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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 (00:00.366)
You ready to talk Joe Chatrete and some other girthy moguls going at it?
Always love to talk about a girthy mogul.
Hiten (00:11.502)
Hello and welcome back to the Promote Podcast, your insider guide to the money and mania of the CRE market. I'm your host, Hatensem Tani, and I'm here again with Will Krasny. Will, you ready to cook?
Absolutely, let's go.
Hiten (00:26.83)
We have a pretty stacked lineup today guys. We've got Chitri, who is staring down $1.6 billion in defaulted debt. We've got Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder, who's got grand plans for a private ski utopia in Utah. And just how bad can real estate distress get when bare-knuckle debt funds are involved? Real bad. We're gonna find that out from Charles Cohn in Fortress.
Great docket.
Hiten (00:51.35)
Okay, let's talk to treat. So I kind of tend to divvy up the universe of real estate Titans by what most defines them. So if you think of related Steve Ross, right? And master builder, city shaper, things like that. There's others who are more financial engineers, John grave, Blackstone, Barry Stern, like sort of hype men and financial engineers. That's what defines them. And then you've got merchants who kind of live and die for the trade. And the king of that merchant class is a guy called Joe Jatriot, the man from Morocco.
Chitreet's been in and out of seemingly every trophy tower in Manhattan. Along with his brothers he controls a 14 million square foot odd portfolio nationally, but a lot of it is now at risk from Lender.
Yeah, I would differentiate it slightly. I think all those guys are kind of the same and they're sort of corporate and then Joe's retreat is what I would sort of call the type of guy it's from one of the Reichman Biographies, I just call them men with deep pockets. There you go. And they sort of come out of nowhere, you know, the money is nebulous, but there's a lot of it. A lot of it. And they put together these deals that
There's a lot.
Will (01:59.074)
would define entire companies just sort of over and over again. mean, if you look at the velocity of what Joe Trichet has done just in New York, it's staggering. I mean, it's the dollar volume in total, but it's just the amount of deals back to back to back to back to back. again, as someone who does this for a living, like one deal is really hard and he's doing seven a year.
I mean, these aren't Mickey Mouse things. Sears Tower, Willis Tower, Chicago, in New York, the Sony building, the International Toy Center, multifamily portfolio, 9,000 units at a time, half a billion dollars. And as he's doing this, there's this kind of myth that comes about. It's like a guy got a call and a French accented dude showed up at his office an hour later.
And what's interesting is that they are very cognizant of the disadvantages they have not being a brand name. Well, they are brand now, but a brand name like Steve Ross or Blackstone or Starwood. so the advantages, though, are that they don't have I.C. They can just show up with a hundred million dollars in a checking account and say, like, we're good to go. It's like, you know, Stuart Scott on Sports Center, you know, he eyes it, he tries it, buys it. Like, that's basically what this guy did at scale.
No credit committees, no investor committees. You just kind of go.
Yeah, and it's good and bad because when the vibes are good and you catch it right, you can make hundreds of millions of dollars, which you did. The downside is that, you know, risk is all the things that didn't happen and for a long time they didn't happen and now they have.
Hiten (03:31.822)
So what are we looking at right now? He's got about $1.6 billion of debt that he's defaulted on so far with another 300 million odd distressed. And he's trying to work things out with lenders in New Jersey, New York. He figured out a recap in Miami. That too, I don't know what that one's about. mean, come on, the guy can afford a $19 million home. That's like table stakes.
for his own personal townhouse.
Will (03:53.59)
I mean, every single real estate guy has a lot of less cash than you'd think.
This is your favorite quote. I remember you pinning this somewhere on Twitter as well. like, but like this is Joe Chitrede, man. I mean, this is like a generational player. So lenders are looking and probably reading about this guy defaulting on XYZ. Does that complicate the conversations he may have on a certain deal? you feel like this guy's bleeding out, do you change the way you approach him?
100 % because these are the types of things that they go from the 15th floor to the basement like that. You know, it's not like, you know, yes, you can kind of recap stuff here and there. would bet the books and records aren't amazing when they're trying to go do a recap. And if you're a lender trying to figure out which way is up, I mean, to treats the kind of guy who would be calling up the asset management associate at, you know, whatever shares company is the lender being like,
Hey, you've got $200,000 of my money in your insurance test. Bro, I want it. I've heard that before. So that's kind of what you're dealing with here. And it wouldn't shock me. You have this great portfolio, but it's a concept I'm sort of fascinated by where you either make your money off of the operating income of the business or off of financing events. And if you're trading this much, it's all off of financing events. And what happens if the capital markets change?
And financing events you mean getting in, getting out, selling a piece.
Will (05:15.266)
Yeah, refi, sell, like basically reliance on the capital markets and sort of how I was trained is like you always want to backstop your returns with cash and you know, treat was not in a lot of these properties long enough to actually do that or implement a business.
I know that we're getting a little crazy here, but he's a child of the Silk Road. Like his family comes from like a big Moroccan trading family and the trade, the deal is pretty much all that matters.
Yeah, I mean, like how much transfer tax do you this guy paid? Staggering amounts.
just billions of dollars worth of real estate. And he's always had this ability to partner with the institutions, even though I wouldn't call him necessarily a street guy anymore, but the operation is definitely a mom and pop. So Sony building 2013, he comes in, I don't know where with a guy called David Bistresser. He buys it for 1.1 billion at the time. And...
The second sort of bidder who was like in sort of second position was SL Green. And somehow Chitrid convinces SL Green to sort out his financing. So SL Green kicks in 300 million worth of Mez. Chitrid then goes gets a letter from Sovereign Wealth Fund in the Middle East, guaranteeing like another 600 million portion. So he is really good at convincing people to give him money.
Will (06:33.454)
That's a that's something you'll see SL green and for NATO do a lot a lot of these stories where the Cowboys buy something they're like well let me just put in some meds and like I really like my last dollar basis there on the the measure the preff.
What is the game here? The game is like, as long as the music doesn't stop, you kind of trade in and out, you make money as that goes. But in a situation like this where a lender is looking at a guy like TraTreet or the TraTreet group and seeing so many defaults across their portfolio, does the tenor of the conversations completely change?
Yeah, I mean, if you're a lender and you see someone who owes you hundreds of millions of dollars behind on his mortgage publicly, like whether or not it's an administrative error, that's scare the shit out of you. And so I would be enforcing all four walls of the dock as much as possible. mean, the the trick shot is that this guy is as savvy and strategic as they come. And you know, if you're just like good old Midwestern insurance company loaned him some money, like good luck. But no, I think that.
It definitely changes the tenor because people sort of see the writing on the wall where it's like, well, I had all this equity implied in all of these other buildings, but the problem isn't one building or this building or another building. It's just office writ large. And that's a lot of what he owns. And then on the multifamily side, it was a bunch of sort of the class C stuff across country that's gotten nuked.
biggest portfolios was this half billion purchase he got from a guy called Tyler Ross. Are you familiar with this guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, is. Mortgage fraud.
Will (07:58.975)
Yeah, I was in jail.
Yeah, and so you you buy this thing, it's like, whoops, it's actually 81 % occupied. Like, what are the odds? And but I think what's consistent is something you should think about a lot as a consumer of this media is when you talk about someone, you know, you see a profile of like brand new developer in like whatever city, you got to bear in mind, like, they're not seeing cash out of these things for years. Like the amount of cash it takes to move forward large scale development projects is staggering. And remember, this is a family. This is not
a public company. is not a private equity firm. This is like a family.
Yeah. So, you know, his attorney Leo Jacobs, a pretty colorful guy in his own right, was talking about quote bare knuckle fight or was it a brass knuckle fight? One of those. He was talking about that happening in New Jersey with his properties. And then he also said, look, Chitreet's not the only guy in this position. It's a lot of people in the market, which is true, but he's spinning that as an advantage. Like, Hey, we actually have a little more leverage than you think. Cause it's Chitreet and 10 other guys and the lenders just don't want this back. you, do you kind of.
Buy that.
Will (09:05.326)
I mean, yeah.
Will is rolling his eyes by the way, you guys can't see it, but that's what he's.
There's a lot of guys in that position. Are they all with the same lender? I mean, it's his job to put out good PR and try to spend it as well as he can. Because again, as we talked about previously, like Aura is the lowest cost of capital and missing mortgage payments on your own house is like really kind of pierces the Aura. And if people think that you can just sort of pull a hundred million dollars out of your hat and make this go away or somehow execute your way out of it, then yeah, you're to get more wiggle room, but.
All signs here point to very bad. But there's a lot of guys who are, you know, potentially self-immolating right now. So why did you want to talk about Joe?
Well, I think Joe's the one that everyone in the industry, when you talk to them, that's who they care about. They look at him as kind of a, if Joe Chitrete can pull this off, there might be hope for the rest of us. But if Joe Chitrete cannot pull this off, the guy with all the savvy, all the connections, all the money and kind of all the mystique, if he can't pull this off, then we're fucked. And I think it's a combination of who he is as a person and kind of...
Hiten (10:15.48)
the 40 years of deal making that have made him such a legend in the business and unquestionably a legend, combined with the quality of assets he has owned over time, right? Like the guy's face should be on the New York skyline and he should be one of the key chapters in any book written about New York real estate. So him kind of facing this kind of problem is very, very emblematic of the market writ large. There you go.
Hiten (10:48.526)
Will I think from all my friends, you're probably the one who watches the most Netflix. It's crazy how much reality TV you watch. Thank you. It's a little unhealthy, a little concerning I gotta say, but Reed Hastings absolutely legendary run in the media business. And now he's gone to Utah and he's bottom mountain. his whole shtick now is to kind of create this private ski haven for the elite. And I know that skiing is not really pure CRE markets.
but a lot of the characters involved here, a lot of the dynamics that come up in the story are things that I wanna discuss with you. So what's your vibe on Powder Mountain? Do know the summit guys by any chance?
Yeah, I grew up a couple of streets away from Elliott Fiznow. And then I worked at Carlisle not too far after one of their business partners. So I know those guys a little bit, yeah.
So I'm just going to give a very quick recap of what happened in 2013. These tech bros, I don't know what else to call them. A couple of them were involved in BizNow, the commercial real estate media company. A couple of them started something called Summit Series, which was this, think of it as like Ted meets McKinsey type of event. Very popular with business executives and real estate executives. So these guys went and bought a mountain in 2013. I think they paid about 40 million to buy this mountain, pristine powder in Utah.
And the idea was to create this kind of new age capitalistic utopia. So this is a peak we work time, right? Adam Newman's going around raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone's talking about raising the world's consciousness and sort of can capitalism do good in the world, et cetera. And this was a physical monument to that idea. They go and buy this mountain and the idea is to develop. again, you, know, dreams is one thing and then there's real estate development.
Hiten (12:37.067)
Will, what can go wrong when you try to develop a mountain from scratch? A city, a city-state on a mountain.
You can just say what can go wrong when you develop period because everything, literally everything. And then it's vertical and with crazy people and topography and a whole sort of social stigma that Reed Hastings has done exist. I don't know if he's never watched the classic movie Johnny Tsunami, but there's tons of stigma about private skiing. Academy kids ski. Public school is bored. It's been that way since we're invented.
No boy.
Everything, you know, when you're not dealing with one parcel, you're dealing with basically an entire, I mean, it's not a city, but just an area where people live. It's just really difficult and the weather's tough, which makes, mean, it sounds silly, but that's a big deal. Like you can't build, you know, three months a year when it's covered in snow. And you have guys who've built nothing, never built nothing, never, and are going to go try to do something incredibly difficult, which again, God bless them.
Nothing.
Will (13:40.29)
They could raise the money. I can barely raise the money for a down the middle multi-deal. like, again, this is like very much cope.
Yeah, again, this is again the salesmanship of it, right? The network of people that they cultivated through Summit and they were able to get a million here, a million there. They put the money together. But when I was a kid, I would play Street Fighter. If you knew the right code, you could kind of skip past Chun-Li and Guile, etc. and go straight to Mbisyn. This is what they're trying to do. They're going straight final boss with this development. It's hard.
Master Plan community development period is very difficult. It takes, you know, decades. I mean, I know a development in the Northeast where I remember the principal went to, I think, community meetings in two years.
Wow. Yeah, and you know the people who were involved and one of them actually ended up being the Messiahs we'll talk about in a second, but Martin Sorrell, like the number one ad guy probably in the history of the universe. We had Tim Ferriss, the self-help guru.
You know, we're four hours a week like what did they expect?
Hiten (14:41.974)
Okay. Hopefully people remember that book. And actually we were talking about Peak WeWork Energy. Another early investor in this thing was the WeWork co-founder, Miguel McKelvey. He bought into the mountain as well. But again, this is real estate development. It's hard, it's expensive, it's brutal. It creates a lot of rancor in the community and it did. And so at some point they ran out of time and money and they convinced Reed Hastings, who had basically made his billions at Netflix.
and was looking for something new to do and is a big snowboarder, they convinced him to kind of take over the project. So last year he bought a majority stake in the project. And so what Reed Hastings said, he had a pretty good quote, which I'm gonna read. He said, I know that in Europe, the idea of private skiing is just awful. He was talking to the FT recently, but there's no social stigma here and the market is so underserved. So I just find this concept of like, this is only for these people who can pay a lot of money for it. It used to be a formerly public.
land, public territory, now it's gone. I find that really interesting.
I mean, has Reed Hastings talked to a person in the world? I genuinely kind of am at a loss for words because it's just so out of touch. And again, I'm not trying to be to make a social statement here. I'm just speaking more about, you just you tell the people what they want to hear so you can build your freaking project. Like this is like what I'm talking about. know, Daniel Plainview even says like he told Eli's like, you know,
The road will go to the church. That's the first place it'll go. Like, where's that here? I mean, come on. Yeah.
Hiten (16:19.502)
Play the game, play the game a little bit. Let's say he has the cash to put this together, which he does. What does this, what is the end state of a project like this maybe?
I mean, I think like the best case is basically a, mean, frankly, the biggest mistake he made was not getting Mike Meldman involved and having this be like some sort of discovery land deal. Cause that's exactly what these guys do and are some of the best in the world at it. And that's why that's more of my point is that it's not that you, smart people have tried to do this. Like, I mean, actually the best case scenario is Yellowstone club. And that's actually a great long time. We have cross Harbor. That's how this.
That's a great case study.
looks the best where you sell the land sites for huge amounts of money and then you basically run an op co that runs the whole town. And ideally like you make money on the op co and you make a ton of money on the prop co, selling lots, owning the hotels, owning the restaurants, owning the housing for the people who work at the place. Like you create that whole ecosystem. It's not just about like, let's just build some beautiful houses and some great skiing. Like you have to really, you know, it's, like a company town from, you know, America West.
Hiten (17:32.238)
or you do like Gary Barnett at the Mayflower in Deer Valley.
I mean, what do they say? mean, real Gs move in silence like lasagna.
Yeah, I mean we're one day we're gonna do a special episode on that whole Gary Barnett Mayflower thing. It might just be my favorite non-New York story probably ever. Giant stealth assemblage, quasi public-private JVs, creative capital stacks, political clout, media manipulation. It's just crazy chutzpah and it's gonna be a lot of fun to talk about. we're gonna do that at some point.
Yeah. And I mean, think for me, think the most important thing is to say like this stuff happens and it's really hard to make successful, but there's people who are excellent at it. like cross Harbor has made like, you know, like $5 billion on Yellowstone and meld men is, you know, Discovery land, you know, unbelievably profitable and they've built really awesome communities. And then just the fact that like the guy who like, it like, put DVDs in the mail so I can do this. Like give me a fucking break.
Well, I think the confidence that gives a guy the ability to disrupt an industry like that is also the confidence that allows him to think that he could pull this off.
Will (18:37.998)
Yeah, I think that's right. you know, yes, Netflix is the most powerful company in media, but, you know, NIMBYism is more powerful than Netflix.
Hiten (18:54.254)
I want to get to our next story, but there's a little snippet that I found in Commercial Mortgage Alert, I think a week or so ago, that I thought was fascinating. I just kind of scribbled when I saw it, construction security blanket. There's a deal going on in the Lake of the Ozarks. These guys are trying to build this resort amusement park and they just landed a 200 million-ish, $234 million financing package from Excalibur. And the juicy thing here for me is that Excalibur is now looking to securitize.
the senior portion of that debt. And I haven't seen too many securitized construction loans.
part of it is like ideally the construction is not out there long enough to be securitized. So it's hard to make anything pencil. And so as we sort of seen in real estate throughout the last 50 years where there's capital, there's a way. so as we look at people are going to get creative and figure out ways to make this work, like I know they're kicking in a bunch of see-paste money. I mean, what I think you will see is if you have developer or if you have lenders now that have the flexibility and capability to do
different parts of the stack. That's a way to sort of make opportunistic returns in the credit market by offering these different pieces of it at different leverage or potentially getting equity kickers, structured exit fees or something like that to sort of juice your returns on the debt side. I think there's gonna be a lot more of that.
Yeah, it's super interesting here. It's like, so like a standard construction loan, it's basically the developers will be able to draw funds when they hit certain milestones in the construction and 40 odd million of this money will fund a reserve account that is allocated for covering two years of debt service. So interesting structure. It's weird that it's happening for the first time in the Ozarks of all places. Like we haven't seen this happen in New York or South Florida.
Will (20:43.95)
It's weird that it's not Bank of the Ozarks doing it.
Isn't there a risk of exposure if you have division A doing this and division B doing this? It's still the same company and exposure to one deal, is that not a concern for lenders?
If you have a balance sheet, it's one of the ways you can take advantage of it to generate excess returns is by being able to do creative structures that a more mainline bank subject to more regulation can't.
What the hell is Excalibur anyway?
No idea.
Hiten (21:16.998)
You hear of these lenders and I no idea where they came from. They just sort of pop up.
They got drawn from the stone and came out throwing hammers.
Another part of the cap stack was 130 million odd in TIFF, tax increment financing.
It's just basically robbing people to pay developers.
Hiten (21:47.362)
Both of us love the movies. Both of us have had good times at Quad Cinema. Quad Cinema is owned by one Mr. Charles Cohen, billionaire real estate Scion. We might have to question that billionaire tag now. I probably have to question that billionaire tag now. Yeah. But like being a Scion is a funny thing. When things are good, the times are good, you get to play philanthropist, you show up, you cut some ribbons. You're a steward of some of the city's most important assets. But when the market turns, you actually have to be a real estate operator. And that's not that easy.
And so kind of the nuclear scenario is Charles Cohen and Fortress.
Yeah, I mean it's sort of like in season one of Gotham girl when Nate's dad gets arrested and his wife's like all you had to do is stand there and not get arrested. All you had to do is not get super levered and blow up and give back, know, giant PG to Fortress.
And when we say a giant PG, we're talking $187 million PG. That is one of the most insane numbers I've heard of for a personal guarantee.
Yeah. you know, it goes back into our first point about to treat, but what's different here, I think, is that again, like he's had great assets and I'm sure if you looked at how much cash Charles Cohen personally has extracted from this portfolio over the last 30 odd years, it's a staggering amount. But the problem is, is that especially now, like you need to put in tons of cash to keep these things competitive. mean, even, you know, good buildings in New York that are fully leased.
Will (23:16.014)
You know they have had tons of catbacks are staring on the barrel like massive cash in refis never mind sort of older less competitive product and.
What's the SL Green, for NATO SL Green ones, either 285 or 270 Park Avenue? That's kind of a good example of what you're talking about, which is like decent building, prime location, you kick in money, you bully the Koreans out of their Mez, and you recap the building and you get a great tenant. Like you can make it work, but you kind of have to know what you're doing.
Yeah. And you also have to have a balance sheet. Like, again, like Charles Cohn's a guy like he was a very rich guy. But a lot of the money is sort of elsewhere. And, you know, frankly, like that's sort of it's sort of like the old Greek shipping thing, which is like in the good times, you take as much money out as you can. And then in the bad times when the lenders are like, where's the money? And you're like on the deck of your yacht being like, I don't have any money to put in. And, know, you restructure like, you know, that's one thing, but that's not what he's doing here, obviously.
I think these things, these buildings are a lot more capital intensive than they used to be. Um, and right now too, you're also dealing with fortress who is not afraid of bullying a very rich guy. They are, they, um, they did it with Harry Macklew on, uh, on his portfolio that he bought from equity office. Yeah, exactly. The world's world's largest hard money loan on real collateral. mean, I think the collateral is worse here, which is probably why fortress is moving so hard to enforce this.
$3.2 billion hard money loan.
Will (24:42.55)
And at the same time, Charles Cohen clearly has assets. He's shifting houses into other people's names. He's moving his four yachts. Allegedly, allegedly, you know, I would say don't sue me, Charles.
But like this is Fortress, right? We talked about like they've taken Maclau out of the cleaners before. They actually took Maclau's former son-in-law, Kent Swig, to the cleaners multiple times as well. And things got so bad that there was a little bit of an anecdote in our book where one of his lenders came to him with a credit card and said, hey, Kent, like go buy yourself some groceries. This one's unofficial. Just go and get some food for yourself for a couple of weeks. Like things had gotten that dramatic. And Fortress, I mean, they're in the business of getting paid back. They're not in the business.
of going to their credit committee and saying sorry.
Yeah, I mean, those are some of the scariest dudes out there. And I honestly think it's just a huge act of hubris to deal with it like this. again, there are ways, you know, these everyone here is big boys, like they know when things are going poorly. And they also look that, you know, it can be bad because they'll come after you and make you exercise 187 million PG. But at the same time, you can use that to your advantage because they're realistic. They are hyper realistic and hyper analytical.
And so if you come to them with a plan that makes sense, like they'll work with you. And I think what they are most upset about is that Charles sort of for a year was acting like this wasn't a serious problem. And had he come 12, 18 months ago.
Hiten (26:10.99)
They asked for more collateral. He gave them some shitty buildings. They asked for more information on his financials. He allegedly kind of like slow rolled them on that too.
And the other thing too is if you just like start selling stuff, know and like show some good faith like that goes a long way, know, and he did none of it and then I think he kind of thought they weren't they were like they're not gonna exercise this and You know, she looks should have read the New Kings in New York and he realized that they absolutely are gonna exercise this
You're not gonna get a divorce, we're not on a mile yet. Yeah.
again, it's just it's so tough because it's not like like, where's the new money going to come from? Like, it's not going to come from refinancing is probably not going to get a lot of equity from selling some of these things. And if you're a billionaire scion like this,
Wait, wait, but like on that, they've already taken, I mean, the UCC foreclosure here was like north of half a billion dollars. I think it was $538 million, which makes it by my account, probably one of the biggest UCC foreclosures of all time. They've already taken the assets back. So now they're just kind of extracting whatever they can from.
Will (27:16.514)
him. So the difference, there's a lot of good things about being a billionaire real estate scion, not having to deal with investment committee, having the freedom to go move quickly, being able to make a choice.
As Richard LaFrac said, I'm not a fund, I am the fund.
But the problem is that if it doesn't go well, you don't have any income coming in. You can't go raise another fund and generate fees off it and use it or use it to backstop your older investments. So that's the trick shot here is like, where's the new money going to come from? Like what value is going to be created? It's not a fun place to be.
It's also like the legacy no longer holds any value, right? When you're a Cohen in the good times, that's a big deal. When you're Charles Cohen, who I don't think is taken seriously as a real estate operator as much, no one's gonna cut, like there's an amazing statement in one of the stories, I think it was the real deal where one of his employees says, oh yeah, Charles Cohen is really involved in the business. Like, don't worry, he's involved. That's not the kind of thing that's gonna give anyone any confidence.
If someone has to like vouch for you that, I'm actually present. I, I look after my stuff.
Will (28:27.758)
I think that's exactly right. mean, and this is very similar to a lot of what another guy who's often in Europe on a yacht is dealing with too. And it really is pissing lenders off that you're there. He's on Instagram, you know, posting from be a Ritz and not from
He's mostly a St. Barth guy, A.B. Rosen's mostly in St. Barth,
Yeah, sorry. Sorry. I don't mean to dismerge him like that. you know, you need to be rolling up your sleeves like working this stuff out. that's again, it's we talked a little bit earlier about like, you know, doing this in the media and like, you know, getting good PR, like, the best PR is to like be in the office, like rolling up your sleeves, trying to do work to get these things leased up and refinanced.
Well, it's pulling a little bit of a Jamie Diamond here advocating for return to office, especially if you're a beleaguered mogul. Got to be in the office, got to roll your sleeves up. And I think the story kind of indicates when you're dealing with a debt fund whose business is blood and sort of bare-knuckle brawling, you can't expect to walk away unscathed. You're going to lose something. You're going to lose a lot more than something sometimes. So there's that old saying, you know, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.
With a debt fund, that's not true. With a debt fund, you owe $187 million in PGs, if you've signed that, they're gonna try to collect. And so in the next few weeks, we'll see how much of that they're able to enforce.
Will (29:51.84)
And it seems like the courts are not really putting up with Charles Cohen shtick either. Because, you know, I'll tell you one thing is that Fortress is prepared for court. You know, they are ready to go. And it seems to be unclear whether Charles until recently realized how serious this was.
HitenHiten (30:21.582)
That's it for the Promote Podcast this week. We had tons of juicy stuff. Chautry down the ropes, a Netflix billionaire's vision for a private ski resort, a securitized construction loan, and even the mother of all peachies.
We'll be back next week with more CRE Insider goodness. If you're jonesing for more CRE Insider content during the week, make sure you sign up for the promote. It really is catnip for those who live and breathe the business. Was there anything else we wanted to discuss? I forgot to ask you, do you ski?
Not as much as I used to, but when I was a kid I had one great lesson from Stein Ericson Lodge in Deer Valley which was, if you look good, you feel good. And if you feel good, you ski good.
feel good, you ski good. I think that's a pretty great way to end this. We'll be back next week. Thanks everyone, ciao.
Bye.