Still Early Innings: The Convergence of Asset Management and Private Wealth - Bill McMorrow - CEO of Kennedy Wilson

I think that's a great segue.

And what you said is about the ability to look beyond the current time.

I mean, it's clearly a pattern that you mentioned, what you did in Ireland, what you did in Japan.

And obviously with the benefit of hindsight, I think many people would be like, oh, of course it was a great investment.

But you painted the picture that would help us understand that in the moment, it didn't seem like the sure bet, but you felt like you had confidence.

I don't want to skip over the Kennedy Wilson today, but I want to make sure that we get to this what's over the horizon in front of us right now that you're focused on.

But before we do, for our listeners, you painted a high-level picture from $57,000 to $38 billion from a domestic company to a global company, from a public company now to a private company.

How should we, how should our listeners think about Kennedy Wilson today? Like, how do you describe the business when you're sitting down with an LP or a potential, you know, JV partner of any, any sport who's trying to understand who you are and what your DNA is?

We, we, over the years, Brandon, we've owned every asset type because you're, you're sometimes buying things from financial institutions.

And if you, if you think you're getting a reasonable price, you're generally willing to buy anything.

Yeah.

And we call those special situations.

But today, if I'm describing the company, we're highly focused on housing here in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Ireland.

And we have an equity ownership interest in, or we're managing for one other party, almost 70,000 apartment units.

We also have a credit business that we bought in 2023 from one of the banks here in Southern California that does construction lending to multifamily developers and to student housing developers here in the United States.

And in the last three years, we've originated almost $8 billion of construction loans all to that sector.

Generally, these are $100 million loans to highly sophisticated people.

And so when you add those two together, that's 100,000 units that we either have an ownership interest in or that we're financing for somebody else.

You know, we still have the remnants of some of the older assets that we have, particularly in Europe, we own more office buildings.

We don't have hardly any here left in the United States, but that's the core business is the housing business.

And we're growing that business at a good pace.

And so two acquisitions that we did in the last three years It really changed the face of the company.

In 2023, if you remember, the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic were having their problems.

Well, there was a contagion effect that spilled over into the other regional banks.

And all of them lost somewhere between 25% to 30% of their deposit base in a very short period of time.