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Merryn Talks Money
REITs Explained: How Real Estate Investment Trusts Work and What Moves Their Prices
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- [01:53]
Jack Sidders
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- [02:14]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Marriant Talks Money Listeners Here is a quick public service announcement before we get into today's conversation. Are you a Bloomberg subscriber? If you are not, you should be. And here is why you will get ad free episodes of this podcast and access to my Marian Talks Money newsletter as well as access to John's award winning newsletter, Money Distilled. You'll also get access to subscriber only events such as the one that we will be hosting on March 17th. More details on that later this week, so be sure to sign up for your.com subscription so that you can join us. And of course, on top of all that, you will get unlimited access to bloomberg.com and to the Bloomberg app, including exclusive stories and premium market tools. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com podcastoffer. Welcome to Marin Talks yous Money, the personal finance edition of Marin Talks Money. In these bonus podcasts we talk about the best strategies for making the most of your money. I'm Meryn Sumset Webb and with me senior reporter and Money Distill author John Stepek. Award winning. Hi John.
- [03:22]
John Stepek
Hi Martin.
- [03:23]
Merryn Somerset Webb
So John, we are carrying on with answering a couple of questions that we have had in from readers and this one is about REITs. It's from someone who says they are a long term fan of the podcast. We like that. Thank you very much. Is there any chance we could have a program on REITs at some point? Unless I've missed it, I don't believe there has been one on the relative merits or disadvantages of REITs in quite some time. John, have we actually ever talked about REITs? I don't know if we have. We talked about investment trusts a lot but I don't think we've ever, ever gone deep into this little subsector of the market.
- [03:54]
John Stepek
I don't think we have.
- [03:55]
Jack Sidders
Yeah.
- [03:56]
Merryn Somerset Webb
And as that suggests that neither of us have any deep expertise, we've invited on a guest. So today we are going to do a program on REITs. James is the name of the reader. Thank you very much. And we have invited into the studio to do with us a Bloomberg expert on this. This is Jack Sidders. Jack leads our coverage on all sorts of topics to do with investing, but in particular real estate. Jack, welcome to the London studio.
- [04:21]
Jack Sidders
Thank you. I'll do my best to live up to that billing. I don't know. We shall see.
- [04:26]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Look, when we say someone's an expert, they're an expert. And that's just that.
- [04:30]
Jack Sidders
Okay, yeah, yeah, we'll let the listeners be the judge of that come the end of the podcast.
- [04:34]
Merryn Somerset Webb
I guess now that's not how it works.
- [04:36]
John Stepek
This is like fund manager stuff. Performance is relative.
- [04:39]
Jack Sidders
So you're definitely fund managers.
- [04:41]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Exactly. Being the expert is not the thing. It's just being more expert than me and John. Okay, so here we Go. What actually is a real estate investment trust?
- [04:52]
Jack Sidders
Okay. So the REIT regime, as it were, came into effect in the UK and they have them have their own versions in most countries in Europe now, just around the time of the global financial crisis. And the idea was it was a sort of tax efficient way for you and me, mom and pop investors in the Bloomberg parlance, to invest in real estate. So you're not getting that double taxation. And the deal was that these companies would return the vast majority of their earnings in the form of dividends. So they would have to have most of their portfolio would be in what they would call the investment portfolio. So relatively boring long term buildings with long leases that would generate steady rents and then they would have a development portfolio or some of them would have a development portfolio where they would do slightly riskier stuff, build out buildings, try and make some development profits. So they've been around in the UK for, what are we talking now? Getting on, I guess nearly 20 years. Nearly 20 years. But.
- [05:45]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Okay, so just go back a little bit. Just be absolutely clear. This is a listed investment vehicle which invests in property in the main, in a property rental business and also in development business.
- [05:58]
Jack Sidders
Yeah, exactly.
- [05:58]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Both parts to this. And then the tax efficient bit is that as long as they pay out 90% of the prop of the income they receive from their property every year, they don't have to pay corporation tax. Yes, so that's the tax efficient bit. Right. So for an ordinary investor, it's simply a way of getting exposure to, to any particular type of real estate without worrying about tax or liquidity.
- [06:22]
Jack Sidders
Yeah. And most of them were already publicly traded landlords before the REIT regime came in. And then they did all the things, ticked all the boxes that they needed to tick in order to convert to become a REIT to get REIT status. And as you said, the whole idea is, you know, if you're a retail investor and you want exposure to commercial real estate, but you don't have 100 million quid to go and buy an office building, then you can go and buy a share in one of these REITs and that will give you commercial real estate like exposure, albeit that then this is probably a whole other issue. We'll get onto that. You're then exposing yourself to stock market volatility, which is very different from commercial real estate volatility. So they've. Yeah, that, that's an entirely separate issue. But so it's. You're getting exposure to the commercial real estate market. But yeah, it's maybe not Quite the same as some of the ways that you can invest in commercial real estate through private funds.
- [07:11]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Okay. And when we say that they invest in commercial real estate, there are actually a variety of different kind of REIT threats. So you've got some in residential property, some in commercial property, some in healthcare related property, et cetera. There's a variety of different subsectors.
- [07:24]
Jack Sidders
Yes, exactly. And again, to further complicate the picture, it always used to be the case that Most of the REITs like to specialise they were a London office landlord or they were a UK retail landlord. And the idea being that me as the investor, I want to make the decision about what type of real estate I'm allocating capital to. And then, okay, I've decided, I think London offices are the thing. I'm going to go and invest in what should be the best London office team who run this London specialist London office reit. Now that's fine, unless you happen to be, say for example, a retail landlord. In the middle of the retail apocalypse that unfolded between very loosely 2010 and the end of COVID when the rise of online shopping basically meant that all the retail landlords had just a torrid time, values collapsed. Understandably, quite a few of those management teams went, yeah, maybe we might need to pivot and diversify. And the big winners that you've seen over, in fact, probably the period that REITs have been in existence in commercial real estate have been the kind of private equity real estate investors and they are much more agnostic in terms of the types of real estate they will invest in. Talking like a Blackstone here, for example. They will invest in any type of commercial real estate depending on where they see there being structural advantages. So they can pivot and they can allocate. They will raise capital from investors with a mandate to put it where they think is best. So you started to see this evolution in the REIT market a bit with some management teams going, oh, maybe we should do different things. Maybe originally we were an office REIT or retail reit, but actually we think warehouses is a thing, so we should pivot into that. But that's an interesting sort of debate then between the managers and the shareholders. And what does the capital actually want? Do they want to make that capital allocation decision themselves or are they trusting the management team to make it for them?
- [09:07]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Yeah, okay. And other areas that they could be in data centers, there's quite a few self storage ones, or there were anyway a whole group of different sectors.
- [09:16]
Jack Sidders
They could be, yes, yeah, exactly, yeah. And in Commercial real estate. If we were having this conversation 20 years ago, it would be like offices. Retail would be the kind of twin aristocracies and then maybe a little bit of warehouses. Now. Retail obviously had its horror show then. Offices probably one of the more unloved sectors now because of COVID and more increased work from home, et cetera. And you've got, as you said, this huge diversity of subsectors. Data centers would be the really hot, sexy one. Student housing was a very niche strategy, now is a very established part of the market. Self storage, healthcare, increasingly. So, yeah, a much, much greater variety.
- [09:48]
Merryn Somerset Webb
All right, let's talk then about what makes these trusts perform or not perform, because some of them have had a pretty awful couple of years. And because they are listed vehicles, the share price can trade at a significant discount to the net asset value. And it definitely has been, as you say, retail has had a bad time. Student housing has had a horrible time, for obvious reasons. And across the board, discounts have been quite, quite high. What's been driving this?
- [10:12]
Jack Sidders
If we talk, if we just focus on the UK here, and I just checked the numbers, the UK REIT sector is currently trading at a discount of just under 20% across the board. This is according to EPRA, the European Public Real Estate Association. And that is a little bit worse than the historical average, although actually that's a bit better than it has been doing the last few years of the last. The UK has obviously just been through one shock after another over the last 10 years, none of which has particularly helped sentiment towards publicly traded real estate. And as we touched on, different sectors have had their challenges at different times. So, yeah, retail, terrible few years, then office, then when interest rates blew out, almost everything was trading at a discount. I think there was one point where probably Unite, which was a student housing landlord, was maybe the only UK REIT that was trading at a premium. That's now gone because of the worries about student housing.
- [11:01]
Merryn Somerset Webb
I think I wrote a very timely article on that. I'd like to remind everybody that when Unite were riding high, I did write an article going, oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you. That was on one very rare occasion.
- [11:11]
John Stepek
Right, that was good teaming. I'm always good.
- [11:13]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Thank you, John.
- [11:13]
Jack Sidders
It is one of the markets that. Yeah, it's. It's. Well, like with a lot of real estate, it's vulnerable to. Yeah. Forces beyond its control. And right now, if you look at the discounts of different sectors are trading at, there's a big variation. So Office is very unloved Resi is actually also. Residential is also quite unloved at the moment. But the warehouse landlords do much better, much narrower discounts. And even at the risk of introducing even more jargon, you've got one that called London Metric, who focuses on what we call triple, triple net leases, where they've been doing quite well there as a bit of a market darling.
- [11:41]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Or hang on, what, what is a triple net lease? You can't just introduce that.
- [11:47]
Jack Sidders
Okay. Basically it's essentially that the tenant is responsible for a lot of the costs around things like dilapidation and so forth, so that there's, there's no, what the landlords would call leakage. They're very long term, they're very secure. And yeah, the rent typically only goes one way. But they're an interesting one, an interesting company because they are going back to our earlier conversation around that whole sort of sectoral allocation way back in the day before they were called London Metric and the people that ran it were basically retail specialists. But their chief exec, Andrew Jones, saw the writing on the wall of what was coming for retail and made the big strategic decision to pivot towards industrial property warehouses, given the rise of E commerce. And that proved to be quite a prescient thing to do. And then they've also. And so this speaks to a kind of much broader issue. To go back to your question about, why are these companies trading at discounts? One of the reasons is lots of them are very small and therefore proportionally they're very expensive to run because Whether you've got a billion or 10 billion or 100 billion, you basically need a fairly similar size management team. And actually that management team is not that big. I often think that of all the jobs you could do running a FTSE 100 company, running a FTSE 100 landlord must be one of the easiest in terms of like headcount that you've got to, you've got to manage. But anyway, they, but they recognize that you need scale to get better cost ratios and that is something that investors now really want and also so you can leverage relationships with tenants and all that sort of thing. And so they have gone out and acquired a huge number of subscale peers and grow themselves. And what that's done is that's pushed them into bigger indices. They're now in the FTSE 100 that introduces new shareholders. But even then you compare them to the US and they. London Metric hub will be one of our bigger REITs. They're tiny compared to their US peers. Now this stat is slightly stale, but I believe it's still true. Prologis huge industrial landlord, warehouse landlord in the U.S. has a, its market cap is bigger than the entire UK REIT sector combined. So when you are a UK REIT and you are going out on investor roadshows and you're going to the US and you're trying to get meetings and trying to get the ear of fund managers and you've got a couple of billion in assets, they're looking at you going A, you're really expensive to run, B, how much liquidity is there in your stock? And they're just not interested. So in order for the UK to get over a bit of this structural discount in what they're trading relative to the value of their assets, one of the things that they really need is scale. And as I say, London Metric is one of these companies that definitely seems to have got that message and they've been on an absolute mission to acquire and to get bigger. So yeah, so that's part of the answer as to why they've been trading at discounts.
- [14:29]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Okay, so it's partly scale and lack of international attention as a result of that. It's partly interest rates. Right, because they pretty much exactly.
- [14:36]
Jack Sidders
Very, very interest rate sensitive. Because basically commercial real estate investors will always demand a premium over risk free rate. So if government bonds are trading at 3, 4, then I want my commercial real estate to yield 6 or 7. Say this is very crude numbers, plucking them out of thin air. A healthy premium for the risk I'm taking. So when interest rate rise, the required yield on real estate rises. When the yield rises, the value falls and equity market investors will straightforwardly, as interest rates start to rise, sell off real estate stocks because they anticipate them having to write down the value of their portfolios.
- [15:11]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Yeah. Okay, so with interest rates likely to fall from here, that's a possibility that.
- [15:15]
Jack Sidders
Should be a tailwind. So we should be entering a bit of a sweet spot for UK REITs right now because basically, again, talking in very crude terms here, no one's really built very much for the last several years. It's particularly if you look at the London office market. For example, we had Brexit, which was big doubts about are the banks all going to leave? Then we had Covid, okay, is anyone going to need an office anymore? And then we had interest rates going up and construction cost inflation going through the roof. So my development that I was planning to build, that I thought would cost me X to build, is now going to cost Me X times two or three. So yeah, the long and short of it is no one's built anything. What does that mean? There's hardly any new supply. And the tenants who are looking for offices at the moment, what do they want? They want the best new stuff that is going to lure staff back into the office. Office say, look, we're going to make you come into the office four days a week, but we're going to make sure it's a really nice office. And also we want to cut our carbon footprint as a business. What's an easy way to do that? If I'm a sort of knowledge based business, oh, I'll get myself a nice zero carbon office building. And there you go, I've ticked my box of, of slashing my, my carbon footprint. So all of which means London office rents should and they are going up pretty rapidly and they potentially will go up a lot more over the next couple of years. So you've got that as one potential tailwind. And this is true across a number of sectors, to be clear, not just offices. And then you've also, as you said, you've got the potential for the tailwind of interest rates coming down, which should be good for property yields and therefore valuations. So quite a rare dynamic of kind of both the numerator and the denominator going in landlord's favour. And yet we still haven't really seen generalist investors waking up to that and piling into REITs in the way that you might expect. And to talk to specialist real estate REIT investors and management teams and analysts over the last few years, there's just this deep resignation about when is the market going to wake up to us? When are we going to re rate? What is the catalyst which is going to cause those discounts to narrow?
- [17:19]
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- [18:03]
Jack Sidders
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- [20:29]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Would you expect a lot more or a lot of corporate action in this sector as you have in a lot of the wider part of the investment trust?
- [20:35]
Jack Sidders
Yes, we have already seen quite a lot. There has been a lot of consolidation over the last couple of years. I think initially that was a lot of private equity firms, Blackstone and the like. Seeing the massive discounts these firms are trading at and going. Yep, okay, I'll have some of that. I think the market is overly discounting those values. I Can see rate rents are going to rise and they wouldn't necessarily say this, but also I reckon interest rates are going to go lower and that'll help. So they've been taking them out at big premiums to their share price, but in lots of cases discounts to their reported asset values with a view to then whether it's splitting them up and selling off the assets individually at book value and then creaming the difference or whether it is scaling them into something else and who knows, potentially Ipoing further down the line. Although brave person to try and launch a big real estate IPO in the current climate for all the reasons we've just been discussing then. But then actually more recently, and this goes back to what we were talking about with companies like London Metrics, we've actually seen much, many more peer to peer consolidation where you might be trading at a discount to your reported asset value and I might be trading at a reported asset discount to my reported asset value. But actually if we do an all paper deal then that doesn't really matter. And so yeah, we've seen a lot of consolidation there. In fact we've had a couple of interesting takeover battles. One in the healthcare real estate space where you had KKR trying to buy a landlord looking like they were going to and then all of a sudden one of their peers came in and said oh actually why don't we do it? And then you as the investors can remain invested and you get to participate in all the rental growth we think is coming down the line, very closely run thing. And ultimately the investors went with the sort of peer to peer deal rather than the take private deal, which I think is quite interesting and maybe says something about tiny green shoots of optimism for the publicly listed real estate market.
- [22:16]
John Stepek
I mean, yeah, I think it's a very interesting sector because going back to the interest rates point, one of the things I think is interesting so from the point of view of interest rates rise, prices go down. So it's a bit like a bond, except it's not actually a bond because the rents mean that it's actually inflation protected. So what you really need to worry about is more a recession or their specific sector getting hammered. And I guess that's kind of one of the big questions at the moment is okay, interest rates are coming down, inflation is probably just about under control and then it's more just about which sectors are going to survive in this particular economy.
- [22:55]
Jack Sidders
Yeah, I mean absolutely. The big risk is clearly is a recession and potential credit risk in the tenant base, albeit that you look back to the global financial crisis and actually the number of landlords who really saw significant vacancies as a result of tenants going bust was relatively limited. Where I sit, and this is, I guess, colored by having covered real estate for longer than I'd care to admit. But I guess immediately since the gfc, actually the thing that has destroyed the most value and driven the most value in real estate has been these kind of big structural changes in the way that we live and work and shop and consume to the point around the rise of online shopping. Look, if you were in, if you were lucky enough to be a warehouse landlord over the last decade, you've just been a huge beneficiary without really having to do anything very clever. Just demand for warehouses has gone up a lot because people need to store stuff a lot more because they want to deliver it to your house instead of it being in a shop. You know, on the flip side, you could have been, and in fact, I think paraphrasing John Gray here from Blackstone, who basically said, you could have over the last decade, I forget the exact time period, but you could have bought the world's worst warehouse and the world's best shopping center and you still would have been better off with the world's warehouse. So it's these big structural forces have been the things that I think have really moved the needle for these landlords. And then we thought maybe Covid would be that thing for offices. And certainly if you looked to the share prices of the office landlords, there was just a huge amount of bearishness. I don't. I think actually with the benefit of a few years on, now we see more people returning to work, we see more companies mandating that. And I think the death of the office, to be fair, also the death of the shopping centre never fully came to pass. It's just that demand is now concentrated in just a far smaller number of very high quality, very large shopping centres. Ultimately, people still want to go and try stuff on. You just don't, maybe don't need 500 of your shops across the UK to cover the UK. Maybe you can do it with 50 in the 50 biggest shopping centres, but if you own one of those shopping centres right now, maybe you're in quite a good, good place. And actually, again, the retail landlords, having endured this like, horrific period over the last couple of years, have actually done quite well relative to the wider peer group.
- [25:04]
John Stepek
See, actually, just you saying that about big structural changes, the obvious question then, is there any angle from AI that You can see being something that may either be an opportunity or a threat for REITs.
- [25:18]
Jack Sidders
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Data centers is obviously the clear play there. And so one of the things that we are seeing and have seen is, is as I'm sure your listeners know, the big bottleneck for data centers is power. And so finding powered land is one. One warehouse landlord described it to me as like finding a lottery ticket. So let's say you were, you were an owner of warehouses across the UK and you're looking at your portfolio and you suddenly realise, actually hang on a second, that site would work as a data center and it's got power, maybe I can convert it to a data center. Suddenly the valuation is going to go to the moon, as they say. And so that's a process that a lot of landlords have been going couple of years to try and figure out and now you are seeing a lot of the big industrial REITs. So companies like Seagro, like Tritax, Bigrock street, they now have meaningful. To be fair, Seagro's had this for quite a while, but they now have meaningful parts of their portfolio that are in data centers. Now what I wonder and could be the next leg of this is do those, does the public market value that differently to the warehouse bit? At which point I'm sure some enterprising investment banker will come along and say, I think you should spin out your data center business into a separate platform because that'll trade at a different multiple.
- [26:33]
John Stepek
What about the consolidation? This is bad news.
- [26:36]
Jack Sidders
Yeah. So data centers are the big play there. Although the risk of being a bit of a belladonna, one of the questions I have around that to our previous conversation about structural shifts and is like these things are just massive stores of cash, just the capex required is so huge. I've really struggled to get my head around it, having spent a career writing about property deals that I thought were big, which were a few hundred million and these things are just like multi billion. What happens when someone invents some new material that allows data to be stored or processed in a different way?
- [27:08]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Well, and Jack, all the talk about moving the data centers to space and all that, you know, it does seem, it seems short term that we will.
- [27:14]
Jack Sidders
Have these buildings and the demand like the. Again I reveal my ignorance here in terms of like the tech side of things, but as I understand it, where you want your data stored, if you're for example training a large language model, is very different to if you're doing something more consumer facing. Because latency like the delay is less of an issue if you're doing predominantly doing training, but then as soon as you're doing something like a search on Google or any other search engine, then the speed is of the essence. A bit, if you're thinking of high frequency trading and that kind of thing. But that has a huge impact on where you might want to locate your data center anyway. So obsolescence risk, I would say, just seems like this huge potential problem for data centers that could be one of those structural shifts that suddenly creates huge winners and huge losers. But I'm sure I'll be writing about that for years to come.
- [28:02]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Sure you will, and we'll be talking about it. So Jack, if for someone looking at this sector now and going look sounds great, Jack is incredibly compelling. I'd love to be in a reit. Where do they start? If you're looking at it right now, what's the most compelling part of the sector and the easiest way in, do you think?
- [28:19]
Jack Sidders
So to our previous conversation around costs and liquidity, you probably look at some of the bigger names out there and again, just focusing on the UK here, warehouses still doing pretty well, pretty solid rental growth, maybe a bit more mixed and a bit more patchy than it was around Covid, where we just saw this super, super strong demand and super strong rental growth. But broadly, I think most of the analysts still see that as a pretty positive area. Seagro is the biggest UK REIT and they are a European industrial landlord, but as I said, also with an increasingly interesting data center business as well. And Tritax Big Box REIT would be the other sort of big UK name there. Actually, Blackstone owns a big UK focused warehouse landlord that they branded Indurant, which you never know, could be a publicly traded company in the next few years, so those stocks are doing reasonably well. Over the last few years the mantra had been beds and sheds, so sheds being commercial real estate parlance for warehouses, beds being the variety of different kind of living strategies. So whether that's rental housing, senior housing, student housing, student housing unite would be the big player in the uk. But as we we started at the top of this recording, student housing is definitely looking a bit less rosy than it has done over the last several years. I spent more of my career looking at London offices than anything else and I have to say, yeah, I think the office market right now, the fundamentals are as good as I've ever seen them. Whether that translates to the public markets reflecting that in share prices is another matter because you've Seen many times where the fundamentals look good, but the public market markets have been focused on something else and it just hasn't translated. But if London offices are your thing, big players there, you've got specialists like Derwent and Great Paul into States who purely do London offices or what used to be the kind of we would call the diversified majors, which thinking they're British land in particular and land security is bigger, but they're moving away from London offices to some degree. But British land, a big part of their business is London office campuses, as they call them. So big collections of London offices and shops where they own the whole thing, but they also have a few other strategies as well. So they would be the way to play that. I suppose.
- [30:24]
John Stepek
The other good thing about REITs is that even if the value doesn't get immediately recognized, they do tend to be higher than average dividends.
- [30:33]
Jack Sidders
Yes.
- [30:34]
John Stepek
So you do get to. What is it that horrible cliche, you get paid to wait. So if you do think that it's fundamentally a good time and it just hasn't come about yet, then at least you're not wasting your time particularly.
- [30:46]
Jack Sidders
Yeah, I mean the traditional thinking with REITs was that they should be really boring companies. They should just be solid, steady dividend payers. And in the US in some ways that's what a lot of them are in the uk because a lot of them were historically. Yeah, they'd already were publicly traded real estate companies and they converted to become REITs. Some of them had a kind of bit in their DNA, a bit more swashbuckling, like they liked doing a bit more development and that was where some of the kind of super profits came from. For that you've got to time the cycle and you've got to. And some of them are very good at that. But yeah, in theory they should be really these boring slavery companies that own income producing assets and hold them for a really long time. And yes, they'll tell you that they do lots of hard work to sweat them and manage them. Basically just sitting on a big portfolio of income producing assets and paying it out in the form of dividends.
- [31:33]
John Stepek
I take it as they're an easy job.
- [31:38]
Jack Sidders
Yeah, well, yeah. Nothing like a seasoned hack to be deeply cynical about the companies they cover. No, the real estate industry is full of lovely, charming people who, who are good enough to give their time and wisdom to ill educated young reporters who are trying to learn about their market.
- [31:53]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Perfect, Perfect. Jon, anything else we need to ask, do you think?
- [31:56]
John Stepek
No, I think that was great. That was very comprehensive.
- [31:59]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Very comprehensive.
- [32:00]
Jack Sidders
Probably much more information than anybody actually needed.
- [32:03]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Thank you very much for coming on today. We really appreciate it. That was excellent.
- [32:06]
Jack Sidders
Brilliant. Thank you so much for having me on.
- [32:09]
Merryn Somerset Webb
Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks yous Money. If you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to follow me and Jon on x or Twitter MarinesW and JohnStepek. This episode was produced by Sam Asadi and Moses Andam Sound designed by Blake Maples and Aaron Casper. Questions and comments on this show and all our shows are always welcome. Our show email is merriamoneyloomburg.net.