Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Ian Colville. He is the founder and Managing Partner of Carpathian Capital Management, an alternative asset manager specializing in U.S. Residential real-estate development. Since launching the firm in 2012, Ian and his team have overseen more than $400 million in residential assets. Ian’S career began in management consulting before he spent a decade in emerging-market investment banking. He served as Head of Equity Sales for both Deutsche Bank and Citigroup in Moscow, advising global institutional investors on Russian and CIS opportunities. After a stint as CEO of Dream House Ukraine—then the country’s largest wood-frame construction firm—he returned to the U.S. To found Carpathian. Thank you so much for being on the show!
Ian:
Thank you for having me, Charles. I’m excited to be here.
Charles:
So you have a very extensive background in global investment. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, both personally and professionally, professionally, before getting in, in 2012 to what you’re doing now? I touched on a little bit, but if you wanna go into a little bit more in depth.
Ian:
Yeah. I’m from Rochester, Minnesota. I don’t actually have any Russian roots, but back in the day I ended up studying Russian in college. ’cause I thought that was a, a cool thing to do. I’d grown up with Ronald Reagan on the tv talking about talking about Russia. And so then I worked in consulting. And then I went back to business school as part of going to business school. I got a dual degree a master’s in International Affairs. I picked, picked up Russian again. I know I made, you know, my business degree was focused on finance and investing. In 2003 when I graduated there was a Wharton alum in Moscow, Russia, who needed someone to come over and just do three months of financial modeling for a warehouse project that he was working on a real estate investor.
Ian:
And somehow it turned into left the two suitcases, and it came back 10 years later with a container full of stuff a wife and a daughter. So <laugh> that turned into investment banking with Deutsche Bank. Then I took some a couple of years and did some real estate work in Ukraine, and then came back and worked with Citibank. What that taught me and how that informs my current our current investing is I saw a number of people in those markets who made money by investing just after a crisis or through a crisis, a during a crisis, you know, really, really sticking it out. And when unfortunately, we had the great financial crisis back in the United States I saw an interesting opportunity, and we can talk about that in a second about how I transitioned into that.
Charles:
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about kind of how you, when you got back here what you were doing. So kind of what you were investing into, what your kind of business plan was before going into what you’re doing now.
Ian:
Yeah. So one of the things that so there was the, the crisis theme that I got out of my time in Russia, and then if you, if you recall, get it, to get us out of the financial crisis, central banks around the world were printing a fair amount of money. And the i the thought was the conventional wisdom was like, that’s gonna lead to inflation. It did, but it took a decade longer than people were expecting. But in times of inflation, you generally want to be in hard assets. So that could be real estate. Commodities is pretty typical real hard things that don’t tend to have their value eroded by inflation. And at the time, ho houses in the United States were super cheap, and we also had very low interest rates. So we had a hard asset, which is a hedge toget inflation.
Ian:
We have a very inexpensive asset homes were selling for well below replace replacement cost. And we had the ability to get really cheap leverage if you could, if you could qualify for it. So while I was working at Citibank, I would actually come back home see some investors in New York, and then I’d buy like a $30,000 house in a suburb of Minneapolis. And so by the time I decided to make this a full-time thing, I personally owned six houses and I brought, had brought some investors in to invest in a 12 year apartment building. So I kind of dipped my toes into the water. And then when it became time to, to leave Russia, it was just becoming less interesting. And I’m, I’m glad I did. I raised $5 million from people I’d met in the finance world and that became our first fund. So raised $5 million, borrow 15 million from a, from banks we owned about, we ended up buying $20 million worth of houses as our first fund. Should I keep going from there or? Yeah,
Charles:
Definitely. No. Yeah. Tell us about like, into what you’re doing now. Like this is
Ian:
Very, yeah. So our that was 2013 and we did it again, raised another five, borrowed another 15 bought another bunch of houses. So at our peak we had about $40 million worth of houses. And so by that point in 2015 or so you know, the, the surplus of homes had gone away. Home prices have been going up since about 2012. So I made a decision that we’re getting into shortage territory here. It’s clear that we need more houses in the United States. We need to invest in the creation of new units of housing. So I’m a financial person. The people work here, financial people, we don’t, don’t, our expertise is not swinging hammers. So we started a private lending fund. So we lend we make private loans to home builders construction loans. We’re we’re more expensive than a bank, but we’re also more flexible.
Ian:
We can do a little bit higher loan to cost. We can close quickly et cetera. So we currently have about a $40 million loan book of loans outstanding to to home builders here in Minnesota. And then a few years after that, we were starting to hear from home builders that even if they had unlimited cash labor and materials, they couldn’t find enough buildable land to build their home, build their home homes on. So the actual, the process of getting land from, you know, sort of a farmland or vacant state to have, have it ready to build a home on it can take a year or two. And that’s called the land development. So we added onto our business a development, finance business. And this is what we do the most of today, is we find we find markets around the country that we really like.
Ian:
We find developers in those markets that we really like, second generation, been around for 20 years. And then we look at the projects they have. And if all of three of those things come together and the developer wants outside capital will typically form a, a joint venture where we put in something like 80% of the equity partner puts in 20%, they go and do whatever project they have proposed to us. An example would be like a 190 home, 190 home age targeted community in a suburb of Minneapolis is one of our projects. Or 130 homes in Atlanta. And we then we split the profits from that development as things start to sell we often negotiate a preferred equity structure, which helps mitigate some of the downtime side risk for our investors. So before I go into that, I’ll just take me in what direction is the most interesting for
Charles:
Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah. one thing you touched on about a minute or so ago is the markets choosing markets. And you’re coming from an institutional background. We have a lot of investors that are on the show, whether they it’s their own funds mm-hmm <affirmative>. Or their small syndicators that might have a different way of choosing markets for one reason or another. They’ve located and they’ve identified that market as what they want to invest into. How have you, because you’re not just, you’re going outside of where you live, obviously you’re going around the United States. Can you tell us just a couple of the key points that you wanna see in a market that’s making it more interesting to you and that really seals it for being something that you want to put funds in?
Ian:
Yeah. Well, first of all, for the smaller investors, I just put a pitch out there and recognize that local knowledge is hugely valuable. So you may be in a market that’s not the tightest housing market in the country, but if you know that, you know, this particular block or this project, or you’ve got this relationship which is getting you a good price that’s not necessarily, you know, that’s very valuable stuff. So you don’t have to leave your home market to make money on a smaller scale. But when we are looking around the country housing shortage is an obvious place to start. It used to be that we could say there’s a shortage in just about every market in the United States. That’s changed a bit during this period of higher interest rates. I would argue that in terms of housing units per capita, there’s still a shortage in most markets, but in some markets, there’s more supply of homes for sale than in others.
Ian:
So month’s supply of homes for sale is a very basic and key metric. Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the tightest home markets in the country has like 1.8, 1.9 months supply of homes for sale in some places in Florida, Miami-Dade, I think of eight months. So you generally think of anything below six months supply of homes for sale is what’s considered a shortage, and prices tend to go up above that. Tend, prices tend to be flat or go down. I can go more into how that metric is calculated. That’s perfect, please. So, month supplies, you take the number of homes for sale in, in whatever markets you’re in. And then you divide it by the average number of homes that sell per month, and you use a 12 month backward looking average. So the average of the last 12 months, how many homes sold per month?
Ian:
So number of homes of sale divided by the number of homes that sell per month, that gives you a month’s supply. So if I say this market has four months supply of homes, it means that in theory, if no new homes were ever listed for sale, which of course doesn’t happen, but this is a, a good it’s, it’s good for analytical purposes. If no new homes were listed for sale, in theory, that market would run out of homes to sell in four months. Everything that’s currently listed would be sold and there’d be nothing left. So that’s a way of suppl combining supply and demand into one metric. Supply is obviously the number of homes for sale demand is the number number of homes that sell per month on average. So it’s a good kind of quick rule of thumb sort of metric.
Ian:
And then from there you look at things like affordability versus, you know, the, the average household income for the market job growth, you know, is the market expanding or contracting? So e economic factors and then you get into you know, I guess that’s just on the market perspective. Once we get, once we’re talking to a specific partner and they say, we do all the due diligence on the partner, and they say, all right, we like this deal in this location, then we look real closely at the local market conditions around that location. So what comparable product is available for sale? At what price? What is absorption in that particular area of town, you know, a faster home selling and competing developments, et cetera.
Charles:
And since, you know, lending and interest rates are a large part of buying real estate in general, whether it’s someone’s residential single family home, or whether it’s a large commercial property, I imagine when you’re saying affordability under that umbrella encompasses also, you know, monthly payments, what people are making in the sense of what, where mortgage rates are and where they might be in, I guess, 12, 18, 24 months when these properties are being sold. Yeah,
Ian:
Absolutely. And then when you look at, you know, affordability calculations, you’ll often see it measured as what percentage of average household income do you need to spend to make the, you know, the average mortgage payment on the median priced house, something like that. So obviously mortgage payment has a heavy component of interest in there. So as interest rates go up with the average median income for the location, you’re probably gonna have to buy, you know, a cheaper house, a smaller house. And the inverse is also true. So we pay close attention to those types of issues. It’s not just the price of the house, it’s your monthly payment.
Charles:
Right, right, right. Yeah, definitely. For sure. When investing real estate, I mean, I, you know, liquidity is always one thing when we’re talking to passive investors and they always wanna know, you know, how long they have to hold the investment for how long, you know, all the whole process of everything like this. Especially I think for seasoned real estate investors, they understand it’s an illiquid investment, but maybe for some other ones coming from other asset classes, it might not be as much. How do you approach this topic with investors, and is there a way of providing LPs with more liquidity when they’re, when they’re working with your firm?
Ian:
Yeah, I love this question. If you know, individual investors, if they’re just buying 1, 2, 3 houses, they’re of course locked into that house until they sell it, for the most part, unless they’re getting some rental stream off of it. As you deal, if you get, as you get into larger pools, you know, raise a fund that’s gonna go buy 40 million of houses or raise a fund that’s gonna go finance eight different developments you generally see two types of fund structures, open-ended and closed ended. A closed ended fund is one where you raise all the money upfront then you go and execute whatever projects you’re going to do. And investors in that fund just have to wait until the money comes back from those specific projects. After those projects return money or from selling or rent or whatever, then the fund goes away.
Ian:
You know, investors can’t move in and out of it during the operating or development years of the fund. We’ve done something a little bit different, which aims to provide more liquidity for investors in our latest development fund an open-ended fund. And there you set, we set a share price every quarter. Investors are welcome to put more money in at the share price, or they can redeem at that share price. The underlying assets in the fund are not shares of Microsoft, however, we can’t just sell, you know, all of it all at once or at least expect to get a good price for it. So there are some restrictions on the redemption process. We ask for a one year commitment to the fund, so there’s a one year lockup you put money in it’s locked up for at least one year.
Ian:
We don’t want fast money moving it out. You can’t do developments with fast money. And the second thing is when somebody wants to redeem they have to give us six months notice. So that gives us enough time to accumulate cash either from, you know, selling a few homes or a few buildable lots at some of the projects, which happens in the net normal course of the business anyway. Or from a line of credit, or maybe we’ve got some investors that wanna come into the fund. So it gives us enough time to accumulate some money and let investors redeem. If anyone’s seriously thinking about it, there’s more, a few more caveats in the, in the documents about not everybody could get on at once, et cetera, but we’re, we’re kind of trying to provide more liquidity than typical closed ended funds but certainly less than shares in Microsoft. So I, I, I’m careful to talk to investors about, you know, for these returns, you you give up something and that’s liquidity, but we’re trying to make it as manageable as possible within the constraints of the asset class that we’re in.
Charles:
Right. I think I, you know, we have this conversation initially with investors. I think it comes up where if they are talking about it beforehand, it’s also something you have to tell, Hey, you’ve already sat in it for the most kinda riskiest right. Two years or three years of it. Sure. And now it’s, you’ve, you’ve gone through the hard part of it, right? If you’re thinking that you wanna, you know, liquidate your position a couple years into it, usually you’ve already gone through where we’ve had the unknowns and now we’re kind of like on the stabilization portion of it, but obviously life events happen.
Ian:
Those are the best times to own to, to own the assets. I, you, I think you’re repositioning multi-family assets,
Charles:
Right?
Ian:
Do you provide investors liquidity midstream before the assets sold?
Charles:
We don’t. It’s something that we, we, if, I mean, if somebody really had an issue, we could do it. We could, you know, we could work it out depending on the size of their investment, we would, you know, we could probably talk to and partners and figure it out. But it’s something that we don’t really allow it, and it’s, I would just, you know, it’s just something when I’ve spoken to other operators that have done it, it’s just becomes a, it really becomes a mess. I mean, between it’s a lot of work and a lot of legal, a lot of costs with it, and it’s kind of just important to have more important to even have these non-liquid or illiquidity conversations beforehand. But obviously life happens. And I mean, I imagine sometime in the future we will have an, an investor or so will want to, you know, get out for whatever reason.
Ian:
Yeah. So we’ve done plenty of closed ended funds and you know, the asset class that you’re in, probably, unless you’re huge and you sort of like do a publicly traded fund or something, what you do where you can’t provide a lot of liquidity other than, you know, rental distributions or something makes sense, you can’t go sell, you know, 5% of an apartment building to cash out an investor. The asset class that we are in is developments. So buy land, do land development, get it ready to build homes on it. Sometimes we’re just selling off lots in onesie twosies to builders who then build the homes. Sometimes we’re involved in the home building process, but either way, we actually are selling off 1% of the project, and we’re selling a lot. We’re selling a home, so we have a bit more cash coming back to us, which makes it a bit easier. But, you know, buying and holding multifamily, there’s all kinds of tax benefits to that. You get a lot of depreciation write-offs and just letting your money sit and grow over time makes plenty of sense. But yes, it’s less liquid.
Charles:
Correct, correct. So you were talking before about when you’re following the housing market, you, you know, you’re understanding where there’s tight housing market, these are the places that you want to go. Another asset class I saw in research for this was that you’re focusing on age restricted communities, which we haven’t spoken too much about on the show, and it’s very interesting where you’re kind of seeing the next kind of place where it might, where there’s gonna be demand. Can you talk a little bit about why focusing on the Asian age restricted communities is
Ian:
Important? Yeah. We, we didn’t set out to do have a focus on age restricted communities. And I’d say that we don’t really, but we’ve got a couple in the portfolio. Actually, the one in Atlanta just paid off and investors made great returns, like 60% on their money. It, some of it depends on what our partners are showing us. You know, if, if we’ve picked a market and we’ve picked a partner if that partner thinks, you know, their best projects are in age targeted our partner in Atlanta, Brock built fantastic second generation large private builder developer, they’ll just, they’ll do regular communities and they’ve got some age targeted communities. And it just depends on what makes sense for the submarket. But if you’re doing it there are some demographic tailwinds and other features of people who are aged 55 and older active adult communities where the home’s a little bit closer together, there’s a central gathering area, et cetera.
Ian:
The first the first one is that demographically we’re talking, there’s a there’s a portion of the population like baby boomers or a large portion of the population. There’s just a lot of people in that segment of the population. A lot often people are selling a larger house and they’re moving, they’re moving down to a smaller house. They tend to pay cash. So our development here in Minnesota, well, yeah, I think 70% of the homes were sold for all, for all cash. So they’re less interest rate sensitive. And sometimes that matters in ti in times of higher interest rates. It was nice to have some age targeted product out there where the buyers weren’t thinking quite as much about where the interest rates where the interest rates were. So I think there’s a demographic reason to invest in that segment. There can be a, a financial reason to invest in, in that segment. And then you just have to look at, you know, where you’re building the community, are there competing communities of that type around? And in the, in the sub-markets that we chose there, there weren’t, you know, that age. We’ve got age targeted communities in the northern metro area here but there weren’t, wasn’t much in the southern metro area. So similar situation in Atlanta with a great partner.
Charles:
That’s great. Yeah. And I imagine in that 70% cash and that remaining 30%, those aren’t people coming in probably with 20% down payments, 8% loan of value. They might be coming in 50 50 or whatever it might be. Higher down payments, larger down payments making, again, the interest rate not as a large thing as it was before. So
Ian:
I sus yeah, I suspect that’s the case. I went and I, I went and did the the work to find out what percent of people were paying in cash. I don’t know that financing terms of what the other 30% were doing, but that would certainly make sense. You know, those folks are downsizing generally. So,
Charles:
So after building a age restricted community, something like this, what is the exit plan there? Is it for you to fill it and sell it to a operator that takes it off your hands or the builder? I mean, like, so this,
Ian:
The two communities that we’ve been involved with are for sale homes. They’re not build to rent communities, although that’s another something we could invest in, we’ve looked at, but we don’t, we, we don’t have one in the portfolio right now. So it’s literally develop the land build the house, the house sells to an end buyer, and we get a little bit of the cash back.
Charles:
Perfect. Okay. So when we’re talking about different markets, you you’re kind of going back and forth about you know, what you’re looking for in those markets, and I think in certain markets you’ll find certain things like tax abatements that make a unique situation that really pushes development. We’ve also seen this with the 8,000 kind of qual, you know, QOZ zones, right? That were throughout the United States, that were, can be earmarked for this huge tax abatement from 2017 kind of thing. But going forward with that, I mean, what are some other special situations that your firm has really taken advantage of that might have been overlooked or maybe not seen by typical investment companies that are out there?
Ian:
Yeah, interesting. Now, at our size where we’re looking to deploy, you know, $5 million or $10 million at a time, we really, we can get into projects of a size that most of the big funds overlook. They need to write a $50 million check. They can’t be working in the areas that we are. So you said special situations and taxes. So I’ll tell two special situation stories, one’s about taxes and one is not, it’s just an interesting special situation. So Brock built in Atlanta, an excellent partner. They had a plot of land under contract in Alpharetta, Georgia. It’s one of the wealthiest submarkets of Atlanta. And it was, you know, right, Maine and Maine Alpharetta, fantastic piece of land. They got it under contract they got it under contract. And the typical process is you then go and negotiate with you, put together your engineering diagrams, you go negotiate with the city, takes a while to get your development approved on that land.
Ian:
And so you don’t actually execute on the purchase agreement until you’ve got approval to do something on it. And that process took quite a while in, in the case of Alpharetta. So I believe they had this piece of land under contract for two, maybe it was three years. And it happened to be during years where there was just an awful lot of appreciation happening. So by the time the city approved their project on it, they had the land under contract at $10 million, but it appraised at 17.8 million. And we generally won’t put money into deals until the city has approved it. That’s one of the risk mitigation strategies. In this case, we, the, the purchase agreement was about to ex about to expire. The seller didn’t want to extend it yet again because they knew what value was in that land, and the $10 million price was, was just too low.
Ian:
So we made we made an exception in this case is we put our money into this project and worked with Brock to buy the land when we had it, when they were about 95% of the way through the approval process. There was a few additional steps administrative steps that need to happen. But we, and, and Brock did not wanna lose this land. So we, you know, instant equity day one, we’ve made $7 million, least according to the appraisal. And then we negotiated a put option where they would have to buy us out if they didn’t get the project finally approved, which they did within a few months and, and we’re off and running. So that’s a fantastic special situation where just because of the length of time, there’s a valuation mismatch and there’s instant equity there. The second one, which does involve taxes is Cincinnati, Ohio.
Ian:
I said it’s the one of the tightest housing markets in the country which is great. And then we have a great partner there, Onyx and East. But they also have, in certain neighborhoods, they have enormous property tax abatements available if you put certain environmentally friendly features into your home. So generally it will cost another adds about five to $10,000 to the cost of building a home. But then the buyer of that home it knocks about a third off what their monthly payment would be for five to 10 years. And it’s, it’s an, it’s an enormous benefit. And it, it, it, they have it mapped out such that it can literally be like, we’re building on this side of the street and we can get this property tax abatement. But the folks on the other side of the street don’t have access to it. So they’ve been very specific about, you know, where they, these things are happening. We have a 29 town home development going on there. And it’s, you know, we’re very deliberate about taking into account, noticing that this is in one of the, on one of the blocks where you can get this property tax benefit. So buying our homes is significantly cheaper per month than buying, you know, homes that are developments nearby, but they don’t have enjoy this feature. Yeah,
Charles:
That’s a, that’s a fantastic benefit. And that’s also one thing that you don’t really have to, maybe not, you know, I think at some point, you know, your development new construction is competing a little bit with existing product, but in this situation, I mean, you’re completely outpacing it because of that savings over the first 10 years, which I mean, five, $10,000 more per home is really not much at all compared to the savings that somebody would have over that, over that decade.
Ian:
Yeah, it’s pretty impressive. Oh, I have another special situation story that doesn’t, we don’t benefit so much, but one of, you know, our end buyer does. We work with a fantastic partner in Florida to do land development for where Dr. Horton is the ultimate buyer at the end. So Dr. Horton finds they’re the largest home builder in America. They find parcels of land where they want to build a community, they get it approved by the city but they prefer to not have the land on their balance sheet while it’s going through the land development process. For the most part. They only want it when it’s ready to build homes on. That’s what they’re they can do their own land development, but they prefer for the most part to let someone else do it. So what they’ll do is they’ll turn the purchase agreement for this plot of land over to our partner there, and they’ll say, you go do the land development, we’ll sign a contract saying that we’re gonna buy it from you once it’s ready. That’s, that’s what we do. But the point of the story is Dr. Horton homes are often cheaper to buy in terms of your monthly payment because of the enormous insurance costs in Florida. So if you’ve got a home that’s 20 years old and was built to a different building code it can often be cheaper to buy a new Dr. Horton home because your insurance costs are so much lower. So I guess that’s another example of a, a special situation that, a specific feature of the Florida market.
Charles:
Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it goes under that total umbrella of the affordability of your total payment really makes a difference to that end buyer, especially on that residential side. But very interesting. So with your firm you, I mean, you have a, you worked abroad for many years. You now work with investors investing into your deals that are foreign investors. Can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe their perspective on the US market and kind of what deals that they possibly enjoy more investing into and what’s maybe important to them, stuff like this?
Ian:
Yeah, it really depends on you know, waxes and wanes with foreigners views of, you know, where the United States stands economically. There’s plenty been plenty of times when the US dollar is strong and just holding investments in the United States. They were making money in their home currency terms, just ’cause the dollar was was getting, was getting stronger. But then after that, there it was fairly easy early on after the housing crisis to tell a story about, you know, hard asset, cheap homes low leverage. So I got started with a lot of foreign money then, and those investors have tended to stick just to stick with us. They trust us. We’ve, we’ve earned them money et cetera. So I can’t, I don’t know that we’ve brought on. I guess every time we raise money, we bring on a few new foreign investors but for the most part, the ones that we have, have been with us for, for, for a long time. And there’s been some dollar weakness lately. So I’m, I hear a little bit of, a little bit of grumbling from the foreign investors. But what the mar US market is still viewed as viewed as a relatively robust place to, in place to invest politics is, you know, dampen that enthusiasm a bit, but for the moment, the economy is doing well.
Charles:
Yeah. So as we’re wrapping up here, and I had a couple things here that we normally ask guests that come on one of them being, you know, what do you see as common mistakes that real estates real estate investors make? I mean, over your past decades of doing this from buying single family houses to now, I mean, building large communities and other land developments,
Ian:
Excessive optimism, <laugh>,
Ian:
Haircut, haircut, everything. You know, when we work with professional builders and developers in our development business, you know, like I said, second generation firms, et cetera, but you know, to be an an investor, you have, there’s by nature an optimistic sort. So we will often take our developers forecasts and haircut them for our own internal ex at home, our own internal expectations. We you know, we’re perfectly happy if they meet what they think they’re gonna, but we’re, we’re okay if there’s a 20% deviation from that. So be careful about optimism. And then, you know, liquidity matters in our, in our borrowing or lending to home builders and Rehabers portfolio. You know, we see people get in trouble if they have four rehabs or builds going on and they’re counting on one of those properties to sell, to be able to finish some of the earlier stage properties.
Ian:
And then interest rates goes up and that whole cycle slows down then the whole thing blows up. So think about liquidity you know, not just the pace that the market’s moving at currently. What if it gets worse? What are your, you know, do you really need to have four projects? Is maybe three okay. Seek to be in this business for the long term instead of will, will ultimately, I think make you more money than trying to do it fast. ’cause At some point, if you’re doing it too fast, the market may shift and you, you know, you lose, you lose everything. You lose half of what you, what you made.
Charles:
Interesting, interesting perspective. What do you think are the main factors contributed to your success over these past few decades?
Ian:
I think we’ve we’ve got a team of people here, which has been doing investing for 20 plus years. And this business is what, 12 years old now, but the people that work here have more experience than than I do. And they have strong relationships. So I guess in our development business, they’re working with developers that they’ve worked with for a long time, even be, even before joining us. So knowing who is really capable of executing getting the job done sometimes we use that preferred equity structure, so we’re delivering steady returns to our investors. If you can be steady, somewhat boring investors, we’ll keep coming, keep coming back to you. So, you know, we got started by, I guess I got somewhat lucky, and I’ve got a few people to give me money in the early days, and it was a time when assets were cheap. But then we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on being as steady and boring as possible since then, so that it’s, it’s an easy decision to reinvest a distribution or refer us to a friend, something like that.
Charles:
So how can our listeners learn more about you and your business?
Ian:
I, we’ll put the company website in the show notes, but it’s carpathian capital.com. Get the spelling of Carpathian. You can just look up Carpathian Mountains, which is a mountain range in the Eastern Europe. So carpathian capital.com is where to find us. Awesome.
Charles:
Well, Ian, thank you so much for coming on today. A great interview and looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future. Thank you,
Ian:
Charles. A lot of fun.
