You’re about to hear 3 minutes of the most insightful and impactful panel you’ve ever witnessed. So yeah, there you go—you’re going to want to run right out and start making investments based on this and work with these insights.

The reason why we’re focusing on supply chain real estate—besides it being a three-decade core competency of mine and our team—is because, in all the 35 years that I have been involved in supply chain investment, I have never seen a perfect storm, a confluence of supply and demand factors come together to validate the investment in supply chain infrastructure as I have seen starting 18 months ago, even pre-COVID, and obviously accelerating dramatically through COVID and continuing forward.

We are focused on real estate with general themes, and we execute within those themes, primarily supply chain and logistics. It’s so exciting to talk about the scintillating topic of supply chain and logistics, which, over the past five years, wasn’t mentioned much—but today alone, we’ve had 27 mentions on the general business channels.

We were in the market prior to COVID, for a significant senior mortgage refinance, and across the board, they took a broad brush approach, as Nar mentioned, of a 30% haircut due to COVID without any substantiating data. The real opportunities may lie in the delta between what appraisers are considering in valuations versus the reality of the underlying cash flow, the underlying potential, or simply the fact that we are seeing an across-the-board asset melt-up due to unprecedented multi-trillion dollar stimulus.

Well, there’s a geographical hedge, but frankly, you have intermodal transport consolidating. If the Kansas Southern and Canadian Pacific Railway merger actually goes through, you’re going to see another wave. I don’t know how many people here have studied that potential Canada-to-Mexico merger and to see what new locations are going to benefit from that. We have, and intermodal transport is going to additionally consolidate.

That consolidation will actually work against the geographical hedge because it’s going to become too homogeneous, and you will be unable to hedge with certain regions.

I’ll give you my best ideas in 10 seconds:

  • Big Box Real Estate into multi-tenant facilities, preferably dry or cold storage.
  • Hospitality Real Estate into student housing, or even better, graduate student healthcare housing adjacent to hospitals.

These are my two very specific ideas.