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Hayley Keene
Foreign.
Lonnie Hendry
Welcome to the Trepwire Podcast, the show where commercial real estate meets data and insights. This is a special guest podcast. I'm Hayley Keene with trep, a data modeling and analytics firm for the CMBS commercial real estate and CLO markets. I'm with Lonnie Hendry, Chief Product officer. Today we're joined by Justin Kennedy, co founder and managing partner of 3650 Capital. Justin brings more than three decades of experience across commercial real estate, finance, distressed assets and development. He has held senior leadership roles at global institutions, operated through multiple market cycles and helped shape large scale real estate credit and servicing platforms. At 3650 he leads an alternative commercial real estate lender, special servicer and solutions provider operating across the capital stack. The firm is known for its disciplined underwriting, risk retention approach and hands on involvement throughout the life of each investment, giving it a direct view in today's CRE, stress pricing and opportunity. And we are so excited to dig into that with you today. Justin, thank you for joining us and welcome to the show.
Justin Kennedy
Thank you Hayley and Lonnie, great to see you as well.
Lonnie Hendry
I know I gave a lot of your background right there, but we'd love to hear it from you. So if you can start by giving our listeners some more info about your backgr, how you got your start in this industry and then how you ultimately found yourself to build 3650.
Justin Kennedy
Well, I started out in real estate straight out of college. I'm from Sacramento, went back to Sacramento from the Bay Area after school and got into the development business and land development in particular. My family had been in the real estate business and so it was kind of a natural transition to me. Having gone to school in Silicon Valley, I, you know, missed the tech thing by like a year. Everybody wanted to be an investment banker, real estate a couple years later moved to an investment bank. During the RTC crisis in the late 80s. I ended up running into actually in the early 90s running into some people at Goldman Sachs and they set up an interview for me in New York and I got hired, became involved in commercial real estate on the trading floor, first in the principal investment group and then as a bond trader trading CMBS and running the syndicate desk for new issue transactions. That really kind of at the very beginning of the market in the early 90s, you know, was a great kind of, let's call it, launching platform for, you know, what real estate capital markets really have become over the last 30 years. As you mentioned, we've made it through A few cycles. The RRTC being the first Russian debt crisis.com era GFC pandemic throughout that I think the let's call it perspective that we have tried to and you know, at each of the institutions that I worked and with the partners that I've had over the time. I have two great partners, Jonathan Roth and Toby Cobb, that founded 3650 with me. And I think if you ask them this question of what is it that makes it, you know, that's kind of been the consistent theme is that this is a hands on asset class and that each one of the assets is different. And today I think this is especially true that in even the smallest of micro locational differences in the markets are generating tremendous, let's call it dispersion in results. And I know that's a word that's been thrown around a lot lately and maybe we can talk about it later but being in a position to provide a hands on asset management program for the asset, no matter what it is, is really I think the critical factor in both creating great investments from the beginning of their structuring and then throughout the life of the asset in terms of monitoring risk and seizing opportunity, frankly by being able to act in ways that make sense and you know, are going to add value to the property. And so throughout the process of our career we've tried to kind of really focus on that and in that way provide better service in creating value at their properties.
Hayley Keene
Yeah, it's great perspective. Justin. I wanted to jump in on a couple of things. We've recorded a couple of guest podcasts over the last few weeks and it's just interesting for a lot of the guests we've had on the farthest back they went was the gfc. And when you mentioned the rtc, it's really interesting just to see how commercial real estate has shifted. I mean in the, in the late 80s, early 90s it wasn't really an institutional play like it is today. And when the RTC was formed, effectively the government was acting as the arbiter to, to offload some of these properties. You fast forward and compare that to where we are, you know, say in Covid, where you have this much different mindset of private credit sophistication, alternative lenders, people that understand the markets at a level that they didn't before. And it feels like you guys have been able to take what you've learned from those early disruptions and dislocations and really build a business model that really thrives during those periods like Covid well,
Justin Kennedy
we would like to think that's the case and that we built it kind of from a perspective of hey, what went wrong and how can we fix it. Haley did me a little bit of a favor there by saying, I've been doing this for 30 years because really this year is my 40th anniversary, Berkshire. But that is provided, I guess, a perspective. You know, I when I first showed up at Goldman Sachs, I worked for this wonderful guy, Pete Brigger, who ran the. Was became the founder of Fortress later one of the founders, Fortress later to me. And I said, Pete, how can we be bidding on these properties? You know, we're just looking at them, you know, in packages. And his response was is that if we're not buying them cheap enough to know that, that we're getting a good track, good, good deal, we're not buying them cheap enough and we need to buy them cheaper. So that perspective I has kind of has stuck throughout kind of everything that I've tried to do. If you think back to the rtc there was just this tremendous creation of product that happened in the, let's call it favorable tax climate of the mid-80s that needed to get resolved in the market at the same time as a crisis is going on within the SNL industry and frankly even broader than that across the banking community generally, but particularly focused in the rtc. One of the resolution mechanisms that we worked on at Gold and help create was the early CMBS transactions that were really these good bank, bad bank deals. In those transactions that the role of the special servicer was created and the ratings and the ratings models started coming together and the actual, let's call it CMBS transaction, that is the general format that we use today in the market was invented. It was a part of these good bank, bad bank deals that we did. And the early special servicers, particularly LNR and now now part of Starwood, you know, were heavily involved in that process. Midland Loan Servicing, also still here in the market, was also a player at that time responding to these various market crises. You know, now here at 3650 that we've created each time we've seen something kind of go sideways in the market, we've tried to respond, let's call it market wide as an industry with making better structures and better decisions. As we're here at this present time, we had the CREF C back in January and people talked about we got to figure out the servicing, we got to figure out the incentive model for creating good collateral. And we've had many of These problems for a long time and not done that, let's call it a complete job of fixing them in the market. I guess the one that we've tried to focus on in our organization is how do we provide a better servicing mousetrap and that it can be responsive to our borrowers at the same time as creating the right solutions for the capital market structure. Whatever it is that the loan is involved in, that's really our focus, you know, I think frankly should be a bigger focus from investors. How are these loans, particularly as we're looking at this increased volatility, higher delinquency rates in the market, how are these loans being serviced for creation of creation and or protection of value? And how is that servicing benefiting the bondholders? That is something I think that oftentimes is not maybe the top focus point of investors in the market and should definitely move up that chain, particularly in periods of higher volatility like we have right now.
Hayley Keene
Yeah, it's definitely. I mean you can't go to a crep C conference without the servicers getting beat up on a little bit. I mean, it's kind of the way it works. They have a thankless job, especially when, when the market's experiencing disruption like we are now. But I agree with you, I think there are things that can be done creatively that do both. They preserve value and preserve dental investors interest. And I agree with you that having more discussions around creative solutions and things that could be done systematically are probably overdue. So it's great to hear from you as someone sitting in your position that, that you feel like that's something that we can work on as an industry, because I think it is something that we can focus on. You know, TRAPP was originated in the early, I guess late 70s as a consulting firm, but we transitioned quickly to a CMBS shop in the early 90s when those first CMBS deals hit the market. And yeah, so we've, we've been synonymous with CMBS pretty much since its inception. A couple of questions just to transition a little bit here. You know, in today's market, if somebody picks up the phone and a sponsor calls 3650, what problems are they trying to solve? I mean, are you guys seeing refinancing maturity as an issue? Is it capital structure? Capital stack is like where, where's the dislocation or where are the disruptions that you're seeing and hearing from people in the market?
Justin Kennedy
So we have three different vehicles that we invest through. So in each one kind of is targeting a Different place in the, you know, we have a stable cash flow lending business which is, is focused on what the market would call conduit lending. We don't call it that because we're actually originating the loans to create a levered equity piece in a transaction which others would call a B piece. And that because we're originating and managing loans for their term, we don't want to call it a conduit because that's what things pass through versus we're creating what we would like to think is a structured finance version of an insurance company. You know, we're, we're creating loans with the intention of and holding the risk in those loans and managing them hopefully the same way the best insurance companies would throughout their life. That's the focus of that business. So really there we're seeing refinancings and new acquisitions of properties that are looking for 50, 60, maybe up to 70 LTV sometimes type of stable fixed rate lending product. Then in our real estate credit solutions business that we call racks, we have, we'll do a construction loan, we'll do a mezzanine piece, we'll do preferred equity deal, it will do a SASB risk retention piece. So generally we're looking to provide kind of that 50 to 70 type of portion of the capital stack or kind of a stretch construction or other type of facility. The types of situations there run the gamut of you know, recapitalizations, debt facilities and bankruptcy. It's quite a flexible pool of capital. Generally again we're focused on how do we help the borrower create value. And then we have a special situations pool of capital where we're targeting opportunistic equity through more distressed or scratch and dent type of debt facilities. But always entering through the debt.
Hayley Keene
The three business lines you highlighted there give you a pretty broad perspective of the market at large. You talked a little bit earlier about dispersion. I like to go back to that if you don't mind of just one of the themes is just at a high level market data may still look relatively stable but underneath the outcomes look look significantly different. Like what is it about your guys's process or your data usage or your team or whatever that gives you conviction on some of these plays that you're making when, when maybe the data doesn't look as clear?
Justin Kennedy
Well, for the first thing we do is we have at this point have about a $20 billion servicing book. We're always looking for the okay, where do we have a property, where do we have a borrower, particularly a repeat Borrower that can help us look at another situation. We're I guess maybe from that old school camp that, you know, there's nothing is a substitute for going to visit the property and understanding, hey, is this on the go home side or the go to work side of the street? Because if you've got a paycheck cashing tenant, he needs to be on the go home side.
Lonnie Hendry
Right.
Justin Kennedy
And the coffee store wants to be on the go to work side today. We would call it micro market is just a critical part of understanding how real estate's performing. I would say that this dispersion is the single most important factor of what's different in today's market than has existed in the past. And if we used to be in a market where let's say you invested in a core fund as an institutional investor, one fund does an 8, one does a 10, one fund does a 12, that's kind of a market that allows you to operate in a certain way in picking managers and picking strategies that is, let's call it relatively low volume, pretty low variance relative to, you know, let's call it other types of investment strategies out there. If today we're in one, an environment where there's one guy's a one guy's a five, one guy's a minus 10 and one guy's a plus 35, okay, the average is still 10, but it's a super different market. And if you happen to pick two of the. Yeah, not get the 35 guy, you got to obliterate it. And so what maybe was a beta oriented or beta capable, I guess type of market in the past where it wasn't that bad if you didn't get the top performer has gone to a total alpha situation where you've got to be figuring out who's the stock picker. That is a totally new dynamic in the market that there is just giant dispersion within even very tight geographic proximity. The story that was in the news, the Worldwide plaza over on 8th Avenue, right. Appraisal cut by, you know, something approaching 90%. You look at Park Avenue, on the other hand is achieving the highest, the highest occupancy and highest rental rates it's ever achieved at the same period of time. There's a whole bunch of things that are making that happen. And we're seeing it in markets all over the country. Downtown LA being one of the most stark of being an underperformer versus Century City, you know, six miles, seven miles away is again, all time high rents, all time high occupancy. So just saying, hey, I want to, I need to, I want to buy an office building in Los Angeles really isn't good enough, frankly, that this whole thing started with retail, but now retail. I think, you know, you guys put out some numbers. I think I saw pretty recently that's showing retail to be the best performing asset class of recent times in terms of rent growth. You know, healthy to see that that market has, let's call it, gone through this period of absorbing obsolescence. Retail is kind of is further ahead in this transition than office, which we're really in the midst of right now. And obviously in New York we're seeing a lot of conversions. D.C. there's some conversions, seeing where it works and where it doesn't work. We're looking at a conversion in LA right now where one of our construction guys was in my office yesterday. And it's like, God, this architect is. I don't know how he figured out how to do this. Fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but it works. It's great to see creative destruction in action and creating really kind of, let's call it new value and old properties.
Hayley Keene
Yeah, I want to jump in real quick on that, Justin, because I teach at a couple of colleges and one of the first things that we talk about and we talk about on our podcast quite a bit is by definition, real estate is a local endeavor and it's sometimes hyperlocal. Two buildings on the same street can have completely different outcomes. As you've walked us through. The other thing is just the general market cycle. You have growth, equilibrium, decline, revitalization. And you hit on a bunch of things that we're seeing real time. These retail strip centers turning into medical campuses or medical offices or malls being converted to medical and or education facilities or multifamily. They're all over parked. They have huge upside with density if you can get local municipalities to work with you. And it's really great to see the value. Like that's how the market is supposed to work, where something that becomes functionally obsolete, somebody comes in with fresh capital and fresh ideas and they create value because in most of those locations they still have good visibility, good access, good parking, good signage, all the stuff that's requisite to have value. The utility has just changed at some level. You know, what you called the old school underwriting of like boots on the ground, you know, eyes on the building. Like, I think that's just prudent. People may call it old school, but at the end of the day, there's Nothing like driving to the building, seeing what's around it, checking it out in the morning, checking out at night, seeing what happens when it rains. Like those are all good practices. The, the part that's I think nuanced now is understanding who the borrower and operator is. At a level like you, you talked about this on your intro of operations is what sometimes makes or breaks some of these deals like the, the bricks and sticks haven't changed much. Fixed assets don't change overnight. But it's the operator skill or lack thereof that can really be the difference between success. You know that, that 5 or that 35 that you talked about.
Justin Kennedy
Absolutely. And I, you know, used my favorite word, which as an economics nerd we like to focus on, which is utility. People think of demand for retail space. Well, demand is not correctly used in that term. Right. It's derived demand that's part of a production function of a, that's bringing together goods for people to look at in a store. And obviously the utility of the store has changed because, you know, whether it's Amazon, you know, using you know, their retail distribution method or Walmart using their store focused fulfillment, you know, mechanism that the utility has changed. And it turns out that, you know, whether the dominant, if you look at the dominant retailers, right, the Walmarts, the Costco, the Target, generally are not reusing stores. The entry of these, of these dominant retailers and the creation by them of their own proprietary designed store properties, you know, created this giant supply excess that needed to get absorbed. We started to see some of this during the run up to the GFC and then saw it for sure in the GFC that there was obsolescence coming to the market. It took going on 17, 18 years to clear a lot of the excess and there's still some to go. But that process of going out and creating value really by the developer's mindset of looking at what is this thing going to be for forward giving how utility is changing, what does this thing need to look like in the future? And that is not a debt underwriter skill set. Right. The classic debt underwriter skill set is a backward looking type of analysis of what kinds of rents and what kinds of occupancies have been driven for this property in its market location. That, that is just not the way you can look at it anymore. The utility is changing too fast. We've talked about what were the, were the big two of commercial real estate, office and retail, but now are actually smaller than the industrial segment in terms of institutional ownership. It would be the argument that we made that the changes in utility have been fundamentally driven by technology changing how we use the real estate. If we look at how much the office changed, because we could do zoom, right, and we say, okay, the office changed that much. Retail changed the way it changed because of Amazon and frankly Walmart using technology tools to change the way retail worked. If we don't think that industrial is going to be changed by automated trucks and automated warehousing systems and other types of, other types of technology improvements coming to that market, I think, I'm afraid we're fooling ourselves in that regard. That the types of facilities where investments are being made is going to be driven by where did these autonomous systems function most effectively? We already see Amazon doing it. They have these Bloff style seven story buildings that they've rolled out around the country. I think they have 30 of them at this point. And at least in their own reporting they're saying that they're making pretty remarkable efficiency gains. If we, we want to learn something about the future, I think we can look at retail and we can look at office and say, you know, no matter what it is, there's going to be technology influence changes that are coming to those markets. I, I don't know how you guys see that, but that's how we're looking at it and trying to be like very, very skeptical about what the future might hold for some asset.
Hayley Keene
Right.
Justin Kennedy
And sometimes it's very optimistic. At the same time, it's a different mechanism that's driving the market than has, than has done so in the past.
Hayley Keene
Yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. And I think it's to your point, it's not an underwriter skill set in today's market. It's something that's going to have to be ramped up very quickly because you're going to have to start quantifying these technological advancements and their impacts real time. Like the example you gave of Amazon, like Clear Heights and Industrial, when you're building a seven story distribution center has much different meaning because they don't need 45 foot clear height because they have seven floors and they're having autonomous vehicles. And it's really, it's a logistical operation as much as it is anything else. I think the other one I would parlay is if you go across the US in these suburban office sectors where you have really big office campuses and then acres and acres of parking garages, if people actually adapt to autonomous vehicles, you're not going to need all of that parking. In fact, you're not utilizing that part of the property to the highest and best use. And I think it has a real disruptive component, potentially positive, potentially negative for some of these sectors. I think Amazon is the other one. You mentioned some of the big box retailers that have had to adapt and we've jokingly said at Trapp, we've gone from the retail apocalypse to the retail renaissance. It just took about 20 years, as you mentioned. But I think if you look at Amazon, at their distribution facilities now, if you look at the land to building ratios and you look at the heavy truck traffic that those things incur daily in 20 years when their initial lease term expires on a lot of these buildings, technology is going to be at such a level that drone deliveries or whatever the next iteration is is probably going to be in place. And you might have a whole lot of functionally obsolete buildings that today are dominating the market, that in 20 years maybe don't have any residual value because the technology has completely transformed how people get their electronics and other deliverables.
Justin Kennedy
Well, I'll send it to you, I think I copied it and I'll send it to you that I saw a video on X of a Chinese distribution center where there's just a giant floor and the floor has trap doors in it and the robot shows and the trapdoor goes down a chute to deliver to Shenzhen. The Shanghai chute is somewhere else across the floor, probably far away because you don't want to get too much traffic going to the same area. The robot shows up, the trap door opens, dumps the thing and then the trap door closed and the robot runs off to go get another package. I was amazed by it and it made me immediately think it's like, okay, maybe the Amazon thing with the seven stories and kind of functioning the same way an old school loft building worked, where the goods come down as they get, get, you know, smaller to, you know, get ready to get shipped out. Who knows what the next technology is? And we better be really careful about how we're looking at investments because I, I, I would just venture that warehousing and high frequency logistics might change a lot more than offices have changed in the last, let's call it five or six years. Are these assets offering an appropriate return to justify the fact that there might be, just like in office and retail, you know, some significant nature of obsolescence depending on a building's applicability to the latest technology in the next 10 years?
Hayley Keene
Those are all very salient points that people have to consider. This goes Back though, to our earlier discussion. I think where you guys sit, you're well positioned to adapt to these things as they happen real time. I mean, while these catalysts of change maybe are different, we've gone through similar disruptions with the ones you listed with the RTC, the.com, gFC, all of these things. Technology to me is just another one of those inputs that changes the output at some level.
Justin Kennedy
I guess I would maybe take a little bit different tact at that in that the RTC was a reaction to a supply pull. The GFC was likely the same that they were. The kind of financing that was happening in the CDOs were essentially saying, hey, just create more loan product no matter what it is, right? And the creation of more loan product created more actual product. Again, a supply pull, this is a demand shift. And demand shifts are way different than excesses of supply because you can grow into a supply excess. If demand shifts supplies, things become obsolete really fast. That is, I think that is maybe fundamentally different about where we are today versus the past cycles. Where at the same time as these financial things, obviously there was a cyclical dip in demand. But cyclical dips repair themselves. Secular demand shifts like we have now don't. Right? Horse and buggy turns into car. The entire value chain of horses and buggies is destroyed within just a few years and replaced by the automobile chain, value chain. You know, and the horse had lasted for 5,000 years and it was gone in five. I'm afraid that we have some of that going on right now. Process of who's the owner that is going to be adapting his property to these new changes is incredible. Important part of, you know, making a good investment, whether it's debt or equity, just on that kind of point of debt or equity. I guess the viewpoint that we have is there's really two approaches. I already talked about one, which is, okay, find the stock picker that knows how to find the 35s and only has a couple of the ones that are not the winners. And that's really the equity response. There's another debt response which is cut off the amplitude by focusing what might have been a core investment in equity and doing the debt instead. The returns from a debt have actually exceeded those from the equity for quite a few years now. And it's going to be interesting to see as we kind of get to this stabilization point, hopefully we're in a continued cycle, downward cycle with rates. I think it's probably going to be a little bit slower than anybody anticipated. Maybe six Months ago. But as we are at a more stable non restrictive monetary policy, I think we were looking for some pretty good recovery in real estate equities. I think that the overlay of these demands oriented shifts or volatility in the market says that caution is still necessary and that we're in a. We frankly are in whether it's office retail or you know, particularly industrial, as we just mentioned, we're probably in a kind of a new world order. Thinking about the forward utility is really the key to making good investments. A multifamily is kind of its own thing. Multifamily is an actual part of like consumer demand. Right. And so that maybe self storage is also a consumer facing product to a certain degree. Hotel. To think those are also not going to be impacted in terms of maybe regionally, maybe more at a regional level, you know, would also not be a very good assumption at this point. I think.
Hayley Keene
Yeah, I agree with you and I actually agree with your point on the secular demand shift on the, on the other points that you made. I think that is a distinct difference to the some of the other things that I had mentioned. So let me ask one last question and then we'll wrap up here. This has been a great, great podcast and we really appreciate you spending some time with us. But one thing we haven't talk about is data centers and kind of this AI hysteria that's playing itself out in the market. Do you guys have a view on those broadly or do you have a perspective that you'd like to share with us?
Justin Kennedy
Come on, Lonnie, you haven't you figured out we have a view on everything? Let's see. So if I were an expert in powered land, I would have really be kicking myself that I hadn't really focused on doing powered land as a augment to our development business. Beyond the powered land, I think the real estate skill set is really not applicable to the either the rewards or the risks involved in the development. A lot of these centers and I look at it and I say okay, whether it's real estate or is this infrastructure? You know, I don't think real estate or infrastructure guys really know a lot about what is the new technology that's going to drive the utility of this particular structure in its location relative to the data transmission pipes and the power generation facilities. To know are we going to be in a technology realm that says that all chips are direct to chip cooling and whether it's this immersion or old school air cooling, those aren't the modern way that these centers are functioning 10 years from now. We just don't know that. And I guess as an investor, one of the things I learned back from that old boss is do what you know and if you don't know, admit you don't know and just let other guys do it. Applicability of AI, however, to our workflows as a real estate firm is really interesting. It is the most effective information collection tool that has ever existed. It's really quite unbelievable. It's also surprising how confident it can be about providing wrong information. I'm probably getting myself in trouble with the AI right now, but you know enough about what you're studying to say, hey, this doesn't seem really right. Like maybe I'll go ask the other AI what it thinks about this and see what it is that it has to be. It has to be used in a way where you're checking it constantly. Maybe that will change. I'm spending a good amount of my time asking our people how is it that we're going to do this and how are we, and particularly how are we going to check it and make sure it's right, but how do we use it to make their jobs more effective? So so far it seems to us that everybody is able to do the, let's call it most rote part of their work much more efficiently. And you know, the way it fills in models is startlingly good if the prompt is done in the right way. I think that there's no way it doesn't change real estate just like it's going to change every other business. You know, even though we say that we're old school and wanting to go look at the property, I don't think that this, that this particular part of the new school we can ignore. And at the same time it's going to make more changes for how the real estate market functions. Utility is going to change because of how AI works. And so merging together the old school versus this, I think is at least what we see as the best path. And it will be a long time before we stop going to visit the properties.
Lonnie Hendry
Well, Justin, I think that's a good point. Thinking about the old school and the new school in commercial real estate, maybe you can leave our listeners with one final piece of advice, either for entering this industry or navigating it as so much changes day to day.
Justin Kennedy
I think that thinking about, we've used it a couple times and it is the focus of this white paper that I've told my partners that I'm going to put out at some point, but utility and looking at these properties and saying, what is the special value this property provides? And you know, why does a user want to be at this particular property as opposed to the one even right across the street? It cannot be looked at a, looked at as a commodity as it was in the past. And if a property functions really, you know, just as a commodity, it probably is going to underperform. I think that's what I would say is the kind of focus of where we're trying to get ourselves smarter is looking at the, the forward ways that a property's adding value to its tenants is, is the thing that's going to determine success or not in the coming years.
Lonnie Hendry
That's great. Well, this has been incredible, Justin. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights. And before we let you leave, can you just give one more plug for your business or let our listeners know how they can reach out to you and learn more about what you guys are building.
Justin Kennedy
Sure. So we're 3650 capital. It's 3650. 3650 days in 10 years that we will service your loan and manage your relationship with us. And that's our longest loan that we make is a 10 year loan. Check out our webpage on the Internet. And I'm Jay Kennedy at 3650Capital.com really great being with you guys. Thank you. This has been fun.
Lonnie Hendry
Thank you so much.
Justin Kennedy
Now I'm experiencing it myself. Thank you so much.
Lonnie Hendry
This has been awesome. You are a great podcaster and we really appreciate you joining us today. So with that, we'll close this special podcast. Thank you, Justin for joining us today. Join us later this week as we look at what's happened during the week and how it may be impacting you. If you have a question or a comment, send an email to podcastrep.com until then, visit trap.com for more info and subscribe to the Trepwire podcast with your favorite provider. Thank you for listening and stay well.
Hayley Keene
All right.
Episode 391 | Justin Kennedy of 3650 Capital on Dispersion, Demand Shifts, and the New CRE Market
Released: April 21, 2026
This episode features Justin Kennedy, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of 3650 Capital, a prominent alternative CRE lender, special servicer, and investment solutions provider. With over four decades of experience traversing multiple market cycles, Kennedy shares insights on the evolution of commercial real estate (CRE), the significance of market ‘dispersion,’ changing sources of demand, and the technological shifts reshaping how value and risk are assessed. The conversation delves into themes of hands-on asset management, the importance of servicing, secular (vs. cyclical) shifts in demand, and how adaptability underpins current and future CRE success.
[00:05]–[04:13]
"Each one of the assets is different. And today... even the smallest of micro locational differences in the markets are generating tremendous, let's call it dispersion in results." —Justin Kennedy [03:15]
[04:13]–[08:49]
"...how are these loans being serviced for creation and or protection of value? And how is that servicing benefiting the bondholders?" —Justin Kennedy [07:53]
[08:49]–[12:00]
"We're creating loans with the intention of and holding the risk in those loans and managing them hopefully the same way the best insurance companies would throughout their life." —Justin Kennedy [10:32]
[12:00]–[16:23]
"...there's nothing is a substitute for going to visit the property and understanding, hey, is this on the go home side or the go to work side of the street?" —Justin Kennedy [12:54]
"...this whole thing started with retail, but now retail... is further ahead in this transition than office, which we're really in the midst of right now." —Justin Kennedy [15:01]
[16:23]–[18:07]
"...it's the operator skill or lack thereof that can really be the difference between success. You know that, that 5 or that 35 that you talked about." —Hayley Keene [17:45]
[18:07]–[24:06]
"...warehousing and high frequency logistics might change a lot more than offices have changed in the last, let's call it five or six years." —Justin Kennedy [24:49]
[24:06]–[29:58]
"...the RTC was a reaction to a supply pull... This [cycle] is a demand shift. And demand shifts are way different than excesses of supply because you can grow into a supply excess. If demand shifts, supplies—things become obsolete really fast." —Justin Kennedy [26:30]
[29:58]–[33:55]
"...even though we say that we're old school and wanting to go look at the property, I don't think that this, that this particular part of the new school we can ignore." —Justin Kennedy [33:37]
[33:55]–[35:10]
"...utility and looking at these properties and saying, what is the special value this property provides? ... If a property functions really, you know, just as a commodity, it probably is going to underperform." —Justin Kennedy [34:18]
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