BIGGEST RISK with Anna Olin

Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

J Darrin Gross

If you're willing, I'd like to ask you Anna Olin, what is the BIGGEST RISK?

Anna Olin

Yeah, thanks. Well, I will make sure my insurance broker is listening to this with this podcast as I as I answer this, which actually I have Have a great relationship with my insurance broker shout out to John, he's been awesome for us. So I do actually love him. You know, I think in the industry as a whole, we always see the biggest, I think risk is the cost risk, right, and the cost of materials, the cost of time and cost to build, which I think our system and building the M8Trix and being in construction for so long, our entire system in existence on this planet now is was built to mitigate that. So when I look at our risks, specifically for Z Life, you know, our biggest I think our biggest risks is what is the market going to do, and nobody has a crystal ball and I can listen to a million podcasts and say, it's going to do this, it's gonna do that interest rates are gonna drop, they're not going to drop whatever. So I think, for us, the way we look at it is location is always going to be key, right location is always going to be the driver, that's going to be the consistent factor, whether markets up or down, no matter what's happening. The second is always going to be how, how flexible are we with the asset. So physically, the physical asset cannot be repositioned? If it needs to be to address the risk, or if something happens if there's a crisis. So you know, if it's, we went in with the intention of okay, we're building apartments, but now they have to be hotels, can the asset be repositioned easily and with with little cost, you know, as painlessly as possible. So so that's something that we always look at, that we try to address up front is the what ifs. And if there is a change in market, we started the English hotel three months into the pandemic, which was an absolute nightmare. It was so funny when we first designed this system, the M8Trix system and I apologize for the the long answer here to your question. But we designed the system around recession proof, we wanted to build a recession proof model that even during a recession, the the asset would be able to produce the pandemic hit. And we've now changed from being a recession proof model to a pandemic proof model. So so so we know that our model works, but it's having the you know, the ability and the flexibility to reposition our asset, and not just that, but you know, our portfolio overall the vision overall to to address market changes. I think aside from that, that physical answer to that is the emotional and mental, you know, flexibility as well, to recognize that and be willing to make those changes. I've seen so many assets, so many projects get cancelled or put on hold, because of market condition changed or something happened, and the owner just doesn't have the flexibility emotionally to look at look at the project in a different way and how to maybe repurpose it or move it around so that it can work is that it's kind of just a hands up open, it didn't work the way it did we have to cancel it, it's gonna sit, you know, while it's gonna sit, thank you for the next 10 years. So I think that's that's how we approach that and how we approach risk. And it really being as flexible as possible, not just with the the physical product, but with our mindset and our leadership and how we approach that.