people I admire here, so glad to be a part of that crew. 

Chris Powers: I reached out to you like when you first launched the newsletter. You said, when I hit 10,000, I'll call you and we'll do one. And late last year, sometime in the middle of late last year, you emailed me. You said we made it. And so here we are, which has been a couple of years in the making. So first off, congrats on hitting 10,000. 

Hiten Samtani: Thank you. We're at 16 and a half now. So it's growing quite well. And I think when you'd reached out, we had the DNA of the thing, but I didn't want to talk about the business. I just wanted to cover the business. So, I didn’t want to talk about my business until I felt like we had some level of scale. And yeah, we're there now. So, it's become, it has become, I think, quite quickly, the water cooler of the commercial real estate industry, which was the problem we set out to solve. And it's a hard problem because every market has its own players and own problems. And there's very little national conversation in commercial real estate. That was the issue here. I wasn't setting out to build a newsroom. So, I had to come up with like some kind of binding glue to make someone in Fort Worth interested, to make someone in Minneapolis interested, and then someone who's like eating skulls in Manhattan, like all those parties had to come together in some way. 

Chris Powers: For the sake of getting this out of the way, is New York the spiciest of all the markets? Is that fair to say, or would you say there's a spicier market than New York? 

Hiten Samtani: Have you ever been to a spicier city than New York in your life? 

Chris Powers: No. No. 

Hiten Samtani: Okay. Then I don't need to answer that question. The money is bigger. The audacity is at a different level. And then what happens as well is it is, New York is nominally an American market, but really, it's a global market. What happens in Manhattan specifically, if you go from, well, you can add a bit of Brooklyn in as well, up to prime Manhattan, is a matter of interest all over the world, so the capital that comes in is very broad, there's a broad source of capital, and then the players that come in are also super interesting. So that's one side. I have though, I should say, gained an appreciation for what I call frontier markets where kind of anything has gone for decades. And so, when anything goes, and Texas is a great example, parts of California are also, used to be a great example of this as well, when anything goes, what people have gotten away with and the ways in which they've made money are so fascinating. HFCs, I hope we talk about HFCs at some point, big topic in Texas. So there's so many different ways to look at these industries and find something interesting. But yeah, pound for pound, it's New York. It's always New York.

Chris Powers: I love it. All right, let's set the stage here. You're a brilliant writer. You're a great storyteller. Truly, I love your newsletter. And I don't read a lot of newsletters. There's a lot of them out there. So, you got to limit it to a few. But like, how did you get into this industry? So just, was it journalism first that you wanted to get into, or I don't even know if you call it that, and then you picked real estate, or was it always real estate journalism that you wanted to do? 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah. So, I'm an immigrant. When you're an immigrant, you don't have the same basket of options that someone who grew up here would. So, I did want to go to- I was very interested in journalism and media since I was a kid. I grew up in a place, and I should say, I grew up in Dubai, fascinating place, but one thing it lacks is a free press. You can't really say anything of note of any kind. So, we grew up reading basically your, almost like a communist version, if you familiar with Pravda, the UAE has its own publications, and they have a news- they have newspapers, but they're very much party line. So you grew up kind of getting this propaganda rag all the time. And so, you really appreciate places like the US where you can actually say stuff. So that was always a fascination for me. I got into Columbia back in 2011. I took a shot, and this is a lot of my life has been these little moments of serendipity. So, I was aimless. I was working in advertising in Toronto, in Canada. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was really bored and frustrated with the Canadian market and the mentality. It's just smaller. It's just smaller. So I come to New York. I am here with my cousins. My cousin and his wife get into a big squabble. I don't want to drive back with them to Toronto. So, I say, you know what, I'm going to hang out in the city an extra day. I go to Columbia, and I was thinking of either business school or journalism school. The business school was closed that day. The journalism school, the director of admissions was just hanging out. So I went and talked to him. I said, okay, let's try this. And in 10 days, I applied. I got in and kind of went from there. That's how we got there. So journalism happened. When you graduate, you have 90 days to find a job. You have 90 days to find a job, and the company in question has to sponsor you to keep you in the US. It's known as an H-1B visa. So very few of the big kind of, the big networks, the big publications, etc., bother with that stuff. The scrappy publications know that they can get really good talent for really cheap because none of us cared about the money. All we care about is staying in the US in the very beginning. So, The Real Deal, which is the publication that I was at for a decade, knew this and had recruited very, very good talent from these international students. So they were down to do it. I negotiated my salary I think 3%. I didn't care. And I just jumped in, and it really went from there. I landed in the exact right spot at the exact right time for myself. 

Chris Powers: This is kind of a loaded question. We don't have to spend a ton of time on The Real Deal itself. I really want to get to where you're at today, but when you started your first day at the Real Deal and your last day at the Real Deal, what was the biggest shift? Like, what did you think you were getting into? And then after 10 years, what did you actually get into? And that's really like, what did 10 years of being in this kind of teach you to kind of set you up for what you're doing now? 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, I had always thought of real estate as a backwater of journalism. I remember I'd gotten into trouble in grad school, and a professor of mine said, if you do that again, I'm going to put you on the real estate beat. He essentially made that joke. And so, I didn't know what to- I didn't even shave for the interview when I went. I remember that because I was like, what is this random publication on 29th Street in what was a pretty fleabaggy office at the time. And so I took the job because I didn't really- I wanted to stay in the US, as I said, but like within a week, I realized, wow, you're kind of in the center of four or five major things that are fascinating on any given day – politics, finance, business, development, urban planning, architecture, real estate is kind of at the nexus of all of that. So if you cover real estate, you have this perfect lens into how money and power work in a city. So, I got that, very, very luckily, I got that right away. So, my journey at The Real Deal was truly memorable, and I still have a great relationship with everyone there because I realized, hey, this is like you're in the center of the center, and most people don't realize it, and so you really got to make this work. Now, from an organizational perspective, it was a little bit chaotic. I remember when I went in, my boss was this wallflower, I had to go and introduce myself to everyone and all that. So, there was a lot of chaos which I was able to use to my advantage because I said look I'm someone who wants to move up. I want to cover this industry, and I want to do a bunch of things here. So, I was able to take kind of advantage of that and make a lot of initiatives. And the owner of the company absolutely loved that. My colleagues, not so much, but the owner just loved to see someone who was doing that. So, when I left, maybe 11 years in, I primarily left because I knew I wanted to shape my own voice into the next generation of what this should look like. And I think The Real Deal is the best of the publications that speak to a broader audience. I didn't care about the broader audience at the end. I realized that all I wanted to do was speak to you guys. And so that requires a whole new language, a whole new patois, a whole new kind of zooming into things that matter, and importantly, ignoring things that don't matter. 

Chris Powers: Is that something that you could write out, like who that audience is and how you're going to speak to them, and it's almost like an art, it's not a science? Or is that just something that's like in your gut that you just know, it's kind of like you know it when you see it type thing? Or could you explain this to somebody else? 

Hiten Samtani: Oh, 100%. I mean, I think it's the thesis of what we do. So commercial real estate insiders is the entire ecosystem of people that are dealing in the business or funding the business. You have everyone from your developers, your brokers, your lenders, your attorneys, your architects, etc. But the important thing is they only care about- they love gossip. It's not like- and our newsletter is very gossipy, but I think it's gossipy about the right things. It's gossipy about how deals are structured. It's gossipy about who came in, who sort of pulled out of a deal at the last minute and someone came in with a piece of pref that saved the whole thing. Or it's when a mezzanine lender gets really nasty and pushes for a foreclosure, and someone else comes in. Or it's when a developer who's lost a ton of buildings finds a nice juicy LP, a Greek shipping billionaire in this case, who's willing to fund the next bet. So it's finding the narrative and the drama in these spaces and ignoring everything else. Everyone was covering when Elon Musk said he was moving to Florida, was doing this and that – great, not relevant to the business. So, what is relevant to the business is the deals, the themes, where the money's flowing, and what is being built. And so focusing on all of that gives you a very good sense of the audience. So we ended up with two broad buckets. If you want, I can talk about them.

Chris Powers: Yeah, let's go. 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah. So one of them is what I would call your day-to-day operators in the business, people like yourself. So, you have developers, lenders, etc., the people who can apply their trade in real estate. So, everyone who is making money in some way from the transaction. That's a big bucket. I knew we would get that bucket because I knew we had, frankly, a better product than anyone else. I wasn't worried about that product, that bucket. The second bucket has been a revelation to me, which is what I call the capital M money, and we've ended up getting all of that. So massive allocators, life insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, so people like Mubadala, you've got Norges from Norway, some of the biggest allocators who don't need to be kind of in the thick of the stuff, but they like to keep an eye out on what's happening. So, all the pension funds, the Middle Eastern money, etc. We've got all those people reading as well. So, we've got executives from those people, massive asset managers, Marathon, Slate Asset Management, BlackRock, etc. The head of real estate strategies at BlackRock is a reader, for example. So we've got those kinds of people. And then we've got the core operators in the business. Those are our two buckets, and like figuring out how to cater to both of them at the same time as a challenge, but it's a fun one. 

Chris Powers: I really do think your writing is so fascinating. Do you think people are, if you had to- like, if it was a pie chart, are people more reading to learn something, or are they reading to be entertained, or is it 50/50? 

Hiten Samtani: I would say honestly it's 50/50 people. And I was very grateful for this. I didn't realize people appreciate the storytelling. For a long time, they had to deal with, and we can get into the kind of different kind of media that exists out there, but for a long time, they had to deal with two kinds of media in the space, either kind of ass-kissy, I'm not going to name the publication, but a lot of like ass-kissy sort of media where you could go and say you're raising a rescue pref fund, and they would call it accretive to value, which is bullshit. You can say anything and they would pick it up, and because for them, access and being able to call you is more important than telling the real story. That was one side of things. And that is kind of the national landscape for the most part. Especially outside major markets, that's all you have. Then the other side of it, for the most part, was real estate was treated kind of as a lifestyle beat. Eh, luxury house here, big office here, big interview here, but that's not what it is. It's so much more fundamental to the way that our cities come about that it's been neglected in that manner. So, when people saw this, there's a COO of a top four brokerage nationally. This person saw this thing. She's like, what the hell is this? I've been in this thing four decades. I've never seen anything like this. So it like hits them in the face. Some people absolutely loathe the promote. I should say that. It's too macho for them. It's too irreverent for them. God bless them. I'm happy that some people don't like it. What's important is that we have a pretty damn big crowd of people who love this thing. And to build a new media company with very little outside capital in an environment like this, where advertising is a little bit shaky, you need to have that passionate audience. Otherwise, I'm like, what is my value proposition? I'm yet another publication. No, this is like, I mainline this thing. I see people who, Shabbat is let's say at 6 PM, and a lot of our Orthodox readers go dark, 5:57, I will see them like opening the email and all of that. And then Saturday when they come back, they're back on it. So, you see people doing this stuff all the time. Our open rates are 70% now. That is the highest in B2B media, not just in real estate media, but I think in B2B media. So, we have something, we have to kind of keep building it. 

Chris Powers: Do you think what you have is exclusive to the real estate industry? I love how you talk about it. You're like, it's the ultimate business blood sport. And then you talk about like, you meet a lot of people in real estate, and you're like, what are your hobbies? They're like driving my buildings, calling my tenants, looking at paint colors. Like they don't play golf, they don't do anything. So now you kind of said, I think you said this stuff is their sports and entertainment. So they read your newsletter like a person that loves the Yankees reads Yankees blogs or whatever. Could anybody in any industry go start writing like you, or because you focus on real estate, it's even more unique? 

Hiten Samtani: This is the question that I think we need to answer by next year because Ten31 Media, which is kind of the broader enterprise, is meant to be a collection of these hyper-specialized media properties. So, CRE is the one we started with because I know that one, that's my world, I understand this market, and I can build a team around that. But to make this thing even more interesting, to make this kind of the vision, which is the ringer for B2B media is the broader vision, I need to bring in these other nodes. So, there are other industries, luckily, that have the same dynamics, not quite the same dynamics because real estate is like Wall Street with no rules. It's the same kind of money and ego, but there's no guardrails. But there are other industries that have similar dynamics where you have a very wealthy audience who's obsessed with what they do. You've got a murky kind of regulatory structure, which also helps in the narrative because if the rules are clear cut and you can't bend them, it makes for very boring coverage. Look at financial planning media companies, like the people who write about wealth advisors, it's a complete snooze fest. There's nothing in there. But private equity or the art market, those are two nodes that I'm quite interested in, and I've been talking to the people who are essentially like me in those spaces to come on board at some point. Those are worlds, which, again, big money, big dollars, global capital, lack of regulatory structure. So, if we can figure out a way to integrate that into the enterprise and kind of create a partnership model with the talent, that's the way I'm thinking about it. I've been- Have you read Powerhouse, the CAA book? Okay. CAA, massive talent agency, and thinking about the next person who can kickstart a division is so, so important. So I've been thinking about that. Again, for a first-time entrepreneur who's very flawed in so many aspects, like planning for the business while running the business is not my forte, but I'm trying to chip away at that. 

Chris Powers: I'll add one more suggestion for you. It would be the oil and gas industry. 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, I just don’t want to get killed. I don't want to end up in like the bottom of a barrel somewhere. 

Chris Powers: If you want to entertain people, I've done probably 15 episodes with oil and gas people, and they, maybe it's because I'm in Texas, but consistently some of the highest listened to because the stories are as wild west. It kind of checks a lot of those boxes. But okay, so you're at Real Deal. You kind of start having this vision to become a niche B2B, I think, how you described it. When did you leave? And just walk me through like what it took to get started. I mean, obviously, you need a laptop, you need a brain to be able to write, but what else goes into like launching a media company if you're bootstrapped? 

Hiten Samtani: It's, well, the first, I decided I wanted to leave sometime in 2022, not because TRD had not been a very fulfilling place, but because I had this next level of thing I wanted to do, and to TRD's credit, they always let me reinvent myself. I kept- new title, new responsibility, etc. But at some point I was like, I'm just cheating myself. And as a result, I'm cheating them because there was one point where I acted like the owner in every way, good and bad. I took extreme ownership over the entire enterprise. I cared about every single aspect of that business. And when I stopped caring about every single aspect and just caring about my own thing, I realized I'm like, you're fooling no one here and you're not fooling yourself either. So, I decided in 2022 I needed to leave. Then it took me one full year to get the balls to say, okay, I'm actually going to leave. That was just the fear in me, having been comfortable, having kind of set up quite a nice life for myself where I could travel, I could chill. I had my job on autopilot for a long time. And it wasn't an easy job, but I knew it. So, it was fairly straightforward. Took me about a year to do that. Then I said I was going to leave. I was initially going to go into a pure video enterprise because I felt like everyone has forgotten how to read. And I'm glad I didn't do that, and we'll talk about that in a bit. But everyone has basically given up on reading bad stuff, like things that are not entertaining and interesting. But people still read if you give them the right stuff. But I was going to make a video only enterprise initially. I ended up, September 2023, I ended up, Moses and I became friends, Moses Kagan, that you know as well. And I just reach out to him and I said, dude, I'd like to come to Reconvene. Can you make that happen? And he was very kind and gracious, and he said, yes, come on over. I came in, I sat down at one of these small dinners that he does. And it's crazy. I left that weekend with my first two angel checks. I didn't even go there to raise money. People were just talking to me and then go, I like your vision, I like your vibe, I see what you're doing. And then they, people that I had never met, people who did not know me even from Twitter ended up being my first angel investors. So that cushion gave me a little bit of like, okay, you can do something. 

Chris Powers: What did you tell him at that dinner? What did you tell them at that dinner? 

Hiten Samtani: I mean, the DNA of the publication was there, which is like I want to create something that is essentially the sports and entertainment version off B2B, but whoring out on the format, but not losing the accuracy and the technical kind of specialization. That's the whole concept is like people love the stuff. I throw in emojis, I have clips from Good Fellas, all that stuff, but the actual deal structure is not compromised whatsoever. In fact, I go a couple of layers deeper than anything out there. So, that's what we talked about. And yeah, and within, I think, a month and a half, I had two wires in the account. That was big. The other part of it, which I think people don't talk about enough is like, at the time, my wife had one of those kind of steady corporate jobs, and her having that was huge for me because it gave us health insurance. It gave us a safety net in case no money was coming in, and we planned for no money to come in for the entire year one. Luckily that did not happen. So having her in that position and saying I got us was huge. 

Chris Powers: Okay, real quick then, why did you- because I remember actually talking to you at that Reconvene and it was, I can't remember the exact but you just mentioned it, it was going to be video heavy up front, and you decided against that. So why did you think it was going to be successful and why were you- did you quickly pivot out of it or not follow through...? 

Hiten Samtani: Not make it the main enterprise. So, we do have video, but I think video was...something I was very intrigued by, I’m still intrigued by. I think there's a layer of storytelling that you can get into in video that's quite interesting. It works for the way that we consume media nowadays. However, video is not something you can kind of just go. And I think I had reached a point. I think I'd reached a point. I left TRD in August 2023. This was sometime in January, and I didn't have a product yet. And I was doubting myself. I was kind of depressed on the couch, kept falling asleep because I was like thinking through stuff, and I just kept falling asleep because I was so stressed. And so I said, okay, I need to do something. I cannot be in this situation where I'm out of the market, out of the action for so long. Let me try to start writing. It's something I'm comfortable with. Let me see if I can kind of crank up the audacity on the writing and then use that. And then the rest honestly is out of my control completely. The promote took off. It became like this contraband in the industry. I know people who were signing up from their Gmail because they didn't want people to know at their company that they were reading it. So we were getting this kind of action. People were sharing the hell out of it. And so, our initial readership was, what, 1500 people. And someone told me, he's like, Hiten, rest assured, it's easily double or triple that because everyone is forwarding this thing. So, we just started writing because of, I think, an existential crisis I was having. I said, I can't just sit around and wait for the bones of the video to come together. I don't know how to edit. I don't have any technical ability. But to write a newsletter, all you need is beehive and some balls and kind of grit, and we did that. 

Chris Powers: And right now, you write it, you put in all the memes, all the graphics, like you lay it all out?

Hiten Samtani: I do. I'm starting to get some help as well. And this is kind of the crisis in this model, so to speak, which we have to figure out. I don't want to pretend like I've solved this problem. People come for the information, but they also, as you said, come for the sauce. The sauce, the information can be taught. You can teach someone how to do that. Teaching someone the sauce is a lot harder. And so I'm starting to train my people and starting to put this together. I've hired some people. We have people on podcasts. We have- I'm co-hosting a podcast, which I'm quite excited about as well. But figuring out how to extract myself a little bit and end up in a model where I'm kind of the supervisor and putting in my context and insight, kind of like Andrew Ross Sorkin did at DealBook, is something I need to figure out. That's going to take a bit. But in the beginning, I knew I had to write the thing because people are there for those- You think about it as like when you're consuming media, you're there for what's on the page or what's on the screen, but you're also there for like that extra, you have a connection with the audience that you can build where they're like, I can see Hiten smiling as he writes this, or I can see kind of that he's pulled his punches here. I can see that there's an inside joke that I don't know, I don't understand this joke, but I'm intrigued, and I want to keep reading because I'll get it by edition 10 or 20 or whatever. So that connection between your audience and the person who's creating the media is so fundamental. And traditionally, it's been kind of reserved for hobbyist media, enthusiast media, things that you read for pleasure. We're trying to bring that into the space that people actually use it for their business. 

Chris Powers: Okay, let's talk a little bit about how the sausage is made. So, if you haven't read the newsletter and you're listening, like go read it, but a lot of people probably listening have. Like you said, you're not getting the broad-based headline that every news publication’s reading. You're finding out shit that every time I read it, I'm like, how does he know this? So, my first question is like, how does information come in? Do you have sources everywhere that are like, hey, I just figured something out, you should write about i? So let's start, step one, where do you get inspiration from, and how does information land on your desk? 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, there's two main components to creating a very, very good specialist publication. I think this applies to us, but I think this applies more broadly. One is aggregation. The most important thing is having your eyes and ears open for what's already out there. So, there'll be articles in the Journal and the Times and the Dallas Morning News, etc. But again, the lens is completely off. They're written for, I don't even know who they're written for. They're certainly not written for you guys. They're written for like this well-heeled business consumer, but that person doesn't exist. There's two types of consumers. One is professionals in the space and one is people who don't care about it. So, they're writing for this kind of middle ground, which doesn't- So you take that piece...

Chris Powers: Can I stop you real quick and ask a question? I don't usually do this, but I got to get the- if you asked those journalists, who are you writing for, do you think they would have an answer, or is what you're painting like media as we know it is totally changed and the legacy types just don't know it yet?

Hiten Samtani: It's a deeply systemic issue, which is the people in these seats often have no idea who their audience is because they're not really connected to them. There's a remove between the audience and the people. And so, I don't mean like- and we go pretty hard, as you know, you've read the newsletter. It's not like we're very charitable to people, but we talk about the stuff that they care about. That's the most important thing. And so, broadly, all these publications are writing for this amorphous audience that they don't quite understand. So, they'll pull in, for example, if we're writing about affordable housing and we're writing about tax credits and affordable housing, that's something important and interesting. Those publications will weave in a bunch of history that no one cares about. Those publications will start with one tenant story, which again, is meaningful and important, but not to the business. So you cannot expect a busy professional to wade through two pages of crap before they get the one nugget that they need. We completely flip the equation. We take that nugget, we center it at the very beginning, we hit you in the face with it, and then we extract context and information that we have. So aggregation is a huge part of it. I would say at least 60 or 70% of our newsletter is honestly stuff that is out there. It's not like I'm creating- first of all, we don't have the bandwidth. Second of all, there are very talented people out there who are doing all this stuff. So, extracting the juice is the most important thing there. Then there's the other part, which is like, okay, this is a big headline. What can I get out of this that's more interesting than what's out there. That's where WhatsApp comes in. That's where all the phones come in. I'm working the phones all the time. I'm talking to kind of the ignored people in a transaction, the title people, the junior broker, the attorney who is maybe not the headline attorney in this deal. We're talking to all of them because they are often the ones who are doing the grunt work, and they don't feel loved. And if you talk to them and you really listen to what they're saying, they might give you something. So that's how we put it all together. And then we say, okay, what is it that the industry needs to know kind of nationally? And so, we'll give you the big story up there. Then, and this is the challenge, as I said at the top, there's no national conversation in commercial real estate. Once in a while, you have stuff about 1031 exchanges or carried interest or Trump tariffs or whatever. But in the most part, you as a Fort Worth operator have your own Fort Worth problems, and that's what you care about for the most part. So, what we do is what we call snapshot coverage. We will zoom in and out of markets and stories that are interesting and hope that the takeaway from that story that is happening in Seattle is interesting enough to someone in Texas. And so far, it's worked because there will be interesting ways that deals are structured or financed or stolen. And those are things that a lot of people can learn from. So that's how we put it all together. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So, top of funnel is just reading what's already out there to the public. Then obviously, you're kind of going, okay, this is interesting. Then you have your WhatsApp, and you probably have lots of lines into the industry. So that could just be people you regularly call, but then also people that you're like, I need to get ahold of this one person to tie the loop on this one story. 

Hiten Samtani: There are some, I mean, it's such an intimate relationship. I have one source who I speak to. As soon as I say hello, my wife knows who I'm talking to because there's- she's like, I know that tone. It can only be this person. And we talk to each other all times of the day and night. So, yeah, there's kind of a collection of sources who are in the business. There's someone who can give you a high level overview of what's going on. And again, this is all, Chris, all comes back to the fundamental, which is like respecting people's time, respecting your audience's time I think is like an act of true love and devotion, and most of these publications do not respect a person's time. They hit them with extra information. They hit them with ridiculous ads. They hit them with like preaching, which is not interesting. Like I got to judge you by the rules of your game, not by the rules of my political beliefs or what I think is right and wrong. I'm just going to judge you by the rules of your game. 

Chris Powers: Okay. Two things. One would be like, how do you know it's a story that you need to kind of follow up on or keep writing about? So, you probably know like, oh, this is going to be going on for a couple of years, so every three or four months, I'll check back in on it and hit it with a new piece versus maybe what's just a one-off rifle shot. Like I'm going to talk about this once and probably never talk about it again.

Hiten Samtani: There's no easy solution to that. I think it's a question of how big are the dollars here? How important are the implications of this? So EB-5, are you familiar with EB-5? 

Chris Powers: Yeah. 

Hiten Samtani: The cash for green card program, etc. Huge story and has massive impact across multiple markets and is zig and zagging. And now president Trump is trying to take it away and replace it with something else. So, every time you go through one of those inflection points on EB-5, it's worth kind of covering. There are other stories which are just so outlandish, but just land and then they have a splash for that moment and then they're gone. Major syndicator falling apart. You write about it for a few weeks and then you're done. And then there are other elements like HFCs, as I said, which is this incredible tax break in Texas, that keeps kind of weaving in and out based on what's happening in the legislature, based on what's happening with Fannie and Freddie. You get a sense of all of that. And again, our responsibility, we're definitively not the paper of record. I have no obligation to tell you anything unless it's interesting and it's relevant to the business. And this is kind of the beautiful spot to be in, a New York Times or Dallas Morning News, etc., has an obligation as a good citizen almost, and it's an important obligation, to cover step-by-step about everything. We have no such obligation. We're very much like we want to be your second read, your second order thinking about this problem or the stuff that you're going to talk about with your buddies when you're discussing, when you're talking shop. So, when you have that as your North star, you can ignore a bunch of stuff until you want to write about it again. 

Chris Powers: Okay. And then, well, real quick, what is an HFC? You've mentioned this. I'm in Texas. I actually have no idea what an HFC is. 

Hiten Samtani: So, they're pretty amazing. And I'll send you a couple of pieces after. HFCs are housing finance corporations. They're entities that essentially were designed to incentivize the creation of new affordable housing. And the idea is that you commit to holding rents at a certain AMI threshold, and in exchange, your property taxes are forgiven in perpetuity. And as you know, in Texas, property taxes are generally your biggest line item. They're the difference between a good deal and a horrible deal, etc. So, this was designed to kind of say, okay, you know what, if you can hold rents at a certain level, we're going to give you a break on your taxes. However, and this is what I love about real estate, there are loopholes upon loopholes. The language in the original, in the law did not specify that an HFC has to exist only in its own jurisdiction. It can travel, which means a random entity in Pecos or Garland County or Cameron County, kind of far flung areas in Texas, which don't even have an HEB, is it, the superstore, can come to Dallas, can come to Austin, can come to Houston where you actually do have very serious like affordability, and they can incorporate their traveling HFC there. So, there are areas in these cities where your threshold, where the market rents are lower or at the same level as this AMI threshold. So, what that means is a developer who's got a deal that's in deep red can say, okay, I will maintain my rents at $2,200 for a two bedroom, let's say. And in exchange, I want my property taxes gone. They're gone. However, the market rent on those units already is $1,900 a month. So, you're basically agreeing to keep rents at a level that is higher than what it is in the market, what the market will bear, and in exchange, you're getting rid of your property taxes forever. When you get rid of your property taxes forever, your NOI goes up, the value of your property goes up. You can get it financed in the muni bond market. You can go the agency route. It's an incredible situation. So, what's happened in the last call it 18 months or so is there's this entire cottage industry of consultants and debt brokers and attorneys who are like, I will create an HFC structure for you and save your kind of dog shit syndicator deal. So, all of the usual suspects, you think of tides, you think of all these guys are doing these HFC deals, because why not? I mean, it's free money. I would do it too. 

Chris Powers: So is the interesting part that they're like operating in a gray area and it's just...

Hiten Samtani: There's no gray area. It's super legal. It's like as legal as can be. 

Chris Powers: So, you're just highlighting like the greatest loophole of all time, basically. And people love to read about it. 

Hiten Samtani: And what's funny is, again, it's like, this is one of the things you think about as a media company. People have read the articles and have been outraged and lawmakers have read the articles, and the Houston Chronicle did something based on what we had done and kind of getting attention, and other people are like, this is great, I want in, what do I do? So, I've had attorneys who've talked to me, they're like, Hiten, you dropped that article, and two minutes later, I got a call and I got a meeting set up. It's amazing. So how people take the information, how they use it is really their business. I'm not here to judge that. I'm just telling you what's going on. That's it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so we talked about this before we pressed record. Media industry at large or journalism at large, trust levels at all-time lows, broadband, not speaking about your business. But okay, so all this stuff's coming at you. How do you determine kind of what's factual and what's not and what's true and what's not? And then, yeah, let's start there. I mean, is it very simple? It's like I just pick up the phone and do a reference check? Or I'm assuming sometimes it's not as easy as that. 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, it's not that easy, and it would be- it would not be true if- you often will have to reference and cross-check things over and over again, but you do kind of develop a sense for the publications that generally get things right. And generally it's very important. There will be slip-ups. I've fucked up. Major publications from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have fucked up as well. It's not like it doesn't happen. The important thing is that you're open to fixing the error and you acknowledge the error. That's the most important thing. That kind of ego in the big publications is often a problem. They will kind of try to hide the error. So that's one thing. But you get a sense quite quickly of these are reliable publications and what they generally miss, they don't generally miss, they're not going to tell you a sale happened in property records if it didn't happen. Like they're verifying that information. So you can kind of surf off that. Where they tend to lose the plot is in the interpretation of it. They often have no idea what A leads to B means. That's the thing. So that's kind of where you have to apply your own expertise, your own experience in the industry, bringing in the right people to verify those things. So that's part of it. I think trust in the media, and forget these random kind of conspiracy theory websites both on the right and the left, forget them. We're not talking about them. Let's talk about the mainstream media. Trust in the media is off because of the lens that the media often uses. So they will attack things that have no business being attacked. Let's take an example from the left. Elon Musk launches a rocket. It sort of... I think it blows up on its way up. The New York Times will have a headline, Musk Fails Again. But the important thing there was that this rocket deployed some, and I don't have the specifics here, but this rocket took off in this way that is extraordinary and it's just an iterative process, and in a year, it's going to do incredible things. That's what to focus on. Or TechCrunch will write an article and tell VCs to go fuck themselves. And how does that make any sense? Who are you writing for? That's where trust in the media goes away. It's not really about factual error here and there. It's about what lens are you using to tell your story? Who are you writing for? So, when you write for the people that you're writing for and actually your content is geared to them, you build trust very quickly. That's the thing. I think that is the thing about general media that is just completely off. You should be able to read a publication and think, okay, this story has relevance to me. They're talking to me. They understand what I care about. For the most part, that is not true. 

Chris Powers: Okay. You'll take things a step further. I'm making up something, but it's like, we'll talk about light income housing tax credits, but you'll take it a step further and find some character that's used them to help monetize, buy a yacht from a Russian oligarch in the Red Sea. How do you- So one, like, do you find that really juicy part again just through reading what's already out there? Or is it like, ooh, heard this person's interesting and has a weird story, and you kind of start calling people around him to like...? Because some of the things you write about, and anybody for that matter, it's like, man, he had to know a lot about this one particular situation, which to be fair, could be, if you were wrong, pretty damaging to write about, you know what I mean? So how do you get comfortable, that's like, I'm going to put it out there, I've gotten the thumbs up, this is good? Because clearly the person that did it isn't the one calling you saying, yeah, I did all this. 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah. So, I often wear dark shirts when I'm writing because I'm sweating bullets and it's such an anxious time. It's not like it's foolproof. But for the most part, a lot of the good juice is already out there. I wear a dark shirt because it can be pretty nerve wracking to write in the manner that we do. It's hits you so hard in the face. And I think that is part of the brand and I think part of the reason that we have a lot of potential to do very interesting things with IP, short films, movies, podcasts. We have that because people are already into the voice, and so then that naturally transitions into a broader business down the road. But all of the juice is in the archives. Everything, 90% of interesting stuff already exists. It's the framing and packaging that makes us different. I'm a shitty reporter. I'm not- like, I can barely read a legal document or dive into records. That's not my job. I'm not a reporter anymore. We're trying something different here. So sometimes you will see a publication that writes about a person who has said this, and you just remember that two years ago, they told the publication the complete opposite, but the reporters, and this is, again, more of a talent model problem, reporters cycle in and out of publications all the time. You will be on the real estate beat for two years, and then you're going and covering finance, and then you're going and covering equestrian, mansions, and whatnot. This happens all the time. So, there's no institutional knowledge in like, okay, Chris told me this, but two years ago, Chris had said the opposite. No one's really tying that together. So all it takes sometimes is like, okay, why don't we just Google what Chris does? Why don't we Google what Chris has told us before? Oh, interesting. Okay. Let's just put this statement next to this statement and see if they jive together. So oftentimes, it's a lot of that. The other part of it is the fragmentation of media works out in our favor. I know that you as a Dallas guy are probably reading the Dallas Morning News and a couple of other publications. I can say with almost certainty that you're not reading the FT's business coverage, for example. And there might be a nugget or two there that are fascinating for people like you, but you don't need to subscribe to the FT and you don't need to read every article. So you can extract, given how fragmented media is, given that there's no single source of truth anymore, there are nuggets and bits and bytes all over and putting them together is fascinating. We had a piece about DAMAC, which is a major, major Dubai based developer that's actually doing something in Miami now. And everyone had written about DAMAC coming to Surfside where there was a major condo collapse and they're building a luxury tower there. Everyone had written that story. I was like, this guy is a bit of a cowboy. He's a very close friend of Trump. He's an interesting character. He's an outsider in Dubai. Let me just go see what he said. So, I went on YouTube and I found this anecdote in which the developer in question is named Hussain Sajwani, was flunking out of college in Iraq. He went to college in Iraq back in the day. And someone had given him the cell phone number for Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq back in the day. So this dude, kid calls up Saddam, actually gets him on the phone and pleads his case to stay in medical school. So this was something he said on YouTube on his own channel, but no one's looking for that. We're looking for that. 

Chris Powers: So, to wrap this little- you do feel the weight and the gravity of, hey, I'm about to press send on this and I got to own it. Because basically, it's like maybe just how I'm built, I don't know if I could do that. It's like you don't have to do it, but it's your job to do it. It's what you've chosen to do. But there could come a time where maybe you say something that you wish you hadn't said, or it wasn't true or whatever, it's like that's just a lot of weight. And so, I'm just- it's interesting to hear you feel the gravity of it. 

Hiten Samtani: A hundred percent, because you have to be- like, I don't want anyone to think that we're not a responsible publication. We feel a lot of responsibility to our audience to get it right, to tell the story in a fair manner, etc. That doesn't mean we can't be playful around it. But I think this is a broader- you bring up something I've been thinking about quite a bit, which is the weight and the gravity, running away from the weight and gravity is like a recipe for a shitty life, I think, and a shitty business. So you're raising investor money, you're a steward of capital. That's not easy either. Like, that sucks. And then in a shitty market, that feels probably even worse than what I do. But embracing the responsibility to do something interesting and great is better than saying, yeah, I got no responsibility, I'm coasting through, I'm writing an article. Let me be vanilla because guess what, if you're vanilla, no one cares either way. But if you're going to be spicy, if you're going to give it the promote special sauce and you're going to put it all together, that comes with an element of high wire act, that comes with an element of danger. Fuck it. You have to do- like at some point, I started too late. I'm 38 years old. I wish I had started this in my early thirties. I spent two or three years coasting, and I kick myself over that because at some point, you want to build a career that is exciting for yourself. Because if you are passionate, and this comes, if you are passionate about what you do, the audience just kind of absorbs it. They feel that thing. And for the most part, you have that feel to yourself. 

Chris Powers: I love, again, I'll say it again, I love your writing and... there's a lot of stuff and then I'll read something. I'll be like, damn, dude. He went there. All right. I want to cover something, and I want to go through three kind of business trends or things that you're seeing from your world. But one thing our friend, I believe it was Barrett Lindbergh said we got to get him to ask is if you want to be in the media, I believe, that the question was...

Hiten Samtani: I think he talked about two different things. One is like the media playbook, which we should go through. The other is like on record, off record, all of that. I think that's important for your audience. So, however you want to do it. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. Hit both of them. 

Hiten Samtani: Do you want to ask me or should I just jump right into it? 

Chris Powers: Yeah. So if I want to be in the media or my company wants to be in the media, like what is the best way to approach y'all and get the most for my time or my buck or whatever you want to say? 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, I think the number one thing to think about is as someone who wants to get press and wants to use the press, the press is a tool like anything else, is who your audience is, who do you want to reach with your messaging. And so, you need to be able to separate this into a couple of buckets. One is utility. I want a lender to see this so that they think about writing me a check. I want a potential LP to see this, or I just want something nice to go behind my wall, an ego exercise. So the first thing to think about is your audience. Who are you trying to reach in this place? If you want to hit kind of a network of lenders and institutional investors, maybe you should think about reaching out to Real Estate Alert/Green Street because that's what they're reading. If you want one of those profiles that you can frame when you're talking about your football and your family and combining faith and fortune and whatnot, then you might want to hit one of the regional papers because they'll just eat that stuff up. So understanding your audience is kind of step one. Step two is when you pick your publication. Start researching who's working on the beat that you are kind of talking about here. So don't pitch a residential reporter about a commercial story. If you have something interesting that involves a little more expertise, make sure that you know that the reporter you're pitching has written stories that showcase her expertise in that situation. The last thing you want is you pitch a great story and the reporter turns it into this like slop of- where you lose the messaging. So you really need to do your research on the publication and the reporter in question. The third thing is the pitch. Do not send press releases. They are completely irrelevant. If you have a billion dollar deal, great. A press release works because it's the number that's going to get you the news, not the release. Forget a press release. It should always be custom because using the media is so, so, so important. It's like, I think of the business in four different ways. There's the landing the deal, closing on the deal, so getting all the money together, landing the financing, building the thing, and then there's a fifth arm, which is how you present the narrative of the thing. And for that fifth thing, the media is super, super important. So you do need to have a custom strategy. You do need to spend a lot of time as a principal thinking about these things. So, okay, you've landed on the right publication. You've landed on the right reporter. You pitch them with the most interesting nugget in the deal. And guess what? The most interesting nugget is not you. I think that's where people mess up quite a bit is like Ford Partners or related or whatever did X, Y, Z. No one cares. No one cares. Talk about the thing about the deal that makes it super interesting, either the structure or the number or the fact that it's the first or the largest or the hottest or the sexiest, etc. People think like that. Reporters as a race are lazy. They want a narrative that they can run with. They want a narrative that they can go to their editor with. Help them. Give them something. Give them some scaffolding. Say, all right, we did this deal, and to our knowledge, this is the first that's been financed by this specific tax credit. It's super interesting. That's something they can run with. They can go to their editor, get a green light on it, and work the story. So I think thinking beyond the release and thinking about extracting the narrative mule, let's call it, is the most important thing. And then there you go. You go from there. 

Chris Powers: Is there a company or an individual that just comes to mind when I say who's worked the media the best in their favor over the longest period of time, besides Donald Trump? 

Hiten Samtani: Unbelievable. Trump is unbelievable about this because he was the biggest developer in New York, quote unquote, for people who can't see me, the biggest developer in New York even when he wasn't developing anything, he became the go-to guy. I think there are companies, there's a guy out of New York called Gary Barnett, Extell Development. What he did in Utah was one of the most amazing masterclasses in media where he combined the use of traditional media to kind of put warning signs out there for people he was negotiating against. So very quick story, Gary Barnett had bought this giant ski resort terrain in Utah right next to Deer Valley, and it was called Mayflower, and Deer Valley is no snowboard- Deer Valley is no snowboarders. It's just skiing. And apparently among skiers, that's a very sacred divide, skiing and snowboarding. He had kind of teased the messaging in the media that, oh, we might allow snowboarding at Mayflower. That's terrifying to the skiers at Deer Valley. So he did that. He combined that with sponsored content, which is essentially a puff piece in some lifestyle magazine about his journey and develop- So you were able to combine like legit media with spawn con to create this messaging that this is happening, and it's fascinating. It's absolutely amazing. So I think of him as a very good example. There are a lot of brokers who've positioned themselves as the go-to, but when you look at their actual deal volume, it's nothing. So, people who are good about- One of the more interesting companies that use the media incredibly well is a company called Kastle Systems. And Kastle Systems, I believe, is a security for buildings company. But what they did during the pandemic was absolutely fascinating. They created an artifact. And I think when you're thinking about the media, thinking of artifacts is a very interesting approach. They created something called the back to office barometer, where they measured key card swipes when you're going back into the office. So, they said, hey, only 28% of people came in this week or 35%. Guess what? The national and international media, if you look at the press between 2021 and 2024, kind of peak of are we going back to the office or not, Kastle Systems was in every major article. Amazing. And they're a fricking security company. So, if you can create something that becomes an index or a market report, amazing. I love market reports as media tools. Incredible. Because people and reporters like that consistency of looking at something quarter over quarter. So, you can create like, it doesn't have to be a massive exercise, you can create like one stat. Industrial occupancy in class B industrial. How has it changed month to month? Create a nice like index or chart or a graph. The media eats that up. Guess what? The next thing you know, you're in the news, you're being quoted. You're the first call on industrial stories. You become the industrial whisperer. And that's amazing. It's a good position to be in because one LP or another, one lender or another is looking at that and saying, hey, I don't know anything about industrial, but I need to allocate. Let me call this guy. And then you take it from there. 

Chris Powers: So, okay, we covered that. Then let's just talk about what being on the record, off the record, and how to delineate when to do each. 

Hiten Samtani: This is the most important thing that a lot of very seasoned people screw up as well. When you're talking to the media, the default is on the record, which means anything you say can be used with your name and attribution. And oftentimes, that is how things go. They'll call someone or the journalist calls them, and they'll say, I can't talk about that yet. It's not closed. Guess what? That journalist is saying, confirmed the deal but declined to speak further, etc. You're screwed. Never do that. Instead, flip the conversation. You want to make sure the default is off the record. So, the first thing you say when a journalist calls you or when you reach out to a journalist, say, are we off the record? And get a verbal confirmation from the journalist that yes, indeed we're off the record. Off the record means I am telling you something for your edification, but you cannot quote me. You cannot even attribute it to a source familiar with the company. I'm just saying that, hey, I heard that Bob lost a shirt on this deal and that his LPs are coming after him and they're planning to sue him next month. Go forth, my friend, go forth and figure it out. Or it’s possible that in the next three months, we will have the capital to  make a play for XYZ. It's just planting an idea. And then the reporter has to go do it. On the record you want to do when there's a completion of a deal, or you want to speak about a lawsuit, and you have to be very careful about what you say on the record. You want it to be short. You want it to be precise. Because if it's long, here's what happens. We're very fortunate that we were able to create this development in the heart of this blighted area of Dallas, and I took the lead on this project, but our partners played an essential role. Here's what could happen. The reporter could say, Chris Powers said that he took the lead on this project. Guess what happens? Your partners are pissed off. The city's pissed off because you didn't acknowledge anything, etc. So make sure your statements on the record are precise and short. Off the record, you can say a lot of things. And then there's the third mode, which I think is your best friend as a dealmaker, which is called on background, which means here's some information, you can source it to someone familiar with the company. It doesn't come from me directly, but I'm telling you that this is happening. This is legitimate. And you can- to make the story legitimate to your audience, you can say like, according to a source familiar with the company, according to an insider in the transaction, etc. And so, the promote, I mean, pretty much everything we do is on background. We don't really do the broad official quote, but that's a really, really important mode to be in. And that's kind of where you add legitimacy. 

Chris Powers: As the person talking to the journalist, you have to say on record, off record, or what was the third, on the background? 

Hiten Samtani: Are we on background? Yes. Okay. So, I can tell you that we've raised 85 million of the hundred million that we need for this project. And we're looking to this mechanism for the rest. That can come and the reporter can say, okay, according to insiders, they've raised two thirds or three fourths of the equity for this project, and this is- that's good because that tells you there's momentum. That's the kind of detail you want to get into the market, but you don't want it coming from you and you don't want your company and your name on that. 

Chris Powers: The big themes of ’24 and really ’25, like as you're getting to see, you're at the center of it all. So, as you think about 2025 and the themes coming off of 2024, how are you kind of setting this year up and how are you thinking about it? 

Hiten Samtani: Yeah, so a lot of what we do is quite reactive to what's going on in the market. And so part of a good media outlet will often kind of move with the market and see what's happening, but you do get a broader sense of the themes that have emerged. I think one of the crucial ones is the collapse of the regional banks and the new capital sources that are stepping in. And this impacts every asset class in every geographic region. So, Signature Bank goes away. First Republic goes away. Silicon Valley Bank goes away. They melt away. What has stepped in to replace them? Oftentimes, the banks or the kind of carcass or the new avatar of these banks is not lending with the same frenzy that they were. So, debt funds have stepped in. Debt funds are more expensive. They're more bespoke, which means they can structure things in many, many interesting ways. But they're also not afraid of going to the mat with you guys. So, if you defaulted with a Signature Bank, you could probably go have pasta with them and figure it out. If you default with the Rialto, which is what took over Signature Bank’s book, you're in kind of a hell of trouble. So, understanding the motivations for these people and understanding where the money's coming from is something we think about a lot. One of the big deals that happened was Fortress bought a stake in First Foundation, which is a big multifamily lender, I think based out of Texas but with a lot of exposure in California. They bought a quarter off the bank. What does that mean for the way that they look at their loan book? How does the credit committee change? How do they think about what they're funding? And more importantly, how do they think about delinquencies and problem loans in their book? That's something that's going to ripple across the industry. So I think a lot about the changing sources of capital. Another big trend that's come up was how insurance, which was once kind of a sleepy field of its own, has been absorbed into the private equity playbook. So Apollo owns Athene and Athora. KKR owns Global Atlantic. So what's happening is that they're using those insurance companies as a source of capital for their private credit bets, which is kind of why you're seeing life co's take on bigger and bigger deals that you're in the industrial space. There was a massive deal EQT Exeter, which is a big player in the space, got a $570 million loan from New York Life. Like, that used to be a CMBS loan, but now it could be a life co loan. So, understanding the sources of the capital and how they're changing the business, super interesting to me. Another big deal is obviously what we're going to do with kind of the blood and guts of all these syndicators that took over many States and went ham between 2021 and 2023. For a while, their backers were just kind of in denial, working things out. Now you're seeing a wave of foreclosures, you're going to see some bankruptcies, you're seeing a hell of a lot of deals going back to the lender, you're seeing rescue capital come in. Our mutual contact Scott Everett recently got in via the PREF piece on a GVA portfolio. So, I think it was like a 1700 unit portfolio that he came in for nothing. So, you're going to see these creative structures pop up as well. And then another one I'm thinking about is obviously the capital F fraud. There's been so much shady behavior in commercial real estate over the past few years. I mean, fake NOIs, title and closing done for a bogus deal or an inflated price on a deal, a deal that went for 43 million is shown to be a $70 million deal. That's all come into light. People are going to prison for real now. And there's a lot of sentencings and reckonings coming up as well. Brokerages have been blacklisted. Title companies have been blacklisted. The shadow, even though it started in let's say Brooklyn, New Jersey, etc., has spread out all over the country. So that's going to be another massive theme in the next few months. 

Chris Powers: So, it's fair to say 2025 will be, it's just an interesting time to write about. There's no shortage of what you could talk about. Is it, I don't know if the question is like, is it better to be in the media during a down market or an up market? 

Hiten Samtani: Well, from a narrative perspective, I think carnage is always interesting. We're very lucky because we started the promote at the exact time the market started going haywire. So we kind of became that source. But now when the markets stabilize, there's going to be so many interesting storylines that are not about blood and guts. They're about creative ways to make money, who stepped in, who's in the ascendancy, etc. So I'm glad we started when we did. And as the markets improve and stabilize, which could take a year or two, we're going to have a pretty interesting lens into all of it because we've seen the bad and mapping the good out in terms of the bad is also an interesting approach we could take. 

Chris Powers: All right. I want to finish on a story that you had mentioned that I think would be a fun way to end this awesome conversation. The circumcision ceremony that you attended at a high-powered Manhattan commercial real estate law firm. You can't make this shit up. 

Hiten Samtani: It was truly something. So, this is a few years ago. A source of mine, a commercial real estate broker in the space, invited me to what's known as a bris, which is the Jewish circumcision ceremony. I think it takes place on the eighth day of the son's life. And I didn't know that these things happen in these boardrooms in Manhattan. So, I show up, and it's in the boardroom of this high power law firm, somewhere on the top floor of a Manhattan tower. And I walk in, and it's all these people in the industry. So it was incredibly fruitful for networking. And I go in, and there's a throne, which I believe the godfather of the, or the grandfather sits on, and then the baby's placed on his lap and all of that. And I'm standing there and watching all this. I'm not deep into this world yet. So this is all like, what is this? Like, where have I ended up? I'm a kid from Dubai, from the desert, and I've ended up at a bris in Manhattan. And so, I'm watching this, and there's a lawyer standing next to me. And I'm not going to name the firm specifically, but he says, just another day at A, B and C, someone's getting their dick chopped off. So that's just like, when I write a book, that quote’s going to be right at the top. 

Chris Powers: I love it. All right, Hiten, this is awesome. I'm a big fan of you. I'm a big fan of what you're doing. And I really appreciate the time today. 

Hiten Samtani: Of course. It was my pleasure and happy to pop back up anytime and talk real estate.