J. Darrin Gross
I'd like to ask you, Nick curls and Eric de Nicola. What is the biggest risk?
Eric DiNicola
I think in the business we're in and because we're in, you know, a few sort of real estate verticals, if we focus say just on the condo development They're, I feel like there are two major risks. One is sort of the political and municipality risk in the city or building. And I'll get into that a little deeper in a second. And then the other one is sort of a macro risk right now or in potentially, you know, the Fed raising rates over the long term, it does, you know, potentially reduce buying power for individuals, and we're selling condos. So the way we kind of, we don't necessarily think at our firm, that's going to happen. So at least not in the immediate future, there's potentially too many consequences for that on a macro scale. But these two things that we see, so when you're dealing with a city like Boston, there's so much red tape, that if you get into a project, without sort of a backup plan, or a worst case scenario, still kind of breaking even, for example, a very simple way to put it would be you buy a property in a three Family Zone, you should make sure if you had if you get denied for your variances, you get denied the Zoning Board of Appeals, you could still develop a three unit property, that would always break even the worst case, because by the winter, the why you can do that you don't need special permission, you're in a three Family Zone, you're allowed. So look at that scenario, if that scenario loses a lot of money, then you probably shouldn't get into it without protecting yourself and minimizing that risk either by having a contingency that Nick spoke about, or some sort of backup plan. So that's kind of the local political municipality risks, because in Boston is just very difficult to develop. And it's getting harder and harder, you know, not even every year, it seems like every month, there's much more red tape. And like I said, the other thing would be more interest rate risk, when you're selling condos. Buying Power does go down for buyers as interest rates go up. So one way we kind of, you know, try to eliminate that is we say, okay, look, where's the market at right now, a lot of developers project out oh, you know, the markets increased at this rate, this is the value of homes, you know, a year ago, this is what they're at now continue with that project that I'm going to sell them for this this much higher than they are now. We don't do that we project as is, even if it's two years old, even sometimes with like a 10% hit to see what this still work. And if it doesn't, you know, we second guess that project. So that's kind of how we try. That's how we see to the biggest risks we see. And those are kind of the ways we would eliminate them in our business. But also just the idea of diversifying within real estate where you have the different asset classes that we had, and the different types of verticals that were involved with, is sort of another way or to risk minimization.