Wyatt Clark: Portugal’s Golden Real Estate Investing Opportunity, Real Finds Podcast #10 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, a podcast series where we have in-depth conversations with real estate experts, entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the industry and, as a result, our world. In today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Wyatt Clark. I’ve known Wyatt since high school. He’s always taken a creative approach to investing and been brave enough to explore the world outside his comfort zone. On the podcast, we discuss Porto, Portugal, real estate investing in Europe, and value investing as an American. We chat about Wyatt’s previous experience on Wall Street, the democratization of real estate, and crypto’s real-world applications. It’s well worth a listen. Hey Wyatt, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Wyatt Clark: Hey, Mr. Lamphere. Thank you so much. Great to see you. Is it Gordy, Gordon, or Gordo? I see some of the fans calling you Gordo in the comments.
Gordon Lamphere: I don’t care. Even “hey you” works, as long as you know who you’re talking to. Wyatt, we’ve known each other a long time. We go back to high school. For the folks who don’t know you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
Wyatt Clark: I went to Tabor Academy with Gordy, in Massachusetts, and graduated from Hamilton College. For the past decade, I’ve been in what I’d call the international investing world, mostly equities and multi-asset portfolio management. I trained as a trader, but with a view on global economic trends, and real estate is one of those. It’s a really interesting time to talk about Portugal, where I am. In the macro picture, I think we’re seeing a flight to quality in the real estate market in general. I’m happy to share with our mutual connections in the industry who want to keep learning what’s going on, not only in Chicagoland but, in my case, in Portugal. I came here for business school, but there’s stuff in the real estate market that Americans specifically have cared about, and some headlines and changes that have just hit Portugal as well.
The Portuguese Business Environment
Gordon Lamphere: I’ll come back to that flight to quality. But for most American investors, the only things they think about Portugal are Portuguese wine and the beautiful coast. What’s it like investing in Portugal, and what does the business environment look like?
Wyatt Clark: It’s an EU business environment. From a big-picture perspective, in a stimulus-driven world, the stimulus given out by the EU is sizable for the country. Portugal is one of the smallest countries in the EU, but when it comes to economic support from the EU itself, Portugal does very well, and that drives things on the ground at times.
They have a Golden Visa program that Americans have cared about, and it’s specifically real estate focused. You buy a property of 280,000 euros. The euro has been fluctuating a lot recently, which has drawn interest. For the past five years, you’ve had Americans moving here, buying properties they fix up and rent, and in rarer cases buying multiple properties. I’ve met some of the Golden Visa holders. I got interested because I was traveling here and started seeing Golden Visa commercials, probably because my computer was geotagged here.
From a general Portuguese business environment perspective, I go to a Portuguese business school and I’m the only American there, so this has been a real experience of adjustment and understanding the Portuguese perspective. They have a serious axe in certain industries. Wine, which you mentioned, port wine specifically here in Porto. And certain industrial sectors, auto parts and auto manufacturing for Europe, with a connection to Morocco and Africa. They’re strategically located for industries you’d never hear about in the US that are actually really strategic to the EU. When there’s a crisis, people realize Portugal has a lot of industrial power. One company is BA Glass, one of the biggest European glass bottle manufacturers, top ten in the world, maybe top five, with incredibly high efficiency scores. I visited them in my MBA. Another is Lactogal, whose milk processing plant in Porto is one of the largest and most efficient in Europe. People might think this is one of the smallest countries in Europe, but there are things it’s strong in that Europe relies on.
Combine that with the Golden Visa and the Chinese shipping and container changes of the past two years, and it makes this region more interesting and the Golden Visa more valuable to certain investors. And the last thing: there’s been so much property speculation that the Portuguese government has intervened and said they might stop the Golden Visa. That’s where I think the market is reading one thing in the news, and what’s really going to happen here is very different.
Gordon Lamphere: I want to come back to that more internal-looking focus in Portugal. But you touched on Portugal sitting in a very unique spot, on the precipice of the New World, right off the shores of Africa. Does Portugal have the industrial backbone you’d expect from that position, or is it still more of a growing or tourist economy?
Wyatt Clark: Tourism is a huge part of the economy. I’m in Porto, the second city. Lisbon is the biggest city, in the south; Porto is in the north. You can see the Airbnb rentals filling up seasonally, and having lived here four or five months, you can see the dramatic seasonal shift. So it’s very dependent on tourism. But Porto is a big industrial place. There’s a guy in last year’s MBA cohort who worked for Canadian Tire, the only North American in that cohort, and the specific reason he came to Porto is that Canadian Tire has a lot of auto manufacturing partners here. There’s a company called Salvador Caetano, probably partially state-owned, a huge auto parts and bus manufacturer. They make the hydrogen or natural gas powered buses in Portugal. There’s a ton of auto going on here.
Then, like I mentioned, glass, because wine is being bottled all over the region. Lactogal. And for e-commerce fulfillment, the warehouse situation is pretty favorable, because you still have some of the lowest labor costs in the EU. People can operate these businesses cost-efficiently, and there’s a good support base for people working in factories in Porto. That whole economy is big here, and I don’t think people know that. I certainly wouldn’t have thought it about Portugal. Another American in last year’s MBA, who used to work in global risk management in Florida, took a job at Caetano and has been in four or five African countries in the two months since. There’s a huge auto trade between Portugal and many African countries, used cars and new vehicles. I lived in Morocco for six months, and Morocco is really close by with tons of trade. The fishing industry is massive too. Vigo, Spain, less than two hours north of Porto, is one of the biggest fisheries on this coast of Europe. There’s seaborne trade going on in a huge way.
Most of the people in my business school class have engineering backgrounds, educated at state-sponsored schools, and have worked on the shop floor for six to eight years and are now trying to move into management. There’s no real Wall Street thing here. There’s real estate, obviously, but the culture of work for young people is still very much shop-floor industrial jobs, incredibly smart engineers who say, I’ll do this for ten years, and then end up in my program.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s something I’ve heard about Germany too, people who grow up and grow through businesses rather than a managerial class that’s disconnected. Do you see that across the board in Portugal, and how does it affect the business culture?
Wyatt Clark: There’s a lot of family business. In my MBA, there are five family business owners out of a 40-person class, slightly higher than a typical MBA. A lot of people work on the shop floor at the beginning, and because the labor market here isn’t incredibly high earning, people change careers more willingly. But there’s also the presence of families who have been large business families in Portugal for a long time, and people who work for the big state-linked entities. One company is Sonae, which has a real estate arm, Sonae Sierra. A guy in my program works for that arm, and Sonae is a big sponsor of the business school. So there is a managerial class in some ways, but versus the US, there’s a lot more understanding between people who work on the shop floor and people in office environments.
I spent almost 10 years as a trader in front of screens, and the thing I confronted in business school was trying to explain to people who know logistics like the back of their hand what I did all day with my head going back and forth between screens. In many ways, my executive skills pale in comparison to a lot of the students I’ve met. It’s been a great experience at Porto Business School, and the value for me is being the only American. You can push boundaries socially in a way where you learn a lot, and you get to shape what these students think about Americans, because they don’t deal with them beyond a meeting-to-meeting basis. If I applied to a top-ten US MBA, I’d spend six times what I’m spending here, and I got a scholarship, which I don’t think I’d get in the US. It’s a value environment, and from a real estate perspective, it’s a value environment too. There’s capital starvation in many areas of the country, but when you see people deploying capital in a smart, well-planned way, they’re able to earn returns.
I’m seeing a lot of 200,000-euro properties. That’s what most properties in my neighborhood are probably for sale for, and that’s expensive to a lot of Portuguese citizens. To them, it’s massive inflation. But think about the trends. They’re trying to stop the inflation by not letting people from outside the country speculate as much. But don’t you think that signals to local investors that this is the time to deploy their last bit of capital into real estate? None of these laws have curtailed the Golden Visa yet, so there’s a window where I think you’re going to see more speculation.
Where the Value Is: Porto
Gordon Lamphere: If I’m an investor, and you have the background of all the screens, trying to find value and arbitrage in the market, where do you think the ultimate value is in the Portuguese market? There has to be some place to deploy capital.
Wyatt Clark: Now I like to walk around neighborhoods. That’s my new thing. I think I’m in the city that’s undiscovered. I’ve had locals say, dude, don’t tell anybody about this place. Lisbon is the main city, the one you see pictures of, where everyone vacations. I think it’s been explored and found since the Golden Visa started in 2013 or 2014, with people buying properties there for years. You can still find good deals, probably better outside the city center. But Porto, where I am, is culturally the center of old Portugal. People from Porto have a famous rivalry with Lisbon. The Douro River splits Porto from a place called Gaia, and people from Porto will point across the river and say, that’s Morocco. They’re very territorial about Porto. The city is incredibly high-to-low elevation with all these bridges across the river, and it’s called the undefeated city, because historically almost every European country, including the British, has tried to conquer Porto over two thousand years and never succeeded. They’d blow up the bridges and nobody could get up the hills. So historically, it’s a city that’s always been fought over as prime real estate, from a topography perspective, with the river and its connection to the Atlantic.
I think Porto is the place, and I was reinforced in that view by what I’ve seen on the ground. In the past two weeks, the Financial Times listed Porto as the number one growth region in Europe. Some of that is PR, but it struck me as a strange coincidence that I’m here feeling this myself. What’s the real play? They want to keep up with development. There’s a housing shortage for regular income earners, so the EU is probably going to stimulate Portugal in general, and Porto is seen as a place that will benefit. Lisbon has been built out and is well known. Porto is still on the verge of being undiscovered. Europeans travel here, but it’s not well known by any of my American friends.
I can mention a couple of neighborhoods within Porto. I lived in Amial, the first place I stayed when I got to the MBA program, for three months before Christmas. I was in a brand-new, refurbished 24-room Airbnb and long-term-stay building on a dead-end street. This is a neighborhood that 10 or 15 years ago was not gentrified, maybe a little seedy. It’s been on the rise, but it’s still not considered prime real estate. There was one brand-new building, and everything around it was decayed and abandoned, with a few people living across the street in small row houses. Halfway through my time there, I could see someone across the street starting to fix up a similar building. You’re on the ground floor seeing the two polar opposites and what the price is to go from one to the other. And the 24-room Airbnb was printing. People flowing in and out all the time. All around it, besides a few families, not much going on. With a paint job and some small investment, maybe 50,000 or 60,000 down, which for an American is a little easier to stomach these days, you can see value creation happening in real time in a place that at minimum has tourism. They’re saying prices are at peak levels, and locals are telling you they don’t expect them to go down. With the Golden Visa head-fake headline of the past two or three weeks, it seems like the time when people really start looking at this city.
I’ve now moved next to the Douro River, closer to the city center, prime real estate, and you see the same juxtaposition. There’s an old stone road up an incredibly steep hill that’s probably been there for hundreds of years, with houses going back into a small neighborhood, and there are still fields. Really close to the city center, there’s still stepped farming going on. Right next to it, development has happened for ten years, huge office buildings overlooking completely undeveloped land. I started walking around and talking to the woman I rent from, who manages 25 rental properties in Porto, and she gives me good color. I saw five, six, seven for-sale properties, one of which was really attractive: close to the old road, far back in the neighborhood, down a narrow street one car can get through, with maybe ten one- or two-bedroom apartments. Around it, some people have bought and fixed up their places. I asked what they’re going for, and there was also a totally burnt-out place with no roof for sale. She said, honestly, the land alone is starting to go for close to 200,000, which is ridiculous to us. She said between 200,000 and 300,000 for these apartments. Some are in okay condition, one or two have been rehabbed and are in really good shape, and you could rent them for a hundred euros or more a night, more for a two-bedroom.
So the play is finding one of these properties. Either it’s a fix-up play you turn into a rental or an Airbnb, or it’s something for retirees or people switching to a slower lifestyle who can afford a second property and want EU residency through the Golden Visa. This neighborhood, Massarelos, is one of the nicest besides Foz, which is right on the beach. From where I am, I can get to the river in five minutes and the beach in a 20-minute walk. I’m paying 800 euros a month in rent, probably an extra hundred because I’m not a local. That’s the picture. From an entry perspective, it’s too expensive for many locals to take a swing. To me, it’s not a market that looks like it’s going down. For the American investor, it’s still accessible. It’s just, what’s your time frame? I’ve mentioned this to our other Tabor classmate, Matt, and he’s told me he’s been looking at Spain and Portugal to buy property for a while but has had misgivings and hasn’t been on the ground much. There’s serious opportunity for patient capital. What I’m seeing is capital starvation: a lot of locals can’t keep up with price increases, and people from outside haven’t come in yet.
Who Owns Porto
Gordon Lamphere: Looking at a capital-starved area: we recently had Emmanuel Lavoie from Jetstream on, who runs a unique platform that helps democratize the hospitality and Airbnb market. Is Porto a pretty democratized market, with a lot of small mom-and-pop owners with 20 doors here and there, or stratified like the US, where you have people with 10 or 20 doors alongside huge hospitality groups?
Wyatt Clark: There are a lot of families that own five or ten properties and have been landlords for a long time, more than in the US, I’d say. People in my MBA will casually mention they have ten apartments that have been in their family forever. So there’s that kind of stratification. The 24-room place I lived in was a custom living situation, but there’s a huge student population in Porto, an engineering school, an MBA program, a university system of sixty thousand students. Around me was a student housing developer called LIV, and they have five or six locations around the city the size of medium office buildings, mostly one-bedroom or studio dorm-style living with shared kitchens.
So there’s big development, and there are families who control certain neighborhoods. I’m living on a street only one car can get up, all stone, not paved, winding back into dead ends, with 25 cars parked along an old-world road not meant for cars. On this street there are about five for-sale properties, and I’d bet three or four extended families live in this neighborhood. Ownership is condensed into certain families that own the really old stuff and keep repairing it year after year. Then there are developments that stick out. Right across from me is a recent modern apartment building with at least forty bigger apartments. Neighborhood to neighborhood, you can see what’s been built recently and what still has the clay rooftops, the picturesque old Portuguese neighborhoods of stucco and cinder block, two or three stories, sometimes with an addition on top that I’m not sure is legal. And then there’s Sonae Sierra and the big entities developing luxury product that caters to foreigners, with a more New York or Chicago urban feel, in what’s still a pretty old-world city, a fishing town in the north of Portugal.
Zoning Pushback and Speculation
Gordon Lamphere: There are always investors who come in and build the globally homogenous block multifamily development. You could drive to any city in North or Latin America and find the same block and ask, why did you build this in Buenos Aires? One of the biggest issues cramping development has been the ability to use the land. I have friends investing in Italy and France. Has that been a struggle in Portugal? Is there real pushback from locals against rezoning, particularly for multifamily, flex, or industrial?
Wyatt Clark: I’m sure in Chicago that’s a huge sticking point, and you can see it here too. The old road I mentioned goes up a hill on land that’s obviously being protected, or there’s a lot of protest about it, because there’s an aqueduct where all the water from the top of the hill flows down to the river through this area. You have families who’ve farmed there, stepped farmland next to the center of the city, either cared for by families or abandoned at this point. It’s probably five, six, seven acres, maybe more, a sizable gulf of undeveloped land surrounded by development on all sides. I know there’s a lot of zoning pushback.
You also have people rightly worried about property speculation. In this same area, down near the river, there’s a property that’s been remodeled with beautiful green tile on the outside, two stories, like a Greenwich Village apartment. Right next to it is one that’s bombed out. I started asking business owners who owns the nice one, because you can see art inside through the windows. They told me, those people came, bought the property, fixed the outside front, then stopped paying the taxes, and now they’re squatting inside. The rules here, as in New York and other places, prevent you from fixing situations like that in a timely manner. That’s the kind of thing that really upsets the locals, and it’s not surprising.
Gordon Lamphere: How do you foresee the next transition? There’s a lot of global pushback against development. Maybe it’s because I’m a developer, but I firmly believe that development done well, as holistic placemaking, is one of the greatest benefits to a community.
Wyatt Clark: Long-term positive. I agree. But you have poor planning or bad actors. There’s pushback against foreigners speculating on property or trying to develop huge swaths of it. I think they’re probably supporting local developers and Sonae-type large players to handle the trickier zones in the city, which is pretty typical. They understand that globally, Portugal is in a geographically safe region right now, with war in other parts of Europe, and Portugal stayed out of World War II. There are memories of it as a flight-to-safety place. So there’s a big accepting front that’s very receptive to foreign investment, and when it gets past what they can control, when there are physical signs on the ground and some outcry, they ratchet things back. That’s what you’re seeing with the Golden Visa flip-flopping. They’ve flip-flopped on crypto here too. Long term, I think Portugal knows it needs outside investment in crypto and property. You have market inflection points where they say, we’re going to get rid of the Golden Visa. But I talked to a woman in my MBA program whose friend is a Golden Visa lawyer, and she has an endless number of cases she’s working on right now. You can look at the headlines, but that’s not what’s passed. The solution from the Portuguese market perspective is probably to hand many of those development zones to players connected to the municipality and the government who’ve developed other parts of the city. Those are the longer-term cases where you need to be well backed to fight the battle long enough to develop the place.
Crypto, Tokenization, and Real Estate Data
Gordon Lamphere: You mentioned crypto. Anybody honest can see we’re in a crypto winter right now. But there are interesting developments, even if you’re a crypto bear or agnostic, in how crypto might reshape the way we interact with real estate. I know you’ve done some work with tokenization. How do you see that evolving?
Wyatt Clark: I’ve done some work in crypto. I worked for some institutional players in the US, VanEck being one, and learned a lot about the space. You’re spot on about the crypto winter. I’d call it a regulation pause. I worked for a startup I think will be successful over time because they just do loyalty around brands in crypto and don’t touch the chain. There are gradations in a new industry that we can both see isn’t going away. I’ve traded some crypto in the past, luckily not really in the past two years. Five years ago in New York, a good friend of my father’s, an established, Harvard-educated investor, started a New York City real estate token. I don’t think it went anywhere. His company still exists, but I think he got the timing wrong. But he was right in his approach: attach it to real assets. People behind this want blockchain, data tracking, and monetization attached to real assets.
The startup I worked for was a location-based loyalty app. Say you have a rental property and want people to use a location-based app every time they check in to an Airbnb. That can all be done now in a web3 way with better tracking of the consumer. From a security perspective for real estate, it definitely has use cases. Then there’s tokenization of real assets, where you invest in a property and extend another line where people can invest in a token representing the property’s value. I’ve seen this more at the international level, in Nigeria for example, and that makes me less confident, because I want to see the actual asset before I buy the token. But in general, with the policy side happening now, the Fed and the CBDC stuff, it’s a fair bet there’s going to be a crypto portion of at least the loyalty market, and NFTs could be used for that.
Gordon Lamphere: There’s broad application. On this podcast we’ve interviewed a group, and I’ll have another on later, that uses tokenization and cryptography to hold together real estate data, so you can invest in a token that independently verifies the real estate data behind it: this building’s occupancy rate, its energy usage, whether payments are on time. It allows democratized speculation through that process. I don’t think buying Trump coin or poop coin is the future, and I’m very much Bitcoin and Ethereum agnostic, but there are applications going forward. It just probably isn’t coin manufacturing.
Wyatt Clark: I agree. I think we’ll see regulation come this year, and a normalization. The whole thesis from VanEck and the people I worked with is regulatory normalization of all the crazy stuff out there. There are still institutions investing in the top coins and in staking, so the flight to quality has already happened in crypto. That doesn’t mean those players didn’t deal with the FTXs of the world, but that’s the shakeout the industry needs so the real long-term use cases emerge, and those would definitely be real estate based, because we might be looking at a real estate crisis. A lot of people I know who used to work at funds as data analysts are now starting real estate data companies, because the people who really want to know what’s going on are the ones speculating in RMBS and all sorts of debt instruments. They pay huge money for real data at the right time to make directional bets in size when they think the US housing market is going to crash. You saw that with the Blackstone REIT situation. That shows you exactly what the use case is.
Gordon Lamphere: I don’t play REITs much, because I’m already leveraged substantially. But I was recently driving by properties owned by a REIT that was trading sky high. It was a pretty large property for the REIT, it was vacant, and they were doing a bad job managing it. I called a friend who had a large position and said, you might want to reevaluate.
Wyatt Clark: Listen to my story and not just their press releases.
Gordon Lamphere: And the funny thing is, when earnings came, it was down. So if crypto can be a monitor for that in real time, it helps democratize the industry.
Wyatt Clark: You should have less boom and bust, theoretically. If you can track this data better, it should help the fringe areas where there are booms and busts, like industrial property, weather the storms better, especially as the US shuts off stimulus. This year, money growth is negative for the first time in quite some time, so you’re going to see stuff in the property market soon. I worked at a place that had a REIT fund and got out of that business six or seven years ago. If you’re exposed to one of those publicly listed REITs, you’re in a bad position because you don’t know how bad the damage is and you own paper. Most people think this is the tip of the iceberg, so let’s get out now, which means liquidity becomes a real issue, and that’s why they’re gating people. We’re in the part of the cycle where hedge funds with illiquid positions that would liquidate down 25% or 30% start finding interesting ways to say, sorry, we can’t distribute money back to investors. It’s the worst nightmare for a lot of stakeholders. If you have real data on real estate properties or credit card payments, there are so many applications that give you slightly better time-series data. At minimum, it helps people dodge one of those REIT situations, like your friend who maybe didn’t listen.
Gordon Lamphere: It wasn’t Blackstone, by the way, and I won’t throw them under the bus, but it was a publicly traded REIT. There’s something to be said about data and the power of tokenizing it, because data without access is worthless to the people who don’t have it. The more we open up the world so investors have access to data, the more democratized and fair it becomes, with a lot fewer black swans.
Wyatt Clark: And you can see legislation happening with pooled investment vehicles that’s really democratizing them, where you can have smaller LPs and smaller buy-ins. You have the fractional stock thing, the Robinhood stuff, but now you’re seeing real venture-capital-type vehicles that are far easier for the average person to access. Combine that with crypto and real-time data, and you should see better returns for the average person. Fingers crossed that’s what plays out. I don’t think the next crisis will be real estate led. The FTX thing was a bigger scare. It might bleed into real estate, or you find someone crypto-exposed who’s also in real estate. But in my opinion, it’s not going to be a 2008-style mortgage lending crash.
Gordon Lamphere: The next black swan is almost always a little different from the last one. People are dumb, but not that dumb.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s go to our Final Four, the four questions we ask everyone, which give a great indication of the person and their perspective on real estate, business, and life. First, and one of my favorites: where do you see the future of real estate going? You’re in a unique place, a growing part of Europe. What are you seeing in Portugal?
Wyatt Clark: Like I said, the flight to quality is there. You’re seeing an uptick in Americans investing abroad, based on what I see in Portugal, and anecdotally in Europe in general, but Portugal has made it accessible. In the real estate world in general, you’re seeing a flight to quality and people who prepared for this years in advance, people who didn’t get much of an audience for years saying, look, hard assets and real assets are worth investing in now, mortgage rates are going to go up eventually. We’ve seen that play out. There’s also more than average capital flight to places where you can have an investment property, and that’s not US only, it’s global. I’m sure Chinese investors have been here in force since the Golden Visa was released, because China owns one of the main utility companies in Portugal. So my answer is a flight to quality globally, with new areas developing because of global trade changes from COVID.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s something we’re seeing on our end. As long as the market is free, capital washes toward value. That’s nothing new. What is new is what’s happening in Portugal, and that’s really cool.
Wyatt Clark: I’m loving it. You should come check it out. You can get great wine for two or three euros a bottle. It changes my whole cost structure.
Gordon Lamphere: That sounds dangerous, honestly. I’ll be in Portugal about a year from now for a good friend’s wedding.
Wyatt Clark: Probably in the south. You’ll really enjoy it. Try port wine from the north. It’s delicious. I’m seeing friends and family getting interested in this place too, which is exciting.
Gordon Lamphere: One of our questions steps back in time. We talk a lot about the future, but it’s important to look at the past of the person we’re interviewing, because we only interview interesting people. Wyatt, if you could tell yourself something as you were leaving college, what would the advice be?
Wyatt Clark: Be more patient as a young business person, and really appreciate what you’re learning and the people you work with. At the beginning of my career, I was in New York City doing the whole Wall Street thing, and that’s a bubble to be taken with a grain of salt. The culture of business in the US is changing. It’s a tech-enabled culture. I’d advise my younger self to be more in tune with tech trends and to be verbal about it, to express ideas about the future from a tech perspective, even if it’s not directly the industry you’re in. There’s a real estate broker in New York I follow who’s positioned himself as someone who talks about blockchain with confidence for two or three years, and that can make a big change in your career, like creating your own podcast does. It shows your individuality in a way that’s very accepting.
I’m 33 now. I was 25 or 26 when I first got onto a trading desk, an incredibly high-adrenaline but also fear-ridden environment. You have to cope with stress objectively and find habits that develop your skills outside work, solitary or group, like sports. I’d advise myself to focus a lot on exercise, which I partially did and partially didn’t. As I get older and as an MBA student, I could end up doing a few different things: fundraising, going back to trading stocks, which has kind of died. I got into an industry that was almost dead when I entered it, but it was still a vibrant, great industry to learn from people. So it’s about separating what you learn about people and about the truth of life over a 30- or 40-year career arc, and appreciating it at a younger age. I’d bicker with older guys on trading desks and get really competitive, and that’s part of the business, but you have to step back and realize some of what they’re saying is a warning you don’t understand because you’re young. Now that I’m 33, I find myself giving those warnings to younger people, and do they always listen? Absolutely not. It’s worth hearing the cautionary advice from people in an older generation who may be losing their edge in the industry. That doesn’t mean they don’t have incredibly good life advice. They may be losing their edge in equities at 50, but at 20 and 30 they made an incredible amount of money, and their perspective is something you don’t understand yet.
A woman I worked with, who I had all sorts of problems with, told me early in my career: try to take one good thing from everyone you meet in the industry. Many people are only really good at one or two things, but they’re incredibly talented at that. That doesn’t mean they’ve had incredible success, because sometimes luck doesn’t go your way, but if you can absorb their methodology even 10% and bring that attitude to every person you meet, it’s only going to be positive. You’ll meet incredibly successful people, ascribe some ideology to how they got there, and find out you’re totally wrong or they’re not who they portray. There are layers beneath the surface in every industry, and it’s worth getting keyed into that before you’re 30, because it gives you more calmness. As you get into mid-career, you’re making negotiations with bigger consequences for the next five years of your life. That’s part of why I went to business school: I needed a year to distill what I learned and separate it from the ego-driven, emotional trading mentality that doesn’t fit even in a slightly different part of my own industry.
Gordon Lamphere: With age comes wisdom. I’d love to have the knees I had at 22, but the stuff between these two ears is worth it. As we shift into the last two questions, is there a book that could provide some wisdom? I’m a big reader, not always in text form, sometimes I put in the buds and listen to an audiobook. Is there a book, or more than one, that’s influenced your business career or mindset?
Wyatt Clark: One thing is mindset. I try to read creative stuff, even poetry, to get out of the work thing. Right in front of me is a book my mom gave me called New Cowboy Poetry. My name’s Wyatt, so there’s a little cowboy thing going on. That’s my escape from work. Also writing, and rereading what you’ve written. I have eight full journals from ten years. Constantly rereading things I wrote when I don’t even remember what mindset I was in is nostalgic, but you don’t learn from it when you write it down. You learn from it when you go back and read it.
From a purely trading perspective, there’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It gives you an understanding of how different being a trader or speculator was in a totally different era versus the electronic world we live in now. It gives me an entrepreneurial feeling, even though it’s about trading. In my actual work, there wasn’t much that was entrepreneurial about doing large trade executions for a huge institutional investor. There’s a lot of information absorption with secondary and tertiary learnings you bring to bear over time, but you’re not being creative in the moment. That book got me into trading for myself, which I had success with in 2020 and 2021, enough to live in Morocco and take an advisory job for a while. I’m not a regular day-to-day trader. I don’t trade futures or options. But it gave me the confidence to say, you’ve been learning about this industry for 10 years, why not try it on your own?
I think this is applicable to real estate professionals especially, because eventually you’re going to buy your own home, buy a property. It’s very transferable. In my business, what’s sad now is you see people with a great risk appetite, very sharp, who never get a chance to take risk at the age where it makes sense. I only got to do it after eight years of my career, once I’d paid off student loans and had enough to trade with. I made 100% on a 30-stock portfolio in one year, with a lot of ugliness and bad timing mixed in, at the end of a bull market, so I had help at my back. But it gives you your own thing. You can have a lot of success in your career independently of this, but you’ll have ups and downs, and if you have a hobby or some knowledge where you’ve broken the seal, taken the risk, and not had your teeth kicked in, you know you can maybe do it on the side for the rest of your life. It gives you a piece of autonomy. Living in foreign countries has given me that as an American too. A podcast might be my next idea, to create that same feeling.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s such a challenge for most people across professions.
Wyatt Clark: It’s really difficult. Getting older, I’ve realized there are well-capitalized guys I’ve worked with in New York who still can’t pull the trigger on anything in their mid-thirties.
Gordon Lamphere: The world changes when you’re in the business. What I always say is, if you’re 22 or 23, that’s the time to buy that flexibility and leverage up. That’s the time to buy the multi-tenant unit, use the BRRRR method, flip it or hold it, and really go for it. Once you have kids on the way, you don’t want that level of risk. You can start over in your twenties very easily. If you’re 45 with two kids to put through college, you can’t. Take the effort and the risk now, because you won’t be able to later.
Wyatt Clark: And save young. If I’d been more diligent about that, I’d have had more capital and my trading success could have been a sizable amount of money, where for me it was enough for one year to live and work part time. But it’s a confidence thing. I was in a seat where I was learning deep industry trends and could develop my own theses and potentially hit something that makes 10x, which I’ve done. When I tell people in my MBA program I owned a couple of stocks that did 10x, they don’t believe me. And I tell them, look, it didn’t change my life. It didn’t create some new world I live in. But I’ve done it, so that’s a one-and-zero situation.
Gordon Lamphere: If it had changed your life, you’d be worried about how leveraged you were. If you live in a world where one thing changes your life, you probably have all your chips on one thing.
Wyatt Clark: You’re betting on luck in a way that’s very risky. I was lucky. These were four- and five-hundred-dollar bets that made me ten thousand dollars. There’s one stock, FUTU, that went so crazy, and that was the learning on the other side, because I owned it and I’d left a job. If I’d kept that job and had steadier income, I probably wouldn’t have sold. That thing did forty x. That would have changed my life. But coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Gordon Lamphere: We all have those stories. In late March of 2020, I looked at Penn National and said, these casinos aren’t going bankrupt, the government’s going to bail them out, I think I’m going to put ten grand in. One of our venture investors was on the phone saying, don’t do it, you idiot, don’t do it. I could have bought a new house. But there are calculated risks. I’m in a business where we make calculated risks for our investors and get 8% to 10%.
Wyatt Clark: Right now, people are dying for 8% to 10%.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s stable. Sometimes you have losses, and things like the pandemic affect a portion of your portfolio, but being a reasonable, rational investor is ultimately the best path.
Wyatt Clark: That’s the reward of rationality with a long-term view: you’ll have multiple opportunities, rather than being leveraged to one thing. I know one guy in New York who did fifty thousand dollars of GameStop calls, and he was right at the right time. I don’t know what’s changed for him since, but he’s got a big apartment in New York City.
Gordon Lamphere: And I know a guy who was all in on Dogecoin when Elon went on SNL, and it did not turn out well for him. On that note, the last and most important question: who should we bring on next? We have a wide range of guests, hospitality, hardcore industrial, BRRRR flippers, multifamily folks.
Wyatt Clark: We have a bunch of real estate connections in common. I think Matt could be a good guy to talk to about real estate. Chase Gordon, my buddy from New York City, is doing very well in real estate there. And I’d say Tabor Academy, whether it’s about sustainability in their regional real estate market or the changes happening at the school, as the alumni leader you are. That could be timely. There’s also a guy I went to school with who’s a Chicago real estate guy I haven’t messaged in a while. There are definitely mutual connections.
Gordon Lamphere: We should definitely reach out to Matt. He’d be a great voice, and what’s going on at Tabor with sustainability is very cool. Second most important question: how does someone get in contact with you?
Wyatt Clark: You can reach me on WhatsApp, my European outpost now, at 203-414-8069. If you’re interested, send me a WhatsApp message. And honestly, LinkedIn is my go-to. That’s where I started seeing you popping up doing your podcast, being out there as an influencer in the real estate industry. For eight years, Bloomberg was my completely centralized communication platform. I miss it, but I haven’t used it in two years. LinkedIn has been a steady platform since I started my career. I was smart to connect with tons of people early, and I’ve watched the platform develop to where people I’ve worked with use LinkedIn as their main business front, doing private placements, high finance, and these are international guys.
Gordon Lamphere: The syndication folks on LinkedIn getting groups together and deploying capital, it’s phenomenal, and people who don’t understand what’s going on there are missing out.
Wyatt Clark: I agree. People give me a hard time for it, but I have ten thousand followers, and that’s actually a currency at my business school, because they’re trying to build their presence. Thoughtful posts are really starting to gain traction. People say post once a day. I haven’t gotten there, but I’ve gotten closer and seen engagement go up.
Gordon Lamphere: There are a lot of wrong ways to use LinkedIn. Don’t just advertise. But there are a lot of right ways. I think three to four times a week is right; I don’t think you want to post seven days a week, as somebody who does it a lot. On that note, I have a showing to run to, which is why we had to bump this up. Thanks again, Wyatt, and hopefully we have you back on the podcast soon.
Wyatt Clark: That would be great. If you want a Golden Visa update, I’m here until December. In the meantime, I’ll send you some names of Portuguese wine you might find in the US.
Gordon Lamphere: We’re going to hold you to that. Thanks again to Wyatt Clark. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.