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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, along with no-BS institutional insider Will Krasne. Now a top 80 pod on Apple in "Business & Investing." Also check out our 3x/week newsletter for industry insiders at https://www.thepromote.com/
Hiten Samtani (00:05)
Being a luxury condo developer is like being an illusionist. You have to take something ordinary, a patch of dirt, a decrepit old building, and transform it into a showstopping symbol of aspiration.
Something the world's richest people need to have a piece of. You have to cobble together funds from a murderer's row of capital sources, then corral architects, planners, builders, and marketers. This is all while battling financing, political, and engineering challenges on the fly. And even when you do the impossible and put something spectacular up, it doesn't always work.
This is the Promote Podcast. I'm Hiten Samtani. We have
Will Krasne (00:51)
And I'm Will Krasne
Hiten Samtani (00:52)
a bonus episode today for you: an unfiltered conversation with JDS Development's Michael Stern. Michael's built some of New York's defining condo projects, including Walker Tower in Chelsea and 111 West 57th Street on Billionaires Row. Some have been home runs, others not so much. He's also taken his talents to Miami, where he's developing two branded condo towers, the Dolce in Gabbana and the Mercedes-Benz Places. The Promote reported recently that the latter
Is finalizing a record construction loan from JPMorgan, part of a billion dollar plus financing package. Let's see if it all comes together. Michael's Maverick career, which has had more than its share of litigation and controversy, is emblematic of this business. A big thank you to our sponsors, Bravo Capital, a leading HUD & Bridge lender that you can find at BravoCapital.com, and Loan Boss your one-stop solution for CRE debt management. Find them at Loanboss.com. Let's get into our conversation with Michael Stern.
Walker Tower is a deal we're both fascinated by. I believe it's considered one of the more successful deals of that cycle in New York City, period. Tell us about how that all happened, how you sourced the deal, how you brought in the investors that you did, where you ended up was a little north of the projection. So let's talk through all of it.
Michael Stern (02:05)
Walker Tower was the most successful deal from an ROI standpoint of any condominium ever in the city. Some deals made a lot more money in the aggregate, but I think from an ROI invested dollars to return. Levered, I don't think too many deals did better than this one. It was financial crisis, September of 2008. I got a call from David Noonan at Newmark. David represented Verizon and they had this
Portion of a building they wanted to sell in maybe what was the ugliest building in New York. It hadn't been washed in 80 years. Had very few windows. It was very depressing. But it was the tallest building west of Sixth Avenue. Kind of super cool deco Gothic vibe to it. Verizon was staying in the bottom eight floors, and the building's 1916 wedding cake type building. So the bottom floors were massive, huge floor plates, through block.
And then the building started stepping back. So the building had a lot of great physical attributes, but it certainly wasn't an obvious deal. Everybody walked it, all the names you know, couldn't figure out what the heck to do with it. No one really had a vision that this thing can with a lot of spit and polish could be spectacular.
Hiten Samtani (03:17)
And at this point you weren't a player yet. Okay.
Michael Stern (03:19)
I'm still not a player. I'm trying
to get stuff built. I was building a bunch of stuff in the outer boroughs and bunch of twelve story rental buildings in Brooklyn and hundreds of single two and three family homes in Hillcrest, Flatbush, East New York, Far Rockaway, bunch of places around Long Island. So I was doing a lot of volume and doing a lot of construction.
Will Krasne (03:41)
And
how had you been funding those deals at that point? Most
Michael Stern (03:44)
Most
of those deals were simple deals, they were relatively short incubation periods, and we were basically borrowing hard money. I was putting up equity and borrowing hard money at like 14% and three points, and it didn't really matter because we were so efficient at building, especially the low rise stuff. In 12 months, we would build 100 homes, and this was the era of three percent FHA financing, Barney Frank incentivizing.
builders and we used to kind of internally bet whether the buyer of some of these homes would make their second mortgage payment. Most of them didn't because the first mortgage payment was taken at closing. And then they would squat there and then eventually they'd get kicked out three years later. But we were gone.
Will Krasne (04:27)
Those are N C double A loans, no coupon at all.
Michael Stern (04:29)
We didn't care because it was very quick in and out. And I was particularly good at getting things approved very quickly and being very creative with zoning. So we were able to take properties even in the boroughs that people thought you could build a couple of single family homes on and we could build fifteen town homes on a property other people thought they could build only two homes on. So we were doing a good amount of volume, but this was not winning any architectural awards.
Will Krasne (04:56)
But you're smiling. That must have been the most fun you've ever had.
Michael Stern (05:00)
There were definitely simpler times.
Hiten Samtani (05:01)
One of the things Will and I will often look at almost like a guilty pleasure is the one eleven West fifty seventh org chart, just to show you how complex things have gotten.
Michael Stern (05:12)
I've seen way more complicated org charts than that one. But that was a big boy deal for sure.
Hiten Samtani (05:16)
Sure.
Back to Verizon. Yeah.
Michael Stern (05:18)
Yeah,
so September of two thousand eight, I toured the building. I get a an alert on my phone that the world had just ended. Lehman crashed literally the day I walked it. And I'm like, all right, great time to be looking at this like depressing potential B office building in Chelsea. Great plan. But sign of the times that I was able at that moment in the financial crisis to get Verizon to kind of take me seriously as a twenty-nine year old kid who had built stuff but not doing a lot of high profile stuff in the city.
So I tied that building up for I think the number was twenty five million two hundred and fifty thousand.
Hiten Samtani (05:52)
With
three million hard. Yeah, it's very good. W what happens with Barry?
Michael Stern (05:56)
Barry didn't come in till later. I had an investor who was putting up the last three million dollars bailed a week before closing. I ended up getting connected with Kevin Maloney at PMG. And Kevin ended up writing that last three million in the stack and becoming a a minority partner in the deal. And Kevin was a very good partner on that deal. And then we brought in Starwood about a year later. We stepped it up slightly. We figured it out. We did a bunch of asbestos abatement, which was
Nightmare in that building. And before we ever built anything, we had to do what's called a separation scope. We had to separate Verizon from the future condo, which was very complex. Verizon has multimillion dollar switches and equipment that you have to really respect. Their FIO switches are worth more than the condo. So you gotta be really careful. So we did the separation work and then about a year later we brought in Barry.
Hiten Samtani (06:50)
Is it true that you take him up to the roof and he's just sold by the view and the potential there?
Michael Stern (06:55)
It was the way I got sold too. The first thing I do whenever I walk a building is I go up to the roof first. I always start at the roof. And when you go up to the roof, you understand that you're on this island of views. There's nothing tall west of Sixth Avenue. Today there's some more stuff that's kind of gotten built along the West Side Highway. But back then there was a historic district that started on seventeenth Street and West absolutely nothing that was taller than eight, ten stories. The views were insane.
The other physical attribute of this building that was really good is it had a million setbacks. So it was a wedding cake building with a lot of terraces. So between the terraces, the views, and the ceiling heights, it had fourteen foot ceilings on the bottom, twelve and a half foot ceilings on the top. The physical bones were amazing. The facade was a disaster. The elevators and stairs were all in the wrong place. So we had to relocate all the cores. We added seven floors to the top. And one of the more complicated things was we had to put in new cooling towers for us and Verizon. Massive capacity because of Verizon's
network needs. We had to build a steel structure, install the new cooling tower, and then whack the old one while the new one came online, which was building steel over spinning fan blades that an iron worker makes a wrong step. It was kind of fun.
Will Krasne (08:06)
For that separation agreement and for that scope of work for Verizon, does that get done after you close on the building? Or is that part and parcel with doing the PSA?
Michael Stern (08:14)
So we did a very interesting structure on that building, which was what allowed it to work. We did an eighteen month sale lease back. So we bought the building from Verizon, but we did a triple net lease back for eighteen months to just kind of buy space past the end of the world financial crisis to figure it out.
Will Krasne (08:31)
Is that how you were able to finance it then too?
Michael Stern (08:33)
Yeah. So we financed the deal originally with a hard money loan from one of my favorite lenders in the world, G4.
Hiten Samtani (08:41)
Trucking empire that is now a real estate empire. Fun.
Michael Stern (08:44)
I remember sneaking through these old office partitions in this depressing Verizon space in the middle of winter with Robin from G4, who was of course in this like fabulous fur coat. They were great. It was not a cheap loan, but they were very fair. And then we were able to do a deal with Marcos and Brendan, and of course Barry. And Barry is the best partner to have. Barry was instrumental in helping us source the financing. We ended up doing about a hundred million dollar loan from Wells Fargo.
When they were still doing construction lending. So really good conventional stack at the end of the day, but a little bit of a a hard money stack to set it up and get it going. But again, we had the Triple Net Verizon lease covering all the operating expenses. Just buy us space to get the separation done, get this incredibly complicated design done, relocating the cores, all the additions.
biggest tilt and turn windows in the world on the parallel path. We were also having a whole debate with Starwood and with Wells Fargo about how we're gonna do this non union because back then there was no such thing as high rise residential being done non union.
Hiten Samtani (09:47)
certainly been the victim of the inflatable rats at several points in your career.
Michael Stern (09:51)
Badge of pride. Yeah.
I have my own rat for a while. I'm not important enough to Gary La Barba anymore.
Hiten Samtani (09:56)
believe
you underwrote eighteen hundred a foot blended sixteen
Michael Stern (09:59)
Sixteen fifty.
Hiten Samtani (10:00)
fifty, okay. And you ended up well double that around four thousand a foot.
Michael Stern (10:05)
North of four thousand, yeah.
Hiten Samtani (10:06)
Will has this great line
Will Krasne (10:08)
It's a friend of a big condo project in Brooklyn and he's like, qualitatively, everybody's thrilled. Quantitatively, nobody's thrilled.
Hiten Samtani (10:17)
Yeah.
Michael Stern (10:18)
I've had my share of deals that were qualitatively amazing and quantitatively non amazing.
Hiten Samtani (10:23)
Just how well it worked out.
Michael Stern (10:25)
I don't remember the IRR and the equity multiple exactly, but I can tell you that on about a hundred and twenty five million of invested capital that's leveraged, maybe a hundred and fifty all in, condo sales were well north of five hundred million dollars. So I let you guys do the math, but the IRR was crazy. the equity multiple was fantastic.
Will Krasne (10:46)
And
it sold quick too, which is really important for these things.
Michael Stern (10:50)
It
sold quick, but it also it sold for numbers that were totally unprecedented. And the biggest thing back then, and I remember meeting some of the brokerage houses at the time who had their data-driven spreadsheets about what the unit sizes should be most were suggesting these kind of railroad smaller units because you have to watch the absolute price point on a let's call it a A minus, B plus block in Chelsea, right? No one's gonna pay.
Whatever that absolute price point is for a large unit. A, we disagreed, but B, you kind of couldn't fight the bones of the building to do small units. This building was very big floor plates. The windows, the apartments were like 70 feet deep off the windows. And you had to kind of lean into doing a pre-war grand apartment that has an entry foyer, that has a grand gallery, that has a home office study. These units were enormous for the time. It's not that we just were reckless.
We just like bigger, bigger's better. You were fighting what the building wanted to be. Barry definitely saw it and let us do the bigger units that we wanted to do. And by the way, we ended up rinsing and repeating 'cause we did Stella Tower with Barry right after is it
Hiten Samtani (12:03)
True that he also owned the dirt at one hundred eleven.
Michael Stern (12:06)
Yeah. Barry actually owned the dirt. We called it the Ritz Thrift Fur Shop. It was this old, weird fur shop on the forty-three foot wide lot next to Steinway. And Barry owned that lot and he owned the air rights from I don't know if you guys remember this. It's like an antique shop and a horror show and a restaurant called Jekyll and Hyde on Sixth Avenue.
Hiten Samtani (12:27)
Do not remember this.
Michael Stern (12:29)
So anyway, so he owned the air from that and he owned that lot and he was kicking around.
trying to acquire the Steinway building, but it was n not in the cards at that time and looking at different options and studying it. So Barry came to me and asked me to get involved and try to figure out what the heck to do with it.
Hiten Samtani (12:48)
On the walker, Michael, it was also your first exposure to this completely different buyer pool, which to your credit you were able to bring downtown. They typically do not come downtown, but it's this global, ultra wealthy type of buyer, because I believe your flagship unit sold for fifty one odd million.
Michael Stern (13:06)
Yeah, aside from the fifty million dollar unit, which is a another story, but you know, an average three bedroom in that building was north of ten million at that time when Chelsea is a big number. And I think that the Walker Tower buyer was a very unique buyer also for the market because it really wasn't a finance building. It was much more of a creative buyer. Actors and actresses and artists and it wasn't finance pros.
Hiten Samtani (13:32)
Your flagship buyer ended up being a completely different story.
Michael Stern (13:35)
It was a strange experience, right? We had the penthouse there, we were asking fifty five million for it. Kevin got the first call on that. There's somebody that wants to come see it.
A fleet of escalades show up. They go upstairs. They spend, I don't know, seven minutes up there. By the time we came down, I think one of the escalades had gotten booted because they hadn't paid their parking tickets. it was just very strange. The deal came together super quick. Rob Ivanhoe at Greenberg reached out and said, This cash is sitting in my escrow account. This guy's real. The guy had Rob Ivanhoe do his condo deal. Like, I don't think Rob Ivanhoe ever does individual condo transactions.
Hiten Samtani (14:16)
For the audience, we're speaking about Khadem al Khobesi, who ran a sovereign fund out of the UAE called IPIC, which became a central player in the one MDB Joe Low scandal. So Michael, when this is all going down, there's a lot of attention being paid to your building and you're navigating all that.
Michael Stern (14:32)
Honestly not really. We sold the unit and then a year or two later this whole one D B scandal came out and the Justice Department ended up seizing the unit or whatever. But we worked with them to, you know, secure it and deal with the common lien charges and whatever. They ended up reselling it. It wasn't like that disruptive for us other than I think there was a a while that the common charges weren't being paid. But the guy never lived there, never moved in.
submitted a a a board package to add like I I kid you not, I think four or five hot tubs that never went anywhere. It was just strange. And then someone else bought it. Very nice guy.
Hiten Samtani (15:10)
You
have such a massive home run relatively early in that product type. So that allows you to go and do the Fitzroy, the Stella, etcetera. Will was very interested in getting your take on how you think more broadly about risk because everything you do is quite lumpy. It's a lot of conviction up front for a potential big payoff down the road. So
Michael Stern (15:30)
Say first of all, not everything we do is that. We have a rental portfolio that is the opposite of risky and sexy, that we don't really publicize not stuff we've necessarily built, although we're building quite a few rentals in Florida now. Very large scale live local rentals, which I think are not super risky. But let's go with Walker Tower. We'll start there. We were in it for a hundred dollars a square foot. I just didn't see that as very risky. I figured we'd figure it out.
Okay, when I look at Stella Tower, which was also a very successful deal that we did with Starwood, a conversion in Hell's Kitchen, similar to Walker, not as frothy in the the pricing, but a very, very solid deal that performed really well. We were in that deal a couple of years later for under $200 a square foot. We did American copper, similar thing. It was very large scale. Sh we bought it from Sheldon Solo, which was not easy. I think it's the only piece of land that Sheldon sold ever while he was still around.
Hiten Samtani (16:27)
You had bow post as your money on that one.
Michael Stern (16:29)
With Bowpost as a partner, awesome partner, very swift deal. Sheldon gave us seventeen days to go from zero to closed. By the way, the record was when we closed the acquisition loan on Steinway, we had a two hundred and thirty million dollar loan that we got done in eight business days with Annally.
Will Krasne (16:48)
Like can you even get a title report?
Michael Stern (16:51)
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. But again, we paid 200 bucks a foot for that land to build an 80-20 rental with a 20-year tax abatement for 200 bucks a foot. I felt pretty good about that. I felt like we would figure it out. So yes, we built a a million square foot pair of towers that kind of dance and clad in copper with the first sky bridge in 80 years. 800 units, very big, but the basis was sound. And you can't overcome a bad basis and all the
The deals that go really sideways, there was something wrong with the basis, usually.
Hiten Samtani (17:25)
on the deals that have gone bad when you do a post mortem, is it primarily that? Is it bad partners, bad timing, bad basis, combination of those? So let's put Brooklyn Tower in that category for sure.
Michael Stern (17:35)
I don't put it in that category because as you said before, some are qualitative wins, some are quantitative wins. Brooklyn Tower for sure was a massive qualitative win. The building is an incredibly high quality, iconic tower that'll be iconic forever. Timing of the credit market sometimes just doesn't work in your favor. We had historically high interest rates after we had completed that building. So the building was occupied. We had a mature loan.
And interest rates were two and a half times higher with no cap. So unfortunately, sometimes the building's just not worth the debt and the timing just doesn't work out. I would have loved to make more money on it. Of course, it just wasn't in the cards with where interest rates were. It didn't make sense for us to to hang on to the building.
Hiten Samtani (18:23)
And what eleven? It's been a long, long journey on that one. Eleven
Michael Stern (18:26)
Yeah, one one's
been a a long journey that is a true legacy building. It's almost surreal when you look at it. How the heck did that get built? I know a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. It was like a ten year deal. We did have a a a difficult capital stack on that one. We had an investor that litigated Ambase for it's going on I think it was filed in twenty fifteen or so, sixteen. That's how long that litigation went on. Obviously I'm not gonna comment on litigation in any particularity, but
That definitely made it difficult. We had a a capital stack that needed to be restructured in the middle. And then we had a crane accident a couple of years after that in Hurricane Thelma. but I don't think anybody really in the long run is gonna remember any of that stuff. That's like inside baseball stuff. People look at that insane, slender, gorgeous terracotta building that's on the fifty yard line of Central Park that almost defies reality.
Yeah.
Hiten Samtani (19:27)
been
a big part of the branded condo movement in Miami. I know that there is action at the Mercedes-Benz places. there's been reports, including by the promote, that you're bringing in Jeff Sofer. And I know you have a big construction loan lined up. I don't know how much you can say, but I gotta ask.
Michael Stern (19:43)
Yeah, not much 'cause we don't talk about deals till they're closed. But listen, Miami is the place where all the branded condos started. You actually have to give Gildeezer credit for kind of starting it. Very clever guy and a very good marketer and has really good instincts. In New York, the best buildings brands are not brands. You look at two twenty, fifteen, right, one eleven, these are addresses. There's no branding. Even you look at what we did with Walker Tower.
We made up that brand. We invented a story about an architect who was unremarkable.
Hiten Samtani (20:17)
What I f I I can't believe I forgot to ask you about that. Tell me about the book. Pre-Michael Stern, Ralph Walker is a notable architect, but that's about
Michael Stern (20:26)
I would say he wasn't even notable.
Will Krasne (20:29)
Architect.
Michael Stern (20:30)
Yeah,
he was an architect. We had bought this Verizon building and everybody called it the Verizon Building. Who the hell wants to live in the Verizon building? Especially with the way it looked. How are we gonna get people to spend four thousand dollars a foot and come live in this building? We gotta come up with something. Cause we had runway, we had time, before we ever started marketing condos, we decided that we were gonna do a an exhibition to the public on this great architect, Ralph Walker. And we
Commissioned and published a book with Rizzoli, Richard Pendicio, who's a genius. We've branded with Richard, I don't know how many times, but it was his idea originally, and it was brilliant. And we did an exhibition in our lobby open to the public that we curated with Ralph Walker's works, which nobody had ever heard of or seen really. and we published this coffee table book. And the irony of it is a couple of years later, Ben Shaul, who's a friend,
when he outbid us and bought what became you know Barclay Street. The
Hiten Samtani (21:32)
The other Verizon building.
Michael Stern (21:33)
Verizon building. He called it Ralph Walker Tribeca. We were bursting out laughing, you know?
Hiten Samtani (21:39)
Do you remember how much you paid to commission the book? 'Cause I'd imagine it's like a few thousand dollars.
Michael Stern (21:43)
Wasn't a lot.
Will Krasne (21:44)
Okay, that was my question. Is is that in the marketing pro forma?
Michael Stern (21:47)
We did no advertising on that building at all. Zero. No digital advertising. No print. No nothing. Just broker events and word of mouth. We very early, while the building was still a skeleton mess, made a weatherproof floor and built a model on the tenth floor. And it was really breathtaking. And that's how we sold that building. And by the way, Stella Tower was named after Ralph Walker's wife is Stella. That's what became Stella Tower. You know, you gotta lean into your assets.
Hiten Samtani (22:16)
What's the part of the development game that really gets the juices flowing?
Michael Stern (22:20)
I'm an engineering geek at heart. I really love finding zoning solutions, engineering solutions to complicated problems. The other parts that I don't love as much, the legal, the insurance, the mundane, the HR. When you're a developer, you're kind of a jack of all trades, not necessarily a master of any. You're quarterbacking a team of professionals, architects, engineers, marketing. You have to know enough about everything, right? It's not as easy as people think to do these big projects, which is why.
Really when you distill it down, there's only a couple a handful of people who do it at all.
Will Krasne (22:55)
something I don't think a lot of our listeners totally understand. Going even back to the boroughs when someone thought they could build two and you figured out a way to build fifteen, practically speaking, how does that work? Is that just you read line by line the zoning code and understood a loophole or something like that?
Michael Stern (23:09)
I treat zoning like the Talmud.
It's not just about reading it line by line, but really challenging the plain reading, the obvious reading. I'll give you a really good example. Walker Tower, we added 50,000 feet of zoning on a building that was technically overbuilt. I don't mind saying it now because they re-road zoning to prevent people from doing it again, but that's okay. We had a building in a zone that was 120 feet tall. This building was 350 feet tall. And we ended up adding seven floors and 50,000 feet by recapturing legacy.
FAR that was behind parapets. I actually worked this with John Setra, who I worked with very closely on that. And we determined that if we take the parapets and we lower them, we would be able to recapture and relocate all the FAR that was on the terraces and add it to the top of the building. So we added 50,000 feet, tremendous value by literally just lowering the parapets. And we had this whole philosophical debate with DOB about it.
And it's not like they just accepted it. We got audited on it. We had to explain it, I don't know, three times. And we were right. Nobody had ever thought about it, but Article One, Chapter Seven, which governs like conversions that were pre-78, had a loophole that basically allowed us to recapture it. It's just looking at it and challenging the plain meaning and going, Well, what does it really mean? And how can we apply it creatively to find value? We did a lot of interesting things on 111 too.
One of the first buildings that use what's called a Waldrum diagram, which is this complex mathematical formula that governs front setback. And that's why we were able to get one eleven so tall.
Hiten Samtani (24:49)
What was the height to width ratio again on that one?
Michael Stern (24:51)
It's twenty four to one. Very proud of the engineering of that building, not just 'cause it's so slender, but the sway is correctly damped. We really worked hard at making sure the movements were damped correctly, which some of the other super talls, which I won't get into, have had
Hiten Samtani (25:06)
Right, I was gonna say that has become a huge talking point and obviously something the media dinns out on. After you pay that boatload of money, the one thing you don't want is bad livability. And we've seen that some of these towers have reached the point now where five, seven years in, the shine has worn off literally. Quite literally. We're seeing so much of that backlash now.
Michael Stern (25:25)
Without getting into anyone else's building and there's some amazing buildings that I respect massively. But we really worked hard to make sure that this building would stand the test of time. You can go walk the building now, been up for whatever, seven, eight, nine years. It's pristine.
Hiten Samtani (25:38)
I got two questions for you. Want the easy one or the hard one first?
Michael Stern (25:42)
give me the hard one.
Hiten Samtani (25:43)
If we Google Michael Stern today, the first couple of pages of Google results are not kind. I know you can't speak about specific litigation. I'm not going to ask you about that, but there's a decent amount of headline risk when it comes to you. How do you navigate that? A personally, and B, how does it impact your going forward business, getting a new construction loan, getting an equity partner, getting something built?
Michael Stern (26:05)
But I don't let it keep me up at night because at the end of the day, we just have to push forward and get our stuff done. The business has become very litigious, very snipey. The instinct when somebody does something well isn't like to cheer them on. It's usually to kind of take pot shots. That's just the society. I kind of took a couple year break from participating in the media because I'm not a huge fan. Maybe that was a mistake. But it doesn't really impact our business. At the end of the day, if the deals are great.
and they're fundamentally sound, they get done. I do think there's there's some noise and it's frustrating and annoying, but it's par for the course and it's nothing new. The Real Deal wrote an article this month and I think it's the third article like that they've written over the last twenty years.
It's kinda fun. Somebody said I look like Superman. That's kinda fun. Put a cape on maybe.
Hiten Samtani (26:56)
A lender checking you out, Googling something, seeing a headline like that, does it not complicate a conversation that you have?
Michael Stern (27:03)
It complicates a conversation and it's something that that we're gonna deal with. But it's not the end of the world. I try to keep my humor about it and yeah, don't really have much more to say about that.
Hiten Samtani (27:15)
And then the easy one, is there anyone in this business or another business that you want to emulate or you think about as a model?
Michael Stern (27:21)
I don't know about thinking as a model. There's so many people in the business that I have a ton of respect for. I don't want to single out some, but like if you ask me who is the quintessential iconic New York developer, I'd probably say Harry McLeod. If you look at what he's done over time to trailblaze and pioneer, hard to beat what Harry's done.
Hiten Samtani (27:43)
Michael Stern of J D S Development, thank you so much for being with the promote.
Michael Stern (27:46)
Thanks guys.
Hiten Samtani (27:53)
We appreciate Michael getting into the deeds of the game with us. It's the kind of inside baseball you can only find at the promote. We'll return Wednesday with our regular show. After three weeks on the Reichmanns Trail, it's gonna be nice to dive back into the news cycle. So we'll see you then. Ciao!