Who Is Winning The Amenity Arms Race? With Jared White – RFP 67 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:05): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Jared White. Jared is a lawyer and the managing director of Quadrum Global, a global real estate investment and asset management firm, where he oversees the firm’s transactions and complex legal matters. On the podcast, we discuss how Quadrum Global identifies opportunities, develops unique properties that outperform the market, and how a user-focused approach is the key to profitable developments. Jared, thank you for hopping on the podcast today.
Jared White (00:50): Thank you for having me, appreciate it.
Getting Into Real Estate
Gordon Lamphere (00:53): So how’d you get into the world of real estate?
Jared White (00:56): It’s a good question. Sort of by accident. I was always interested in finance, but I felt that staring at a Bloomberg terminal was not as hands-on, not tactile, and not as creative. Real estate, honestly, is a world where there’s sophisticated finance going on, but there’s also a creative element to it, design. It’s tactile. You can walk by and take a look at something physical. In some ways it’s very analog, and that’s what I found interesting about it.
But I ended up getting into the business in a roundabout way. I had worked in real estate after college, and then the GFC hit, and real estate was not a good place to be. So the opportunity cost was quite low to go back to school, and I decided to go to law school. I graduated from Brooklyn Law School and I practiced law for a few years. Then, like most things in life, there’s a process of elimination. I realized that being a lawyer was probably not for me, even though I enjoyed it, I met some great people, and I wouldn’t have traded that experience. In 2014 I took a job with Quadrum, and I’ve been here ever since, going on eleven years.
11 Belgrave and ESG Office in London
Gordon Lamphere (02:22): We can talk a little bit about Quadrum, but I think what’s most interesting about Quadrum is you guys work on some pretty interesting projects. One of the projects that I found particularly interesting is a building you have in London, I believe it’s 11 Belgrave. I know there’s going to be a wide range of opinions among our listeners about ESG and environmentally friendly buildings. There are going to be some people who are incredibly supportive and some people who are going to say, hey, what’s the bottom line? And I think overwhelmingly it’s been a successful building economically, even if you’re not particularly an eco-warrior. So I’m curious, how did that deal come about? And can you tell me a little bit more about building ESG and environmentally friendly buildings?
Jared White (03:18): The truth is I’m not super involved with that project, but what I will tell you is that it’s won a number of awards. It’s very unusual in that it’s in an area in Victoria that is not really known for office, and it’s notoriously difficult to build and to add on. Over the course of a few years, with a fantastic team, we developed what they call a scheme in London. Here that’s a pejorative word, but a development scheme that did so many groundbreaking things for London. Not necessarily for the world. One accolade is that it has a 5.5-star NABERS rating, which is a UK rating, and it’s WELL certified.
I actually have some notes on it just to make sure. There are so many awards I couldn’t quite keep track, to be honest with you. But anyway, the way that deal came about was we were looking to maximize the scale of the building. Obviously, in London, open floor plates work well for office, and we were looking to maximize the scale. To do so, we had to do something that was really outside of the normal scope of an office redevelopment. And it’s been working out really well. It’s in lease-up. There have been some amazing leases. The leases are well in excess of our underwriting. Our cost basis is too, but in general, it’s a good project, and it certainly stretched our imaginations in terms of what was possible from an ESG perspective.
Gordon Lamphere (05:08): I’m sure the London market is different than most of the markets that we experience in the US. I’ve certainly had conversations with people on the other side of the pond about the London market, and it’s a very unique market in many ways. But are there insights that US developers, which is primarily our listener base, or US investors can take from that building and the London market?
Jared White (05:38): The truth is we have a team based in London. Our CEO is based in London, as well as our COO, and Ilyas really oversaw that project. Like anything, because real estate is an analog business and it’s tactile, like I said, being close is really important. It’s very hard to manage a project from afar. So Ilyas being very, very close and being present at the building often was definitely a key to the success there. He understood the office market.
And stepping back for a second, in a city like London, it’s hard to build ground up, and it’s hard to achieve those types of ESG ratings in retrofits. So to do this really was like pushing a boulder up a hill. One example that you don’t really appreciate is that most offices in London do not have operable windows, and we have operable windows. Obviously, since COVID, fresh air is much more appreciated. Another little thing that was very unusual about this project is the elevators. Normally elevators don’t have fresh air intakes or air purifiers. You get into an elevator, you’re stuck in there, and whatever air is in the elevator is in it. First we were told it was impossible, then we were told it was really costly, and once we got the second answer, we figured we could do it. So we have elevators that actually have air purification and fresh air intake.
Those are little examples, and there are a lot of small things like that, but they add up to an experience that really is far and away above a typical office that you find in central London. If you go out to Canary Wharf, you can find large towers that have some of these features.
Is There Demand for ESG Office in the US?
Gordon Lamphere (07:51): In terms of that, do you think that there’s demand for more environmentally friendly, ESG-driven offices in high-end American markets? We’re talking New York, Miami, Chicago, LA, San Francisco. Or do you think that office that incorporates factors beyond just price per square foot and bougie insides is just a London-centric thing?
Jared White (08:19): I think it depends on the perspective of the tenants. Obviously this whole concept of ESG doesn’t really work if it doesn’t drive a premium. You can justify getting a lower yield, but if there’s no premium whatsoever, then it really doesn’t work. And getting that premium depends on the perspective of your prospective tenants.
It’s sort of unfortunate, but a lot of the businesses that do invest in ESG are financial firms that have free capital to devote to this type of thing. A lot of businesses that run on a very tight margin can’t afford to be picky about whether there’s fresh air in the elevators. But if you have a long-term horizon and you care about your employees having a good experience in the office, you will find certain firms. It takes longer to lease up, there’s no question about it, just like it takes longer to sell a Ferrari than a Volvo. I drive a Volvo. So it does take longer to lease up. There are fewer people who are interested in it and fewer people who pay a premium for it, but those that do tend to be a little stickier. It’s hard to imagine a firm putting a flag in an ESG building, getting a reputation, having employees rely on the experience of being in the office, and then having that pulled away. So what you lose in terms of leasing velocity, you hope you gain in terms of stickiness.
The Huron in Greenpoint
Gordon Lamphere (10:07): One of the places where we’ve seen a lot of velocity is your Greenpoint development in Brooklyn.
Jared White: Yep.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m curious how that project evolved, because it’s an entirely different area of the commercial real estate market, but I think it’s also a pretty fascinating development, and it tells you a lot about the high-end New York market. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that got off the ground and why you targeted that area in particular?
Jared White (10:36): Yeah. Greenpoint was always sort of an extension of Williamsburg. That whole Greenpoint waterfront was zoned for manufacturing and industrial. It was not permitted to build residential. In 2005, during the Bloomberg administration, they rezoned that entire area. I don’t remember the scale and scope of it, but maybe forty or fifty acres of the waterfront were rezoned. I think they were talking about either 10,000 or 20,000 units.
But if you fast forward to 2014, roughly ten years later, there still wasn’t a single building that had been built on the waterfront. A lot of planning, a lot of things going on. At that point, Williamsburg was already starting to get expensive and starting to price people out, and people were looking for that next extension. There’s always an investment philosophy to put yourself in the path of growth, right? A rising tide lifts all boats. A lot of people took that philosophy and bought further out on the L train. You go to Graham Avenue, then you go successive stops on the L train, and that is one of the paths of growth. We felt going north, because Greenpoint always felt like a cultural extension of Williamsburg. So in 2014, we bought this plot of land, really essentially land banking it.
There was a zoning quirk on our block, and we thought we might be able to get the site rezoned. I’m happy to go into it, but it’s another two or three minute story. We were essentially unsuccessful in doing that. So we bought it, A, to land bank, and B, because we thought there was a 50-50 shot that we could get the site rezoned and get additional density. Those are the two reasons we bought it.
That rezoning attempt failed in 2016 or 2017, and it failed really because MIH, mandatory inclusionary housing, had been put into law. And if you recall, for anyone who’s steeped in the New York City development market, the tax abatement for multifamily development was called 421-a. That was the original program. It actually expired in 2016 or 2017, and it wasn’t renewed for about a year.
Jared White (12:52): So in that year, we’re sitting here, we’d have to do mandatory inclusionary housing if we rezoned the site, but we wouldn’t get a tax abatement. Even without affordable housing, even doing 100% market rate, multifamily development almost does not work because of the taxes. So the abatement is sort of a precondition to any multifamily development making financial sense.
So we basically pulled away and said, okay, it doesn’t make sense. We’re not going to chase after a rezoning and spend all this money if we don’t like the economics. But around the same time, Greenpoint really started to mature. In that four-year period between 2014 and 2018, some buildings had popped up, one of which happened to be across the street from us, called 21 India. It’s now called The Greenpoint. It’s about 360 units of residential multifamily. In 2017, I believe, they decided to make the top 10 or 15 floors, about 95 units, condo, and they had started selling, and they were selling quite well. We looked at those numbers and said, okay, maybe we put ourselves in the path of growth, the market moved, the tide lifted, and maybe it makes sense to do a condo development as of right, without rezoning. So in 2018, we embarked on that phase. We had hired Morris Adjmi.
One of the issues with our plot is that it’s 650 feet long between the waterfront and West Street and only 100 feet wide. So it’s very long. It’s literally the size of two football fields. Normally what someone would do with a waterfront site is push all the bulk they can up to the water. But Morris, as part of his creative process, had been looking at the history of Greenpoint. It turns out Greenpoint was sort of the Silicon Valley of shipbuilding in the 1800s. They actually built the first ironclad ship for the Union Army during the Civil War. The first non-wood ship built for military use was built in Greenpoint. And when he’s telling me all this, that Greenpoint was sort of the Silicon Valley of manufacturing and shipbuilding,
Jared White (15:11): my jaw was on the floor. I was like, really? It seems like it’s gone far astray. But anyway, from that, he designed a building with two towers. It’s much more expensive to do two towers. Think about it: you have extra facade, you essentially have two separate sets of elevators. It’s almost like building two buildings.
But if you look at the building in profile, it looks like a ship with two smokestacks. And he said one of the beautiful things about doing this is we can create all of these little stepbacks and get all of this private outdoor space. More importantly, the East Tower, which is closer to West Street, would see over a lot of the buildings that put all their mass up at the waterfront. It sees over the backside of those smaller buildings. 21 India, our neighbor, is built about four or five stories the whole way back, and then the waterfront is built 40 stories. So by floor five or six of our East Tower, you see right over the back of 21 India, and you see the river and the Manhattan skyline. We thought it was actually a pretty ingenious move. We also got eight sets of corners instead of four, so we have much more light and air coming into the units. That’s what we did. We designed it in 2018 and 2019.
We started foundations, and then COVID knocked us out for about a year and a half. We paused it, then picked it back up at the end of 2021, and we completed the building. Now we’re about 92% sold. We’ve broken at least three price records, possibly more, three that I know about: price per square foot for a three-bedroom in Greenpoint, price per square foot for a two-bedroom in Greenpoint, and the overall highest price of a condo in Greenpoint, which is 5.7 or 5.8 million.
Design Choices and the VRF System
Gordon Lamphere (17:09): Do you think that the two towers approach and the model of really going for a heavy light and air design is what drove some of the economics? Or do you think it was primarily site location? What do you think was the primary driver of some of the records you’ve broken in terms of penthouse sales?
Jared White (17:34): I’d like to say there’s a formula that I could tell you. There’s really not. There’s not any one decision. In development, we all like to value engineer. We like to say, well, if I do this, what’s the ROI? If I do that, what do I save? You value engineer out anything that doesn’t have an ROI, and you add in anything that does. The calculus for us is a lot more simple. We just built a great building, and we think that the commercial success will follow. Of course we value engineer. We don’t take an extremist approach to that mentality, but we certainly don’t overengineer the science of the value engineering process.
So one thing is that eight sets of corners obviously means you have more corner units, which have more light and air and better layouts. We tried wherever we could to put in islands as a design feature, because people love islands. The interior design was very referential to Greenpoint. We didn’t want it to be overly gaudy or ostentatious. We wanted it to be referential to Greenpoint’s past while still being classy. The window system is really fancy and high end. It sort of looks like casement windows, but it’s this grid pattern that you would tend to see in an industrial building, so it’s referential to Greenpoint’s industrial past.
One other thing we did that is certainly not an ROI, and many people would tell us that we’re crazy, is we used something called a VRF system, variable refrigerant flow. It’s essentially a high-end electric heating and cooling system. You would typically see it in very, very high-end condominiums in Manhattan, and it’s much less common in condos like this. One of the advantages is that it’s more energy efficient. But the most important thing is it’s much quieter. You don’t have a fan coil unit inside your unit, so you don’t get that loud, low hum. It’s really like ambient air blowing.
Jared White (19:58): So you can achieve heating and cooling much more efficiently from an energy perspective, but also from a sound and lifestyle perspective. It cost us a lot more money to do. And actually the zoning code in New York kind of punishes you, because it allows you to deduct certain things as mechanical space in a typical four-pipe system, which is what you’d more often see, and most of our competitors had that. They don’t allow you to deduct certain refrigerant lines in a VRF system. So besides being more expensive, it also hurt our mechanical deductions. But we touted it and marketed it as a sign of quality in this building, and we think people actually bought into it.
One of the funny things is that people say the units are actually too quiet. People say, well, I hear noise on the street or this or that, and the windows far exceed their STC rating and all that kind of stuff. It’s because there’s normally this ambient noise when you’re in any apartment, from the HVAC and from other things too. Because we don’t have that, other things feel louder, which is ironic. But anyway, no good deed goes unpunished.
The Amenity Package
Gordon Lamphere (21:15): As someone with kids, you have those white noise machines for kids, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the extremely quiet apartments, some folks are putting those in. In terms of some of the other holistic things that I’ve seen, at least in some of your marketing materials, is there anything else you put in that makes the building unique and maybe drove people toward your product versus other product in the market?
Jared White (21:45): What I would say is that it’s certainly not unique that we have the amenities we have. If you go to any of our competitors, especially the larger ones, you’ll see the same amenities. They all have a pool and roof decks, a kids’ park, a lounge, a gym. But our amenity package is certainly oversized for the size of the building. We have about 30,000 square feet of amenities.
We have a pool, a lounge, a dining room, co-working space, a dog wash. We have storage on site. We have a gym with a mirror studio, or ballet studio. We have a sauna on the second floor. We have a proper kids’ room, and then we have what we call the Nook, with bean bags and a TV. We have an outdoor park on the second floor, and then each of the towers has its own roof deck. One is dedicated to passive recreation, just an open lawn where you could come and have a picnic. The other is more active. There’s furniture, there are grills, and that’s the social side.
That type of amenity package you’d expect to see in a building with 400 units. We have 171. So I think that is also unique. The amenities are there, and they are used, obviously, but it really is the kind of place where you could rent the lounge for a party for your friends. It’s not the kind of building where those amenities are always in use and you feel like you don’t have any agency over them, where you can’t use them whenever it’s convenient.
Co-Working Space After 2020
Gordon Lamphere (23:30): One of the amenities you mentioned was a co-working space. We’ve been working with a number of individuals who’ve put those in their buildings. I’m curious, has that seen a lot of use? Was that a driver in the post-2020 world? Or is that just another check in the box for developers in the New York market?
Jared White (23:56): Look, I think it’s very useful to have. Everyone appreciates a change of scenery. There’s still sort of a lag, and the impact of COVID is obviously still affecting the return to office. I don’t think that’s a trend that’s going to last fifty years, but I do think that Zoom and all of these technologies are enabling us to work from home more often.
In a neighborhood like Greenpoint, which is a little less transportation friendly, there isn’t a direct subway to Manhattan. There’s the ferry right there, so it is accessible in some ways. But I think people who are attracted to Greenpoint are attracted to it because it’s a little enclave. It’s a little removed, it’s quieter, there’s not as much hustle and bustle. So I would expect that it would filter for people who work from home on occasion, or a higher percentage of people who do. So we were intentional about having that. It’s not a huge co-working space, and it certainly didn’t displace other amenities for us. Was it the first amenity we put in? I don’t recall, but probably not. But it certainly was important to have.
Buyer Profile and Unit Mix
Gordon Lamphere (25:25): When you were talking about filtering for people and trying to understand who your buyer profile was, can you talk a little bit about what drove your buyer profile and how you strategized and planned around it? That’s one of the conversations we tend to have the most when we’re selling land sites to developers.
Jared White (25:51): Yeah. There are a couple of different segments. There’s no one demographic that you can speak to, so you need to create a building that’s as broadly appealing as possible without giving up your edge. That went back to how we thought about the building. When we were designing it, we were trying to make decisions based on, if I was living in the building, what would I want to see? We used that as a guiding principle. Again, not to be reckless with ROIs, but we didn’t want it to be over the top and ostentatious, and we didn’t want it to be not luxurious enough. The VRF system is an example of luxury.
When it comes to the buyer profile, we looked at a few different segments. There are people who just like new developments. They buy early, off plans, and they get good value. For those people, having a reputable developer and builder who has a lot of skin in the game and is building a quality product is usually important, so we wanted to get that. And that exists across all demographics. There are young people who like new construction, older people who like new construction, people in every corner of the world who like new construction.
Then we figured there would be a lot of people looking to come to Greenpoint for a slower pace, moving from Williamsburg or from other high-traffic, high-transportation neighborhoods. That’s why we built the large amenities. We also had a very high mix of twos and threes. We had 51 twos and 41 threes, 92 units, so more than half the building is two-bedrooms and three-bedrooms. That was a little contrarian if you look at most new developments. They have a high percentage of ones and a high percentage of twos. They like threes because they sell for a high price, but they don’t sell quickly, so people don’t build too many threes. Studios move very quickly, but they’re the lowest price per foot. We actually built a lot of studios and a lot of threes, so we were kind of contrarian in that regard. And we built a lot of twos and threes because we figured there would be people who…
Jared White (28:14): Just imagine someone lives in Williamsburg. They’re in a two-bedroom, they have one kid, they’re having another one, they need more space, and they can’t exactly afford what they want in Williamsburg, so they move north to Greenpoint. We have a lot of three-bedrooms that would check those boxes, and the amenity package, with the children’s amenities, is suited to that. That’s pretty much it. I could keep talking about the different demographics, but that’s the gist.
Hospitality Thinking in Residential Development
Gordon Lamphere (28:45): One of the other things that makes you guys unique as a business is that you’re also involved with Arlo Hotels and the hospitality management world. One of the big conversations we’ve had on the podcast generally is that, as we’ve moved into the post-2020 world, almost all asset classes that involve people, and we’re not talking data centers or industrial that has very few people involved, have increasingly moved toward a hospitality management strategy in terms of how they engage with their customers. I’m curious if your hospitality background as a business was involved in the development of your residential assets.
Jared White (29:43): Like everything in life, your experience comes to bear as you do new things, and that’s why experience is valued. Any employer would value an employee who has experience in something for obvious reasons. But there wasn’t a one-to-one tie in that regard. The development team at Quadrum has built dozens of hotels, and at the time we were building The Huron, we were building two or three hotels. I wouldn’t say there was some specific trick we had up our sleeve that we deployed at The Huron from the hotels. But what we definitely understood is that operating a building is a challenge no matter what, residential or hospitality. There are people, there are characters, there are things.
A lot of developers, I think, miss or undervalue operational ease once the building is built, especially in a condo. “We’re going to sell out of it. If the manager has a hard time operating and the package room is too small, sorry, you’re out of luck. Not my problem.” We definitely didn’t take that approach, because when we build hotels, Quadrum owns all of the Arlo hotels, and we also operate them. If the package room is too small, there’s a guy who sits in an office next to me who has to deal with that. So we don’t get to run from many of our poor decisions.
That philosophy definitely came into play at The Huron. That doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes, but we involved a property manager, in this case FirstService Residential, very early to make sure all the operational needs were covered. Garbage, the garbage baler, all these things that we don’t really know about. What do you need for a building this size? Do we need refrigerated storage for groceries? How big does it need to be for this size building? Do we need one on each side because we have two towers? Do we need two bike rooms? Is it going to be annoying if the bike room is in the East Tower and you’re in the West Tower and you have to walk across? All of these little things are small in the scheme of things, but they impact people’s experience, especially
Jared White (32:11): small things that repeat themselves over and over. A bike room in the wrong spot would annoy somebody. It’s small, but it would annoy them because they have to deal with it every single day. So that appreciation for the operation of a building came to bear when we designed and built The Huron. We always had that in mind.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere (32:34): One of the things that’s always part of our podcast is our Final Four. It’s a great way to wrap up the podcast and learn a little bit more about you and where you see the world going. One of my favorite questions I always love to ask, and we can put on our Nostradamus caps, is: what do you think is going to change the most about real estate over the next ten years?
Jared White (32:57): That is a good question. What do I think is going to change the most about real estate in the next ten years? Man. I want to say something about AI.
Gordon Lamphere (33:12): You don’t have to influence a stock price by putting AI on there. It could be something a little less buzzwordy.
Jared White (33:21): What I find is that real estate is becoming more and more a tale of two markets. Class A trophy property is shattering records, and the traditional discount that you’d see for B, C, and even D properties is widening. The gap between the A and the C stuff is growing. Office is a good example of that, but it works in residential as well, and in hotels, frankly. So what I think is going to happen over the next ten years is a serious reordering of the value-add space. There are going to be fewer and fewer value buyers and more and more people who want to take something and do what we did in Victoria at 11 Belgrave, and completely reimagine it. Hopefully that’s going to put a lot of people to work in the construction business and the design business, and hopefully it’s going to be a home for people to work once it’s built.
Gordon Lamphere (34:35): When we talk about reimagining things, I know we can’t reimagine our lives, but there are a lot of people starting out their careers who listen to this podcast, at least a solid percentage. If you could give one minute of advice to a young Jared in the industry, what would that advice be?
Jared White (34:59): There are a couple of guiding principles I think about for myself that I think are useful early in your career. One is that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and in a moment you could throw it all away. So conduct yourself with integrity and honesty, always. That doesn’t mean being a pushover or rolling over. You can be firm and conduct yourself with integrity. I can be very, very firm at times. So that’s not a license to roll over and be treated unfairly, but that’s one piece of advice.
The other is a general philosophy, which is just say yes to things. People going out for drinks. My wife wants to kill me all the time because I’m going out for this or I have a dinner for that. But real estate, especially the deal-making business, is first and foremost a people business. No buildings get sold without people: one person deciding to sell, one person deciding to buy, and a bunch of other people helping along the way, lenders and lawyers and architects. It’s a people business. So just say yes to things. Say yes to events. Go to things. Try to never pass up a meeting if you can avoid it. That doesn’t mean upsetting the balance in your life, like the balance in your marriage, for example. But just say yes to things and be present.
And an in-person meeting is always a hundred times more impactful than a Zoom. If you’re ever trying to get something done, an in-person meeting is much more likely to be successful. So those three.
Gordon Lamphere (36:40): I couldn’t agree more. There are so many deals we’ve saved over the years by sitting down and breaking bread, or just having a cup of joe with somebody we’ve been going back and forth with constantly. One of the things we fight for, and sometimes it’s hard, is to get book recommendations. I’m a voracious reader, not always physically, but sometimes in the audiobook world. I’m curious if you have a book that you would recommend our listeners pick up.
Jared White (37:13): Well, The Power Broker is a famous one that I think everyone should read. I’m looking up the name of the author because I can’t quite remember it. It’s The Power Broker by Robert Caro, about Robert Moses.
Gordon Lamphere (37:31): It’s a New York zoning classic. Yeah.
Jared White (37:33): It’s a legendary New York book. There’s also a book by Jane Jacobs. Now I’m blanking on the name of it because I read it years and years ago, but it’s about what makes cities. Jane Jacobs was an urbanist. It could be The Death and Life of Great American Cities. One of the things I appreciated about her book is this. A lot of times in our lives we’re trying to order for efficiency. To use a simple analogy, think of Silicon Valley, all the tech companies being next to each other. That creates efficiency. When hiring people, they just have to move to the office building next door. All the zipper manufacturers are in the same spot, and that creates efficiency.
But I think what makes cities great is that the zipper manufacturer is next to the button manufacturer. That’s what creates innovation, stepping outside of efficiency. Efficiency and innovation can sometimes be inversely correlated, the same way quality and scale sometimes can be. Her book let me understand how and why cities have this gravitational force that makes them the centers of innovation, so I really appreciated that. And it’s centered in New York, which is where I’m from.
Gordon Lamphere (39:01): I appreciate that book recommendation. Ninety percent of what we do is industrial, office, and land brokerage, and we bring on people from a variety of asset classes because we believe that innovation comes from crossing over and learning a little bit about another asset class. There are numerous things from other asset classes that we’ve applied to our own business and our own practice from this podcast, and they’ve been extremely valuable. In terms of the ultimate value of this podcast, it’s always about finding the next person. That’s what The Real Finds Podcast is about: having real conversations and talking to real men and women who are in the arena that we can get a little bit of advice from. So I’m curious, who’s the next person in the world of real estate that we should have on the podcast?
Jared White (39:54): The next person in the world of real estate. Someone may kill me for throwing their name in. We obviously work with a lot of great attorneys, and there are attorneys that I really love working with, one of whom is actually based in Chicago. You’re based in Chicago, I’m presuming?
Gordon Lamphere (40:21): We are, we are, yeah.
Jared White (40:23): The Michael Jordan jersey was the giveaway. So one is an attorney at Sheppard Mullin named Mike Roth. Another is an attorney named Adam Kopald at Goodwin Procter, who’s a close confidant, and a third is an attorney named Adam Feimer at Haynes Boone. All three specialize in real estate. I would not get into a ring without one of them being my blocker or counterpuncher. So we rely on all three.
Gordon Lamphere (41:00): We’ll have to reach out. I’m a lawyer, and in a previous life, that was a little bit of my world before getting into real estate brokerage and investing. So we’re always happy to talk to lawyers. That’s not an issue. I’m married to one. There’s one last question that we do have to ask, and that’s if somebody wants to get in contact with you, Jared, what’s the best way?
Jared White (41:32): The best way is to email me. You want me to give my email?
Gordon Lamphere: Yeah, yeah.
Jared White: It’s [email protected]. That’s J-White at Quadrum, spelled Q-U-A-D as in David, R-U-M as in Mary, Quadrum Global dot com.
Gordon Lamphere (41:49): Jared, thank you so very much. We really appreciate it, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Jared White (41:53): Thank you so much for having me. Great time. Take care, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere (41:57): Thanks again to Jared. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find 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.