Leading Voices In Real Estate

Brad Dockser is the CEO and Co-Founder of GreenGen, a global firm dedicated to helping real estate owners and investors move towards a zero–carbon future. In this week’s interview with Brad, we kick off our third annual month-of-August focus on climate change and the built environment.

Cathy Marcus, Global Chief Operating Officer and Head of U.S. Equity at PGIM Real Estate, discusses the power of playing the long game in real estate. A recurring theme throughout the Leading Voices in Real Estate podcast is just how essential a long-term vision is.

Matt Pestronk, Co-Founder and President of Post Brothers, details how he and his brother Mike became leaders in Philadelphia multifamily and are now taking their expertise in adaptive reuse of office buildings and ground up development to Washington, DC and other markets. When they founded their Philadelphia-based company just before the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, they had no idea what kind of challenges they would face on their entrepreneurial journey...

Constance Freedman, Founder and Managing Partner of Moderne Ventures, talks innovation in technology solutions and its impact on the real estate market. Moderne Ventures is a Chicago-based venture fund focused on technology firms that are disrupting the real estate, mortgage, finance, insurance, hospitality, and home services industries.

Mitchell Silver, now Principal of Urban Planning at McAdams, explores the lasting impact of work-from-home and the recovery of our urban fabric post-pandemic. In this week’s rebroadcast, I brought Mitchell back to revisit our original podcast episode together from two years ago.

In honor of Sam Zell, real estate legend and trailblazer, we revisit our 2016 conversation about how he built his real estate empire. As the son of Jewish immigrants who fled Poland in 1939 as Hitler invaded, Sam’s life path is marked by resilience, controversy, and an insatiable drive to succeed.

In part two of our series on real estate services platforms, Justin Wheeler, CEO of Berkadia, talks about the focus of his firm on multifamily finance and investment sales and how that focus defines their strategy and culture. This conversation is the flip side of the coin from our prior conversation with Brett White, who talked about the strategy and strengths of the global, full service real estate services platforms, Cushman & Wakefield, and CBRE.

Brett White, Executive Chair of Cushman & Wakefield and prior CEO of Discovery Land Company, discusses the evolution of today’s global giant real estate services platforms. As the first of this month’s two part series on the real estate brokerage and services platforms, Brett tells the story of the growth and evolution of the giant real estate services platforms.

Antonio Marquez, Principal and Managing Partner at Comunidad Partners, talks about his firm’s focus on workforce housing and their community oriented, impact investment business model. This is the second of a two part series this month on Leading Voices focusing on the housing crisis in our country.

I’m trading places this week, and I’m the guest! Enjoy this rebroadcast of my interview on Juniper Square’s The Distribution podcast with Brandon Sedloff.

Ismael Guerrero, President and CEO of Mercy Housing, dissects the housing affordability crisis, subsidized housing, and stewardship of public dollars. Founded in 1981, Mercy Housing has grown into the nation’s largest nonprofit owner of affordable housing.

Christopher Hawthorne, Senior Critic at the Yale School of Architecture, discusses why collective spaces deserve intentional design and public support. After over a decade as the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, Chris took a position as the first Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles, working under Mayor Eric Garcetti...

Jordan Slone, Chairman and CEO of Harbor Group International, shares the secret sauce behind the company’s $20 billion, diversified, but apartment-sector heavy portfolio. With 58,000 units of apartments, Harbor Group International came in 15th on last year’s NMHC top fifty list of apartment owners.

This week’s podcast guest is Chris Merrill, the co-founder and CEO of Harrison Street, a $55 billion family of real estate funds focused on demographically-driven real estate niche sectors such as student housing, senior housing, life science, self-storage and infrastructure throughout the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. He talks about their strategy as a break out from the four main real estate “food groups” and how their strategy is “de-risked” both by focusing on these multiple niche sectors and through working through multiple operating partners in each business.

This week’s podcast guest is Kevin Marchetti the co-founder of Bay Grove, a real estate private equity firm that has built the world’s largest portfolio of cold-storage warehouses, and its operating company, Lineage Logistics, that runs the business. The company has scaled up by acquiring different businesses and portfolios, and now Lineage employs over 25,000 people globally.

This week’s podcast guest is Wemimo Abbey, a 30-year-old entrepreneur already making waves in the apartment business as Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Esusu. Esusu allows lower income renters to use their rental payments to help build their credit scores to create a pathway to their personal financial health.

As a holiday treat, this rebroadcast episode from January 2021 features Paul Saffo, forecaster and Head of Future Studies at Stanford University. He forecasts the future of city development in light of historic patterns of change, economic shifts, and the role of real estate post pandemic.

MacArthur Foundation Genius Award Winner and internationally recognized leader in the field of homelessness, Rosanne Haggerty, President and CEO of Community Solutions, dives deep into the challenges of the homelessness crisis and talks about how the problem is indeed “Solvable”. Rosanne puts the homelessness crisis in context as a symptom of broader systemic failures rather than as the fault of individuals experiencing homelessness.

This week’s podcast guests are Michael Van Konynenburg, President of Eastdil Secured, and Chris Hartung, Executive Director of Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at Berkeley and Co-founder of the Terra Firma REIT investment funds. Mike and Chris provide their perspectives on how the downturn is affecting both the public and private commercial real estate markets particularly given the near lockdown in the real estate capital markets.

Ross Perot Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and real estate developer, talks about his varied businesses, inside and outside of real estate, including the development of the giant Alliance project in Fort Worth, developing public private partnership projects in the US and abroad, and about his father’s legacy.