From Wisconsin to Miami: Louis Archambault's Journey Through Commercial Real Estate

From Wisconsin winters to Miami sunshine, Louis Archambault’s journey shaped his unique perspective on law and real estate. In this cafecito chat, the Saul Ewing partner and CCIM Miami board member shares insights on Miami’s industrial market, creative deal-making, and the philosophy behind condo law. Tune in for a dynamic conversation blending personal story, market trends, and fresh strategies for navigating South Florida CRE. 

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Thanks for joining us on CRE Cafecito, the CCIM Miami Podcast where deals, insights, and Miami flavor come together.

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You can find Ruben the Cuban on LinkedIn.

Chapters

• 1:20 Meet Louis Archibald, Real Estate Attorney
• 7:06 From Wisconsin to Miami Law School
• 11:20 Discovering Real Estate Law
• 18:46 From Small Firm to Saul Ewing
• 25:33 The Industrial Real Estate Market
• 34:55 The Philosophy Behind Condominium Law

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Welcome to today's episode. We are very, very excited to have one of our very own CCIM Miami District board members, louis Archibald. He's a partner at Saul Ewing and, lou, I'm excited to be here. You're a great storyteller. You have a lot of things that our folks can learn from. We're very, very honored to have you on the board as well, and thank you very much for taking some time to talk to us today.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Absolutely, Ruben. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Absolutely, absolutely. And, lou, I know we've known each other for a few years through the board and so forth, but why don't you give us a little background? Because before we get to the attorney and all the nice beautiful things you do and so forth, where you're born, tell us a little background about yourself. Where'd you grow?

Speaker 2: 1:26

up Sure. I was born in Wisconsin, wisconsin.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Yeah, yeah, don't tell me, you're a Green Bay Packer.

Speaker 2: 1:34

Oh, I'm 100% Green Bay Packers fan, born and baptized.

Speaker 1: 1:37

This conversation is over. No, just kidding, I'm a Chicago Bears fan.

Speaker 2: 1:42

I was born in Chicago, that's all right, I like the Bears, I like the Bears. I like it when the Bears are good. I'm actually excited. This year, I think that they'll be an improved team and it's always a lot more fun when both teams are good, which is different than when I grew up, and it's certainly different for you. For the last couple of years it's been a flip, but growing up in Wisconsin was great. It's a great place to to grow up.

Speaker 2: 2:04

I went to the university of Wisconsin, madison, for undergrad and really enjoyed it. But after that experience I thought you know what I want? To be a part of the world. I want to to expand, go to a bigger city, be part of the city that's international, so that I can meet people from all over the world. So I got accepted to the university of Miami for law school. All over the world.

Speaker 2: 2:25

So I got accepted to the University of Miami for law school. Funny enough, the day I got my acceptance letter it was 38 degrees below zero in Wisconsin. So it was the universe telling me it was definitely time to leave and seek out sunny beaches and a different climate. So I started at Miami in law school and actually when I was in my first two years of law school I was also on the cheerleading squad. I really enjoyed it, had a great time. I was going to watch the games anyway and you know, and I've always enjoyed exercise and staying in shape, so it wasn't that much of a of a sacrifice. And if I had to study, I told him look, I have to study to make sure that that I, I, I, pay attention to my number one priority. But I had a really good time.

Speaker 2: 3:08

You were disciplined is what you're saying. You had good discipline.

Speaker 1: 3:10

I say well-rounded.

Speaker 2: 3:11

There you go, don't be afraid to try new things. Even if you're not the best at it, at least you give it a try and have a good time. There you go, perfect. So in law school I was committed to staying south. I wasn't going to go back to Wisconsin. I mean, miami hits so far above its weight in the world. Its population, it's the same size as Milwaukee, but it's so much more internationally faced, international cosmopolitan that I really enjoyed that. And when I was in law school I actually met my wife. She is Cuban, she moved from New York to Miami when she was three years old and we met in law school. So at that point I was like, okay, I'm staying in Miami.

Speaker 1: 3:58

There you go.

Speaker 2: 3:59

And I've been living as a Miami Cuban for the last 30 years. Wow, so it's been great.

Speaker 1: 4:08

So during law school, when you got into law school, did you already know hey, I want to go into real estate law, you know, kind of specialize in real estate on the law side of things, or how did you? What was that kind of journey? You know, law school, we got to law school because there's a bunch of different avenues. You can take the law degree.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Yeah, when you graduate they try to keep it more general, but I did focus a lot of my classes on transactional issues, commercial contracts, tax, issues related to doing business and when I first started practicing, I was at a firm that did some litigation and some real estate work and I found myself really enjoying the real estate work that I was doing and also I realized very early that litigation wasn don't mind getting paid, I don't mind fighting, but if you want one thing and the other person wants the other thing and we can find some middle ground, why don't we just get along and move on, right? I thought the point of fighting was to get along and have a deal, but I realized that for some clients that wasn't the case. They were fighting because they really liked the fight and I thought, you know, this really isn't for me. And I really enjoyed the aspect of real estate in the sense that, since it can't go anywhere, it's a great vehicle for a lot of things you can borrow against it, you can develop it, you can live in it, you can trade it, it can become a commodity very quickly. So all of those different aspects is a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: 5:46

Obviously, in Florida, and particularly South Florida, miami. There's so much going on from a development perspective that Miami still has so much room to grow that it's a great time to be down here and to be involved specifically in real estate. And the other nice thing about it, too, is when you're doing real estate work, you deal with such a wide range of people. I could have a call in the morning with a billionaire developer that's developing a you know, a 20 acre piece of property. You deal with a lot of different people, so it's very different. If a problem comes up, it's not how do we figure out how to fight over it, it's how do we figure out how to solve the problem. So I enjoy that.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Well, great, great, and so you made your way over to Saul Ewing. Your partner and you guys are the sponsors for today's episode, so thank you very much. Can you tell us a little bit about Saul Ewing and how'd you get there to Saul Ewing?

Speaker 2: 6:39

Sure, I started at a smaller firm. I was probably 10 to 15 lawyers for many years at a smaller firm. I was probably 10 to 15 lawyers for many years. And Miami matured.

Speaker 2: 6:48

When we first started working, a lot of the developers that we were working with were local. They were borrowing money from local people, they were raising money from local investors, so it was a very different atmosphere. And then, I would say probably at about 2010, given a couple of years after the end of the 2000s, when the market dropped, it changed. Miami suddenly was having developers coming from outside the city. There were lenders or equity players that were from New York, that were from other areas of the world and they didn't know who we were. So it became very difficult to do deals because we were fully capable.

Speaker 2: 7:27

And it's not like I changed expertise or what I was doing, it's just you have a different scope of client and reach and reputation nationwide or internationally, and so at that point I could see that I was going to have to go to a larger firm.

Speaker 2: 7:46

Point, I could see that I was going to have to go to a larger firm. And so I moved to the firm when it was Arnstein-Lair, which had three Florida offices and a Chicago office, and then about seven months later we merged into Saul Ewing, which now had offices all over the East Coast, and now we have offices even in California, and so suddenly it was like growing. You know, you change jobs, and now you're you. You, you change jobs, and now you're, you're on the desk, car right. But we have offices that are more or less the same size in almost every one of our offices, from Boston to Miami, chicago, minneapolis, la, you know, dc, philadelphia. So a lot of our practice is still able to represent those middle to large companies and do a wide range of deals. And then we also have, at different offices, international practices that make sense for that area. By the way, I got my cafecito because I have to be true to the name of your show.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, rocket fuel, that's right yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:45

If I do one of those, the problem is I was doing with milk I mean partly because I'm from wisconsin so I have to keep up my levels. But if it's just a little shot, it's like it's so fast, and then you're saying yourself, oh I, I want another one, that was too quick. And then you do another one and then give yourself 15, 20 minutes and you start shaking. You say, say, oh, I'm in danger.

Speaker 1: 9:05

Let's start with the industrial side. I know you said you work with like developers. You know you go through some entitlement and different process Because Miami is. You know, you've been here for a while now in Miami. You've seen the growth industrial and just Miami in general has had, has grown leaps and bounds over, like the last 10 years, let alone 15, 20 years. But let's dive a little bit into industrial.

Speaker 2: 9:30

If you don't mind Sure, and I'll give you a little story. Also, it weaves into how I got into CCIM. So when I was a much younger attorney and this is going back to before we started the Outlook conferences, probably about 20 years ago I was attending a networking function conferences. Probably about 20 years ago. I was attending a networking function and I was good friends with Ed Redlich and Steve Riggle and you know some of the the local industrial guys and they were sitting at a table with Paul White and and talking about start, you know doing a, a this, you know growing the CCIM chapter. And I came over and I said, hey, how are you guys? And they said, hey, Lewis, would you like to join us? We'd love to have an attorney's input. I said, all right, sure, this is great. And so I sat at the table, started to get involved Right from the beginning. We started planning the Outlook conferences, having the Outlook conferences. I've been the chapter legal advisor from that point on and got to know again a lot of the people that had dual designations John Dahm, ted Konigsberg, jr Steinbauer, danny Zalonker, and all of them really took me in. And then I now do that similar role in the Board of governors for the Miami association of realtors on the commercial board. So it's funny how, throughout my networking, I always said you know, I I I don't necessarily want to network with lawyers I like lawyers but I want to be with people that are doing business right. So I've always networked with brokers and people in commercial real estate in different aspects and it's always been great. I've learned from you how to be a better salesperson. Hopefully I can share on the legal side and that's what I do on the industrial side and that's how I was able to become part of a lot of different deals.

Speaker 2: 11:14

Everybody touches Florida within one degree of separation. It's crazy how much the state interacts and because of logistics and distribution centers and last mile distribution, obviously you know Florida is a large consumer state and that's where there's always something going on from an industrial perspective People buying and developing building warehouses. You have smaller players that are identifying land, trying to put assemblages together to be able to sell them to some of the larger players for warehouse development and even older projects still have some value because you can do business out of a small 1960s warehouse with 25 clear and no real bays, because you know you might have a showroom in the front and either manufacture or run some of your distribution points out of the back of the building. So you know there's always some value for property one way or another. And you know Miami's landlocked for property one way or another.

Speaker 2: 12:16

And Miami's landlocked Not only that, but with Miami 21,. There's really not much industrial land available in Miami and in Miami-Dade County. A lot of it's developed. In Broward it's almost all developed. So you do have a premium on either redevelopment or potentially doing other areas for development in the state just because of land scarcity. So that becomes inevitable.

Speaker 1: 12:42

A lot of the folks I talk to that specialize in industrial. You know we talk often about the. You know the Amazons of the world. They have these. You know millions of square feet that they need and so forth. But there's something about that b minus c small bay mom and pop type. You know flex space warehouse that will, it seems like, will never go out of out of out of fashion, if you will, and it's always needed and they have something, I think in miami something it's like sub two percent, almost like one percent vacancy, so it's just never available.

Speaker 2: 13:18

Right and now go even for cold storage. It's an even smaller niche and harder to find. And actually Miami, one of the largest imports we have is flowers. They're flown in daily and they have to be refrigerated and there's a large need and there's only so much space there's. Also if you're trading in fresh fish, same thing you need chillers, you need refrigerators and there's just not much of that space available and you don't really have many options, because if you need to deliver fish to Miami, you need to have a distribution point here. It's just you have to figure it out. You can't set it up in Lakeland, or you could try, but then you have to figure out something else as far as transportation, so it becomes a logistics issue. Or pharmaceuticals you know again, if you're dealing with pharmaceuticals that have to be refrigerated, you don't have many options. You really have to.

Speaker 1: 14:12

You have to do what you got to do you know, you know, the working one thing is finding the space and then penciling out the deal that makes sense with, you know, construction costs and so forth and and that sort of thing. So, uh, we're just still a little bit at the moment here in, you know, middle 2025, with some some space between the bid-ask spread there, then trying to make the numbers work. So, but, uh, right, that's a lot of fun though, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 14:35

Oh, yeah, I love the hat, I love uh, you know your your your hat for this show.

Speaker 2: 14:42

But you know, that's exactly what it is in the real estate world, right? We they most of my clients have, you know, a closet of of several hats, and the first one they're going to put on is let's see if we can buy it. And if I can't buy it, let me see if I can broker it. And if I can't broker it, let me see if I can be a lender for the deal, right, and if I can't be a lender, maybe I'll broker as a lender and I'll do the mortgage loan. And if that doesn't work, then let me put in the equity who maybe wants to be an equity player. And if I can't do that, I'll sit for another three weeks and then do the whole thing all over again, right?

Speaker 2: 15:17

So, everybody kind of choose properties and choose opportunities for a while and tries to see if it works. And if it doesn't work, you just wait. It's like the rain. You just wait five minutes and the seller will come down in price.

Speaker 1: 15:28

And now it makes sense to be the broker for the deal and then you come right back in and put on, you know, hat number three. So it's a lot of fun that way.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Yeah, yeah. So it's a lot of fun because you never know how it's going to run and or how the deal is going to be presented. I'll get calls from clients hey, this particular property, the, the, the owner's in foreclosure and he's willing to sell within the next week is how quickly can we do diligence and how does this look? Or, or, I have an opportunity to come in as the equity player. Maybe from equity I can try to take it over. You know, there's always something. You know these guys are mavericks, and so the creativity aspect. It's a lot of fun. A lot of fun. That's right. Yeah, the opportunity comes up. You got to make it work. So, yeah, so it's.

Speaker 2: 16:15

It is a challenge as a lawyer for those, because you know, I have two sayings for people. Is number one my practice can go from zero to 40 in 2.5 seconds and it only takes two people that need something immediately for a bad day. Yeah, you just, you know that's just the way it is. So you always have to kind of be free for things. But when you do talk to people that are in other practices and they say, I don't know, I I need this from a response from you real quick and I said, well, how's real quick. They're like can you get it to me in a week, a week, a week? I mean everybody's saying I need it yesterday and then having to massage my schedule of trying to figure out how I can get it all done.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Uh, just, you know, spin my plates, keep running down the line and spinning plates and hopefully nothing crashes absolutely, absolutely and then well, so let's shift a little bit from industrial and, by the way, I love in the conversation. But I want to get a little bit into the condos because I know right now some people condos is a little bit of a bad word. The condo market in miami has, you know, gone up and down and we've had a lot of different cycles of the market for the condo. But yeah, it seems like you know you have a sweet spot in your heart or a soft spot in your heart for condos. You know a lot about condos.

Speaker 1: 17:23

You really dealt with all sorts of condos and I think that's also an area that not a lot of people realize. You know the history of condos and you know taking an apartment complex and turning it into the condo conversion kind of plan, not just building a condo and you know there's a lot of. You know Florida is a little bit different than other states, like Illinois, that where you can actually take some of your deposits when people start buying into condos at the beginning to actually use for your construction, if I'm not mistaken. And so those are. So maybe tell us a little bit about condos what been experienced.

Speaker 2: 17:53

I don't know if you have a story.

Speaker 1: 17:54

I like a story and I have a little trivia question for you. A little app with around the time.

Speaker 2: 17:58

Okay, yeah, we'll see how I do other trivia, but uh, yes. So condominiums are great. You know you're trying to own your, your piece of paradise. And, yes, you can use the deposits in florida over the 10 percent for for the project construction if you want. You can even use the first 10% if you post a bond.

Speaker 2: 18:16

But what's so fun about condominiums and actually doing the documents is when I was an undergraduate, I studied political science and philosophy and a lot of people would say philosophy, how is that going to be anything? Right, you're just sitting around and thinking about things that aren't real. But I use my philosophy degree all the time when I'm doing condominium documents and condominium development work, because when you're doing a condominium, none of that is real at first. It's just a plan, it's just a scheme, it's a document with schematics over how they intend to build the project and what you really have to do. And this is the fun part. You're rolling out the survey or you're rolling out the CAD drawings and looking through how they're planning on building the project and you have to sit back a little bit and picture in your head how the building is going to look spatially and then how is it actually going to be used, because so much of the documentation you know, florida statutes in chapter 718 for condominiums. What you're doing is creating a volume of air and legally dividing up that volume of air based on the actual units, which are little blocks within the property. Limited common elements, which is spaces of air that one person or an entity has a right to use, and then common areas, which is something that everyone's going to use in general. So all of that is theoretical.

Speaker 2: 19:43

So when you're sitting back at the beginning of the project, you're saying to yourself okay, this elevator, who is it going to use it? Where is it going to go? Who's going to have access to it and who's going to pay for the insurance and the maintenance? Right, this lobby over here? Is everyone going to use it? Are just some people going to use it? Is it open to the public? Is it have access to commercial units where you're going to have more foot traffic In the parking areas? Who's going to have access to what areas? Are you going to divide up the parking spaces? Who's going to own it? Are you going to have a restaurant bar? How are's going to own it? If you're going to have a restaurant bar, how are you going to key that access with an elevator? You don't want to have general access. You're going to have to dedicate an elevator.

Speaker 2: 20:21

That's going to change some of the costs in the way you develop the project. How are you going to lay out the units? Where are you going to put the bathrooms, the toilets, the showers? Those are all going to have to line up. If you adjust those, even a couple inches, it changes the entire line of those units so that if you're off by, say, five inches on a toilet, you might lose a closet. You might have to rearrange the floor plan for the units to make sure that it all fits.

Speaker 2: 20:50

But all of that doesn't exist at the beginning. That's just you sitting back and picturing the building, no-transcript. You know this was going to be an issue, or that was going to be an issue. So you have to chase ghosts a little bit to try to determine and predict proactively what are going to be some of the issues. And then the better you do your documentation, the better you set up this building, the smoother it runs and the happier everybody is. So it's a lot of fun from that aspect. It's also fun because of how it evolved, right, I mean, people buy houses Okay, great, you can have a house but obviously land along the beach in Florida is very valuable. Everybody wants a piece of it.

Speaker 2: 21:44

So condominiums started to come about because the idea of wait a second, what if, theoretically, we're able to define that space and sell someone a three-dimensional space? Now we can take a very dense building and divide it up. And co-ops had already existed, where you buy into a corporation and then lease your space. But they thought if you could legally own the space, then it would change everything. You could do this in a different way. And that's how you developed with condominiums and the ability by statute to actually create legal-defined three-dimensional spaces of air.

Speaker 2: 22:23

And then people said, oh well, that's now gotten a little expensive. What if we could take one of these units and just own a right to use that volume of error for five days out of the month, or however it divides up on a schedule, it starts to become much more complicated, which is why timeshares started to become not as attractive, because it just gets so complicated that it's hard to manage. But that was the idea. And then you can evolve that even further and say well, what if we buy our space but we actually do it as a condominium hotel to where I'm going to put it into a management company. They're not pooled, but you put your unit to a management company to lease it out individually as a hotel and then I can use it every so often to lease it out individually as a hotel and then I can use it every so often. So it becomes more like a contractual arrangement with a condominium management company, which is also for hotels. So it's not really Airbnb, you're actually running it through a company individually.

Speaker 2: 23:32

And then you know, when you go into a building let's say it's you know whoever's managing the building from a hotel perspective yeah, I'd like to.

Speaker 2: 23:42

You know, lease room 701 for three nights, okay, and then you do it that way. So you know, once you've got it and you've got the idea and the theory behind how you're going to do some of these, you know it's really just the limitation of how conceptually you can do a building. We have clients that do vertical subdivisions which, again, rather than a three-dimensional volume of air for a condo, you actually deed a three-dimensional volume of air right next to the other and you have space then that you own like towers. Think of it as air towers right next to each other, rather than specific condominiums, and you can do that now like you would do any other properties. You don't necessarily have to divide up a mixed-use building by the condo statutes. You can do it as a as a vertical subdivision. All this is theoretical. It definitely stimulates that side of me that always like to sit back and just think about philosophy and other philosophical topics. I get to do it as part of my job, so I really enjoy it.

Speaker 1: 24:47

I'm sure you've seen your fair share of stories with condo associations and condo owners and so forth. And that leads me to the question. I kind of have the condo owners and so forth. And that leads me to the question. I kind of have the condo conversions process. From my understanding it's I mean you would think, oh, it's been around for a long, long time.

Speaker 1: 25:04

Condos, I think, started in Europe and my understanding it came, you know the idea, in the 60s and 50s and 60s kind of, via the Caribbean, like Cuba and puerto rico, coming this way into the us to become a little more popular. Pop there's was not literally like one, hey, here's the first condo where it started. But in the 60s, you know, when it was very, very early going through the condo conversions, do you know the, the, the attorneys that kind of started trailblazing the condo conversion process? And I'm not going to say they were the very first one. I don't want to go on the limb saying that, but they were one of the very first ones. They were very well known and, being a Midwest guy, they're from the Midwest. Do you happen to know their names?

Speaker 2: 25:51

I wouldn't know their names, though, so you got me stumped. That's all right, but I do know, like I say, it was an evolution after the co-ops, because you had a lot of issues related to co-ops. So people thought, well, it might be better if people actually own their own unit rather than just being a member in a corporation. So there was an evolution. But yeah, the statues started in in Florida in the seventies. So I'm curious as to your answer.

Speaker 1: 26:19

Joseph Moss, or Joe Moss is well known in Chicago in the sixties he and his partner, they started going up and down. They actually had an issue an apartment complex on I want to say it was on Michigan Avenue and they went through this and they kind of figured there were attorneys, young attorneys, that started figuring out hey, we can legally turn these apartment complexes and start buying them out and turn them into condos or doing the condo conversion. And so they were one of the very first I'm not going to say the first, but there were early pioneers into the condo conversion or Joseph Moss I had a chance to meet him before he passed and he had some great, fabulous stories. So that's great.

Speaker 2: 27:05

Yeah, yeah, I didn't live it for the first time around, but definitely in the mid 2000s when there was a the conversion craze down here, that was pretty crazy. Anything you could do. I did quite a few conversions of my own along the way but any apartment that was available. I mean at one point I had an Italian client that literally came to me and said anything from 65th Avenue on the beach South, if anybody's available, I will buy it with cash. I mean, they were anything they could get to be able to get any product, because at the time, you know again, the Euro was like 1.5 to 1 for the dollar. And you know they were here and they were looking and they were excited Anything, anything they could get their hands on to convert it and sell it. That's what they were interested in. So it was a lot of hot and heavy for a while.

Speaker 1: 28:04

But again we're in the epicenter. Yeah, absolutely, what do you kind of see on a local Miami level and maybe international level? Next six months, 12 months kind of thing, what do you see? The months kind of thing, where? What do you see? Or the momentum kind of going in the? You know, we can talk about real estate general, commercial real estate in general, or if you have something specifically that, uh, you think, hey, this is something that could be a good little piece of information somebody could take away sure.

Speaker 2: 28:31

well, as far as trends, miami usually is the first ones to go into a cycle and the first ones to come out of it. So we are, more you know, the tail wagging the dog when it comes to trends and I think that you're going to see a lot of sales and a lot of interest in condominiums to continue in Florida one way or another. Again, because we're the safe haven for so many areas of the world. If you're in South America, latin America, eastern Europe, if you have a place that you want to go where, you're thinking to yourself, if I'm instable where I'm at and I want to not necessarily just move my money out of where I'm at, but I want to put it in property because I'm worried that even if I keep it in a bank internationally, somehow someone's going to reach it. I can land bank it in the United States. And if I'm going to land bank it, even if I break even, I'm okay with that because I feel like I own something, so there's always interest for that.

Speaker 2: 29:41

I mean, one of the jokes that I have is that you know with my kids when they were worried about the war across the world, and you know what, if there's a world war. And I said don't worry about it because you live in Miami. And the reality is, every world leader, every world gangster, every warlord of the world has property here in Miami and the last thing they're going to do is blow up their vacation home. And it's somewhat of a joke, but it's not.

Speaker 2: 30:05

So, you know.

Speaker 2: 30:07

So I don't necessarily worry for Miami. I mean, you do have things, like you know, certainly high tide, sea level rise is a concern Long term. A lot of Miami is built on dredged land. A lot of the islands are dredged islands, so from that perspective there may be isolated areas that are probably more vulnerable than others. But we still have lots of solutions to be able to mitigate that in the short term and in the medium term. So I'm not really worried about that. Miami is landlocked, and you know, and again, as even with climate change and differences in the weather, we have the oceans all around us and we have a lot of predictive rain, so those regulate the temperatures to some extent. Where it could be 110 degrees in Atlanta and it still may only be 92 degrees in Miami, simply because we have a lot of mitigating factors that a lot of other areas don't have. So I don't worry about us long term. And again, in the short term, there's always something going on, there's always someone coming here. Miami hits so far above its weight internationally that locally I'm really not worried, and Florida as a whole the same thing. The peninsula is hot. There's always room for redevelopment or development in different areas and smarter development. So I don't see it ending.

Speaker 2: 31:36

There's always talk and I think some of it is wishful thinking in the sense that if the market were to stall or go down, it creates opportunities. So to some extent people it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People want to see interest rates drop and the markets to crash and real estate to have trouble so they can buy it. But if there's enough of that money waiting on the sidelines, it's not going to go down that far In the end of the 2000s. I'll tell you a really quick story. So on the Miami beach again, everything was crashing all over the place in the 2008, the sky was falling and we had a client that had a couple of units in South Point and they were talking to the lender about trying to do a forbearance or some sort of abatement of their payments or maybe even a reduction of their loan. The bank did an appraisal and this was absolutely at the worst of it and they came back and said no, we're not going to agree to that, because from our appraisals the value of the properties have just stabilized. They're not going up. Agree to that, because from our appraisals, the value of the properties have just stabilized, they're not going up at the moment, but they've stabilized. So we're comfortable with the fact that if we have to foreclose we'll get the value out of these units.

Speaker 2: 32:45

And that was at the absolute worst part. So you know I'm not necessarily worried. But again you will see. If you're seeing the market starting to change, you'll see people asking for forbearances with loans. You'll see foreclosures pick up. You'll see workouts happening with lenders and they'll try to work it out for a couple of years just to see if the market shifts and they can sell the property or recapitalize it. And then, if that doesn't work out, then you'll see some action. But again, when everybody else is screaming, oh, the sky is falling and the rest of the country is having trouble, Miami probably already is back in its recovery.

Speaker 1: 33:25

Wow.

Speaker 2: 33:26

Great, we're lucky. We're in a great space, Ruben Coming from the Midwest to play in the sunshine. We both made good choices.

Speaker 1: 33:32

Absolutely, absolutely. I'm very, very happy, especially with the cafecito and the very cigar friendly environment down here.

Speaker 2: 33:40

So that's, right.

Speaker 1: 33:41

You know that's right, lou. Thank you so very much. Appreciate it being here on the CRE Cafecito CCIM Miami District podcast. Thank you, and to Sol Ewing, for being our sponsors today as well and sponsoring this time, and it sounds like you not only help CCI in Miami, but you're helping a lot of different associations and a lot of people. So keep doing what you're doing and thank you for being such a great pillar of the CRE community here in South Florida and abroad.

Speaker 2: 34:13

So absolutely Ruben. Thank you so much and I appreciate the Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 34:17

Thank you very much. We'll be, I'm sure, seeing you around each other soon.