Transcription
Is the crash in the commercial and office space over? And how's the industrial market doing? And will all of this spill to the banking system? Our guest today is David Marino, who's actually seeing what's unfolding right now on the ground with tenants, landlords, and the lenders. And he's here to tell us all about it. I think what we're going through now is certainly the worst commercial real estate market that we've seen in over 30 years. You got 170 million square ft of office subly space around the country. You got 250 million ft of industrial. And it the problem is so bad every industrial market today in 2026 is two to three times higher availability rate than pre-COVID.
>> I'm Same and this is Market Insider.
>> David, it's great to have you back on. Welcome back.
>> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me back.
>> We want to talk to you about commercial real estate. It's silent, it's quiet right now. What's happening?
>> Well, when you say it's silent and quiet, I think most people, you know, the layman, everybody just kind of out living their lives, right? They drive by these buildings and they're almost just part of the environment, right? They're just part of the built environment. Nobody's really thinking about what's happening inside of these buildings. And we are now six plus years past when CO happened, right? And so when we were together last, we were really speculating still about the after effects of CO, what was to come. And and while it had been very mature, you know, postco, we'd been 5 years almost at that point. Now 6 plus years later, habits are formed. You know, the horses are out of the barn and never coming back. meaning the employees, the workforce, those that have gone remote, those that are working hybrid, the behavior is basically set now. And corporate America has really settled into a new normal around office space, allowing employees to generally work in these conditions. They found that it's good for the employees, it's good for recruiting and retention. And so this is the new normal. And the effect on the office space sector is that most companies, we'll call it 85% of all companies in the United States have had their lease expire in the last six years. And so they've been able to resize and reset. So the current footprint they're in, if they downsize from say 40,000 pre-COVID to 20,000 now is where they're going to be. And the data supports this. If you look back in the last two years, essentially across the US, all of the office markets are now in equilibrium. So we have hit bottom. And that's what's I think challenging for people. So many folks are living in the past thinking that CO was yesterday even though it was six years ago. And corporate America has basically now resized to accommodate that. And so the office inventory has now kind of settled into a new low and and I think the challenge is for the office sector is understanding how long it's going to stay at the bottom. And this is where I think capital markets people and maybe just we as humans get into this behavior of thinking that things are either getting better or worse. You know, if you look back historically, there have been periods of time, years where the office market just sat at the bottom. Very much the period of 1997 to 1998, for example. So, I believe we're in some kind of extended equilibrium where this bottom can last 3 to 5 years, potentially even longer. where most US office markets are now at 20 to 30% availability on the industrial side of the economy.
>> So like there's 20 to 30% vacancy all the time.
>> Exactly. 20 to 30% availability, right? Meaning not just physically vacant but space that's on the market for lease or subleasase as well. So all of the offerings for lease or subleasase being on the market which is higher than the technical vacancy rate. Right? If you look at homes for sale, you don't typically break it out on vacant homes for sale. You just look at all homes for sale. And I think that's part of the problem in our industry where lenders, developers, landlords always look at vacancy rates. And I think the brokerage community kind of rigs it that way versus looking at availability rates because availability is higher than the physical vacancy of space.
>> because some people are subleasasing.
>> Yeah. So today there's 170 million square feet of office space on the market for subleasase. The brokerage community doesn't want to count that because it's not vacant. Okay. There might be a building 100,000 foot building on the market for sub lease with three people in it, but yet the brokerage community would say, "Well, there's
>> there's no vacancy."
>> That's right. There's three people in the building and the lease has another five years to go. It's not vacant. And so there's a lot of lying with statistics going on in our industry where people sort of manipulate the data to create a favorable story and a favorable narrative as why values should be higher than they might otherwise be. And one of those is manipulating vacancy versus availability.
>> So 20 I'm going to use availability now. So 20 to 30% availability. What does this mean for the real estate space for the commercial space? Can people get really good deals? Are these places going to what's going to that what's that going to do to the rents?
>> Well, great question. Every asset class, particularly ours, commercial real estate, is supply and demand driven, as is residential real estate, right? If you have in residential real estate more buyers than sellers, it inflates price. Well, in our industry, what's happened in the last 6 years is supply has been going up gradually to this new bottom and prices have been coming down a little bit. What what landlords have been doing is offering massive free rent packages. So landlords and their investors and their lenders have been trying to kind of prop up face rate by giving away other concessions. Okay. So what other concessions look like? I just represented a client an engineering firm for 14,000 square feet which is basically space for about 70 65 people. And the landlord that just bought a building down the street was in escrow and wanted to win this deal. They gave us an 8-year lease with a year free. In other words, my client moves in at the end of this year and doesn't pay rent in all of 2027.
>> For the whole year.
>> For the whole year. Okay. Zero rent. Okay. And the landlord paid for all of the tenant improvements to remodel the space and gave a cash moving allowance. They got their $3 a foot, right? So, they can say to their lender and their partners, "Hey, we we leased 14,000 ft² during escrow." So they got their face rate, but they had to give all this other stuff away to get it. Okay, that's what's happened is the market has drifted down to loading up transactions with concessions versus just dropping rents.
What about on the back end of this where parts that we may not see like the owners of these buildings, the banks, what's happening to them when they're seeing this kind of availability?
>> Yeah. So, so what's happened with a lot of owners during this down cycle is there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of foreclosures around the country particularly in the last 3 years where a property say pre-COVID was at 90% occupancy and now it's at 60%. And particularly those that had loans coming due. So commercial loans while the amortization of the interest and the principal is 30 years typically there's a a balloon provision where it's payable in a shorter period of time. So somewhere around year 7 to 10 in most commercial loans there's a balloon payment where the landlord has to pay it off or refinance it or sell it. What's happened in the last 3 years is a lot of owners have hit that balloon mark and interest rates went from 3% to 6%. So if your occupancy goes from 90 to 60 and your interest rate goes from 3% to 6%. You're immediately underwater. And so lenders in those situations have generally foreclosed on the properties and resold them at a big discount. Or some lenders are still operating the real estate because they want to try to get leasing activity up and then sell it for a higher value than what the fire sale price might be. Um, other situations have been very creative where lenders really don't want to foreclose. Lenders don't want to be landlords. They just don't. And so what has happened in some cases is they've taken an existing loan and they've they've split it in two different pieces. So let's say you have a loan on a building for $100 million, but it's not performing. What a lender might do is say, "Hey, we're going to bifrocate that loan. We're going to take that $100 million loan and we're going to carve off $30 million and set that aside and call that a B loan." And that B loan sits on the balance sheet and gets no interest. Okay. The A loan then is performing at 70 million. And the lender might say to the landlord and the investor, look, you kick in 5 million bucks to pay down the loan and we'll create this structure that allows you to pay the debt service and have a little headroom and we'll take $30 million off the table, park it on our balance sheet. we won't foreclose, but we're going to treat it as literally a different loan. And so, I've heard of a number of circumstances, and again, this is not all public, right? This isn't in the Wall Street Journal. Nobody's writing about this kind of stuff, but a lender can get creative today. And given that lenders don't want to own the real estate, and that
>> they don't want to take huge losses because otherwise they have to write off a lot of
>> well, and they have to take reserves on their balance sheet against it, it hurts their ratios, right? And so the lenders don't want to foreclose on the real estate, nor do they want to put somebody into default unnecessarily. So what we've seen in the last 3 years is the lending community getting very creative trying to salvage what they can. You know, it's I think of my industry like a battlefield sometimes. You know, you've got those landlords that are dead or dying and you've got landlords that are walking wounded. The lenders are trying to figure out how to salvage the walking wounded. They're trying to put put those folks back to health and resuscitate them and get them back into the fight. That's sort of what's happening in the market right now. And I don't think that's going to change. Like if you look back at the early 90s when the government got involved in the savings and loan industry and took over all the banks and all the loans went bad and commercial real estate was selling for, you know, 10 20 cents on the dollar because the government basically wanted to clear out the assets of these banks. That is not what's happening. Nor do I think that's what's going to happen. So I don't believe that given how sick the office market climate is nationally, I don't think it's going to at scale negatively affect banks.
>> Do you think different regions are impacted differently or is it across the country?
>> Different metro areas are more affected than others and different areas within metro areas are being affected. And giving you an example, take San Diego County. Downtown San Diego has had approximately 11 high-rise office buildings already be foreclosed upon or or go through a for sale process where a loan was hitting a balloon payment and the lender and the owner basically said sell the building including the Irvine company's portfolio downtown and there's more distress to come and there's a couple of office buildings in downtown San Diego that have been foreclosed upon and are being converted to residential now. So that is a that is a micro trend, not a significant amount of impact on office inventory nationally. But meanwhile, you look at suburban San Diego and the suburbs, which have anywhere from 15 to 22% available, have pretty much held their own at this point. Whereas downtown, which has about 40% availability, the highest in the country, again, this is San Diego, is really sick. And as a result, about a third of the quality buildings have already gone through some kind of financial renegotiation with the lender or foreclosure. And that's happened in downtown Los Angeles. It's happened in New York. It's happened in the big metro areas with central business district markets. San Francisco has had many foreclosures, but generally I think the worst is behind us. Yeah, there's still going to be more, and the developers that own these things, frankly, are handing the keys back. There's some really ugly tax consequences because there's depreciation recapture they have to deal with, but for the most part, these folks are handing over the keys because there's no value in the real estate anymore. You know, if you have a a building you bought at 200 million and you had debt at 150 and the building today is worth 80, it's a math problem. Nobody can solve that. And so, the current owner isn't going to write a big check to throw good money after bad. they would rather walk away. And generally, these loans, this is what people don't understand. These loans are usually non-reourse loans. They're they're generally not personally guaranteed. And I'm talking about high-rise office buildings, right? I'm not talking about people like you and me that own a little 10 or 20,000 foot building with a local bank, right? I'm talking about institutional real estate. Stuff's generally not personally guaranteed. Very limited cross collateralization.
>> So, people walk away.
>> Yeah. These are typically individual assets with their own individual um partnership agreement and they're collapsing all over the country.
>> And you mentioned you don't think this is going to impact the banks much. Is this a big portion of the market that's going through this handing the keys to the bank or is it not a huge portion of
>> Well, so it's interesting. You you look at a bank's balance sheet and they might have say 10 15% of their assets in real estate, but some of that's in industrial, some of that's in multif family, some of that's in office and and so you have to look at how much as a percent of the balance sheet does
>> do they have into office?
>> Yeah, exactly. In the different asset classes, right? Like how's it broken up, right? Details matter. And so you have to look at how much they have concentrated in office or biotech wet lab and then where those assets are. The rollover of the debt is typically distributed over many many years. So you don't have all these loans really expiring at the same time within one financial institution. So my experience so far, my opinion of doing this for 35 years, of going through four cycles now, is that we're not going to see a collapse of the banking sector because of commercial real estate. It doesn't mean it won't be bumpy. It doesn't mean billions of dollars won't be lost, but this isn't going to be a trigger effect that somehow uh like it did in the early 90s be a contributing factor to taking down the economy.
Do you see these buildings stay the same or do you think some of them will go through major changes or or would it what do you see what do you picture when we are looking at these buildings some of them are empty but we don't know what's happening inside them
>> a couple things are happening one is they will be resold at a discount to replacement cost and a new buyer can then go in and recapitalize these investments in other words some landlords because they have an old capital structure simply can't be competitive because they need a higher rent and they don't have enough money to fund the tenant improvements and the remodel costs that it might take. Get a new landlord at a low basis with some dry powder for capital reinvestment. Now we can sort of reboot these assets and and revitalize them and bring them back to be more competitive at a lower cost. The other thing we're seeing though is a lot of owners are looking at these things and realizing that they can tear office buildings down to build residential. And that's really the trend we've been seeing here in the last couple of years. And I'll give you a great example of that again from San Diego with the Irvine Company. They own two office buildings right in the heart of a market called UTC. And they are two threetory atrium buildings. They are probably built 40 years ago and in total they're about 45,000 ft each. Well, that particular asset of two buildings is right at a trolley stop. There's the retail mall across the street and there's mass transit and retail within walking distance and it's a huge job center. So, what the Irvine company's doing is they're starting the demolition of the buildings next month. They're going to tear them both down and build two apartment high-rise buildings of 550 apartment units. So, taking these class C office buildings that really aren't generating strong rents that need a lot of capital reinvestment, the landlord developer has all these underlying entitlements that haven't been accessed. And so they're able to go vertical and build a lot of value for the community and themselves by tearing the office buildings down and building residential. That's really the conversation now. It's not about converting office to residential. It's about tearing down some of these B and C-class office projects that haven't exploited their full entitlement density whereby now landlords and developers can go vertical. You know, turning, let's say you have a campus of six buildings that are all two-story garden office buildings in the middle of Long Beach or Elsa Gundo, just generic class B minus C real estate that's 30, 40 years old. Well, if you can scrape all that and take all that land that was all that parking and create a community of six-story apartment buildings, why wouldn't you do that? Because that's where the value is today. So, what's happening is these office buildings are being sold at basically land value, residential land value minus demolition cost. So if the land's worth $100 million and it takes you $10 million to tear all the buildings down, you got a $990 million land basis and now you can build residential.
>> So you see that's happening going forward.
>> It's it's already happening and it is where things I think are going for the next 5 years.
There's a lot of talk about the conversion from office buildings to apartments directly, but I've also heard from some experts that's very hard to do. Do you think that's going to happen?
So, so it is happening, but it's happening at a very small scale. The estimates are about 75,000 residential units are going to come online in the next couple of years as a result of these conversions, which which by the way, estimates are that we have at least 4 million units of housing shortage across the United States. So, somebody that's solving
>> the White House just added it and said it's 10 million.
>> Yeah. So, so depending who you talking to a couple days ago, you know, and and it depends on who you're trying to house. Who are we trying to create housing for? Okay. So, somewhere between 4 and $10 million units is probably the truth, right? And so, if you're converting office buildings across the country and only adding 75,000 units, you're not you're not even nicking at the problem, right? You're making zero impact. So, it's not happening at scale. And where it's happening is primarily New York and with older office buildings with small narrow floor plates. And what I mean by that is every residential unit has to have a lot of glass line and every bedroom typically by law and its fire code has to have a window. So if your living space needs a window and your bedrooms needs a window, well goes on the inside, right? Maybe some storage, some utilities, a powder room, a kitchen. So, the problem is the the depth between the window line and what they call the corridor can't really exceed 28 feet to do a residential conversion. Well, most most office buildings are 40, 50, 60 ft. They're way too deep to do residential. So, the floor plates just don't work. And then there's building systems problems or structural problems. There's all kinds of nuances.
>> Plumbing and all those things.
>> Yeah. The plumbing, right? Because to do residential, let's say you put 20 units on a floor. Well, every one of them has multiple restrooms, dishwasher, kitchen, right? So, you have all these floor penetrations. Well, a lot of office buildings weren't designed to have hundreds of what they call core penetrations going through the floor, creating Swiss cheese, creating structural instability, right? So, there's all these engineering and design problems that developers face turning these office buildings into residential towers. There's also a pricing problem. They've determined that a brand new specialbuilt residential unit typically sells for 10 to 20% more than a converted office building turned into residential. In other words, you know, if we're going to build a Mercedes, the Mercedes is going to sell at a certain market price. But if you take an old Chevy and you try to put a Mercedes lent logo on it, you know, it you're not going to get a Mercedes, right? And so people, the the consumer, right, of housing is smart enough to realize that a purpose-built residential building has better amenities, functionality, architecture, on and on and on than an a former office building that's now a residential tower. So, so you do have an economics problem you're fighting with as well.
Let's go into industrial. What are you seeing in the industrial market? Is it the same?
It's actually quite different as to industrial real estate and what's happening right now and how we got here. So, you know, rewind the clock to the beginning of COVID when the government was giving away trillions of dollars to try to keep a a floor on the economy, right? And everybody is now working at home or a student at home and all of a sudden there's a run on e-commerce, right? So consumers basically start buying stuff as fast as they can and in about 3 to four months after CO started companies like target.com and Walmart and Amazon literally couldn't keep the stock the the shelf stocked. It's running out of everything, right? And so what happened was there was an immediate surge of demand for big warehouse space. And by big warehouse space I mean buildings over 100,000 square feet. Okay? So, so big big buildings
>> 100,000 square feet.
>> Yeah. 100,000 up to a million or a million5 square ft. Okay. Like you look at an Amazon distribution building. Some of these things are a million square feet. They're they're some of the biggest buildings in the country. Biggest ever built. So very quickly in 2021, landlords started building buildings as fast as they could. The problem is these buildings take two to three years to bring online. You know, you have to get the land, you've got to grade it, you've got to entitle it, you've got to design it, you got to permit it, you got to build it, three years. Okay? So, if you're a developer in 2020 that see this demand surge, it's going to take you 2022, if you're lucky, 2023 to get your building online. Well, what happened is all these developers at the same time around the country realized that there was a great opportunity here. Meanwhile,
>> because the rents went up, too.
>> Yeah. Because because overnight demand exceeded supply. Like I remember representing a company back in 2021 for 300,000 square feet out in the Corona area. So this Inland Empire part of Southern California just to the east of us here. And there were literally three buildings and there were 10 companies bidding on them. In fact, while we were in lease negotiations, the landlord came back and I've never had this happen in my career. the landlord came back and raised the rent during lease negotiations which is a fors it's forbidden right I've been doing this 35 years thousands of times one time has that happened because it is incred it's an incredible bad faith right for a tenant or a landlord to repric the lease rate during lease negotiations and they said to us that they had multiple other proposals for longer leases we were seven years they had proposals for 10 years in order to continue to do do the deal. They need another another nickel in rent. And so it was just a bidding war literally at the time. Well, by 2023, 2024, consumers are back at work. They're not spending the government's money anymore, right? And they are back to normal consumer behavior. So, the demand for warehouse space essentially evaporates and these big companies withdraw their demand from the market. Meanwhile though, developers are still building buildings. In fact, there is 1.2 billion square feet of buildings with a B billion 1.2 billion.
>> 1.2 billion square feet of buildings built warehouse buildings from 2020 to 2025.
>> A historic unprecedented number like around the country each year they might build build 20 million 50 million square feet. 1.2 billion square feet
>> in five years. So we built like five times more maybe 10 times more.
>> Exactly. Every year.
>> Exactly. So I describe it again using a military analogy. It's like they were building aircraft carriers in 1944. In other words, the war is over, right? That we don't need these things anymore, but yet everybody's still building aircraft carriers, right? So, and that's what these buildings look like. They're as big as aircraft carriers. They're huge. Now we have this glut of new construction around the country. and developers have had buildings on the market two years, three years. These buildings are sitting around collecting dust. Meanwhile, the lenders are starting to panic because there's no tenant in these buildings. Okay. And simultaneous to this, big corporations start putting space on the market for subleasase. This is
>> they don't want them anymore.
>> Yeah. Because they they overcommitted, right? 2021, 2022, they lease half a million square feet. by 2023 2024 they realize they only need 300 so they're trying to subleasase 200 okay well just to do the math today there's about 250 million square ft of industrial subly space on the market around the country 250 million ft
>> available
>> available for subleass today and comparing that to the office sector which I said earlier there's 170 million square ft of space for subleas around the United States of office space today so while people I think instinctively feel the office space market is sick. Industrial is worse. In other words, you got 170 million square ft of office subly space around the country. You got 250 million ft of industrial. And it the problem is so bad every industrial market today in 2026 is two to three times higher availability rate than pre-COVID.
>> Wow. And how much is that?
>> So the Inland Empire for example, pre-COVID was about 7%. During the tightest market in the Inland Empire, 2022, it was down to about 2%. Now it's 14%.
>> And do you think it's going to go up?
>> So, and I do think it's going to get worse
>> because there's more coming, right?
>> There's still some new construction happening out there, as crazy as that might be, but we're experiencing a demand shock in the Empire right now for for two reasons. One is the tariffs that happened last year, okay, which are now illegal, but the the damage is done. These tariffs shut down and reduced the amount of imports coming into the US. That's just an economic reality. And so the amount of warehouse demand went down. Exacerbating that, now the war in Iran with fuel with fuel prices going up, we're seeing about a 20% decline in truck traffic right now. So again, ships are having trouble. Supply chain is difficult. The the global economy is kind of grinding right now, right? There's a lot of friction in the economy and so oil is not getting around. Cargo generally is cuz cargo doesn't really go through the straits of Hormuz. It's mostly fuel but we are having problems as a country and in the world the broader world to grease the skids and so as a result we're having some problems here in the US around industrial real estate. So I do think it'll continue to get worse. I I I don't think the bottom is here yet. But here's here's what's crazy is we haven't seen the whipsaw of prices that we we would expect. In other words, if the Inland Empire precoid warehouse space was 75 and during the bottom of the market, meaning the tightest the market was in 2022, it was $1.75, so more than doubled. We're not seeing rents back at 75 today. landlords are still fighting to keep rents at a buck a foot or a buck 10 a foot even though availability's doubled. How does that happen? In other words, precoid you look at availability at 7%, it's now 14. Prices were at 75 cents and they're now a buck 10. Well, if if supply has doubled, prices should be less, right? Well, what's happened is you've got landlords with capital structures that can't maneuver, can't lower their prices, and the brokerage community basically packs together to try to keep a keep a floor on pricing. So, you got landlords and brokers that aren't telling the market what's really going on. And so, business owners and CEOs making real estate decisions are a little ignorant. And because there's no transparency in my industry, that's why I get on these shows to try to educate business owners. What is your opportunity really out there? Well, if you're a owner of an industrial company or you're an executive team member of an industrial company, the market across the country today is worse than it was pre-COVID.
>> So, but the rents should be
>> the rents should be
>> back then or less. Yes. Right. But they're not. So, it's a knife fight in the market today
>> to get prices down to where they should be. That's that's what we do as a company is help the business owner and executives take on this David and Goliath fight against the big landlords and their brokers so they're not overpaying which is happening right now as tenants are overpaying for their real estate.
>> Do you see as this being the worst time in commercial real estate
>> in some respects? Yes. It's the worst in recent memory. In other words, probably the worst time in our adult lifetimes is really from 1990 to 1995, 1997. That's where we had the savings and loan industry taken over by the federal government. Assets significantly devalued. Things were selling for half a replacement cost or less back during that time period. Um, we've had some bumpiness since with the tech wreck and then the mortgage crisis, but I think what we're going through now is certainly the worst commercial real estate market that we've seen in over 30 years. And and it's yet to play out, you know, because the office sector is still sorting out the casualties. The industrial market hasn't even started to. I I do believe in the next two three years there's going to be a tremendous amount of defaults and foreclosures in the industrial real estate sector. Biotech wet lab space where it's primarily in Boston, San Diego and the Bay Area is has probably lost half of its value or more. You know, if you look at the big REITs in that sector like Health Peak Properties or Alexandria, you know, their stock has just been clobbered in the last two or three years. And that's because the underlying asset value of these buildings is is down substantially. rents are almost half of what they were at the peak 3 four years ago.
>> Now you mentioned at during the SNL crisis if we were selling these buildings at half the replacement cost. What is it now?
>> And it's situational so it's hard to generalize because um welllo amenitized well leased buildings are still very very valuable and there case by case.
>> Yeah it is very case by case. In fact, you could read the news today and it would talk to you about how dire the market is and tomorrow it would talk about how opportunistic it is. And and and it's almost the American way, right? Like there's always this American optimism that there's always some entrepreneurial opportunity, right? So you get groups like Blackstone and Stockdale and some of these other groups, they'll default on a loan somewhere and hand the keys back to the bank. Meanwhile, they're raising another fund to go buy assets somewhere else. It's really crazy and because it's all happening simultaneously, right? The same guys that have kind of run something into the ground, someone's giving a billion dollars to go buy something else.
>> Buy something else.
>> And it so I just shake my head sometimes like who are these people giving them this money because they just lost it all over here and they're going to try to make it back over there, right? So it's it's kind of crazy, but this is like big stake stuff, right? This is this is big money. It's still playing out is what I should say. It's still a a tough time.
>> Now, David, based on what you're seeing and what this period you've seen, is there any lessons that you and your colleagues have learned in this space?
>> If I just look at my own company, right, when you say you and your colleagues, what we realize is that you've you've got to work really hard whether the market's great or the market's really bad because this market does go in cycles. I think any business, any industry goes in cycles. And so when things are good and and feel easy, a lot of people take their foot off the accelerator, right? They coast. And then when things get bad, they try to they try to hit the next gear and try to reactivate and respond, right? But if you're not already working hard, when things go bad, it's not going to end well for you, I think. So, you know, I look at precoid, we were already all working long hours and really hard. And then when CO happened, everybody worked even harder. And I and I think a lot of people in our industry decided to kind of go on vacation. 2020, I remember talking to a lot of our competitors and they said, "Nothing's going on. No one's doing anything. I'm just going to take time off with the family." It's like, "Okay, good, good for you. That's great. But meanwhile, there's always someone to talk to. There's always someone transacting." And so my whole company went into a very offensive mode to try to get out in front of more customers even though there were instinctively fewer opportunities. So we were building market share at that time. So I think for me that that's the lesson learned is there's always opportunity no matter how grim things are. You just have to lean into it and work harder and work longer and make more calls and get better at your craft.
>> David Marino, co-founder with Hughes Marino. It was great to have you back on Market Insider.
>> Thank you. Look forward to coming back again.
>> What do you think about the discussion we had with David Marino on commercial real estate? Do you see something different in your community, in your cities, or do you agree with him? And what do you think of the industrial side of this conversation? Do you think some level of manufacturing will come back and occupy this space? or do you think we're going to have significant vacancies left for many years to come? Make sure to tell us in the comments. I'm Siamak. This is Market Insider. We'll see you next time.