Christina Scarlatto:

I think I'm lucky in the fact that I came from soccer and I had all these things that made me a very powerful woman. And for me, I feel like being different was actually an advantage. You walk in a room full of suits and I am not. I look different and I think it helps me stand out and I want to stand out. I want people to know who I am for better or for worse.

Nancy Lashine:

Hello and thanks for tuning into Real Estate Capital. I'm your host, Nancy Lashine of Park Madison Partners. Park Madison is a capital solutions and advisory firm serving the global institutional real estate business. We sit at the intersection of real estate managers and their capital partners. In bringing these two groups together, we speak to a broad range of thought leaders about recent trends in real estate investing, capital markets, operations and technology. And on this show, we try to bring some of those insights and conversations directly to you. Our guest today is Christina Scarlatto, the senior portfolio manager for Real Assets for the World Bank Pension. Cristina is responsible for strategic planning, monitoring existing managers, and evaluating prospective managers. Cristina has worked with the World Bank Pension Fund for 18 years, having started her career in the World Bank's Treasury Department in 2004. Unusually for this day and age, Cristina started working for the World Bank right out of school, and while she has moved teams, she has never moved employers.

Cristina was past chairperson and still serves on the board for the Pension Real Estate Association or PREA, which is one of the most important nonprofit organizations in the institutional real estate industry. PREA sponsors educational forums, research initiatives and events for its over 700 corporate members. During this conversation, Cristina and I discuss themes like navigating difficult market cycles, the art of manager selection, her views on real estate portfolio construction, and what it means to be a powerful female leader. I think you'll enjoy Cristina's honest insights about the real estate industry and building a career that you love. Our conversation begins when Cristina gives us a glimpse into some of the formative moments that shaped her trajectory.

Cristina, so great to have you joining us today. You've been busy. In fact, it took a while for us to get this on the schedule, so I'm really thrilled that we finally have you here, and I know a lot of people are excited to hear what you have to say. You already have a long list of accomplishments on your resume, but first, let's roll back the tape a little bit. You grew up in the Northeast, you played soccer in college, and as I thought about it, those were the days when women's soccer was just gaining momentum. So tell us a little bit about how you got into that.

Christina Scarlatto:

I grew up with boys, not siblings, but just boys in my neighborhood, and they always played soccer, so I would join them. And actually my first team, I wasn't allowed to play in games because I was too young, so I just went to practices, but I was the only girl on the team and I scored all the goals, so I really enjoyed it from day one. There was one other girl and she picked flowers, so she wasn't for me.

Yeah, I played soccer all my life and my dream was to play in college, and I got to fulfill that dream to play in the Big East at Seton Hall. It was a pretty amazing experience, one that I will never regret, although my knee doesn't work anymore, so there's that. My parents were super encouraging. They never missed a game. My dad would even show up to Seton Hall on a Wednesday. I'd look up in the stands and he'd be sitting on the bench waiting for my game to start, and then he'd take me out to dinner and he'd drop me off on the way back up to the train station in Newark, and he would take the train home. So he'd come up for the day literally just to watch me play soccer.

Nancy Lashine:

Oh my gosh.

Christina Scarlatto:

We grew up in Arlington.

Nancy Lashine:

Well, that's amazing. That's very cool.

Christina Scarlatto:

Absolutely.

Nancy Lashine:

And you speak Spanish fluently, is that right?

Christina Scarlatto:

Yes. My dad was from Puerto Rico. My mom was from Cuba, spent summers in Puerto Rico, so Spanish was always part of our house. My friends used to joke that they would just listen for their names when my mom got [inaudible 00:04:04].

Nancy Lashine:

Oh, that's great. So how'd you get interested in real estate? Was it just coincidence? How did that all come about?

Christina Scarlatto:

Sure. My mom actually worked at the bank, and so I had an opportunity to intern here while I was in business school. And so I'd been at the bank for a while. Actually, when I finished business school, they were actually letting people go. They were downsizing. So I started looking for a job somewhere else, but one of my mom's former colleagues got wind and thought that that was preposterous and basically opened the door for me to join the risk and rebalancing group that supports the pension fund. So it wasn't the most exciting job, but it certainly was interesting to learn more about pension.

And then back in 2007, real estate private equity split. And David Colette, who I know you know well, basically was the real estate team and he needed to build a team. So he pulled me aside and he said, "You know more about the pension fund than I do, and I can teach you about real estate. That's easy." He didn't hire me on the spot, but when I did go to get interviewed, he refused to interview me. He just sat in the room. We just talked about pretty much anything but real estate. So my first day on the job, I was actually in Chongqing, China underwriting a not so good agent manager because I transitioned. So I spent part-time working on two jobs for a little while, and then my first full day on the job, I was actually in China. So it was quite an experience and I had no idea what anything was. I didn't know what a GP was. I didn't know what an LP was. I didn't know what a PPM was.

Nancy Lashine:

And your Spanish was not helping you, I'm assuming at that point?

Christina Scarlatto:

Not in China, no, but it was an amazing experience and I never looked back. I love real estate. It's definitely a super fun industry to be in.

Nancy Lashine:

So I remember the first time I went to China to meet with a real estate manager and he spoke zero English, I spoke zero Chinese. And I had to look around at other people to gauge, because so much of this business is knowing if you trust somebody and without being able to even understand tonal intonations, because, of course, in Chinese it's so different. How did you get comfortable? Well, you probably weren't very comfortable first day on the job, but over time, how did you pick local managers in a place like China?

Christina Scarlatto:

Like you said, it's a people business. At the end of the day, I always say these are marriages. 10 years, likely much more than that. More than that because hopefully we'll invest in more than one fund or if things don't go well, they never last 10 years, they always last closer to 20 has been my experience. So it's a people business. It's underwriting the numbers as much as it is underwriting the people and who is driving those numbers. So like you said, getting to know people more than just beyond the conference room, being able to visit assets, how they react in good times, but also how do they react in bad times? How do they salvage value? So much of that is not in the numbers. And so getting to the bottom of that is a huge piece of our due diligence process.

Nancy Lashine:

Do you think about how you invest differently because you're investing for a pension fund than you might like you are an endowment, or if you were at a for-profit bank, for example? Maybe we should take a minute just to explain what the World Bank is and does, what its charter is.

Christina Scarlatto:

Sure. I cover real assets for the World Bank Pension Fund. So it's the pension years of the bank. So we're a little bit of an island of the rest of the bank. The World Bank mission is to end world poverty. It's written on the wall in our main building covered by all the flags of our member countries, which is pretty much every single country in the world with a few exceptions. But we are sitting on a little bit of an island because while we're neither domestic nor foreign, we're multilateral. We are based here in the US and therefore, we follow fiduciary duties in terms of return. So return is our first and foremost is to make returns for our pensioners.

In terms of being an endowment or pension or public or what have you, I think I have the best of all worlds, and maybe that's why I've become a lifer here. But we're fully funded. We have no liquidity issues. They don't really look to us in the real estate portfolio, real asset's portfolio for income. We can take a lot more risk like the endowments do, but we don't have to worry about liquidity like a lot of them did coming out of the GFC and so forth. And our process is pretty straightforward in terms of approvals and things like that. So we have the best of all worlds. David used to joke that the grass is always greener because, obviously, things seem harder when you're living in it, but when you go outside, you realize others have to present to boards and have more bureaucracy to deal with. Thankfully, we're a little bit more streamlined here at the bank.

Nancy Lashine:

And are your liabilities in dollars or are they in these currencies all around the world?

Christina Scarlatto:

Dollars for the most part, the strong majority, 90 plus percent in dollars. There is an option to get a local currency, which typically ends up being Euro, but predominantly our liabilities are dollars.

Nancy Lashine:

So how do you think about your real estate strategy? Are you looking for total return? Are you competing with private equity? What's the role of real estate in the portfolio for you?

Christina Scarlatto:

Short, inflation hedge. Ha ha.

Nancy Lashine:

Ha. Is real estate really an inflation hedge? We hadn't killed that question a few years ago?

Christina Scarlatto:

It's funny because we've been carrying that definition for so many years and it never really meant much till today. Now you're like, "Ooh, I hope that works out." No, so our benchmark is CPI plus 400. It's a long-term benchmark. We think of things in a more long-term spectrum. Obviously, we look at quarterly numbers, but we're more focused on the long-term numbers. Our objective is to find the best risk-adjusted opportunities. I think we tend to come at it with a little bit of a barbell approach where we do invest in core, not for the reasons most invest in core, but then take on a lot more risk, like the endowments do. So we'll do a lot more opportunistic and value-add, but then create that barbell so that we have some downside protection if things go awry, but we can take advantage of the upside in good markets.

Nancy Lashine:

And how have you been repositioning the portfolio of the last few years?

Christina Scarlatto:

It's a ship. It's massive and it's hard to reposition, especially because we only invest in funds. But I would say if you go back to probably starting in 2013, coming out of the GFC, we did a big push in a multifamily for all the reasons that now seem really obvious, but at the time, it was a little bit scary, but the biggest one being, obviously, the homeownership rate coming off. I would say around '13, we started to get a little bit nervous that multifamily was getting expensive, so we're figuring out other ways to take advantage of demographics. So I think there's been a big demographic push within the real estate portfolio and even in the more broader infrastructure portfolio as well, where most of what we've done new has some sort of a demographic tilt, whether that's manufactured housing or data centers, or more recently we did a deal in studio space, something that there's some sort of demographic play there because we feel like that has done well in that market, but also buoys the portfolio if things go awry.

So I would say on that real estate side, it's had that demographic tilt. And then on the infrastructure side, we've had a little bit, obviously, of a renewable tilt and other creative spaces like that, digital as well. We've taken advantage of it both on infrastructure and on real estate.

Nancy Lashine:

Do you think about infrastructure as an inflation hedge as well?

Christina Scarlatto:

Yes.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah. So are you looking at shorter leases there?

Christina Scarlatto:

It depends. We run the gamut. We have what we would call core in real estate, and we have more opportunistic plays as well. So it runs across the risk spectrum, but we do think of it as also an inflation hedge, we hope. Time will tell.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, there's no question that when I started out in real estate, everybody was 80% plus in office and regional malls, and people thought that retail was an inflation hedge, but because of percentage rents, turned out to not really work out that way. And then all of a sudden also people realize that the TI issue that you have in office, tenant improvement issue, that you have an office and leasing costs, you have probably even more so in the regional mall space. So the cost of running the assets really obviated in the inflation hedge. I think the view is that with multifamily and manufactured housing and even shorter term industrial leases, you have more of an ability to raise rents.

Christina Scarlatto:

And there's just such a strong demand and that's at the end of the day. We're so undersupplied on housing and then interest rates continue to go up, it's going to make housing less affordable and so create more renters.

Nancy Lashine:

Right. Well, there's basically two ways that prices go up. You either have higher cash flows and more demand, or you have lower cap rates or higher multiples. Well, hopefully the latter will happen in your portfolio. You do a lot with emerging managers, which is somewhat unusual for a pension fund. Tell us a little bit about why you're comfortable investing with emerging managers and also how you assess these firms that have relatively short track record.

Christina Scarlatto:

I think partially it all stems from where I started. So when I joined, we had a lot of managers, but a lot of them, those investments were made with a private equity hat, if you will. It wasn't until the end of '07 when I joined David, we had a dedicated real estate team. And the relationships that still are in the portfolio today, for the most part, are those smaller nicher merging managers, if you will, from those days. The rest didn't survive, for the most part. We only actually have four managers pre-GFC still in our portfolio today. So that tells you a lot.

And I also got to see, and I'm not trying to throw any of the big funds under the bus, but we had a lot of those big global funds that made a lot of mistakes and we're charging a ton of fees. And even some of them that were quite successful, A, they took forever to finally liquidate. Some of them are just now liquidating, finally, that last asset or that last liability. And then B, even if they did really well, which some of them did, the gross to net spread was just massive. And I just have a real hard time paying exit fees on real estate and things like that. And there was just fees upon fees upon fees.

So to me, at the other spectrum of it is I feel like real estate's really a local business. It's not just what zip code, but it's what corner. It's not what drives this tenant, but there's just so much of it that's local. And so we have both, don't get me wrong, we have some of the larger type managers. Most of them actually were started as emerging managers that have grown to become larger managers for the most part, but I also think I like that drive that some of our emerging managers have, and yet, they do have a lot to learn, certainly, on things like ESG and the like. And it's something that's really important to us, but it's also fun and great to be able to influence them and teach them and have some of our former emerging managers show our new emerging managers the ropes on ESG and other things to think about and how to become a better fiduciary to their investors. And so far, so good because those managers are really quite well for us.

And I think on a net basis, hopefully better or if not, all things being equal, and then certainly much quicker. I find that a lot of our smaller emerging managers have been able to liquidate whole funds much quicker than some of your more traditional larger funds. I think there's room for both. You can complement the portfolio with both, but I really like that hunger that some of the emerging managers have. And granted, it takes a lot more work to underwrite and to get comfortable around a new manager. But so far to date, it's been really successful for us, and you can drive a lot more of the discussion and the terms when you come in early, which I like to do.

Nancy Lashine:

Right. Well, obviously we're like-minded at that. We love working with emerging managers also for all the reasons that you just said. And they really are highly motivated to make sure those first couple of funds are very successful, so they're living, eating, breathing, sleeping. And early realizations are very helpful in raising the next fund. So that's part of the quicker turnover as well. How about international? I actually had this image, as you mentioned, when you first started the World Bank, it was like, I had forgotten this, but remember how the tight the security was and you had to go through the turnstiles and people said to me, "Make sure you show up for your meeting 20 minutes in advance because the line's going to be really long to get through and all that stuff." But you were doing a lot of international investing in those days. How has that worked out for you and how are you thinking about international real assets today?

Christina Scarlatto:

So our portfolio is 86% US, which a lot of people always are like, "Wait, you're the World Bank. Aren't you supposed to be more international?" Look, I think overall we've done okay there. We've had some really nice wins and we've had some really big not so great results. It's hard. I think especially emerging markets, it's a lot harder. I can't help but bring up Brazil, even if we do well in the REI, we just are getting pounded by the currency and at the end of the day, is it worth it?

I do think there was a time, probably before my time, where you could make exceptionally outsized returns overseas compared to what you could do here in the US. But at the end of the day, do we need that? We value diversification and we will continue to invest overseas. We have a couple really good managers in Europe, a couple really good managers in Asia, but do we need to go much further than that? It's a higher bar at a minimum. It just is. We've been successful and we've got some really good managers, as I said, and we will continue to support them and we will continue to look to try to complement them. But at the end of the day, if I can invest in US multifamily or US debt and get my nice consistent net return, it's hard to say that's better than taking all that extra risk for a return that might end up being outsized or may end up just being okay.

Nancy Lashine:

Right, to say nothing of the drain on your team and staff to monitor it.

Christina Scarlatto:

Exactly. We're a super small team.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah. So what were some of the hardest decisions that you had to make that turned out really well?

Christina Scarlatto:

Coming out of the GFC with a brand new CIO and David had just left for KAUST was certainly a challenging time. The market maps I created for multifamily work, very impressive. I think that time was difficult. It worked out great, as you can imagine. The two big moves we made were multifamily and debt here in the US, and those worked out really well. I think beyond that, I mentioned manufactured housing earlier. I don't know that that was my hardest decision, but it was the first time we'd done a club deal since I joined and since our CIO had joined as well. So I think that was a big one that has worked out really well to date and is hopefully, let's say, we'll close soon, but those are also the most fun.

Learning about new spaces, learning about data centers, learning about manufactured housing, learning about studio space. Those are actually also the most fun to do. Nothing against multifamily or office or retail or anything else, but one of the things I love about real estate is how tangible it is. So we all live in real estate. We all go to work in real estate. Well, up until two weeks ago, I was working from home.

Nancy Lashine:

That's real estate.

Christina Scarlatto:

That's real estate still, yeah. But what's been fun about learning about some of these newer niche year spaces is just trying to understand how they work and what makes them work and how things have changed or evolved and why they've become compelling or what have you. They're also the most fun for me, personally. This year, I'm calling it the year of re-ups. We have 24 re-ups this year, which is the most-

Nancy Lashine:

Whoa. That's insane. That's insane.

Christina Scarlatto:

Yeah. I call it the merging of vintage years is what has happened. Normally it's about 10 to 12, so basically I think two vintage years basically merged.

Nancy Lashine:

And is that because managers put out money much faster than they expected or they-

Christina Scarlatto:

So my theory, not saying it's right, but my theory is, so you had managers who raise pre-COVID, and then COVID hit, and everybody kind of slowed down for that. There was that lull. And then you have managers post-COVID that raised less money than maybe they could have or should have. But it was post-COVID, and it was just like, "Okay, let's just raise what we can and get back to the market." And then 2021 was just such a crazy transaction volume year, that merged those vintage years together. And now you have this year with 24 re-ups, which is double what we normally see on any given year.

Nancy Lashine:

So that's a little scary, vintage year exposure.

Christina Scarlatto:

Yeah. Yeah, not everybody's getting a re-up, but we're doing what we can, writing a little bit smaller checks and/or just pushing some people out to next year.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, and your experience is completely consistent with everything we've heard in the market. It's absolutely the year of re-ops for, I think, everybody. So is there anything you would like to share with people about lessons learned, things they should never, ever do, or just put a big caution sign on the door?

Christina Scarlatto:

For the GPs, I have a whole really long list, but for myself, I think trusting my gut. I think that one is always a hard one to do. I think because our portfolio has grown out of the GFC and everything's been overall pretty positive, with a few exceptions here or there, it's always easy to just re-up again and that sanity check of like, "Yes, it's easy to re-up, and yes, maybe things will get better, but maybe it's time to walk away." I think it's that piece. And we have walked away, but some we should have walked away maybe a little bit earlier than we did. And for a whole host of reasons, it's not just performance, sometimes it's just things happening at the team that just don't feel quite right. And there's definitely an example of that for me where I just didn't trust my gut on that, and we went on more fund and I wish we hadn't.

Nancy Lashine:

Look, it's how we all learn. And I empathize with that so much. And every time I look back at something that blew up and I go, "I knew, I really knew. I just didn't want to believe that that was..." Yeah, so it's good. It's good. That means that's why you have such a long resume of very successful accomplishments. Before we move on to talking about your role in the industry, is there anything you'd like to share with the GP community in short form here?

Christina Scarlatto:

Avoid conflicts, selling between funds, investing across two funds. When things are going well, it's all fine and great. And this new continuation fund, it's less prevalent in real estate, but I'm sure it's coming. It's huge in infrastructure. I think it's riddled with conflicts. I think when things are going well, everything's great. When things go bad, those conflicts get really messy. Those continuation funds go really good or really bad, then it just doesn't look right. So for me, wherever you can keep it as clean as possible, I think that's always the best decision.

Nancy Lashine:

Great advice. Keep it clean. You have an incredibly busy job, small staff, you're a working mom, you travel all over the world for your job. So what possessed you to take on the chairpersonship of the industry association? Which in and of itself is probably a full-time job. Tell us about your desire and willingness to give back to the business.

Christina Scarlatto:

Well, first and foremost, saying no to Gail is the most impossible thing to do. For those of you don't know, Gail is the machine that is PREA. I finally learned after three phone calls to just always just say, "Yes, Gail, what else can I do for you next?" So there's that, but honestly, it's because of some amazing women in this industry that I think I even had the opportunity to even be on the board, who put me up, if you will. She shall remain nameless. But it was an amazing experience, and to have the honor of being chair was even more amazing. PREA is an incredible machine that I don't think anyone can ever appreciate unless they're on that board. And even more so within the executive committee. Gail and her team are five people, and they're incredible in what they do and what they pull off. And a lot of people dismiss PREA because it's so large or because it's so GP heavy. But I actually think it's an amazing organization, what they do. What they're doing with the foundation is just incredible. And actually, now-

Nancy Lashine:

Tell us about that. What is the PREA Foundation?

Christina Scarlatto:

So PREA Foundation was formed several years ago, started as a effort to bring in more minorities and women into the industry through a program called SEO, where they bring in interns from rising sophomores, rising juniors, I believe, from minorities from all over the US and try to match them with different firms within our industry and really create that from the bottom. But I recently joined the board of the foundation thanks to Gail, who I can never say no to. I was like, "Can we get six months off?" "No."

They do so much more than that now. They're working with high school interns, they're working with a program to help kids coming out of high school join portfolio management, doing multifamily portfolio management and the like. There's so much more than just SEO. SEO is this amazing program, but they're creating all sorts of grants to get more diversity and more women in our industry. And it's incredible. And that's all because of PREA and because of Debbie Harmon and Kevin Faxon and a few others who really spearheaded this. And it's just an incredible thing that they're doing for the industry and for these kids who get an opportunity that they wouldn't otherwise maybe have.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, I think my first PREA meeting was 1985, and there were two women there, and obviously no minorities for a long time. So the complexion of the industry still has a long, long way to go, but there's a real effort underway to change things, and it has to start early. So thank you for all of that service and all that you've done. Has being a woman presented any unique challenges for you in the business?

Christina Scarlatto:

I use it to my advantage.

Nancy Lashine:

Good for you.

Christina Scarlatto:

I think I'm lucky in the fact that I came from soccer and I had all these things that made me a very powerful woman. And for me, I feel like being different was actually an advantage. I think if I was a male in this industry, I wouldn't have been chairperson of PREA, or I wouldn't have even maybe been on the board. I don't know. I can't say that for a fact, but I think being different-

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, I think I would contest that.

Christina Scarlatto:

But I think being different makes me different. You walk in a room full of suits and I am not. I look different and I think it helps me stand out and I want to stand out. I want people to know who I am, for better or for worse, and sometimes not the best reputation, but mostly because I'm just a mean LP that beats everybody up on legals.

Nancy Lashine:

I certainly have never heard that about you, Christina, so let's be clear.

Christina Scarlatto:

I'm tough. I like to be tough.

Nancy Lashine:

You know what? When you write a big check, you should be tough, right?

Christina Scarlatto:

Yeah.

Nancy Lashine:

You absolutely should be tough. And people and other investors look to you. When you've invested in something, other investors look at this and they say, "Oh, World Bank's invested. Okay." It's like a seal of good health. They know that you were disciplined in looking through the docs, and that's critical because so many groups won't do that. They'll need a leader. So you are a leader.

Christina Scarlatto:

It scares me sometimes people's due diligence process, but I definitely have other peers in the industry where I also, "Oh, okay, they're invested. Okay, all right." That's a little bit of a stamp of approval. So I'm not the only one, for sure. There's definitely plenty of us that work really hard to underwrite managers. So anyways, I think being a woman, I've used it to my advantage. Certainly, I could see how it is a disadvantage. I'm certainly incredibly grateful to all the women that came before me who have paved the way for women like us. But I think I came in at a magical time, and also being an LP, obviously, helps because everybody has to be nice to me, whether they want to be or not. So that also helps a little bit too.

Nancy Lashine:

I don't think it's that hard, but yeah, sure. Do you think being a woman has impacted your career choices?

Christina Scarlatto:

I don't know.

Nancy Lashine:

I'm asking you that, it's totally selfish question because of the age difference. I know for me, it was really, really hard. When I started out, there was no iPhone, there was no BlackBerry, so you couldn't work remotely. You were at your desk at your computer waiting for someone to assign you some work. And it wasn't even FaceTime, it's just that was the only time. So it was very different in terms of any kind of flexibility. And also, you didn't play golf and you weren't necessarily invited out drinking at night. It was just different.

Christina Scarlatto:

Yeah, I hear you. I think my choice to stay at the bank for as long as I have has been influenced by the fact that I'm a working mom. The bank, certainly for all its faults in many ways, it's a good quality of life. I get a lot of vacation. I get every other Friday off.

Nancy Lashine:

Oh, lucky you. Let's not spread that around, please.

Christina Scarlatto:

Yeah. So it's been very flexible for me as a mom, and that's been really important to me because just like my dad showed up to all those games, I definitely want to be able to do the same for my kid. I do travel a lot more than my dad did, and certainly I struggle, but I do my best to be present. And I love my little man, and I want to be there and support him.

Nancy Lashine:

Oh, he's so lucky. He's so very lucky. What advice would you give to other young professionals who are looking to get into the real estate business?

Christina Scarlatto:

I think at the end of the day, be yourself and try to get to know people in this industry. One of the things that has kept me in this industry so much is that I feel like unlike private equity, it's a little bit smaller, it's a little more intimate. When I go to PREA, it's like a reunion. I see all my friends in this industry that I love and get to catch up and obviously talk about business and everything else, but also hear about how everyone's family's doing and things like that. So I think by making those personal connections, it makes it a lot easier to make those business connections.

My advice to young people, especially on the higher side, is please don't pitch me at 1:00 in the morning at the bar after PREA, but please take the time to get to know me and make a personal connection with me so that when you do email me next week, not tomorrow, but next week, you can reference something personal about what we talked about and then be like, "Hey, do you have a chance to look at my pitch book?" Because I can guarantee you I won't retain what IRR cap rate that you're focusing on on some asset, but I will remember the fact that you have two kids, or that you played soccer or something like that, something that was personal. So it's a people business as we started talking about at the beginning. So taking the time to get to know people certainly makes it a lot easier to get your foot in the door to explain to me what it is that you're doing from the business side.

Nancy Lashine:

Well, you realize that you've just given the greatest hint of all, which is that you might be found at the bar at 1:00 in the morning, which by the way, you will not find me there. That's great. Christina, thank you so much. I really appreciated your insights today, and I know our audience will as well.

Christina Scarlatto:

Thank you. This was fun.

Nancy Lashine:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Real Estate Capital. Before you go, I have a quick favor to ask. We put a lot of thought and effort into this show and making sure we bring you insights from real estate leaders that you don't normally find in the mainstream media. So if you're enjoying this show, please remember to follow it on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. We'd also love for you to share it with others or give us a review on Apple Podcasts so others can find us. Thanks again for tuning in. For more information about our firm, please visit our website at parkmadisonpartners.com.