The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.
Oftentimes investors enjoy the fast-paced style of growth, and they enjoy seeing their returns grow in real time. That said, it’s better to be conservative even if it’s a little less exciting as you learn the ins and outs of investing in commercial real estate development. Even when things are going really well, it’s best to pull back and keep from getting too consumed in the fast growth investment style.
Richard Wilson: Okay, do you believe that most investors you serve are concerned with downside protection or about growth?
Dr. Forrest Bryant: Well, I’ll answer this the way that you asked it, which is what are the investors, you know – doctors and dentists they’re very growth oriented, now that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what we let them do, but they’re always swinging for the fences. Every one that comes in is always, they’re always looking for home runs and we have to go through an education process and we build out a portfolio and we’re looking for certain things with different asset types, so sometimes we have to lead them to downside protection and letting them understand what their risk tolerance is. Even sometimes, one of the big things that we like to do is help our clients ramp up and go through a liquidity or an exit event, and even on the backside of that sometimes they’re still so aggressive, and they’re wanting to do all of these really really aggressive investments and we have to go “Hey!”. One of my sayings to clients that have sold is you only have to get rich once. If you get rich twice, that means you had to lose it the first time, so let’s make it, let’s invest it conservatively and let’s put it in things where, you know, we’ve been very blessed in almost everything that we do is double digit with – we’ve been pretty spoiled in everything that we’ve been doing, we’ve just been kind of cranking on all 8 cylinders. Even the stuff that is really really safe is doing really well right now but we have to constantly go back to the well and say “It’s not always going to be like this, we’re going to have some dark times. We have to make sure that we’re allocating and we’re being safe.” So, I don’t have to push any of them to go to be aggressive, I have to, if anything, I have to pull them back.
Richard: Right, sure.
