J Darrin Gross
I'd like to ask you, Ken Van Liew, what is the BIGGEST RISK?
Ken Van Liew
Yeah, I, you know, I think, you know, you can look at risk in a couple of different contexts, you know, you know, one, you obviously want to look at the risk, you know, of your personal life, and I've been in situations where I've done big projects where, you know, where I've, you know, placed all my assets in a trust and, you know, things work to go array, you know, in the sense of building projects, you know, and a lot of cases I used to have to put up performance bonds, you know, so, you know, it was a large sense of, you know, similar it's like a personal guarantee, you know, and when the bonding company steps in which you're you know, being insurance must be very familiar, you know, we used to get into, you know, sub guard policies and, you know, because you know, bonding was very expensive. The construction in the high rise we talked about before, the construction portion of it was always the highest risk, right. Some of those contractor contracts are in the neighborhood of $50 million, you're buying, you know, curtain walls from all different parts of the world, you know, I was traveling to Italy and Canada and, you know, making sure things are getting on the boat and time and, you know, all these little things, everything had to work like clockwork. And, you know, in that world, it was, it was extremely risky. And what we used to do is, you know, we would bond every single trade, if we had to, or if I couldn't bond the trades, I would have to sub guard the entire project, in order to satisfy the bank, you know, in case something happened on this, this, this mechanism was in place to save the day. You know, and, and I guess, you know, if you're just looking at an investment, you know, there's risk with that, you know, you want to make sure, you know, you're buying an asset, you know, there's not going to be this huge capital expenditure, you know, my, my expertise in building buildings, you know, I can go in and, you know, jump in an elevator shaft and tell you, you know, when the things going to, you know, you know, kind of die, you know, I can go and look at Central HVAC plants from building data centers, and, you know, what's know what's going to happen. So, you know, I think the biggest risk with with people buying existing assets, is not knowing what they're looking at, you know, and then all of a sudden, you're like, you know, shoot, I gotta, you know, upgrade the electrical service to 400 amps to get the tenant upstairs. And that means digging the road. And I had these two dentists that had the building in White Plains, they wanted to convert it, the residential, but we needed to upgrade the gas service in the water service, and they waited too long. And then they started building 400 unit next door, and I'm like, Guys, you got to pull the trigger. Now, you know, so those are the kind of risks, you know, not knowing what you don't know, or not, like we said before, recognizing what you don't know, and, and, you know, getting out of your own way, you know, because our egos, you know, I think, you know, sometimes on a personal level, so, so there's all different kinds of levels, I think all different kinds of contexts. You know, so, you know, I talked about personal existing assets, how the development is viewed and how, you know, I think that insurance aspect comes into play. You know, you know, in that in that case,