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Your Commercial Real Estate Insider guide. From profiles of the biggest dealmakers to skyline-shaping transactions, we bring you the deals, breakdowns and war stories that move the market — for insiders, by insiders. From bad-boy guarantees to CMBS tranche warfare to syndicator sins, we cover it all.
Each week, The Promote Podcast explores three of the most interesting and consequential stories in CRE, taking you well beyond the headlines and into the heart of the action. Hosted by the award-winning “Bard of CRE,” Hiten Samtani, founder of ten31 media and author of The Promote newsletter, along with no-BS institutional insider Will Krasne. Also check out our 3x/week newsletter for industry insiders at https://www.thepromote.com/
Hiten Samtani (00:00)
Every real estate allocator and institutional developer rags about their focus on risk-adjusted returns. But real estate development is among the riskiest games in all business. The skyline's littered with the carcasses of builders who flew way too close to the sun, who had the right land, but maybe the wrong capital stack.
Will Krasne (00:18)
a
key equity partner pull out at the crucial moment. Ask me how this feels.
Hiten Samtani (00:22)
Poor guy. Or deliver their project into the teeth of a recession.
Will Krasne (00:27)
or how to lend or cut proceeds at the closing table.
Hiten Samtani (00:29)
There's just so many things that can go wrong and sometimes all at once.
So when someone pulls it off in spectacular fashion and is able to repeat the playbook over and over across market cycles, it's kind of worth understanding how.
Welcome back to the Promote Podcast, your insider guide to the money and mania of the CRE markets. Hiten and Will here with a special episode.
Will Krasne (00:56)
related at Hudson Yards.
Hiten Samtani (00:59)
One player, one project. Specifically, we're looking at their de-risking playbook. How they're pulling off a $25 billion, 18 million square foot mega project in New York City while continuously taking chips off the table. I have never seen anything like
A shout out to our sponsor Vesto, which gives CRE players a single, clear point of access for all their bank accounts. More on them in a bit.
All right, dude, where do we start? I mean, there's almost too much to grapple with here.
Will Krasne (01:31)
Looking at this project, we got to start with one of the few people who has managed to tame, or at least ride, the beast of urban campus development. Little baby goat, Stephen Ross.
Hiten Samtani (01:39)
You talk about the goat, aren't you?
Steve Ross. All right, so we have to skip a lot of the B-roll here because we're assuming that the promotes audience is familiar with who the hell Steve Ross
Will Krasne (01:51)
Yeah, every billionaire has their media narrative about how they started their business. Everyone knows Steve Ross. Everyone knows he got fired for telling his boss to fuck you. Got a loan. But there are a things we want to hit because they come into play later with related.
Hiten Samtani (02:00)
Fuck you, Bear Stearns, yeah, all of-
So let's just talk about the key things that really matter for this episode. his uncle, Max Fisher, wealthy guy, very savvy businessman. He managed to stay afloat during the depression because he locked in gas prices. When the prices were low, he kind of locked in long-term contracts.
Will Krasne (02:23)
There used to be a REIT called Rich Uncles. know, Steve Ross, again, like adjacent to the most important thing in being a great real estate investor, which is to be born into a real estate fortune. Ross trains as a lawyer, loses his job. We talked about starts related, focusing on tax credit deals. This is a good place for an enterprising young lawyer to start because you don't need a lot of capital and you can use your legal training to generate alpha.
Hiten Samtani (02:48)
It's
like the technical know-how is a substitute for having money to start.
Will Krasne (02:53)
It's not dissimilar to how David Rubenstein and his partners started the car log group focusing on tax shelter deals as well.
Hiten Samtani (02:59)
So Russ does this, he figures out how to do affordable housing tax credits, makes quite a business out of it and grows and grows and grows. He jumps into development, real estate development in the eighties. We've talked a couple episodes ago about 625 Madison.
Will Krasne (03:13)
Most people when they talk about round tripping a deal, means they bought it and they sold it. I don't know, we need a new term for buying it, selling it, buying it back. Like maybe the Karkorian because he did it with MGM like three times.
Hiten Samtani (03:23)
He's done it so many times. Anyway, that's a tangent. Steve Ross becomes a mini-macher. The SNL crisis hits in the late 80s. And like so many other would-be titans, Ross finds himself deeply underwater.
Will Krasne (03:37)
Yeah, he blew up in his own words from this excellent 2013 fortune article, which everyone should go read it. So in his own words, words, was worth $350 million in 1988 and negative $120 million in the early 1990s.
Hiten Samtani (03:42)
It's so good, I'll put it in the show notes.
So who comes to his rescue?
Will Krasne (03:54)
So remember that rich uncle? Max shows up. And so he, along with George Perez of the Related Guru in Florida, and they had been partners, think Steve owned a piece of Related which
Hiten Samtani (03:56)
Max Fisher.
couple years ago they finally kind of disconnected formally.
Will Krasne (04:09)
Right, so Max and George Perez invested in related itself, the parent code, to keep it alive. And this is apparently pretty dire straits. ⁓
Hiten Samtani (04:20)
You were
telling me the numbers were like 20 development staff went down to five. Yeah!
Will Krasne (04:24)
So bare bones, not a lot of folks. And that's as tough as it gets.
Hiten Samtani (04:30)
So Ross stares death in the face and he was in his early 50s at the time. So naturally given who he is, once he's back on his feet, he decides to go for the most complicated, biggest swing of his career with Time Warner Center.
Will Krasne (04:43)
What's interesting there is there's echoes of Hudson Yards. was the of the staging ground for it, creating a new really like filling the hole in the donut of that area. Yeah, even the deal being awarded to somebody else and then it coming back. mean, you have a little bit of a background there. You guys talked about it and the Kings of
Hiten Samtani (05:02)
And this is what we wanted to really hit on in this episode. Developers come and go, Eichner's been at like nine and a half lives.
Will Krasne (05:10)
Both bills, Zeck and Dorif went bankrupt. Both of them. It's almost a rite of passage. I I was listening to a podcast the other day where they talked about they want to invest in great men after the fall because they're humbler.
Hiten Samtani (05:21)
doesn't quite work that way. so with the other guys it feels like they do the thing and their takeaway is like, I almost had it, I should just do it again. Yeah, but Steve Ross isn't like that, he does something different.
Will Krasne (05:33)
He creates something more sustainable. Sounds like he was very thoughtful about working on his business as much as he was working in the business on the actual projects. And the near-death experience really crystallized that in how he needed to put together a sustainable model that let them have an enduring company that can handle crises because these types of projects, the stuff he was graduating into, Time Warner Center,
Hudson Yards eventually some of these other large scale things. take so long. You're guaranteed to go through a cycle.
Hiten Samtani (06:07)
couple cycles right and it's taken out like really big developers throughout history right like so many people have been felled by the dream of building a kind of a new city a shiny new city inside a city.
Will Krasne (06:19)
yeah, mean, most famously I think the Reichmanns in London.
Hiten Samtani (06:22)
is correct. But as Michael Camperato, one of our guests said on the pod, like real estate, you almost have to think about it like real estate organizations are really, in most cases, a collection of deals, some good, some great, some nightmarish, but related actually built an institution out of this collection of deals.
Will Krasne (06:43)
They built a balance sheet and you know those affordable deals we mentioned early on related. ⁓ ton of them
Hiten Samtani (06:47)
Yeah.
they're, some of them have, they've owned them so long that they're basically passed their.
Will Krasne (06:54)
They're out of their tax restrictions. they're going to fully to free market and are just cash flowing like crazy.
Hiten Samtani (07:00)
Yeah, so he's got that business, is a very, very healthy long-term business that he can tap into when he needs cash to kind of go and do those bigger swings that he's known for.
Will Krasne (07:12)
To that end, also was able to raise equity at a very tough time and I think that inculcated in him the fact that you need to raise equity when it is available, not necessarily when you need it.
Hiten Samtani (07:23)
This is like end of 2007. He sold a quarter of his company for like a it's a convertible debt transaction. It's a little complicated, but broad strokes. got one and a half billion dollars for 25 % of related companies.
Will Krasne (07:36)
Hit 10. How much did he pay in tax there?
Hiten Samtani (07:39)
Probably nothing?
Will Krasne (07:42)
Yeah, you've played nothing. Yeah.
Hiten Samtani (07:43)
That's crazy. So what did he do with that money? That he went and maybe bought himself a little sports team or what?
Will Krasne (07:49)
Yeah, he did. ⁓ You know, he was a huge fan of Ace Ventura
Hiten Samtani (07:54)
Marino
should die of gonorrhea and rations.
Will Krasne (07:56)
in how laces out Dan and bought the dolphins. But a huge portion two went to the related balance sheet just again to like batten down the hatches and you know, post GFC, it wasn't as if he was out there like super extended on a bunch of projects. shifted the business model. So they focused on workouts, doing stuff to generate fees. think they famously, it was like they sent a battalion of people to the fountain blue structure is so, so important in how you set up your company, because if you're a fund.
Hiten Samtani (07:59)
Would you like a cookie, son? ⁓
Will Krasne (08:26)
you have artificial time constraints. You have to buy and sell within certain periods. And if you raise a fund and you go into a recession, like tough shit, you gotta deploy it. And the venture's just gonna stink.
Hiten Samtani (08:38)
And you got to return money to investors. And when you're raising the next fund, this can like weigh down on you. It's a whole vicious cycle.
Will Krasne (08:44)
Yeah,
you have to sell great assets that you might want to own for the long term just because of the fun life. it keeps you from doing certain things that may be really profitable over the long term because you only have a certain amount of fun life. So you couldn't do an urban master plan community like this out of a fund. You couldn't do a 30 year tax credit deal out of a fund either. They were able to own these affordable deals forever and that let them be ballast for the rest of the firm.
to the name like everything was related you think of related you might think it's the same thing as star capital group or lone star or brookfield but it's not like they are doing a lot of things off of the related balance sheet and then bringing in partners on these specific deals and that derisks them for them creates fee streams and then
Hiten Samtani (09:33)
It's just partners, right? It's like a consortium of lenders. It's a consortium, like a whole playbook of creative financing. And we're going to get into all of that in a second.
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and tell them the promote sent you.
So let's get right into Hudson Yards now. Let's go to the far west side of Manhattan where there was basically nothing there. Time Warner Center is a huge success related. You could say probably Steve Ross at that point is the alpha developer in New York City, know, one, two, depending on your flavor, but like he's really up there. So Tishman Spire is the other.
Will Krasne (10:40)
Yeah, so Tishman's Fire was originally, I think, awarded the contract for the rest of the railyards. That is correct. And then they lost, ⁓ my math may be off here, but a zillion dollars on Stytown. A bird flaps its wings and we end up with a vessel.
Hiten Samtani (10:56)
Just to clarify, Tishman's buyer themselves lost like $60 million. There's some kind of ridiculously small amount, but CalPERS absolutely lost a shit ton of money. And so did everyone else. It was a bad one.
Will Krasne (11:08)
and go read other people's money by the inimitable Charlie Bagley.
Hiten Samtani (11:13)
Charlie Bagley.
Charlie, we miss you man. Thank you for reading the promote. Let's get a little bit of background on how they tied up the steel.
Will Krasne (11:20)
When Tischman backed out, again, we were in the great recession and construction activity halted, capital markets were frozen, and what had been contemplated, which was a purchase of the rail yards, and you had to spend an enormous amount of money to cover them to be able to build on top of it, that just wasn't feasible. Steve was really focused on protecting their downside. so I always say, like, real estate's great because you can do whatever you want as long as you can get the other person to.
Hiten Samtani (11:47)
as long as the other guy agrees to it, or in this case, the city, the state, the federal government.
Will Krasne (11:50)
And holy shit that he got the MTA to agree to some crazy stuff.
Hiten Samtani (11:54)
This is one of the most incredible agreements, right? They had these, let's call them triggers to close on Hudson Yard. So residential prices had to hit a certain threshold to force them to close.
Will Krasne (12:05)
Yeah, on a price per foot basis. Barbara Corcoran needed to sell a lot of co-ops to make this project happen.
Hiten Samtani (12:10)
And then construction activity was the other barometer they use. these are, this is incredible. Like basically we have the deal, but we're only going to have to kick up, we're only going to have to kick in the funds when certain things happen that make the macro environment more sort of amenable to what we need to do.
Will Krasne (12:26)
Yeah, because they were going to need to get a massive construction loan to start this thing off and that just was not going to happen in 2009. And they were just going to wait until everything was open. But this allowed them to have control of the site, which they could do a ton of pre-development work. They could do a of planning. And most importantly, they
Hiten Samtani (12:43)
could
go fundraise, they could find partners. And by the way, this wasn't it though. That's not all the MTA gave them. yeah. The MTA said that, hey, for the first five years after closing, no rent, free rent. The rent stay like before, which was zero.
Will Krasne (12:55)
And it still might not be enough. They're still worried about it. That things might not have recovered enough by the time they were starting to have to pay rent. But they got all of this, which again, like de-risk the thing significantly. yes, they would have had dead deal costs, but they had no carry costs on the site itself. mean, obviously they're paying lawyers, know, tons of money, like all of their internal dev work and all that. But the biggest things that can kill you, they didn't have to pay for for quite a long time. ⁓
Hiten Samtani (13:24)
pretty
sure they probably negotiated a bargain rate with Jonathan Mechanic or Jeff Lenoble or whoever it was.
Will Krasne (13:30)
John the mechanic come on the podcast. So the empty also, I think help them because this is going to be a ground lease and the ground leases that we've talked about and has been in the news recently can be very tricky.
Hiten Samtani (13:32)
Yeah, we'll have him on. We'll have John on for sure.
So in this case, giant, giant site, right? Like it's gonna give rise to 17 million square foot development, whatever it is. What the MTA did here was create a ground lease that is quote, severable, which means it turns into multiple ground leases and each of them has their own kind of cap stack. So it's a little bit easier to secure financing instead of having this one monolith of a ground lease that you have to deal with.
Will Krasne (14:07)
So, you know, again, for some of the casuals who listening, this is sort of like if you see a strip mall and there's like a Starbucks on the end cap. Like a lot of times that's separate ownership. It's the same thing here. So essentially they made 10 Hudson yards the Starbucks, 50 Hudson yards was the McDonald's drive through and that's
Hiten Samtani (14:25)
And Hudson Yards was the karate.
Yeah. So he gets a capital partner for the master plan. He reels in the Canadians as usual. Omer's, which is the Ontario pension fund. He's got the playing field set, but now
Will Krasne (14:38)
do do? He's tons and tons of work, years of work, millions of dollars spent, and they're now, they made it to the starting line.
Hiten Samtani (14:46)
That's all it's, it's again, like one of the things we want to hit on in this podcast is the sheer scale of the ambition here, right? Like it's already a massive coup, but this is nothing. This is like so far from the, from the, from the gravy. So how does he solve the financing puzzle?
Will Krasne (15:00)
Totally.
He needs billions of equity billions like like not just like two billion like
Hiten Samtani (15:09)
actual billions. ⁓
Will Krasne (15:12)
⁓ He needs many billions of dollars and you know related has deep pockets. He's got deep pockets, but they don't have that
Hiten Samtani (15:22)
He kind of comes up with this innovative structure of condominium-izing as much of the project as he can. So creates office condos, ⁓ sells them to Coach, KKR, Wells Fargo. He creates a retail condo, sells it to Neiman Marcus. That didn't turn out so well for Neiman Marcus, but that's by the by.
Will Krasne (15:40)
Coach KKR and Wells Fargo, like that's a motley crew. But why is that important? Because they buy their spaces and it's sort of like if you're in Florida and you buy a condo that's being developed, your deposit helps the developer fund the project.
Hiten Samtani (15:43)
Like one of those walk into a bar joke.
The other part of it is also you're creating momentum, right? You're attracting more investors by the idea. So you're creating a lot of activity, exciting investors, making it easier for you to talk to your lenders, et cetera.
Will Krasne (16:07)
The one thing would say too about KKR is they were at Nine West, famously at Nine West for a long, like you can read like Barbarian at the Gates, which we've schlocked on another pod, but like they're one of the most famous tenants of that building, which is maybe the most famous office building in New York before this. And they came like that is there's so much value to that beyond the financial just because it gives permission for everybody else to come here.
Hiten Samtani (16:30)
You're
basically making a point like Willem Dafoe and the Boondocks Saints, which is the symbolism of this thing. Kind of kings of capital moving over West. That's a big...
Will Krasne (16:38)
Yeah,
mean, and then, you know, ⁓ at that time he was still alive, but Sheldon Solo is asking what happened to his building and, you his property manager goes...
Hiten Samtani (16:50)
So we talked about the office condos. I wanted to bring up Coach specifically. So Coach wasn't just a buyer of the office condo. They also came in on the construction side. They were also a lender. Pretty amazing how he could get them to, I didn't know they were.
Will Krasne (17:04)
I mean, the handbag economy was doing quite well.
Hiten Samtani (17:07)
Then you had the observatory, which they sold to KKR at some point for half a billion dollars.
Will Krasne (17:11)
Yeah, this is, know, famously like Empire State Realty Trust. I think the observatory there at one point was like some insane amount of their entire company NOI. yeah, and they're like, we're going to do this thing over at Hudson Yards. It's going to be competitive.
Hiten Samtani (17:21)
Like laughably huge proportion.
It was hard for me to admit this. The view from the peak or whatever it's called at Hudson Yards is probably my favorite view of New York City now. I'm going to say that for the record. It's pretty astonishing.
Will Krasne (17:36)
Wow, that's...
Them's fighting words.
Hiten Samtani (17:46)
We're not even close to the-
Will Krasne (17:48)
We've just talked about selling stuff down. We haven't even gotten into the financing yet.
Hiten Samtani (17:51)
Yeah, so should we talk about the Israeli bond market?
Will Krasne (17:56)
I think we've talked about it before, but it's always worth mentioning again, because what a time that was.
Hiten Samtani (18:00)
So just in a nutshell, ⁓ Tez bond financing, is the Tel Aviv stock exchange financing was basically a way for you to get debt at maybe half the cost of conventional Mez at the time. So it became a cottage industry of brokers and securities experts and people who would help you incorporate your company, a part of your company to then be floated on the Israeli bond markets.
Will Krasne (18:24)
Developers
generally put in their dogs that got financed there. Starwood, think, famously put their mall portfolio to get financed
Hiten Samtani (18:30)
And
there's been a lot of drama. mean, like Gary Barnett's bonds did not do very well for a long time. Related had quite a bit of drama. But anyway, they were able to raise quite a of money.
Will Krasne (18:39)
People are like put your piddly wink stuff on the taste and what's crazy is I like read some of these filings and they would just like the comparisons were Amazing like the William Vale the sales comps in the taste bond report for the valuation of the asset were like office buildings on Fifth Avenue Amazing
Hiten Samtani (18:59)
So they were able to raise on the Israeli bond market and then they went the other way too. They went to EB5, right? And they raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, it's a cash for green card program. At the time it was primarily Chinese investors and we've talked a lot about, you know, the middlemen who made a tremendous sum of money raising billions of dollars for developers. Again, it was primarily structured as mezzanine financing and worked out really well for the developers, worked out even better for the middlemen.
Will Krasne (19:06)
from your fave.
Hiten Samtani (19:26)
didn't work out as well for the Chinese investors. But again, that's another story. What we wanted to say here was every single type of financing mechanism that was available at the time related was able to tap into. Is it time to bring up the children yet?
Will Krasne (19:38)
single one.
Not quite yet, almost. I was just thinking, imagine the title report, imagine the org charts here. mean, good lord.
Hiten Samtani (19:49)
Then let's talk a little bit about the lenders on this. We had a little bit more of an interesting lending syndicate in the mix. Construction financing here on part of the project came from a combination of consortium of Starwood Property Trust, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and OMERS as well. OMERS was both an equity partner and a lender, and then you had the unions.
Will Krasne (20:12)
This is like straight out of the Irishman like Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters pension fund like build in Vegas stuff.
Hiten Samtani (20:19)
100%. So let's talk about your favorite.
Will Krasne (20:21)
Children's Investment Fund, with the very innocuous sounding hedge fund, will help.
Hiten Samtani (20:26)
has
the Chris Hone divorce settlement taped on the back of his wall because he's so obsessed.
Will Krasne (20:30)
my God. Yeah. Legendary investor. And for some reason he deigns to deal with us commercial real estate people and has provided a bunch of high octane financing, I think on 57th Street condos and here at Hudson Yards. And as Hiten mentioned, his divorce filing is public. You can go read it.
Hiten Samtani (20:49)
I'll try to put it in the show notes. And then the final piece of this that we should definitely talk about is the pilot financing. So they just got related, just got about $2 billion in what's called pilot, which is payment in lieu of taxes financing to construct the platform on the Western side of the yards, where the taxpayers are on the hook for this. And it was really interesting because they just had to kick in a little bit of extra affordable housing to make this happen.
and related is pretty tight with our current mayor, Eric Adams, and apparently he pushed pretty hard for this as well.
Will Krasne (21:22)
they were the biggest affordable housing developer in New York. So they're happy to add it. And I don't think they did not have to add it at this site. Let's just be clear. Like it was not here. It is uptown.
Hiten Samtani (21:33)
But there was some chatter about how the casino part of this was basically, they were more than happy to give up that component of the project to get what they really wanted, which was the pilot funds, the two billion in pilot funds. So, Wynn basically became collateral damage in this whole negotiation.
Will Krasne (21:50)
If you're not first, you're last.
Hiten Samtani (21:54)
This project started in the GFC and here we are almost 20 years later. It's pretty astonishing lead times and you have to navigate so many different things from market cycles to COVID to changing preferences. I think one of the things you mentioned off camera, Will, was that Related expected the retail to be their primary moneymaker and it turned out to be completely not it.
Will Krasne (22:16)
yeah, and that's sort of what we talked about at the front. You have to set yourself up to last because these projects again, as we said, take so long. And what's the only guarantee about something taking very long is that your pro forma is going to be wrong. And so when they initially were conceptualizing this and, the early 2010s, I think they were like, this retail is going be incredibly valuable. Like we'll make a little money on the, on the office and like, we'll break even on the condos.
Hiten Samtani (22:40)
You've dabbled a little bit in masterplan.
Will Krasne (22:42)
Yeah, my first job was buying and developing master plan communities. And we always joked that third developer would make the money because the first two go tits up. sometimes being third isn't even enough because so much has to go right here. Because think about it, the infrastructure has to get built. You have to create critical mass because every piece feeds on itself. If you have retail, but no people who live there, like that doesn't work. If you have offices, but no restaurants, no retail.
Like in apartments nearby, that doesn't work. Like everything has to tie into each other.
Hiten Samtani (23:13)
Listen, you can't just live and work. You've got to live, work, play as ⁓ Ross probably said at some point or Blau did.
Will Krasne (23:19)
This is a place, again, Eric Adams is very supportive of it. You can stay out late with the boys and wake up with the men. All in one place.
Hiten Samtani (23:29)
But I will say that like, besides the financial jujitsu that has to happen here, besides the incredible amount of fundraising prowess and structuring prowess and all of that that related is great at, there's so many other things that you have to get right. You have to get the media narrative just right. You have to get the political environment through multiple mayors, right? Started with Bloomberg, then de Blasio, then Eric Adams, then maybe Ramdani, who knows where it's gonna go, right? But you have to navigate.
every single administration, every single force that comes at you for such a big project that has been, you know, decried as a tale of two cities only for the super rich. The whole idea is like, you have to keep the faith and rally people across so many, like so many different cycles and so many different parts of New York city to make this work.
Will Krasne (24:21)
incalculable how much brain damage occurs doing this stuff. You're not building it yourself. You're building it with the city, whether you like it or not, especially in a PPP like this. And you have to have so much finesse and, you know, at the end of the day, building the building itself is the easy part. Like everything else leading up to it is the hard part.
Hiten Samtani (24:39)
This is the perfect encapsulation of Ross's approach to development over his career, right? Which is he feels like developers get in trouble not because the projects won't thrive, but because the core kind of financial engine isn't quite there.
Will Krasne (24:53)
Yeah, I they have the balance sheet and they use it to play offense. So, I mean, they will buy land or put out the spec, the pre-dev, create the value through rezoning, permitting, that whole process. And then when they bring in their equity partners, they recap their equity out. So they're making money off their balance sheet, strengthening their own balance sheet.
Hiten Samtani (25:13)
I think this is a great point, Will. They're not waiting for the payoff like in year 20. They're like making money every couple years through equity partners, through refis, et cetera, figuring out ways to de-risk over and over.
Will Krasne (25:25)
Yeah, because these things work on a J curve generally and you don't make any money until well into it. you know, again, they're like figuring out a way to structure it so that they're taking their equity off the table in a lot of cases early on at a markup. And then they're bringing in that sweet fee paying OPM while they're going through the debt.
Hiten Samtani (25:41)
Yeah,
and think instead of seeing the cap stack as this monolith, this giant void that needs to be filled, they see it almost as like a collection of expanding and shrinking parts, depending on where they are on their cycle, they'll rejig it multiple times, depending on the political climate, the kind of partners they can pull in. So it's a really fluid way of playing the game, which I appreciate.
Will Krasne (26:01)
As Ed Mylott says, what I've done is changed and manipulated the cap stack.
Hiten Samtani (26:05)
I want to say that it's pretty astonishing, like this is a one of one kind of guy. This is obviously a one of one project, but he isn't done. He isn't what in his like late seventies at this point, Steve Ross.
Will Krasne (26:17)
I think he's an octogenarian, as they say, and he just got financing for a $700 million West Palm Beach office deal. ⁓
Hiten Samtani (26:20)
he might just be.
What I love about New York in general is even Steve Ross can't be the cock of the walk. He's like number three or number five or number seven. When he goes to Westbound Beach, he's the absolute king and that's why.
Will Krasne (26:36)
That's it. I don't know, I think he might be the king of New York too.
Hiten Samtani (26:41)
That's it for the Promote Podcast this week. How related it has been de-risking cuts in yards has been a topic we're both obsessed with for quite a long time, so we're really glad we were able to chop it up. A shout out again to our sponsor for this episode, Vesto. See how its service gives CRA players a single, clear point of access for all their bank accounts by going to Vesto.com. That's V-E-S-T-O.com.
Will Krasne (27:03)
reminder, hit us up at partnerships at the promote.com. If you want to reach our audience of e-girls, West Village idiots, Trust Fund bros, the people who paid $3,000 a foot at Domino Park for a condo, all those people, they all listen to the promo and you want to reach them advertisers.
Hiten Samtani (27:21)
Absolutely, and please like, and subscribe to this podcast so more people can find it. We'll be back next week with more CRE Insider goodness, and on this one though, I reckon we probably need a part two at some point.
Will Krasne (27:33)
I so too. There's a lot more to build here. They have another tower, I think, going up that is looking for financing and there's a lot more stories to dig into about related here and then just related real-
Hiten Samtani (27:44)
bars.
guess we gotta do it. Alright, thank you for listening and thank you Will. Ciao!
Will Krasne (27:47)
Thank you.