That's where you want to put your money.

Potentially, or build or identify some confluence of partners that could assemble that.

But that is something that wasn't before possible, like as recently as two years ago.

And so I guess what excites me is like, if you kind of step back to when I started Fifth Wall, What was on offer to do as a venture capitalist was you invested in tech companies.

You bought minority stakes in fast-growing tech companies, and you were along for the ride.

And we've had 10 IPOs.

That's amazing.

your eyes.

Do you understand that, Brandon, or do you feel like that's just shortsighted?

Yeah.

I, I both understand it and I think it's shortsighted, meaning I, I think that is how the real estate industry has historically thought.

And I think it begs a very existential, almost like epistemological question about what is the real estate industry? What does it mean to be in the enterprise of real estate? And what I think it means is that the real estate industry is how you use space, three-dimensional physical space, which I'm using my words very carefully, space to create the economy.

So whether you use that space as a home or a rental asset or a factory or a mall or a data center or a marina, that is using space to create the economy.

Now, how you use space to create the economy shifts and changes over time because of consumer behavior changes, because of the way the economy is changing, because of geopolitics, and because of technology.

What's consistently been the case is that the real estate industry doesn't see those changes or recognize those changes as being instances of real estate.

Could you justifiably characterize it that way?

It like went up all of a sudden, so you didn't really have a lot of time to react and like think it all through.

Totally.

I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of exactly what you expect to happen when you're like the government produces like t- literally tens of trillions of, of, of capital, you know, very, very quickly alongside a low interest rate environment and then massively rotates back the other way.

A lot of dislocation is going to happen, and I just think the, the proptech ecosystem was very, very exposed to that.

And so that forced this reckoning for a lot of businesses, and I'd say it changed sentiment in the category dramatically.

And I'd say proptech went through kind of like a pretty bleak 30, you know, 24 to 36 months.

And it now feels, or it has felt for probably the last 18 months, that we're on the other side of that, and that this new generation, this new cohort of proptech businesses are emerging, and they're very much informed by those experiences.

Yeah

Mm-hmm.

And so that's not a knock on the entrepreneurs internationally or the ideas or the technologies.

It's just a dynamic that I think many venture investors, um, have recognized, which is why is it that so many of the largest, most transformative tech companies seem not just to come out of the US but come out of California? And it's because this ecosystem works, and there's a path dependency to outcomes when you have so many people that are so focused on this category with so much capital and so many resources and so much expertise.

That's been hard to replicate internationally.

And while it's improved, I would say the US is still orders of magnitude better-

It's not a spoken priority.

It's not a...

Yeah, I think it's more than just not a spoken priority.

Wow.

Um, so I grew up in, in the real estate industry.

I always loved the industry.

And then I went to college, and in college I studied the political economy of cities.

That's what I wrote my thesis at Princeton on, which is actually what ended up becoming the Hudson Yards project that we know today.

Back when I was in college, they were contemplating a West Side stadium, and so I wrote about Dan Doctoroff and the whole vision behind what that could become.

And, like, the whole, the dynamics of how politicians and commercial interests converge around stadium development and just urban development and the history of New York, and that was what I was always passionate about.

So, so tell us, out of everything you're seeing, what gets you the most excited today? Like, what do you think is either the new frontier in prop tech or climate tech or what- whatever the tangent is? What's either the new frontier or what seems to be the most promising to you?

But also, I want to understand, what does this say about CBRE in reorganizing itself to get into Flex Office?

Yeah, so at Fifth Wall, we were obviously incredibly proud and excited to be investors in Industrious.

And now we're announcing Fifth Wall Securities, which represented Industrious.

on its sale to CBRE.

And I think what this shows is that CBRE has really lapped its peer set when it comes to innovation.

Like, they have truly leaned into the space in a way that their peers just have taken a very back-footed approach.

And I think this acquisition is part and parcel of that.

What's the next big deal? So

I don't know how else to phrase it.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say opportunities as much as it, I think, is going to bring into the foreground a lot of the problems that had plagued LA historically.

So one thing I think you will see is this feels like a 9-11 moment for Los Angeles or like a Hurricane Katrina moment.

And I think in both of those instances, in the case of lower Manhattan and in the case of New Orleans, those cities used tragedy and a crisis to rebuild themselves.

And I think you also saw this flourishing of civic pride and civic identity.

I actually grew up in Manhattan, and I was there during 9-11, and I experienced that firsthand.

And I think LA is going to experience something similar to that, where I think people are going to feel prideful about LA as this amazing economic engine in America, as this amazing cultural city.

But again, I just wonder if Do you think overall interest in the industry has perhaps cooled for some reason?