Tim Milazzo (RTS #41)

Guest: Tim Milazzo
Topics: Stack Source, leasing

Transcript:

Chris Ressa 0:01
This is retail retold the story of how that story ended up in your neighborhood. I’m your host, Chris ReSSA. And I invite you to join my conversation with some of the retail industry’s biggest influencers. This podcast is brought to you by DLC management. Before jumping into the podcast, we have a quick new segment called Data drops brought to you by place a.ai Today’s data drop is about Walmart and targets big summer, both retailers were positioned relatively well during the early pandemic restrictions because of their essential status. They also proved equally well positioned for the mission driven shopping trend that privilege their one stop shop orientation. The result was a relatively strong 2020 for both in terms of offline retail. While most don’t love to make year over year comparisons, because of the COVID impacts. What is interesting is the year over two year, Walmart and Target both had a very strong 2019 Back to School comparing the equivalent months and 2019 shows Walmart returning to visit growth for the first time in 2021. With July visits jumping 2.9% compared to July 2019. And the visit surge that target is enjoying all year continued with visits in May, June and July, up 7.7 11.4 and 15.9% over the equivalent months in 2019. This is just astounding, I think it speaks to how strong Target and Walmart really are. They continue to innovate. They continue to bring in first class products drive value provide an unbelievable multi channel experience. And their foot traffic continues to increase. It don’t see that changing over the course of a long time. So thanks, everyone. And that was our place or AI data job.

Ressa 1:53
Welcome to retail retold everyone. Today I’m joined by Tim Milazzo. He is the CEO and founder of stack source. I am very excited for him to be here. He’s a disrupter in the commercial mortgage space. Welcome to the show, Tim,

Tim Milazzo 2:05
Thanks so much for having me, Chris,

Ressa 2:10
Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and what your company does.

Milazzo 2:15
Absolutely. So I’m Tim, I’m co founder and CEO of stack source. We are an online commercial real estate financing platform. And we touch retail heavily as well as other sectors like multifamily office and industrial. And the shortest explanation is we built this online platform that gives real estate investors a menu of financing options. So they can find better financing very easily than they otherwise would. So we’ve built this platform stack source online financing portal. And we’re we’re building it and growing it and that’s my company to unpack that a little bit. If I’m a borrower, potential borrower, I have a deal that I want to finance. I go online, I fill out some information on your website, and then you bring me back potential quotes. Yeah, yeah. So you actually get instantly matched to different lending programs that are cataloged in our database. So if you were to have a conversation with an old school financing broker, they’d ask you a lot of the same questions that are financing portal is going to have you key in like, what type of asset and what’s the address, and you know, what’s the financing scenario here, and they’re going to go back and search their contact book and try to remember who is a good lender fit and they’re gonna probably bring you to a few trusted lenders and try to get you quotes. And that process is actually going to take like days and weeks and you enter that information in our portal, you’re instantly getting matched with loan programs that are algorithmically matched based on the location, the size of the loan request, the type of financing scenario, we actually keep, like 76 different criteria, which will match or unmatch, one of the hundreds of lending programs in our database, so that you’re instantly seeing, hey, here’s how many matches I have from banks, credit unions, life insurance companies, CMBS market so that I can see hey, these are my universe of available lending options and decide which ones that you want to pursue. So you can get the best loan that matches your real estate investment. Got it? Are you matching me with a lending program? Or like, am I getting a person to talk to what am I actually getting? Like when you say matching? Yeah, well, so you’re matched with loan programs, we actually have one person to talk to, which is a stack source capital advisor, who is day in and day out like a real estate finance professional years of experience as lenders and mortgage brokers that are going to walk through the process and explain the pros and cons of different lending programs. They’ll be the single point of contact not just for you, but for the lenders asking you about the deal so you don’t have to answer the same question a dozen times for you know, a dozen lenders that are reviewing your deal.

So you get one point of contacts, which is a stacks horse capital advisor, we are unashamedly borrower advocates. So you know, lenders, we do business with them, we’ve got great relationships with a number of lenders, but we’re negotiating on the borrower’s behalf to get the best financing package. So that person has the capital advisor, you know, real estate finance veteran that is helping you through the process.

Ressa 5:21
Understood. And so

what are you doing that’s disrupting the space other than the technology piece, which I think is obviously key. But what is the technology actually doing disrupting

Milazzo 5:33
the space? Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things that we’re enabling that don’t happen in the traditional process. One of them is just purely the speed of it. Because we’ve automated this platform that while you’re entering information, it’s starting to design a digital om of what the lender needs to see, we actually go out and call API’s real estate data platform so that when you give us the property address of this strip mall that I’m looking to buy in that town, it’s actually pulling information that’s going to be needed by the lender and inserting it in an OM as you go, we’re shaving days off of the process of finding that which can really make a difference when in an acquisition deal. It can really make a difference in a 1031 exchange, when you’re running out of time to get your properties identified and your deals done to shave days off the processes is a part of it to enable transparency for the borrower, if you talk to a your average commercial mortgage broker that’s been in the business for a long time, you do you do not get transparency into Who are they going out to? Who are they talking to? What are they showing them? You know, what’s really what’s really the universe of available options here? They’re coming back with term sheets after you know, you know, a kind of an undetermined amount of time could be days could be a couple of weeks. And here are your term sheets, here are the two options you have. Do you know those are the only two options on the market? How many people did you talk to like, Were you busy on other deals, and you were lazy on mine and going and getting financing options. So on Saturdays we have that transparency of here are the nine lenders that have said they can do you know, a single tenant without a tenant credit tenant in, you know, Iowa with this with this type of quick serve restaurant. And you’re seeing these are my nine match and match lenders, you know, five of them are turning me down because of this reason. And I’m getting for quotes pack and you’re getting that transparency on the process, you’re getting transparency and fees as well. commercial mortgage brokers may have certain preferred lending relationships that are going to pay them an extra, an extra something on the deal. And that’s something that never happens on stack source. Because we’re fully transparent. There’s just X source guarantee and fees on the process that you can see everything is going to be faster, and we’re going to expose you to the best financing options available.

Ressa 7:48
Sounds interesting.

You mentioned term sheets, as a borrower, if I have done this before, can I just once I get the term sheet, kind of say, hey, stack source, I can take it from here? Or are you guys in the process the whole way,

Milazzo 8:06
we typically stick with the process until closing day to make sure a couple things happen. One, that the lenders living up to their term sheet, which unfortunately, in commercial real estate does not happen 100% of the time. And as a matter of fact, another new feature we’re launching on the stack source platform is lender ratings. And, you know, is this lender likely to reiterate? And is that lender closing in the typical amount of days that they say they can Oh, we can close in 30 days is that happening on other transactions with other borrowers. And you know, think about riding in an Uber versus riding in a taxi, you’re getting driver ratings, you’re getting, hey, this person has gotten this really good feedback. And you’re getting, you know, there’s an accountability there where they know that you can leave ratings and reviews and feedback and you they can get kicked off if they’re not doing a good job. And that shouldn’t be happening for lenders that should be happening for commercial lenders, where they’re giving you a term sheet, they’re honoring their terms, they’re closing on time. And you know, as an ecosystem, we’re not simply there to deliver a loan quote, and then step out and you can get screwed. We stay with you through the end of the process to make sure these things are happening. You know, risks are being mitigated, and these lenders are honestly living up to what they should be doing.

Ressa 9:20
So is the platform going to more than just banks?

Milazzo 9:25
Yes. Banks, their their stepbrothers that are often forgotten credit unions. There are actually a lot of credit unions across the country that are already doing a lot of commercial mortgage flow, or they want to be doing more commercial mortgage flow, but they don’t have the same presence and branding and advertising to some of the big banks. And sometimes they can be the very best most aggressive lender based on leverage based on prepayment penalties, depending on your financing scenario. So banks, credit unions debt funds, so these would be you know, everything from a private rich on Little that can make a real estate loan and has done it dozens of times, too. It’s a fund in New York City that’s set up to do transitional commercial mortgages, as well as life insurance companies. So in the CMBS market, so life insurance companies, probably the lowest rate recourse lenders, you can find and CMBS, usually the lowest rate non recourse loan, so you can find both a really good fit for long term holds of assets, usually not a good fit, if you want to sell the property within the next few years. But the very best rates, you can find, you know, depending on, you know, what you’re trying to do with that asset long term. So all five of those food groups are represented on the SAC source platform, it’s 900, unique lenders, and you know, a few 1000 unique lending programs, as some of them have multiple buckets of capital.

Ressa 10:48
So getting to brass tacks right now, my guess would be you’re trying to get both lenders and borrowers on the platform right now is that is that where you’re at in the lifecycle of statures,

Milazzo 11:02
you know, being at 900. Lenders, while we do add additional lenders, and most of most of our concern is just continuing to go deeper with our lending relationships and go deeper into their credit boxes and with the right executives, that those lenders because we have pretty good market coverage of the different lenders that want more commercial mortgage deal flow, and relationships with borrowers and deal flow with borrowers is the thing that I mean, that’s there are 10s of 1000s of real estate investors out there that may buy a property may value commercial property of one sort or another across the country. And so getting the word out on the borrower side is, you know, something that we will always be doing, and always letting borrowers know, here’s what we can do. Here’s what’s happening in the capital markets. Here’s how we’re making this process more effective. You know, on the lender side, we’re, we’re kind of there a couple of years ago, you know, when we were just starting the platform, that was a huge uphill battle, we’re gonna have quality deal flow, we’re going to give you the information you need that you can quote these things quickly. And it was a huge battle uphill battle with traditional lenders. That battle has largely gone away as we’ve gotten deals done. And as the promise of the platform really has paid off, in that we’re doing hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial mortgages, and the lenders want it.

Ressa 12:22
Excellent. I’m going to hold us right there.

We’re gonna continue that part of the conversation in a few minutes. I want to get to know Tim a little bit more found out. Tim lived in the town that I live in for 10 years, which is random because I live in a small suburban rural town in northern New Jersey. So yeah, that is unique. Anyway, I got three other personal questions for you, Tim, are

you ready? I’m ready. All right. Question one, Tim, when’s the last time you did something for the first time? Ah, well,

Milazzo 12:56
Chris, you know that I moved away from New Jersey, I was commuting into New York City for years and and including building this business. But what I’m trying now I just moved to Florida recently, and I’m trying to make our company fully remote, and work from home forever. And that’s something that I’m trying for the first time, I started working from home and the pandemic stopped going into the city and I realized, I can do this pretty well. And I went all in on it. So that’s brand new. For me buying a house in Florida working from a home office is is brand new to me.

Ressa 13:27
Sure How many employees on the team,

Milazzo 13:31
we just went north of 20. So that’s a mix of Capital Advisors, software engineers, and design people just hired our first Director of Finance last week. As we start to scale to the point where day to day and month to month, I was falling behind on some of the procedural stuff and the financing. So we’re, we’re very much a real company at this point. We are we just went north of 20 people.

Ressa 13:56
Okay, question two, what is one skill you don’t possess? But wish you did?

Milazzo 14:00
I really wish that I could design well, and I can’t I can think logically. While I don’t code on our platform, and I have a chief technology officer that manages our software engineers, I can code better than your average person. And I can think through and what systems do we need to build, but I can’t design it. We have an awesome designer, are you you’re not our user experience lead on our team now. But I’ve always lacked the design that would let me get these ideas I have in my head and show somebody hey, this is the way it’s going to look. I need to leverage other people to do that. Chris, I just I don’t have an art bone in my body. I couldn’t draw as a kid can’t design as an adult. I really wish I could but

Ressa 14:42
I can’t. Understood I can’t draw design do any of that I not musically inclined. I appreciate art but I have no artistic bones in my body unfortunately.

Last question, what is one thing most people agree with but you do not That’s a tough one.

Milazzo 15:02
And there may be a few that people agree with that I don’t there, I think there are a bunch of real estate investors that see physical retail as on the decline because of the internet. And because of E commerce. I don’t think that I don’t think that physical retail is on the decline, I think it’s going to continue to increase, but it just will be reshuffled to the right areas with increasing population and, and have the right makeup. I do not think physical retail, for whatever, you know, investors are for people that are looking at ecommerce, it’s not going away, it’s actually going to continue to increase even if the internet is increasing faster. They’re both going to continue to go up.

Ressa 15:46
I agree. And I love that one. And I think that’s an interesting one. Because, as I understand it, your background you mentioned you were a coder, your background isn’t necessarily the commercial real estate or the commercial, real estate finance background, your background is from the tech industry. Can you give us a little bit more about what your background is? Yeah, well, so

Milazzo 16:08
as I was growing up in, if we can name it, Tyndall on New

Ressa 16:12
Jersey, New Jersey, that’s where I live.

Milazzo 16:16
So my dad was a commercial leasing broker. And he started in Manhattan and works filling up office towers, and then he transitioned into New Jersey and I read REITs and not just retail but offices and commercial real estate was taught at the dinner table for me growing up. I studied finance, I interned at you know, big real estate and finance companies and I, I was the smart spreadsheet kid in the corner at these internships. But I didn’t think I’m gonna go become a broker, I’m gonna go grind through cold calls for two, three years and build a book of business. I always loved technology and the way business would change with technology. And I worked at first at Google and later at Facebook, in advertising technology, coming out of college. And I got back to real estate because I saw the opportunity for real estate tech, and for online technology and real estate to come together and not you know, I wasn’t the first real estate tech founder, they were already hundreds. And some of them were really successful, and fintech founders, financial technology founders, but I saw that with all this FinTech and with all this real estate tech, the commercial real estate financing process was not getting it was not

Ressa 17:32
yet digitally.

Milazzo 17:35
Yeah, it wasn’t evolving in the way that other businesses were and not at the pace. And I didn’t see anybody that was building this to me very obvious idea of hey, why can’t you log in somewhere and see all the available financing options for X property? There were crowdfunding portals that said they could syndicate equity for you. And there were investments arrows portal saying we can we can run an auction to buy this property. On the on the residential side, there was like Rocket Mortgage, who fast forward five years the worth $50 billion, great job, Dan Gilbert and Rocket Mortgage, but I’m saying, Hey, you can get instant mortgage quotes online and closing processes coming online. And those seem to all circle pay for real estate investors getting online financing options, and like making that process easier. It must happen, right? But there was nobody making progress on this, Chris. And that was shocking to me. And while I wasn’t, you know, a 20 year commercial mortgage broker, knowing all the ins and outs, I knew enough people to talk to about this. And a lenders like, you know, property owners brokers like what’s what’s going on? What’s the what’s the day to day on this? I found the commercial mortgage brokers went way too deep in what are the day to day problems with deals, and we have to do it this way. And like they were to set in their ways if they’ve been in business for 25 or 30 years. And then people that were brand new in the industry, if you’re buying your first deal, or maybe the first time you get screwed over by some lender on their term sheet, it’s a shocking experience that is the industry really like this. And that was the gap. That was the gap where we knew stacks had to exist between the first impression where is this really what the commercial mortgage process was, and getting stuck into? Hey, I know too much. And I know why it’s this way. And I know why it’s this bad. There was that whitespace in between where stack source could exist. And that’s, that’s what brought me back to real estate. Fascinating.

Ressa 19:28
And what did you do at Google and you were in the ad space at Google and Facebook?

Were you coding?

Milazzo 19:36
Not on the consumer facing platforms? No. So I I had a few different jobs over a few years, but a lot of them in sales and operations. So there was a part of the career there when I was an account manager helping other websites maximize their advertising revenue. And but more more of the time I was the sales operations guy for these ad sales teams at ad technology sales teams, which are really the revenue drivers for these companies, its advertising technology. And, you know, what was our go to market strategy in growing this ad revenue, and this ad tech revenue, you know, analyzing and projecting future revenues. And, you know, I was part analysts part operations and part like internal tools that our sales team would use to prioritize and sell to different customers. And some of that stuff is translated really well into, okay, we’ve got a team of Capital Advisors, and how do we maximize our revenue? And how do we make this better, you know, for, for the people that we’re serving.

Ressa 20:38
Very cool, unique background. Now,

you’re in this space. And now you’ve got reception from the lender world. And you’re starting to get borrowers on you mentioned hundreds of millions of fields of dollars in deals, what are the challenges now to get to like, the next face, right? Everyone reaches like this point, you know, you have a good idea grows, and then you hit this like plateau and getting over that next hurdle, whatever the revenue number might be, one of the challenges you face and getting to that next level, whatever it might be for you.

Milazzo 21:13
Yeah, well, I, you know, I think we’ve gone through a couple of these stages already from idea to the platform works was at stage and then you know, the platform works to there are the first transactions going through, you know, now in 2021. We’re growing and like our revenues, tripling this year, because our loan volume is tripling, and we’ve we’ve done a certain amount of lending. The next stage for us is how do we go from small and fast growth to can we sustain that, and we become a top commercial real estate finance company, can we be a top 10 Or a top five commercial mortgage origination platform, and that’s really what the focus is for the next few years for stacks versus growing that so I’m hiring management for our company now for the first time, you know, head of origination, head of finance, and, and starting to put together a management team. And it’s not just, I make every decision, and I do it, and then I get to it, but I have to empower those people. And I have to get the right people. That’s, that’s like a major thing for us. We really, Chris have not done marketing. We have not done paid advertising for stacks, we have done our own organic marketing, for our blog, like so like you’re doing the podcasts, we have a blog, that we’ve we’ve gotten really good on certain topics of being like the first results on Google because we explained so complex topic, and we don’t hide anything. And we just explained, here’s exactly how your interest rate or your fees work on a commercial mortgage, here’s what lenders are doing with your files like this. But we have not done any paid advertising for the company. And so

Ressa 22:46
and you come from the paid advertising world, so you’re probably pretty good at maximizing the algorithms on the social media platform, since you’ve come from the paid ad world, I’ll tell you,

Milazzo 22:58
knowing the channels and how to work them and how to like manipulate programmatic advertising, I know all the concepts there, I think the key challenge with the marketing is like clarity of message in a way that like 1000s of different people are going to understand very quickly. And then like, you know, paid ads, there is unlimited scale there. But I think for startups, you can reach everybody on the internet, if you just pay enough, and and you can manipulate it to can try to control those costs. But it’s very expensive to reach everybody in the industry that way. And so, you know, we key in on more organic channels and things where we can have like a higher return. Because we I can be better, I can be 10 times better at paid ads than some traditional, you know, brokerage or lender that’s trying to go after the same people in the same way. And they could just spend 50 times as much and you’re gonna drown us out. And so like the the marketing and the advertising approach for for an earlier stage startup, you know, when you’re making your first million in revenue, and then when you’re making your first 10 million in revenue, you have to find other ways to market, I think it’s kind of lazy for a startup to just say, Well, I’m just going to raise another 10 or $20 million. And we’re just going to chuck it into advertising. I think it makes it may make you more valuable in the short term because your revenue goes up. But if you can’t find that sustainable advantage in how to get to customers, and how to help customers, and then actually convert more of those leads, I think you’re actually doing a disservice to those investors that are giving you $20 million. I think you’re doing a disservice to your company when like we run out of other interesting ways. So we are pushing that as far towards like the longer part of our journey as possible.

Ressa 24:45
Well, one of the things that we talk about all the time in this e commerce brick and mortar discussion is we say all the time customer acquisition cost is the new rent and the cost to acquire customer is gone. Sky High because of what you’re talking about. And we say it’s the new rent. And so anyway, talking about the company a little bit more, have you guys gone to the VC firms have you raised money is it all bootstrapped where yet in the process, the majority of

Milazzo 25:17
the money that we’ve raised and it hasn’t been much, we raised like less than a million dollars and a pre seed round to get going. We then raised earlier this year, Chris, a $2.6 million seed round, that was a seed round after we had already reached small scale profitability, and over a million dollars revenue last year. So we we’ve been, we have not been aggressive in that demand. In that regard. The majority of the money we’ve raised has come from real estate investors, they understand the pain point of how bad financing could be, how much better it could be, and want to support that vision of let’s make financing better for the industry. So the majority of our capital has come from real estate investors and real estate brokers that see that want this vision to become the reality see that we’re building this in, you know, for they’ve deemed the right way. And so that’s where the majority of our three point X million dollars of funding has come from.

Ressa 26:13
Got it. All right.

Let’s give it a little bit. You said it’s so odd, it was so obvious. But I think there’s actually a lot of places in real estate that technology hasn’t been able to crack yet, whether it’s financing and other places. It’s just this long history of evolving potentially slower to change than other industries. What do you think is next for this space that people don’t see coming? I’d love to get your take from coming from a tech background

Milazzo 26:46
a lot. I think there’s a lot happening, I think in retail, out of all the major food groups, you see people paying attention to other forms of alternative data. And I think that is something that all of the sectors of real estate should wise up to, I think it’s going to, you know, impact every every major asset class. But, you know, you think about retail foot traffic and vehicle traffic and social media sentiment, and, you know, things that were not primarily considered real estate data a decade ago, like, are the first things you look at when you’re doing site selection, or where you’re looking at acquiring properties, or maybe they’re the second things you look at. And so, data and like analytics, that’s not going to reverse that’s going to continue to accelerate. I think, artificial intelligence, maybe not in the way that it’s like, oh, an AI is going to determine the value of the property and like, bid against you and like, but artificial intelligence in a way that will optimize spaces and, you know, be really impactful from an asset management standpoint. And potentially also as a as a signal on the on the investment standpoint, is something that has to be thought about, at some level, because it’s coming, it has not been a disrupter yet, it’s gonna take a long time to be a disrupter. But when it happens, it’ll happen fast, when real artificial intelligence takes in all of that data and can synthesize it and, you know, become a signal. And, you know, I would say on the financing side, automated lending quotes for certain products, like just like you, you experience on the residential side, like, hey, enter your credit score, enter your income history thing, like, here’s your mortgage quote, you’re at 2.75%. Because you’re, you know, prime or something that’s coming to commercial real estate. And that’s, that’s very close to our sector and being able to get an instant commercial mortgage quote, that’s coming. So those are a few there’s, there’s a lot there’s, there’s a prop tech startup for just about everything at this point, whether they’re successful or not, or have users yet, may may be there or may not. I tend to route on like all the prop tech and everybody doing it, like because I think it’s all like really cool.

Ressa 28:58
These are, these are big assets. Sometimes it could take years

Milazzo 29:03
for, you know, assets to trade hands or for financings to happen or for decisions to be made on properties. So it’s not all going to be at once, but it’s something that everybody should be aware of.

Ressa 29:13
But great insights, or there’s a question that I have here that I forgot to ask on when you were talking about your business. Are you able to on the complicated sometimes there might be a mess piece, right? Sometimes there might be multiple lenders on a deal, depending on size, are you are you able to do those things on the platform?

Milazzo 29:34
So we recently hired a new EVP head of originations that is like an experienced debt and equity broker for 30 years in addition to running like originations for banks and credit unions and like was a managing director for like a very popular debt and equity brokerage. And I would expect keep watching stack source for like What we do over the next few months in the next year, because right now we’ve we’ve had, we’ve built a platform, we’ve executed platform, and we’re executing on a lot of senior lender, straightforward commercial deals, somebody looking for the lowest rate, someone looking for the most leverage from a single lender, etc. Keep watching for what we’ll do next, because we’re onboarding some really impressive real estate, finance talent, the people that have negotiated and structured those types of deals. And, you know, we we’re going to continue adding capabilities to the platform.

Ressa 30:33
Perfect. Lastly, a lot going on with inflation, interest rates, you’re seeing a lot of deal flow. Now. Anything you can tell us on what you guys are seeing as it relates to the debt markets in general, as it relates to commercial real estate and the insights, maybe the two or three things you’re seeing that people might be on the lookout for.

Milazzo 30:54
Yeah, well, I’ll give you the bottom line first, which is it’s absolutely a borrowers market, if you are doing good deals and reaching out to the right lenders. And here’s why. Commercial rates are tied largely to US Treasury yields in the US for for any sort of perm product, and it’s tied to overnight lending rates if you’re talking about transitional loans. And both of those indices are still at really historical lows. US Treasuries are at lows, LIBOR and its replacement Sofer are at like really, really low rates. So both floating and fixed rate, commercial mortgages are still at these historical low interest rates. Both the US federal government and the Federal Reserve, and like every bank in step are very liquid. There’s a very illiquid market. There’s money to be lent. Now, what we’ve seen last summer with COVID, and then this summer with like, the little bit of relapse with Delta variant COVID, and a little bit more uncertainty, when there have been periods of acute uncertainty, like how bad is this going to affect businesses, businesses have to be shut down? How long are they going to be shut down? When there are those acute periods of uncertainty, the gap between different quotes from different commercial mortgage lenders, the same time bank to bank credit unions or credit union LiveCode let go the gap between quotes from different lenders on the same property widens. Now, it’s a banner year for commercial mortgage origination it may be it’s going to be either the second or third largest origination you’re ever here in 2021. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the only time we’ve had $600 billion of loans originated in the US was 2019. It’s not going to quite reach that, but it’s going to be more than 550. It’s a huge year. But you’re going to get very different interest rates. If you find the right lender that has that excess return on their balance sheet or is able to get more aggressive. So we saw last summer the largest ever difference between quotes on different property on the same property from different lenders. Second largest gap of all time was this summer as delta poke that said, it is moderating somewhat as we head into the fall, Chris, but that gap is still pretty wide. Just meaning like if you’re a commercial mortgage borrower do not settle for like a decent quote on a commercial mortgage to leverage your property. You can find the best rates and the best terms and the most leverage now if you look under the right rocks and don’t rely on one quote from one relationship lender,

Ressa 33:38
sage advice during the pandemic, early parts of the pandemic last year a lot of lenders kind of just went to the sideline there was this like, well multifamily? Is anyone ever gonna live in an apartment again? They’re all gonna move to the suburbs, retail is anyone gonna shop office? Anyone gonna go in working in office? So hotels, is anyone going to ever travel and go to a hotel, there was all these, you know, extremes. So lenders were waiting and see. And there was this definitely time period where there was a lack of originations are there still lenders on the sidelines or majority of them off the sidelines and raring to go?

Milazzo 34:14
I think almost all lenders have come off the sidelines, but have kept caution on like a couple of things like one if you’re if you happen to have a property that you have to refinance right now. But like, it’s one of the worst counties in the country as far as like current COVID numbers and infections and hospitalizations, that’s going to that’s going to harm your ability to, like, you know, finance that easily, if you are in an area that lenders are worried is going to have a longer term impact from some of the societal changes or if like COVID, like, you know, if it just becomes endemic after the pandemic, like it’s just going to be different strains of it each year is, is your is your property going to be one of the ones that’s impacted? most or least about if it’s in the most category, like we think this is a city that’s going to struggle, it’s not going to have a lot of population comeback, or it’s not gonna have a lot of spending come back, you may have trouble overall that’s not the case overall lenders are liquid, they have to deploy capital, they do not want to be sitting on cash, they want to be sitting on the right loans with the right risk adjusted returns. And with few exceptions, lenders are in the market debt funds, banks, life insurance companies, again, sitting on cash, especially if they expect inflation, to continue to be here to stay is not a good value proposition for them. They need to put money out into the right risk adjusted returns. And it’s a very liquid market.

Ressa 35:44
Especially, you know, us borrowers saved more than they ever did before banks. You know, they’re putting all this money in the banks banks got to put that out and they’re paying interest on its back to the bank customers. They got to put that out to

Milazzo 35:58
work. Yeah, absolutely.

Ressa 36:02
Well, listen, Tim, this has been great. Thank you so much. Good luck. I hope it all starts to really take fold to how you envision it sounds like you’re already on your way. And thanks for coming on the show today.

Milazzo 36:14
Chris, thanks so much for having me.

Ressa 36:16
Thank you, everyone. Thank you for listening to retail retold today. One of the things we didn’t do was tell you where you can find Tim and learn more about stack source. If you’re interested in stack source and want to learn more about what they offer, please go to www dot stack source.com. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to retail retold. You want to share a story about a retail real estate deal that you were a part of on our show. Please reach out to us at retail revolt at DLC mgmt.com. This show highlights the stories behind the DLC, all perspectives. So it doesn’t matter if you are a retailer, broker, entrepreneur, architect or an attorney. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to retail retold so you don’t miss out on next Thursday’s episode