John Coe 00:00:09  Hi, I'm John Coe and welcome to icons of DC Area Real Estate. A one on one interview show highlighting the backgrounds and career trajectory of leading luminaries in the Washington, DC area real estate market. The purpose of the show is to highlight their backgrounds and their experiences, and some interesting stories about their business, as well as their past, and to cite some things that you might take away both from educational standpoint as well as lessons learned in the industry, and some amusing and sometimes interesting background stories. So I'm hoping that you will enjoy the show. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to share that both this podcast and the community I started in 2021 called the iconic Journey and CRE, is now part of a new nonprofit organization with that same name. The new company will offer opportunities for sponsorship to grow the community, both in membership and in programs. It also allows you, as listeners to show your appreciation for this podcast, which has delivered episodes twice monthly since August 2019, with a charitable contribution.

John Coe 00:01:29  Transitioning the community and podcast into the nonprofit organization is underway. The community, which is open to commercial real estate professionals between the ages of 25 and 40 years old, is currently up to 65 members and growing. If you would like to learn more about either joining the community or contributing to the podcast, please reach out directly to me at John at Coe Enterprises coeenterprises.com separately. My private company Coe Enterprises. Now will focus only on advisory work for early stage real estate firms and career counseling. If you have interest in learning more about its services, please review my website at Coe enterprises.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me for another episode of icons of DC Area Real Estate. My episode today I'm featuring Toby Millman, who was the regional partner for Transwestern Development Company in the Mid-Atlantic region. Toby's, journey in urban planning and real estate development is inspiring, and I think you're going to really enjoy the story. Toby currently oversees the DC, Maryland and Virginia markets and reaches up to the upper up the East Coast to New York and Boston, but most of his activity so far has been in the Washington area.

John Coe 00:03:00  He joined Trans Western about a year ago, and he had been at Brookfield before. Toby grew up here in the Washington, D.C. area and Potomac, Maryland, went to Wooten High School. His father was in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and worked actually on Apollo 11 space research. His mother was also in technology. They lived in Connecticut before he moved here to the Washington area. He was very fascinated with urban development from an early age. Went to the library to study it and was really intrigued and enjoyed his visits to New York and D.C. as a result. So he went to us when he was in high school. He went to an architect presentation of the Smithsonian by Andres Duany and really turned him on to urban planning and development. So that led him to his studying urban planning at Cornell and subsequently Chapel Hill universities in North Carolina. So he got an undergraduate at Cornell and a graduate degree at Chapel Hill, and decided to get right into the urban planning area. So he joined a firm in Boston working on the Big Dig there.

John Coe 00:04:12  And a big project in India decided that he liked the real estate industry. After doing a presentation to AEW about a suburban office park in Boston. So he decided to roll into that industry by joining Toll Brothers, Big Land developer and homebuilder. down in Philadelphia. He moved there, was there for a couple of years, and then decided to come back to the D.C. area and basically found a job in the newspaper with Aiken, young and Taub idea at the time was very early in their career, so he spent several seven years there and really learned the development business With Bob young and Tom and Terry Harkin. Subsequently, in a joint project, he joined Abdo Development. Jim Abdo talked him into coming on board, and the two of them started developing infill residential development up until the global financial crisis. So then he had to back up and figure out what to do. He and his wife left the area and they started a manufactured housing business up in upstate New York. I did that for a while until he was called by Vornado.

John Coe 00:05:23  Vornado called him and he was able to come down and start their multifamily division after the arts, after the, you know, the commercial. So there's lots of activity there. The merger with JBG Smith, which caused JBG Smith forced him to make a change. So then he joined and Martin Ditto stayed with Martin for a couple of years and then jumped over to Brookfield when they acquired Forest City and he was overseeing the Navy Yard projects, etc.. Subsequently, he then joined Trans Western. He was recruited to come over to work for them and he talks about that. Trans Western is a national Development company division of the Trans Western Companies Brokerage and Investments and other other businesses. But this is a special development division that's in multiple cities around the country doing primarily residential development. They also have an industrial division he talks about. So Toby's journey is quite fascinating. He's been through both large and small corporations in the industry, both entrepreneurial as well as very large companies, Brookfield being one of the largest. So he has quite an interesting career.

John Coe 00:06:37  And I think you're going to enjoy this conversation and his lessons learned. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Toby Mullen. So Toby Melbourne, welcome to icons of. DC area real estate. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, John. That's great. So please tell me your role at Trans Western Development Company and your day to day activities at a high level today, if you would. Sure, sure, I'd love to.

Toby Millman 00:07:05  But first, before we get going, I want to thank you for doing these podcasts. I think this is a real service to our community to be documenting these stories of folks who have contributed to to our community here. So thank you for doing this. You're welcome. So I am the regional partner for Trans Western Development Company in the Mid-Atlantic. and what that means is I oversee the team and the pipeline for development activities for the larger trans western companies in the Mid-Atlantic states, which is primarily Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia. Although we do look at sites up the East Coast in the Massachusetts, New York new Jersey area as well.

John Coe 00:07:53  So what, 75-80% in the D.C. area, pretty much of your project so far?

Toby Millman 00:07:56  Yeah, I'd say 90 to 95% right now. I'm hoping yeah I mean we're hoping to do more of these coasts. But right now most of what are.

John Coe 00:08:04  You doing new business development up there or are.

Toby Millman 00:08:06  You. How are you doing that. Yeah, we've looked at a number of sites. We like sites and we're not looking at stuff in like Manhattan or downtown Boston. Those are obviously very competitive, but we've looked at some sites, mostly stick ville projects in sort of outer areas of new Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, Boston suburbs, things like that. So do you do just out of.

John Coe 00:08:31  Curiosity, do you do joint ventures with other developers? Are you looking purely at your own projects and just capitalizing them?

Toby Millman 00:08:39  We primarily do our own projects for our own sponsor, although we do a fair number of JVs as well. It's somewhat opportunistic. So if there's a if there's an owner of real estate or somebody has real estate tied up, we're more more than happy to talk to them about JV, those deals.

Toby Millman 00:08:56  We're also doing some development work. So we're doing a conversion right now in downtown D.C. with a lender that had to take an office building back. So where their their owners are up on that project on a fee, working on a fee basis? Oh, well, that sounds great. So let's switch back.

John Coe 00:09:16  Go back to the time machine here and talk a little bit about your origin story, where.

John Coe 00:09:21  You came from, Toby, and your background and your family, If you would. 

Toby Millman 00:09:24  Sure. I grew up in the Washington area in Montgomery County, Maryland, Potomac, Maryland, to be precise. My dad was a mechanical engineer working for the federal government. He worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so he worked in the area of, Regulating nuclear power plants. But prior to that, we were living up in Connecticut before we moved to the Washington area. And one of the interesting jobs he had was he was working with a team that designed the backpacks that the Apollo 11 astronauts wore landed on the moon.

Toby Millman 00:10:03  Yeah. Really cool. So it was, you know, talked about that as being one of the more kind of fascinating aspects of his career. But when we were four years old, when I was four years old, he took a job with the federal government and moved moved to Maryland. My mom had a series of careers. She when we were living in Connecticut, she worked for United Technologies. She would, I'm sure it was one of the very first women working with computers, mainframe computers for United Technologies, and we moved down to the Washington area. She wound up being a consultant for hospitals that were doing, you know, that we're looking to invest in their in their assets, in their, in their properties. So in some ways now they think about it. I mean, she was sort of active in the real estate world with the hospital industry. And then she ultimately kind of mid to late career got her CPA and became a CPA and accountant and had a couple different jobs. But she ended her career with Wyeth er, the pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia.

Toby Millman 00:11:10  So she had a very interesting and varied, career.

John Coe 00:11:15  So you had technologist parents. That's quite.

Toby Millman 00:11:18  Something. Yeah. They were both. Yeah. Sort of analytically oriented. Yeah. That's kind of.

John Coe 00:11:24  Sets you up for that kind of.

Toby Millman 00:11:27  A career.

John Coe 00:11:27  So talk about high.

Toby Millman 00:11:29  School and you know, growing up did you have any siblings. So I have one sister. She still lives in the Washington area, as did both my parents and I. I went to high school, which is a public high school in Rockville, Maryland. Yeah. And it was a pretty it's a traditional, conventional suburban upbringing. In some ways. My life after growing up in the in in Potomac was a reaction to the suburban life. I swore to myself that I would, I would I wanted to live in a city in a more sort of dynamic environment, not to take anything away from, you know, the the environment my parents provided for us, which I'm obviously very thankful for. But I was always drawn to the cities.

Toby Millman 00:12:14  I mean, I remember being like in a car train, you know, coming into a major city, whether it was New York or, you know, even D.C. and there was a certain amount of energy and excitement that I feel even as a young kid, that this was different. And I think that those sort of early days really kind of drove me towards the interest in, in cities and building and Placemaking. I had, I think, an intuitive sense of that, and there were a couple of sort of seminal experiences I had as a kid. As a teenager, I used to spend a lot of time in the Rockville Library, so the Rockville Branch of the Montgomery County Library system, and there was a back room that you could pull things off the shelf, and it was all Rockville, Montgomery County history related. And so, you know, there were like narratives and maps and photos and things like that. And I remember stumbling upon this information about how downtown Rockville used to have a historic downtown.

Toby Millman 00:13:18  There were these photos of these, you know, sort of Georgetown looking retail buildings. And I never I didn't know as a kid that that had even never existed. All I knew was that there was this big mall and dad that had been built in downtown, and that was the thought that was the way it always was. And it was very shocking to me that anyone would rip out these old, beautiful, old buildings and drop in this what, you know was arguably probably the day it was built. An unsuccessfully, yeah. Monstrosity that the city had to deal with for and still is dealing with. Well, I think most of it's been torn.

John Coe 00:13:53  Down now, I think, hasn't it?

Toby Millman 00:13:55  Most of it has. Most of it has. But I mean, I think, you know, they they dealt with that for decades afterward. And it's and as in reading the materials about this era, it was clear it was really only a handful of people that had made these decisions about, you know, demolishing downtown Rockville and building this mall.

Toby Millman 00:14:15  And so, you know, that was where I realized that it didn't take a lot of people to make, you know, either really bad decisions or potentially really good decisions about places. 

John Coe 00:14:28  And that's one of my other podcast guests, Gwen Wright, was head of the company Historical Architectural Group, and she brought that to the to the fore.

Toby Millman 00:14:43  Yeah, she loves the history.

John Coe 00:14:45  Of Montgomery County.

Toby Millman 00:14:45  So yeah, there's a lot to love. It's a very interesting place. So that inspired you? That was an I just remember that being as kind of an eye opening moment. And then a little bit later, I was probably in my probably 16 or 17 years old, my mom, knowing that I was interested in design and planning, things in that realm, she had signed me up for my permission for a Smithsonian lecture series with, a series of architects. So these were all held posted downtown DC locations.

Toby Millman 00:15:19  Sure. And the one I remember the most was a lecture by an architect, Andres Duany, who became associated with the New urbanist or new, you know, traditional design movement, which was the basis of the concept behind that was that we should rethink how we're planning and designing cities or new new communities, new developments, moving away from sort of more sprawl oriented design to moving looking backward towards how cities and towns developed in a more compact, walkable, environment. So he had done a he was doing a presentation on what was what was a new project for him called seaside, which was down in Panhandle of Florida. And they had only built exactly. They'd only build a handful of homes and buildings in this project. But again, it was just very eye opening to me that you could sort of buck the trend and, you know, an area that would have almost certainly been developed with more sort of conventional, let's say, suburban style waterfront development. They somebody, the owner of this land, had made a conscious decision to do something different there to basically build a town.

Toby Millman 00:16:39  And that just really fascinated me and really solidified my interest in urban planning. And this idea that one, you know, people can do something different here locally.

John Coe 00:16:52  He inspired the Alfandre family in Montgomery County, and they developed Kentlands

Toby Millman 00:16:59  Which is.

John Coe 00:17:00  A new urban design.

Toby Millman 00:17:02  From the.

John Coe 00:17:02  Scratch community. And Art Fuccillo and my other guests talked about that project because he was involved in.

Toby Millman 00:17:10  The land development of that and built.

John Coe 00:17:12  The shopping center. And he was, together with your former employer, Bob young, in that project as well.

Toby Millman 00:17:19  So there's it's.

John Coe 00:17:20  Interesting.

Toby Millman 00:17:21  That was interesting evolution of that project. Yeah, that and Falls Grove was another project with Arlen Lerner. That's right, that's right.

John Coe 00:17:29  That was that was False Grove. That's that's.

Toby Millman 00:17:30  Right. That was the right project. I'm sorry. It wasn't Ken, but Kentlands. I lived very close. Inspiration. Yeah, it was an inspiration. There were several. There were Fallsgrove, there was Kent Lens and then King Farm.

Toby Millman 00:17:42  That's right. One. And those, those also I would lived very close to Kentlands when I was in development. I actually took probably thousands of photographs of that project when it was under construction. But so, you know, as I was growing up, I was solidifying this interest in, in urban planning, and it became very clear that was the direction that I wanted to head. It's great.

John Coe 00:18:08  So then you went on to Cornell University. Talk about that experience.

Toby Millman 00:18:12  Yeah. So as a as I mentioned, I was singularly focused on urban planning, and I applied only to colleges that offered a formal undergraduate programs. And I Cornell was the best school I got, got into. Certainly from a ranking perspective. But it was kind of funny anecdote there. I had somehow gotten an informational interview with the dean of the planning program, Cornell, and this was before, you know, it even applied. There is probably, you know, early in the year that, you know, senior year and of high school.

Toby Millman 00:18:49  And I went up there, I met with his name was Dick Booth, and I spent, you know, an hour or two with him. And at the end of the conversation, he looked at me and he said, we had a really, you know, really nice, engaging conversation. He looked at me and he said, you know, I really like you. I'm going to see to it that you get admitted. And, you know, it's like one of those stories you hear from like the 1940s or 50s where, you know, two people meet on a train and you know that that allows that person to get admitted into into college. But sure enough, I got the acceptance letter in the mail and I was off to Cornell.

John Coe 00:19:26  So the lesson learned.

Toby Millman 00:19:27  There was the lesson learned is, you know, you know, a, you know, follow your interest and be passionate about it and reach out to people and be willing, be afraid. Don't be afraid. They can just say, no, you can't take an appointment.

Toby Millman 00:19:43  But and then, you know, obviously, you know, take whatever opportunities are given to you to engage with the people that have a say in making decisions about your life.

John Coe 00:19:54  Absolutely. So it was a good program. I have to assume.

Toby Millman 00:19:58  That you enjoyed it. Yeah, it was a great program. It was the one thing I was, surprised by. It was very, theoretical based. It was kind of more academic. And so a lot of the professors that were there at the time were these like lions of the planning world, folks like John Forster and Pierre Clavell. I mean, these were guys that were very prolific writers about kind of social aspects of planning, less than the kind of land use or physical aspects. And so while it was fascinating and I learned a ton, I didn't get kind of the land use component that I was hoping to get out of the planning program. So I wound up taking a lot of courses in the hotel school there, which was where all of the real estate coursework was was held.

Toby Millman 00:20:55  At the time, they now have course have a very good undergraduate real estate program. So I learned a fair amount about real estate through through the hotel school. And then the landscape architecture program had a lot of coursework on urban design and more physical planning. So that's where you did your drafting. And you're exactly kind of learned about the built environment through that. Right? So I was able to cobble together coursework that met my my interests. Cool. Very cool. So you then.

John Coe 00:21:28  Went on into the industry and into urban planning. Talk about that. And how you how that came about.

Toby Millman 00:21:35  Well, I tried right out of undergrad to go in, but it was 1992, which was one of the worst recession years in our lifetime. And so there were no there were not a lot of jobs. And so I knew I wanted to go on to grad school at some point. So I decided to just keep on going and got into University of North Carolina, Chapel Hills, a master's degree program in city planning.

Toby Millman 00:22:03  So I went there for a couple of years, and that was where that program was much more sort of Landis oriented, and that was where I was able to satisfy those interests. And that was an excellent program, excellent time there. We happened to win. uncW won the national championship in basketball when I was there, so that was fun. I also met my now wife there, so achieved a lot of major accomplishments. Goals? Exactly.

John Coe 00:22:27  That's fun.

Toby Millman 00:22:28  And Chapel Hill.

John Coe 00:22:29  Is beautiful place too.

Toby Millman 00:22:31  Fantastic place to spend two years or many years of your life. Yes. So graduated from there in 1994 and wanted to go out and get a job. And in urban planning, you know, this is this was my vision to eventually be like a planning director of a major city or, you know, some working somewhere in the planning field. And I interviewed for a number of jobs, ultimately wound up taking a job with a engineering firm in Boston called Vhb. And what drew me to that? They had a small it was a very large engineering firm.

Toby Millman 00:23:10  So most of the people that work there were engineers, but they had a small group planning group that was led by a gentleman named Bob Kay, Who are there. Our role was to coordinate the activities of all the engineering function. So there was transportation engineers, civil engineers, environmental engineers and so on, some of these very large scale projects that tapped into each one of these engineering disciplines. Our role is to sort of be the air traffic controllers for these all these engineering groups. And so we worked on projects there. There was, of course, the big project in Boston at the time called the Big Dig, which was the undergrounding of Interstate 93 through downtown Boston. And there were all these ancillary projects associated with that. So they were building the new Ted Williams Tunnel, which is the tunnel to Logan Airport. And then there were all the roads at the airport associated with that. So we worked on the road system for the airport and how it connected into the Ted Williams Tunnel. We also did a lot of the environmental impact statement work for that.

Toby Millman 00:24:19  So that was a big chunk of what we worked on, which was all about the.

John Coe 00:24:22  Transit that you do. The T, which we're kind of t is all.

Toby Millman 00:24:25  We did a little bit. And that just how it connected with, you know, it goes to Logan Airport right. So there was some coordination work that went along with that. That was the first rapid bus I've ever been on that silver. Oh really?

John Coe 00:24:39  I think they call it. Yeah. Yep.

Toby Millman 00:24:41  Yeah, that's kind of cool actually.

John Coe 00:24:42  I don't know why it wasn't made rail, but they did a bus anyway.

Toby Millman 00:24:46  So you know the story there.

John Coe 00:24:48  Just out of curiosity.

Toby Millman 00:24:49  I don't or I don't recall a number of years. So we had that. We did a project in southern India. So the governor at the time, Bill weld, I'm sure he went on an Indian trade mission to the nation of India and came back with a project for us to help the southern state of Karnataka plan for design a basically an interstate highway between Bangalore and Mysore to major cities in the south part of India.

Toby Millman 00:25:24  And along that interstate was going to be four new cities, and those cities were going to be the selling of the real estate for those cities was going to help finance the construction of the of the highway. So we my team worked on planning for those cities, along with obviously coordinating the the execution of the highway as well. So my understanding, I never went there. I still haven't been there. I my understanding is the highway did get built, but the I don't know what the state is of the cities that were planned along the highway route, but obviously very fascinating, interesting project. And then we worked with a number of smaller real estate companies, particularly the one I remember the most was with AAUW, the big investment group in Boston, and they had just put on her contract a office park outside Boston. They were buying from MetLife, and they asked us to do a zoning analysis of what the development potential, redevelopment potential was of the office park and see if there was any unused density or how it might lay out.

Toby Millman 00:26:33  And so my my boss gave me that property. It was sort of a bite sized, you know, kind of good project for a relatively junior person to dive into. And I dove into that thing, you know, headfirst. I remember working really late hours just really perfecting it and, you know, had the opportunity to actually present it to the executives that were working on the project. And they were just I remember them being just very impressed with the level of thought and effort that went into it. And that was, I think, the moment I can trace back to when I said to myself, you know, I want to be kind of on that side, on their side of the table and we're on in the real estate, side of the business, because I saw how, you know, decisions about investment can really shape, what winds up getting built and executed much more than, planners probably can impact. You know, the planners are sort of doing very high level and kind of working on the edges of what developers are proposing.

Toby Millman 00:27:35  I saw an opportunity to really kind of have a more substantive impact on what can we get built.

John Coe 00:27:44  So did they look at feasibility. Is that really what the question was for you to, you know, the density feasibility or the potential of the site or what. What was the big question they were trying to answer that you answered for them.

Toby Millman 00:27:59  Yeah. They were buying this for the office buildings primarily. So, you know, the price they were paying was based on what the value of the office buildings was. And, you know, this was a 1995 or 1996. So this was before, you know, there was a problem as much of their of a problem as there is today in the office market. So I think they were pretty happy with what they were getting today. But they wanted to understand was there any potential future value that that could be, extracted from the site through potential redevelopment? So this was kind of a part of their just due diligence exercise and understanding what the potential of the, of the site was.

John Coe 00:28:41  So this motivated you towards real estate. So how did you take action.

Toby Millman 00:28:45  Then.

John Coe 00:28:46  To get there.

Toby Millman 00:28:46  So yeah. So I decided that that's I really want to jump over to the real estate side that the private sector side. And you know, I really didn't have other than a few courses I took at Cornell in the hotel school, I didn't have a lot of background and certainly running models and doing underwriting and analysis of real estate deals, But that didn't stop me. I didn't care, and I was young enough to, you know, I knew that, you know, you can still be trained. And so this was back before, you know, the online job search websites. You could go on to, newspaper websites and search their classifieds. So these are the print classifieds that were converted into databases. And you could search and I would just search for real estate and development on, you know, pretty much every East Coast newspaper's website. So, probably sent out 100 plus resumes and wow, one day I got a call from, gentleman who ran the Boston office for Toll Brothers.

Toby Millman 00:29:53  And he asked me, they said they've gotten my resume down and Philadelphia, the headquarters for toll, and they had failed. Philadelphia had asked him to reach out and interview me. So I went in for an interview and gentleman's name was Bill Gilligan, and he I could tell the interview wasn't going great. I mean, it was fine, but it wasn't. You know, we weren't clicking or he was sensing, like, I just really didn't have a lot of background that might be relevant. And I felt like I needed to throw a Hail Mary. So at the very end of the conversation, I said, do you know what GIS is? And of course, GIS is geographic information systems, which is the mapping of billion map data. And I said, no, I have no idea what that is. And so I explained it to him and I explained how it might be able it might be helpful from acquisitions perspective, you can map out sites based on their zoning, based on their demographics, based on their size.

Toby Millman 00:30:51  And I could see his eyes just light up like this was amazing. This could be an amazing tool and I don't know for sure, but I believe that just that little bit of the conversation led to a second interview down in Philadelphia, and they flew me down there and they offered me the job. And I wound up moving to to Philadelphia. And that was my first real estate job to.

John Coe 00:31:19  Introduce the firm to GIS then.

Toby Millman 00:31:22  I did. I got them to buy a copy of GIS, which was sort of the, yeah, consumer version of the of Arkansas's GIS system. And yeah, we used it, we used it, we used it in particular. What they wound up. I originally was working in the Philadelphia suburbs, but eventually they had me going to new markets for them. So it was like Chicago and Nashville and Detroit and Salt Lake City, places like that. And what was particularly useful for was going into places that, you know, we weren't really familiar with. I mean, it's one thing to map out suburbs of Philadelphia where they knew every little parcel of dirt, but going to a new place and being able to kind of visually see where were the areas we should be focusing and the specific parcels we should be targeting.

Toby Millman 00:32:12  And yeah, I think it was very helpful tool for for us to pursue new, new sites.

John Coe 00:32:19  So how did you learn about it? Was it the engineering firm they started using it or who taught you about it? Just out of curiosity, how did it how did it how did you get introduced to it?

Toby Millman 00:32:28  It started in planning school. Uncie are you and see okay. Yeah, this is where we first started to work with it. And then. Yeah, when I got to VP, they had it. They actually had a GIS team there. And so I was working. I was very interested in it as just the sort of subject matter. And so I got friendly with the GIS team and was trained, was doing a number of projects with them. So yeah, I've become quite familiar with the systems.

John Coe 00:32:59  That's great. That's a.

Toby Millman 00:32:59  Tool that.

John Coe 00:33:00  Obviously it's exploded since then.

Toby Millman 00:33:03  Oh, yeah? Yeah. Now it's like mainstream.

John Coe 00:33:06  Oh, absolutely. It's awesome. So you were a Toll Brothers.

John Coe 00:33:10  For how long?

Toby Millman 00:33:11  I was there for a couple of years and learned a ton. That was where I really learned how to run a model. There was a guy named Paul Burkhart. Is this grizzled old land guy. Tell me everything he knew about land acquisition, including how to underwrite, dirt guys. They called him dirt Guy. He was a good guy. yep. And he took me under his wing. And so I was there for a couple of years. But, you know, I really want to get back to the Washington area, and I really wanted to get into more urban oriented development. Of course, Paul was doing more suburban tract subdivisions. You know, they hadn't gotten quite into the urban stuff yet, but they were starting to dabble in it. They didn't have the whole kind of city living, you know, Sure it's not. That was still years and years away. So I was ready to move on and again answered. I'm probably one of the few people that a huge chunk of my career was built on just answering classified ads, but I think the feeling most people get their job through connections.

Toby Millman 00:34:17  But again, I answered a classified ad in the Washington Post and it was for a I didn't know at a time. They didn't say where the job, who the job was with, but it wound up being a job with EIA and so at the time was called Acon young and Tab associates before they shortened it. And they wound up inviting me to come down to D.C. and interviewing with Terry Harkin and Bob Young and Taub and some of the other folks. It was it was this was the this was a 1998. The company was probably only maybe three years old, 3 or 4 years old.

John Coe 00:34:51  So they were with the holiday companies before that broke off.

Toby Millman 00:34:56  Exactly. Jacqueline, and they had had some success at holiday. Building kind of early prototype urban infill, high density townhouses. And I think those Terry and Terry and Bob got together and said, you know what, we can do this on our own. And so they set up AIA and they were doing all of the acquisition and development work, the two of them alone.

Toby Millman 00:35:18  And I think they determined that they really needed some, some help.

John Coe 00:35:22  Yes. To listeners out there, I did an episode with Bob young and Bob. So please listen to that.

Toby Millman 00:35:28  Yeah, it's a great story to that. Yeah, yeah. And so they they hired me basically to be their right hand development acquisitions guy, 2028 year old kid. I'm sure I was appealing because I was relatively inexpensive at the time, but had had the experience with Toll Brothers doing land acquisition and quick quickly became key, became fully ingrained there and learn looking.

John Coe 00:35:56  At sites mostly.

Toby Millman 00:35:59  I was, I was, I was chasing new news sites and also working side by side with them on the entitlements, the design, it's somewhat the financing of the projects, although we did have sort of exclusive relationships on the on the equity side there. And I just learned, I mean, the two things I remember learning the most about there was, you know, Bob young is a genius when it comes to design product. And I would see him, he'd sit down.

Toby Millman 00:36:29  At the time, our architect was Chris Lazard, and the two of them would sit down for hours working through every little detail of a of a unit, moving walls, you know, an inch or two here, you're just shifting things around, and they would go through dozens of iterations. And what it really just taught me was like, never the thing we're selling in, especially in residential development. The product we're selling is the unit. It's the thing that the person is is buying or renting that they're living in, and you want to perfect it. Like any product, if you're selling a refrigerator or, you know, whatever it is, you know, the people who are developing those products are constantly working to make them better and perfect them. And I think it gets lost a lot in our in our, in our industry that just that product, you know, they sort of leave a lot to the, you know, just hand it over to the architects to just sort of do what they do.

Toby Millman 00:37:25  And then whatever they design is what we'll wind up building. But what they did.

John Coe 00:37:30  In my experience, and what I noticed is that they were the first ones that kind of went into existing subdivisions and existing areas and carved out sites in ways that very few others were willing to take the risk doing to, to make it work. But they understood the economics well enough that they could spend the kind of money they had to to develop these sites, and they actually made money doing it because no one else was willing to do that. So they were kind of a pioneer in that infill townhouse development space. And I'd argue they probably still are the leading infill townhouse developer in the region when you argue that.

Toby Millman 00:38:11  Absolutely. I mean, they certainly were the only ones doing that kind of stuff back in the late 90s, and they're one of only a few that are still doing it and doing it well. I mean, what they really did well and and what I think shocked a lot of people was the densities that they were building.

Toby Millman 00:38:26  Yes, townhouses. I mean, some of the projects we were building were 40 townhouses. So this was these were for simple townhomes, 40 units to the acre. Yeah. And I think most people just couldn't even fathom that people could live that densely and have it be livable. Right. And so by doing that and being very creative about the design, how they laid these projects out. They added a tremendous amount of value to the sites because most people are like, oh yeah, we can get max 10 or 15 units to the acre. And they were able to, you know, in some cases quadruple that density, which obviously delivers a lot more value to the land. So, you know, learned a ton from from Bob on that and just, you know, how to run a business a small growing business. And then Terri Aken was just the master of make the making the deal. I mean, he is the relationships leveraging his relationships and the toolkit of little tricksy tricks. The wrong word, but little elements of of contracts to sort of get help solve a seller's issue.

Toby Millman 00:39:39  You know, the seller would say, you know what? I just I would love to do the deal with you, but I just I need this one thing. Can you help me solve it? And Terry always had something he pulled out. His tool kit was like, all right, we have the way to solve this for you in our contract. And nine times out of ten that did it. So I always just kind of kept a memory, a database of those little tricks of the trade that Terry I saw Terry use. And I still use many, most of those today. And I credit that, you know, with being able to make a lot of the deals I have over the years.

John Coe 00:40:11  Well, I think urban development requires that because, you know, you're looking at different odd situations, almost every infill project you look at, and it requires a unique perspective each time. It's not there's no cookie cutter. It's not like, I hate to say it, but Toll Brothers, it's pretty much a cookie cutter business out there doing those greenfield development deals.

John Coe 00:40:34  You know, you can basically lay the lay the landscape almost identically. Every site, except you do have some undulation of the site, but normally it's relatively simple to do from a land development standpoint, but infill is it's three dimensional chess.

Toby Millman 00:40:52  And you have a lot more neighbors, you know, two and certainly cities like that, we were developing in like Old Town Alexandria, yes, DC and Silver Spring, Maryland. You know, it feels center town scrutiny. Yeah.

John Coe 00:41:07  Yeah. No question. Yeah. So then you went on to another infill developer talk about that experience.

Toby Millman 00:41:14  So when I was at EIA, we did a project called the Bryant School. Right, which was an old DC public school property on Capitol Hill that had this historic school building and then had some land around. It was a park, the parking lot and playground for the for the school that was completely abandoned had been abandoned for I think 20 years. And where the we got entitled on that site conversion of the school building to 20 condos and 38 townhouses on the surrounding land.

Toby Millman 00:41:47  And Bob and Terry. It was not our business to be doing adaptive reuse. That was just we weren't really set up to do that. And so they said once we got the entitlements, they said, go out and find somebody for by the school building and we'll build the townhouses. So I went out to, you know, the the cast of characters that were doing adaptive reuse at the time. You know, this is probably like early 2000. And one of the major players at the time was a guy named Jim Abdo, and who had gotten just a lot of notoriety and media attention for the work he was doing, primarily in the 14th Street border at the time, which was still sort of in its early stages of revitalization. And I remember I met him out on the site. We were walking through this old school building. It was a mess. You know, there's pigeons everywhere and, you know, kind of had to see the vision. But, you know, I could sense he was excited about it.

Toby Millman 00:42:45  He's like, can we get up on the roof? And I had never been on the roof of this building, so I, we kind of figured out how to get up there. And once we got up there, I saw why he wanted to get up there because it had this unbelievable, unobstructed, 360 degree view in every direction, including, you know, the dome of the Capitol and the Library of Congress and the monument and his, you know, eyes lit up. And I think, you know, at that point he had a vision of, you know, creating kind of a rooftop deck up there. And he basically said, I want this building. So we wound up working out a deal and selling him the building. And so for 2 or 3 years, he and I were working side by side. He was he was developing the the condo building, the conversion, and I was doing the townhouse development. And we got to know each other pretty well. And, you know, both I think sort of got they liked each other, liked working with each other.

Toby Millman 00:43:40  And so I reached out to him and I said, you know, are you were you are you ever interested in bringing in a, you know, a partner or, you know, somebody to help support you? He was sort of one man. And I had, I think, maybe 4 or 5 people working for him, but he was the only one really doing development. And I said, you know, now, you know, now that you say, yeah, I think I could use a little help. And so we wound up joining forces. I left, I was at EIA for I think six years left EIA. And, you know, part of the reason I left EIA was I felt like we were running out of sites. I was like, how many townhouse development sites are they? We needed like 3 or 4 acres. And I was worried we were going to run out of sites. Well, they proved me wrong because they've been doing it for now, 20 years since I left and haven't run out of sites but creative.

Toby Millman 00:44:32  Yeah, exactly. But anyway, I jumped over to Abdou and was there for about seven years. And did you know some very iconic projects there, including Monroe Street Market, which was the project that basically created a retail main street for a Catholic university. We did some bi-rite multifamily deals in the Rosslyn Ballston corridor, which nobody does buy, right? Multi deals in Arlington that were very successful called Worcester Mercer Lofts and Gaslight Square for rent. Those were all comp for sale condos.

John Coe 00:45:06  All for sale okay.

Toby Millman 00:45:08  Yeah we were we were all pretty much for sale developers.

John Coe 00:45:11  That's interesting. The thread there.

Toby Millman 00:45:13  Because, you know, you.

John Coe 00:45:14  Started with Toll Brothers and then to I.A. and then Abdo all for sale. So you never really looked at rental projects in your career up until that point, right?

Toby Millman 00:45:23  No, no, I didn't, and I really didn't know much about analyzing a rental deal I knew for sale. And then we did a project called Senate Square, which was one of the first. That's a gorgeous.

John Coe 00:45:36  Project.

Toby Millman 00:45:36  Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. On eighth Street, which involved also conversion of a historic building and development of of new art of.

John Coe 00:45:43  History in that.

Toby Millman 00:45:44  Building. Yeah. Little sisters of the poor. And then the Capital Children's Museum was in that. That's right. For a number of years.

John Coe 00:45:51  The architecture there was pretty unique.

Toby Millman 00:45:53  Spectacular. So I had had an amazing run with Jim. And I would I always say like, I probably would still be there. I'd like to think I would still be there if not for this little thing called the Great Financial crisis. That kind of put a the end to the to the great, certainly the for sale housing run that we had. So that was, you know, in 2008 and I was in a position where I had to shift once again.

John Coe 00:46:22  So talk about that decision, which you just did after after Hebdo.

Toby Millman 00:46:27  Yeah. So Jim and I, you know, we were we would talk and it was becoming clear that he really just wanted to finish up what we were working on at the time.

Toby Millman 00:46:38  So we wound up getting a partner in Barstow for the Monroe Street Market project, and they wound up taking the lead. Moving that forward. They had Penny Pritzker was there was their equity on that deal. And then we had a project, Gaslight Square. As I mentioned earlier, that was on Clarendon Boulevard in in Arlington that we needed to kind of power through the, you know, the issues related to the financial crisis. But I don't we I think both came to the conclusion that there probably wasn't going to be much more happening after that. And so my my wife Jessica had some health issues, and there was the financial crisis and, and unclear future with Abdo. And so we decided to get out of DC and sort of cash in our chips and ride out the storm not knowing how long it was going to last. And so we had this house. We had, renovated. It was this beautiful 1912 house. And Chevy Chase DC had gotten some awards and was in Washingtonian magazine, so we knew we could sell it, even though it was kind of a tough real estate market.

Toby Millman 00:47:50  And sure enough, there was a lawyer. Couple bought the bought the house, probably overpaid for it, but it was allowed us to kind of cash in and we had to figure out where we wanted to go. And so we decided to move to upstate New York and to the Finger Lakes region, to a little town called Skinny Atlas. And this was going to be we had we had been vacationing up there in the summers and really loved it and just thought it would be a good place to kind of settle out, settle down for a little bit with, you know, as I said, ride out the storm. And meanwhile, I'd worked out a deal with Jim Abdo that I'd worked 50% time for him, help him kind of close out the projects we were working on. And as long as he would let me use the other 50% of the time, start my own company, and I had an idea that had been brewing in my mind for some time a business plan about building a company around prefabricated construction or modular construction and developing in college towns, because I felt like college towns were places where there was still, you know, some economic drivers in the face of the financial crisis.

Toby Millman 00:48:59  And there was also tended not to be the wherewithal to do more complicated infill housing. So I set out to create a company called the company Agora Development, and I tied up a site in Ithaca, New York, which of course were Cornell, as I was familiar with that area. And it was it was you could build, I think, like 5 or 6 houses on the site. Bye bye. Right. And I wound up getting approval to build 29 houses. So sort of following the EIA A model of identifying the site. I had approval to build 19 single family modular homes and simple modular townhouses and got the project acquired. The site, got it financed. I worked out some creative financing with the modular factories, where they were carrying the costs of the construction until we closed on the homes with the buyers, the individual buyers. So I didn't have to finance the actual construction of the homes, just the acquisition of the land and the infrastructure and the site work. And it did. It did okay.

Toby Millman 00:50:08  And we still were fighting against the background issues of the financial crisis in terms of just the market demand for for sale housing. But it certainly proved out the concept that it was a viable business model. And so I had another site I tied up in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I was ready to just, like, proliferate this thing, you know, all up and down the East Coast. I had a portfolio of three designed, modular friendly homes that I had had. I had an architect engaged, an architect to design for me. They were proprietary plans that only I could use. So I had sort of all the pieces were ready to go to scale on. And that was when I got the call from Vornado to come back, potentially come back to D.C. and help them start up a multifamily development platform there, which they didn't do, not have everything they were working on was primarily office development. They needed somebody who understood multifamily. Excuse me. I'm going to take a quick drink of water here.

Toby Millman 00:51:15  Sure.

John Coe 00:51:16  So talk about that decision. That had to have been tough because here you are. You know, you're an entrepreneur, you're doing well. You're selling these units and you're you have this design. You built, this infrastructure that you're excited about. I have to assume, and you get this call. So what? What made you say, you know, maybe we should go back. So what what what made the hardest.

Toby Millman 00:51:42  Hardest decision in my life? I literally oh, man, I labored, I labored over it. And, I mean, for all the reasons you just described, you know, I had put blood, sweat and tears and my money, I mean, it was just. Yeah, there's so much invested in this thing. And I saw.

John Coe 00:52:00  Your ego too, right?

Toby Millman 00:52:02  Yeah. For sure. And I just, I don't know, I guess I sort of it was this inflection point. I was like, all right, I can try to slog this thing out.

Toby Millman 00:52:11  It wasn't like I was just on that. I wasn't not just on the cusp of becoming wildly successful. I saw a long road of having to kind of build this thing out and get to a place where it was sure, you know, sort of self-sustaining And I think I just decided that I needed something a little more stable, a little more certain, I guess probably be the better word. And, and because if it had been just any development job, you know, where maybe I was stepping into, you know, an existing multifamily platform, you know, somebody had, you know, left and I was replacing somebody and there was already a team there. I think it would have been a lot less appealing. It was the fact that it was still very felt very entrepreneurial. I could, you know, pick my own, hire my own people and sort of create my own culture in a way, kind of like what I was hoping and planning to do with my own company. So there were still some aspects of it that were comparable to starting your own company.

Toby Millman 00:53:14  And I didn't have to worry about where the where the next dollar was coming from, obviously deep pocketed, you know, this this.

John Coe 00:53:23  Was your biggest leap though into for for rent housing. Right.

Toby Millman 00:53:27  Yes.

John Coe 00:53:28  Yeah. So that's that's that's a big change.

Toby Millman 00:53:31  Yeah. It was it was daunting because I had a really you know, while by that point I certainly I mean we had done the Monroe Street Market project at Abdo, which notwithstanding the fact that, you know what I said earlier, that we mostly did a condo, that project was rental that we did with Zito. So I had learned a fair amount enough to be dangerous. Uhhuh. Or enough to be semi confident in my in my skills. So yeah. So it got to, you know, Vornado I did make that decision, made the leap. It was a difficult decision and and wound up you know putting together just a really amazing team all of which I'm still you know, the people I hired are all people that I'm still close to and stay, stay in close touch with including I don't know if you know Jason Fudan.

Toby Millman 00:54:17  He started with my hotel. Yes.

John Coe 00:54:20  I bet Jason.

Toby Millman 00:54:21  His.

John Coe 00:54:21  Partner, was a mentee of mine.

Toby Millman 00:54:24  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

John Coe 00:54:25  So young.

Toby Millman 00:54:26  Yeah. Jason worked for me on that team, and he used one of our projects, The Bartlett, which was a big 700 unit multifamily project in Pentagon City. Sure. The beta test site. So that was their first deal. Hotel? Yeah, yeah, that's where they stood up the white hotel concept before breaking off on their own. So we did a number of projects there. And what what also appealed to me for that, for that opportunity was Vornado already controlled the development sites that we were going to build out. They owned all of Matt Park, which wound up becoming the Amazon HQ2 site for JBG, and then Penn Place, which was also became part of the HQ2 site. These are all multi multifamily development sites that were just sort of laid out in front of us, like I had thought I had years, if not decades of development pipeline to work Yeah.

Toby Millman 00:55:21  And so I was there for, for five years. And again, it was a, it was just a really great run and worked with just some amazing people. And we started getting rumors about the potential JBG merger, which, you know, I found out later had already been discussed probably 2 or 3 years earlier from that. And I was actually asked to participate in terms of helping underwrite some of the deals, some of the sites that JBG was contributing into this new partnership. Yeah. And so it was becoming quite obvious that where this was heading and that, you know, JBG was more known, better known for their development team than Vornado was. And Bernardo has a we were kind of more of an operating platform. And so it was clear, you know, JBG was going to be the top dog when it came to the development, especially on the residential side.

John Coe 00:56:18  I mean, potato of course, had a long history in the office sector. Of course. So yeah. Yeah. With Charles E Smith companies.

Toby Millman 00:56:26  So yeah. Exactly. And you know, the residential components of Charles E Smith had already been spun out to Archduke. Right, right. So we were kind of rebuilding something that had previously existed within the Charles E Smith organization. So I started to, you know, this is probably, you know, four and a half years into the Vornado situation and I realized that I was going to need to probably find something else, sadly, because, again, we just had this great. We'd even branded our little team as the as the residential studio, just to kind of give it a little cachet and but, you know, so I that was when I connected with with Martin. Ditto. That was my next, next opportunity.

John Coe 00:57:07  That's when we met.

Toby Millman 00:57:09  That's right. So what Martin Martin and I started to talk and it became clear for those listening. Martin was and is was a kind of another visionary kind of, you know, along the lines of, you know, they're obviously very different people, but more like a, like a Jim Abdo in the sense of a small development company doing really interesting design forward projects in DC.

Toby Millman 00:57:35  And part because of that, he was a very compelling figure to me, because I'd already kind of been through the Abdo experience and enjoy that. And so we got to talking and it became clear that there was an opportunity for us to work together, you know, and Martin had very amazing, vision for what, living in the 21st century could be like. Yes. I was kind of oriented to create, turning, converting vision into a business plan, converting it into reality. And we wound up working, up a deal to to to join forces and, partner up together to advance the company. So how did that do?

John Coe 00:58:22  And so how did how many deals did you work on and what what all happened there?

Toby Millman 00:58:26  We did a couple of deals. And, you know, I think it became clear that we were just sort of headed in different directions in terms of where we wanted to go. And again, this was not there was no animosity or, you know, just two people sort of with different goals.

Toby Millman 00:58:47  And it was his name was on the door and, you know, so I deferred to him. I wasn't going to try to challenge where he wanted to take things. And I think, you know, it just kind of came to the mutual conclusion that it just wasn't a good fit. And so I wound up at that point. Brookfield it was it was become had become known that Brookfield was in the process of acquiring Forest City And not only their operating assets, but their development pipeline in DC. And I thought that looked like, you know, another good opportunity to join up with a deep pocketed organization that had a kind of built in development pipeline that I could help execute. So I knew some folks at Brookfield and was able to get in front of, you know, the folks making the hiring decisions. And as soon as the deal closed on the Forest City acquisition, they made me an offer, and I wound up moving over there to ultimately run the development platform for Brookfield in the Mid-Atlantic. And then eventually the entire southeast, Mid-Atlantic and southeast were in my purview there.

John Coe 00:59:59  Did you succeed Debbie? Debbie Ratner, Saltsburg basically in that role, or were you kind of working hand-in-hand with her?

Toby Millman 01:00:06  I was working hand in hand. She had you know, she was she was head of of For a city in Washington. So she had a much more sort of it wasn't just the development role. She was a broader role. Yeah. I mean, she was the she was the CEO effectively of I don't know what the exact title was, but I mean, she was effectively the head of the whole office. So I wouldn't say I replaced her but worked closely with her. She had some, you know, overlap in terms of when I joined. She was she was still there and got to know her, you know, through that and learn a tremendous amount about projects like the yards, the history of that and how they had acquired that and what the vision for that, for that was. And, you know, that was probably the yards. The development of the yards was my primary focus because that was the most active development deal we were working on.

Toby Millman 01:00:54  So we built the the office building and the yards for Chamonix, which is an international development organization that relocated their headquarters to that was a 300,000 square foot office building. We also built another multifamily building called Villa, which is finishing up lease up now. And then we did a deal with a group called Irby to build micro units in a 450 460 unit multifamily deal project that's finishing construction right now. And then we were also leading efforts to redevelop the site next to HQ2 and Pentagon City, and then also site called Haley Rise, which was a 3,000,000 square foot development master planned development out in Reston, so had a number of simultaneously active projects.

John Coe 01:01:49  One of my mentees, or creative.

Toby Millman 01:01:52  Guys.

John Coe 01:01:52  That I've ever mentored, Jason Jason Bennett, was working for a city at the time when I was. This is before the Brookfield acquisition, and he stayed on through the transition and then moved to California, I think after that merger took place, apparently came back. So I guess you worked together with Jason for a while.

Toby Millman 01:02:14  I did, yeah, he was. He wound up moving back to New York City, and he and he was focused on oddly, even though he was in New York, he was focused primarily on stuff down in the southeast, a lot of mall redevelopments that were associated with the GGP acquisition and among other things. I mean, he was doing a lot. So I got to work and got to know him and got to work very closely with him. Probably that last year or so that I was was at Brookfield and really enjoyed working with him. He's he's a great, great person, very smart, smart developer. He told me your favorite.

John Coe 01:02:49  Shape was Octagon. So he mentioned that to me, which I thought was funny. I don't know where that context.

Toby Millman 01:02:57  Was, but.

John Coe 01:02:58  What's the context of that story?

Toby Millman 01:03:00  Well, there's a room that. So when when Covid hit and I was working out of working from home for six plus months, like all of us. And my office was in a bedroom in our house, and the shape of the bedroom is an octagon.

John Coe 01:03:18  Oh, well.

Toby Millman 01:03:19  Everybody would always comment on that. Toby. Oh, Toby's in the octagon room again. That's great.

John Coe 01:03:30  So obviously you made a change after that because that's where you are now. You're what at the time was Perseus and now trans Western. So talk about that transition.

Toby Millman 01:03:40  So unbeknownst to me, I mean, you can kind of get a picture of my career here that there were kind of a series of stops, most of which were unpredictable or were not predicted. And so, you know, I'm here at at Brookfield, I'm, you know, I've been there for about four years and it became clear that, you know, Brookfield is really a giant finance machine we were working for, a fund, essentially. And they, you know, they they have the opportunity to invest in anything, and they buy ports and railroads and solar farms and hydroelectric plants. And development was not the highest yielding asset in their asset class and their portfolio. And so it was becoming clear that their investments were starting to get, you know, steered more to towards other types of even within real estate.

Toby Millman 01:04:38  They were buying more operating assets, moving somewhere away from development. And so I just decided, you know, I like to build. Right? I mean, that's why I'm in this business. And so I didn't want to sit around and wait for years just to get an opportunity to, to build something. And so I decided it was it was time to finally move on to to next step And learned about this opportunity with trans Western and trans Western, just to give you like a quick primer. So there's the trans western family of companies and there's four companies within that. There's real estate services, which is the brokerage and property management, those kinds of functions. There's TGA, which is the investment group. So they raise capital to invest into real estate. There's the hospitality group obviously hotels. And then there's GDC Trans Western Development Company. So that's the platform that I work for. And the president of TDC is gentleman named Carlton Riser is based in Houston. So I interviewed with Carlton and it quickly, you know, I didn't know much.

Toby Millman 01:05:44  I knew of trans Western because I knew there were real estate services group in DC, but it was not that familiar with the development platform. And it became clear that this was a really a unique opportunity to work for a company that was privately held and was still run by, you know, the original founders of the of the the larger trends Western company. And it was a nice hybrid where, you know, I had worked for large institutional companies that were rather in bureaucratic organizations just by their nature. I've worked for a number of small entrepreneurial organizations, including my own company that were very financially lean, but, you know, fun and entrepreneurial. And I think TDC offered this opportunity of somewhat of a hybrid. The local office, local offices are run very entrepreneurially by the leaders of those offices. And we sort of think of ourselves as a small local entrepreneurial group chasing deals and, you know, executing on the on those projects. But we're backed by a large, you know, deep pocketed institution not only to help sort of host deposits and fund entitlement costs, but, you know, HR and accounting and all those functions that can be somewhat mind numbing to work through.

Toby Millman 01:07:04  What was interesting.

John Coe 01:07:05  About your change there, though, compared to your situation going to Bernardo, was you had a culture already built by your your predecessor who actually had a company that was acquired by France Western Development. That's right. One of my former podcast guests, Bob Cohen. So talk about the cultural, you know, shift. And you know why, Bob, you know, who had built Perseus back and probably the early 2000 when he first started it into the organization he had when he decided to bring Trance Western. And it's a partner at the time before the transition to the firm. Talk about that history. Love it.

Toby Millman 01:07:44  Yeah. So I don't know all the reasons why Bob, connected with trans Western. I know sort of the chronological history of it. And then in 2017, they trans Western wound up becoming his investor. funded some of the projects that were underway at that time. And then by 2020, they had fully acquired the Perseus entity, the platform that Bob had had created.

Toby Millman 01:08:14  And then so the company name at that time, it was it was rebranded as Perseus TDC, which I don't think I think many people didn't even know what that TDC was. But of course it was Trans Western Development Company. Most people thought a lot of it is Perseus, Bob Cohen's company. And, you know, they were quite active in the development space at the time. And then I think at some point Bob decided or, you know, there was this understanding that Bob was going to retire. And that was around the time that I came into the picture. So I know it was important for Bob to meet me as effectively his successor. Accessor. Nobody can succeed, Bob. I don't want to give the impression that I'm just stepping in the Bob shoes, but you know, the person who was going to be day to day running the operation, and I had a couple of really good conversations with I had met him a few times over the years, so I already knew him a little bit, but, you know, had a real opportunity to meet him and understand the history of the organization and the culture.

Toby Millman 01:09:16  And I think we both agreed there was a really good fit there. And then, of course, you know, I was also speaking with the folks in Houston, the trends Western leader. Sure, including Robert Duncan, who's the chairman, and Larry Heard, the CEO. And these are all people that, you know, I interact with. Yeah. And you know what? Again, what I loved about it was what Bob had created. There was just this sort of sense of like, almost like a family, you know, it was a it was a very casual, informal group almost, you know, more like what I had experienced with Abdo and Ditto and those organizations. And I like that I was drawn to that. And so, Bob, you know, stayed on for a few more months after I joined in April of 23. And we wound up when Bob did ultimately retire, which was obviously this was planned. And we decided, you know, we really need to there was a lot of confusion in the market about what was Perseus, what was TDC, what was the relationship.

Toby Millman 01:10:24  So it was somewhat sad because, you know, Percy has had this long history, but we did decide ultimately to move the Perseus name from from the company and just kind of lean into trans Western development company and go into a full education program, because most people in Washington thought of Trans Western as the brokerage and property management services. So we needed to make sure folks understood that Trans Western was also a full blown standalone development company, and I think we've been pretty successful in educating. Were you the last.

John Coe 01:10:59  Holdout of the trans western development divisions with the with a name that was not trans Western at the time, or were there other?

Toby Millman 01:11:07  We were the only one that had the only one at all. Everywhere else they had kind of set up the so was to.

John Coe 01:11:14  Novo and other markets, not JVs.

Toby Millman 01:11:16  Like like.

John Coe 01:11:17  This was okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I think you're it's interesting observing from an outsider's viewpoint. you're in a unique situation where you've got, as you said, kind of a family culture, but you also have the backing of a very large national organization that has a, you know, robust reputation and capital sources.

John Coe 01:11:40  So you have a, you know, unlike your prior entrepreneurial situations, you now have a backbone that you didn't have before to to get deals done. Right.

Toby Millman 01:11:50  Indeed. Yeah. I mean, I think we tell it, we can tell a really good story about, you know, where this locally based group, the people are all from D.C. these aren't folks that got shipped in from Texas to try to set up a, you know, a D.C. operation or D.C. based. Folks, our offices are at 20th and K downtown. Yeah. and we know the market extremely well, but, you know, we have access to these, to these resources to access relationships with the capital markets. And, you know, right now, in particular, you know, being able to demonstrate that you can you have the wherewithal and the resources to close on a site. And that's probably what the number one question brokers ask us when we've submitted an offer. Where is your capital coming from? And I would imagine it's a lot harder for a local, you know, shop to make the case that they have the capital just available to them, that they're not going to have to go out and try to, you know, shop it around together.

Toby Millman 01:12:49  And that in this day and age right now. That's right. Everyone knows that's a little bit of a challenge. Whereas I think it's.

John Coe 01:12:55  Pivot to that for a moment. Why don't we pivot to financing. So let's say you get control of a site. It could be an existing building or a ground up situation. So what is your process and trying to capitalize that.

Toby Millman 01:13:10  So I mean we have a group of LP equity partners that we have done a lot of deals with. We have relationships with, including our own in-house, you know, trans western investment group. Tig is a non-exclusive equity source of equity for us. When we talk to them on every deal. They don't do every deal, but we talk to them about every deal and our capital markets. We have a TDC capital markets team that's based in Houston. These are not brokers per se. These are sort of business development or managers of our of our of our capital markets relationships. We also do have access, of course, to the trans western capital markets brokers who we use on some projects, and we also use some sort of third parties depending on the situation.

Toby Millman 01:14:05  And again, we just have, I think, a credibility in the market. And because, you know, I think we're perceived as being a kinder, gentler group, folks like to work with us. I think we're easy, relatively easy to to work with. And, you know, I'm learning more and more about all these long time relationships that have been developed over, you know, years if not decades that, you know, I mean, I'm able to get the benefit of for our local DC projects. And so I'd say, again, nothing is easy right now. I'm not going to say that we just, you know, make a call and all of a sudden we have the money just shows up, you know, you have to work for it, but it's a lot easier than going out and into the wilderness without any sort of, relationships or limited track record.

John Coe 01:14:53  So talk some of your recently completed projects, perhaps first, and then talk about some upcoming opportunities that you're looking at right now.

Toby Millman 01:15:04  So we have some great stuff in the pipeline, both finishing up and also, into the future, but two projects that are under construction or finished or just finished up construction. One is called the six, which is a stick wrap deal, meaning it's a it's a wood frame building wrapping wrapped around a precast garage. It's in Hyattsville, Maryland. That's about 300 units and it's an opportunity zone. So we have an opportunity zone, partner, equity partner on that particular deal. And that's leasing up right now. And it's going very very well. The market's good.

John Coe 01:15:40  They're very.

Toby Millman 01:15:41  Good. Yeah. It kind of came to us that neighborhood. All of a sudden there were some name, chefs that started opening restaurants, literally, you know, across the street. So that always helps to kind of put you put you on the map. Folks were already going there for nightlife. And then we have a project called capital Rose, which is 15th and S streets, downtown D.C. this is a deal that was just struck before my time, but it's finishing construction now.

Toby Millman 01:16:14  It's 158 units. It's a ground lease on land owned by the Scottish Rite Temple. Really complicated deals and historic district it went through. You know, my understanding I again, I wasn't there but went through a very challenging entitlement process, as you might expect, but as leasing up very, very well and getting very strong rents, as you might expect in the location, like the Logan Circle, DuPont Circle neighborhood. And then looking forward, we have a we've really leaned into and believe in office Theresa conversions. So we have a project at 1133 19th street. So this is between L and M right in downtown D.C. this is the old MCI headquarters building. And this particular building lends itself very well to a conversion. It's a relatively small floor plate. it has the ability to have windows on three of the four sides of the building. It's not post tension construction. It checks a lot of the boxes you're looking for for these conversions, and we're finishing up our DD drawings there and expecting to start construction in the latter half of next year.

Toby Millman 01:17:27  on the other end of the spectrum, the other types of deals that seem to be working right now, we hope that they're more deals will become more viable, as interest rates come in and, construction costs, you know, flatten a little bit. But the other type of deal that's working are surface park, garden, apartment deals out in the suburbs. so we have a site out in on Richmond Highway near Fort Belvoir. that's going to be about 250 units that, would serve that that niche. And those deals, the downtown conversion deals work because you're able to get, you know, the rents necessary to make the economics work. The suburban stick deals work because your cost basis is low enough to work within, obviously somewhat lower rent structure that you're getting out in those locations.

John Coe 01:18:17  So how are you managing those projects? So talk about your team a little bit.

Toby Millman 01:18:22  Yeah. So we have and it's typical for development team. It's a relatively small team. There's seven of us. And my formula I've been able to develop over the years is that one development manager can handle Two, maybe three projects in any sort of stage of development.

Toby Millman 01:18:43  So you could have, you know, that that one person could have one project under construction and one project and entitlements or two projects and construction or whatever, some combination. And so right now, with the five or so projects that we have in various stages of development, the team is right sized about where we should be. We have two development professionals. We have, an analyst, a, head of construction, myself, and an office manager. and that's that's all we need eventually, you know, as we add to the pipeline and we'd like to at least double our pipeline, we will add more people to help.

John Coe 01:19:23  Staff the execution of this project. Yeah. What's interesting is you're not vertically integrated per se, and within TDC, you're kind of horizontally integrated with your company Trans western. So for instance, you don't have a property management division for multifamily at least, but you do for commercial properties. And so it sounds like you're focused mostly on residential right now though. So you're not looking at commercial deals that are.

Toby Millman 01:19:53  Yeah. I mean we're capable of doing office or hospitality. We do have another vision of TDC that strictly focuses on logistics warehouses and are industrial. We do not. My team does not execute on those types of projects. there's another group in new Jersey that does the East Coast work for that. And so that's a pretty active group, as you might expect. But yeah, right now my team is almost entirely focused on a multifamily.

John Coe 01:20:23  Well that's interesting. I you know I think about you know the various stages of development. I mean if you had two projects in entitlement that might be that would be hard, especially in this environment when you're looking at mostly conversion situations, there just aren't that many ground sites that you're looking at today. That's complex because you've got to analyze the physical, what's there, and then all all the, you know, entitlement issues. Certainly in the District of Columbia, that's mammoth with not only dealing with the planning agencies, the government, but all the neighborhood people. And, you know, having to convince people that, you know, residential use for office, former office uses a little bit, you know, there.

John Coe 01:21:12  But I think your site on 19th, which is interesting, is very close to residential development and can an interest. So, I mean, you're right. And street is all residential up there. So and in the north it's pretty much residential in that part of the city. So you're really at the edge of the CBD.

Toby Millman 01:21:33  where.

John Coe 01:21:33  You are physically your office. That would be to be a little more challenging to be right in the heart of the district, to build residential. But I guess there are examples happening right now.

Toby Millman 01:21:45  Which there are. I mean, I think each site, you know, this is, you know, again, tapping into my planning background, there you go. And frankly, you know, even like folks like Jim Abdo, you know who you know what I learned from him? Or one of the many things I learned from him was just how to kind of tell a story about us. I created not tell a story, but create a story about a site. And, you know, every site I look at, I feel like has some story to tell.

Toby Millman 01:22:10  That 19 street site. I think the story is it happens to be on one of the most active, vibrant retail streets in the downtown. You got the palm and you have the Ace Hotel, which has a very vibrant ground floor bar. You know, there's a number of other restaurants up and down that corridor and down the street as well. So there's already enough there that I think from a from a multifamily demand standpoint, there's not much you need to do to convince folks that this is a viable neighborhood. But yeah, if we were looking at it and we are looking at sites and other parts of the downtown that are maybe a little more challenged from trying to sell, tell the tell a story that this is a neighborhood. And so, you know, one thing we are looking at is, you know, I think at some point, once the sort of easy buildings are picked off, the easy conversions, we're going to be left with a lot of buildings that are going to be a lot more challenged, a lot more difficult to convert, both because of the location and just the physical aspects of the buildings themselves.

Toby Millman 01:23:13  And so I think there's going to be neat is going to need to be more wholesale redevelopment, not just one building here, one building there.

John Coe 01:23:22  So assemblies.

Toby Millman 01:23:24  Some form of assemblage with city support to make those happen. And I know we are starting to look at stuff like that. I know others are. I certainly the city is eager to see. They think they've come to the the recognition that, you know, we can't do decades of just piecemeal conversion here. We need at some point we're going to need to do something more holistic.

John Coe 01:23:49  So in seeking a project for development, what characteristics are you seeking. Talk about your evaluation of a site and or existing building. Of course cost basis is critical. However the capital markets tend to govern feasibility most often. Any other considerations like government incentives for instance that help you.

Toby Millman 01:24:10  Yeah I mean we're completely opportunistic. So we don't have like a food group of, of project type that we're focused on other than we know what ones seem to be working the best right now.

Toby Millman 01:24:24  And those were the two that I just mentioned, the downtown conversions and the Suburbans ticked up. and so we tend to focus on those deals just because we know there's a higher probability they're likely going to work. And, you know, everything goes into the model. Right? So you have all these assumptions, costs, assumptions, revenue assumptions, incentives, taxes, you name it. It's all going in there. And it's all feeding and creating generating and NOI net operating income. And you know, we have to hit a certain yield and certain IRR internal rate of return to make the projects to know that the projects are going to be financed with capital markets have made it clear to us what metrics they need to see to be projects that they'd be even willing to to look at. So it is heavily driven by the capital markets and just by the interplay of assumptions that go into our, our underwriting.

John Coe 01:25:24  But, you know, it's a dance and oftentimes you can get people to lean in if they believe in something.

John Coe 01:25:31  Yes. So that's you know, you can put all the pro formas together. And I haven't found a pro forma yet that it's actually met. It's, it's it's projections in my entire career. If you show me one that you've done that actually met your projections all the way, I'd love to see it because it would be unique. So the idea is convincing the capital market folks that this is a project that's going to be viable, and you'd like to bet on that. So I guess my my gut sense is what to you makes a deal work and not work from that standpoint, even, you know, all the numbers come in. What is the gut sense to you? What makes sense to you to develop?

Toby Millman 01:26:17  I mean, to me, I'm always looking for sense that they're upside that, that there's a greater likelihood that it's going to do better than what we've modeled, then it's going to do worse. And I look to projects like, you know, when I was at EIA, we did a project called Harrison Square, which was the entire city block.

Toby Millman 01:26:38  It was 13th and V in the in the Logan Circle, and they were just off 14th Street. And it was a rough, really rough neighborhood at the in the late 1990s when we were doing that project. But I intuitively at a sense and again, I probably tapped into my urban planning just intuition that the the that the that the development was coming to that location and that we were going to be while we were on the frontier by the time we were under construction, you know, had gotten through the entitlement process and we were actually putting houses up. The market will have come to us. And that's just sort of in some ways, reading the tea leaves or just kind of watching where development is pushing from. So I felt like, you know, we were. We had managed the risk on that deal so that we knew that we were our downside risk was protected, but that we had tremendous upside risk there, which was realized. The project wound up doing way better than we had, modeled.

Toby Millman 01:27:37  And it wound up being a really important project for the redevelopment of DC because it became kind of a thing that, you know, leaders, the government officials and the development community pointed to and said, oh, wow, those guys did really well there. We should be looking for more sites. And so, you know, with these conversions and again, really any site I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about it like, you know, what's, what's what's the what's the potential for this thing over performing. And I will I think, I mean you're just talking about it right now. And it's making me realize that I tend to sort of gravitate toward the sites that I think probably have a higher potential for.

Speaker 3 01:28:20  For.

Toby Millman 01:28:20  Over, over performing. And I do think these conversions as the downtown re develops and more and more of these conversions get done, and more and more people are living downtown and becomes more and more acceptable. I think people will look back and say, oh, that was a no brainer.

Toby Millman 01:28:36  Of course, these are these conversions made a lot of sense. And, you know, I think that's going to probably be the case, when we get to that point in time.

John Coe 01:28:45  So, Toby, tell me about your the business being evolving to, to several factors, including work from home, amenity wars, the capital markets, the affordability crisis, housing crisis, among others. Describe some of the innovations that you believe have had the greatest impact in both developing and operating properties. What is happening today that most has the most impact on the current business in your mind? Well.

Toby Millman 01:29:13  I mean, the beauty of and probably the curse of development is there are so many moving pieces to everything that we're taking into account. You know, I think on the affordability side, this is obviously become this is a bubbled up is probably the biggest issue that's facing our industry in terms of being part of the solution. I think that's why you're seeing a lot more projects right now, getting financed with various forms of tax credits or public subsidy.

Toby Millman 01:29:46  And, you know, I think, you know, we certainly will be looking at more, financing avenues for those kinds of projects. I think one thing that's interesting about development and construction in particular, is how slow the uptake is with new technology. We're sort of, I think, behind as an industry in terms of, you know, we talked a little bit about modular and prefab. You know, that's been sort of slow to get adopted or find And opportunities to to use that. I do think there are from a technology perspective, there's been.

John Coe 01:30:23  Some.

Toby Millman 01:30:24  Programs like BIM, which is, I think, building information management. I believe where you're able to see buildings in three dimensions instead of just, you know, two dimensional piece of paper and be able to see the conflicts between HVAC and structural elements. That's been a huge innovation that's saved a lot of time and money and headaches. I think we're just starting to see some of the early impacts of AI, especially as it relates to leasing properties up and the interface between the consumer and, you know, the property, you know, where we're probably taking a little bit of a step backwards is with LRO and these dynamic pricing systems where there's a feeling and belief, I guess by some, that this is a form of collusion and there's some pushback on those.

Toby Millman 01:31:17  So we're having to kind of go back to the to the old ways of just comping properties, you know, manually. so it's a little bit of two steps forward, one step back in some cases. But at the end of the day, you know, I think in any in terms of making a project viable and finance able, you know, you have there's it's a dynamic situation. You know, either rents are strong and your and your costs are high. sometimes your rents are a little bit depressed, but but often those are situations where your hard costs are a little bit lower. So it's just sort of understanding what, you know in this slice of time, what inputs are allowing for your projects to, to, to, to go forward or, and frankly, not go forward.

John Coe 01:32:01  What's interesting is what what's current today is not what's 2 to 3 years from now when we're delivering. Yeah. So how do you be prescient enough to understand what the market demand is going to be like three or 2 to 3 years from now.

John Coe 01:32:17  Offline, we talked a little bit about this new software product called Rocker Box, which they look at predictive analytics. Yeah. And they used the, you know, research techniques with certain tenant bases out there to understand what are the amenities people want to want, what will they want in the future? What are what seems to be the trends to try to stay ahead of that in predicting it and whether, you know, the market can stand the amount of amenities it has or if it needs it to to get it and what and get granularly into that. So that might be a product that certainly would help, you know, from a development standpoint.

Toby Millman 01:32:56  Yeah. No, I'm really interested in learning more about that, because we do feel like we're always in a position where we're trying to predict, you know, what the market wants. We're also, you know, I think in discussing earlier you're sort of trying to predict where development is going, you know, just physically, it geographically in the city or even regionally? And, you know, a lot of that is just instinct, right? You're sort of you're extrapolating trends like if you see, you know, for many years the DC was getting redeveloped from west to east.

Toby Millman 01:33:26  So it didn't take it wasn't rocket science to realize that if you were even developing sort of three blocks east of, you know, the line where development had happened, you know, it was probably going to come to you eventually. But I think, you know, to your point, the sort of market trends or or consumer preferences, those are a lot harder to predict. You could be building amenities, you know, the sort of the, the, the, the, the kind of best example are like theater rooms in apartment. That was the rage, right? Everybody had a theater room. Nobody's building theater rooms anymore because the market has kind of moved past that. But there was probably a period of time when people still were delivering theater rooms because they were designed and planned five years earlier. So even though the market didn't want that anymore, well.

John Coe 01:34:15  The pandemic changed a lot of the markets situation, obviously. And so I interviewed Toby Barstow and I asked him, so, you know, he said, yes, we have people staying in their homes much longer than they ever did before.

John Coe 01:34:29  Yeah. So you've got different utility needs. You've got different needs for common amenities. You need people. People may want to get out of their small apartment and go down and share the common areas, but not necessarily leave the building. Right. Be there. So you, in essence, have, different uses. Yeah. Within your space. Yeah.

Toby Millman 01:34:49  I mean, co-working and apartment buildings now is a big thing. Big thing. It's very important to set aside. I mean, for many years, you didn't really have set aside co-working areas. You just sort of had lobby space, right? Lounges. And people were sort of setting up or conference rooms that people were taking over for their personal Offices. Now, in a project I delivered recently was delivered that I was involved with for for Brookfield. There were quite a few small set aside offices that you could close the door, and it was just a desk and, you know, a space with Wi-Fi that you could sit in all day and do work.

Toby Millman 01:35:27  So more and more of those are becoming prerequisites for part of your amenity package. Yeah.

John Coe 01:35:32  So anything that you've seen that really is unusual or mostly just to common trend at this point.

Toby Millman 01:35:41  Yeah. I mean, as you sort of I think said before, I mean, there has been we've gone through a period of amenity wars. I think there is a pulling back in some ways of things that have become clear aren't necessary. I mean, I've toured a number of buildings now in the market that don't have pools. Yeah. Which seemed, you know, nobody thought you could deliver a 300 plus unit building without a pool. I mean, to me, it makes sense why a pool isn't necessarily at the top of everyone's list of something they absolutely need. So, you know, I think there's some trial and error in terms of what the market is showing it wants, but also pool of things like that are very, very expensive to deliver. And if you're not getting ROI on it, why are you providing it?

John Coe 01:36:26  So the other angle I wanted to go after is hotel ization of of the of residential properties.

John Coe 01:36:34  What's your opinion of that.

Toby Millman 01:36:36  I mean I think that's been in the works for a long time now. I mean, I think there's been a merging of, especially the interior design community that has been working on hotels, is now been more active in the multifamily space. And that's been we worked. Oh, man, I'm not gonna be able to remember the name. I forgot to edit that out. But, you know, we have worked on projects where we've hired interior designers, whether they were the primary designer or maybe a peer Reviewer that is coming out of the out of the hotel industry. I would also say, you know, if you go back 20 years ago, there was a clear differentiation between condo for sale condo product and multifamily condo was always higher level finish, often had better amenities, and and rental was sort of, you know, a lower middle tier product. In some ways, I feel like it's almost roles have been reversed. I think if you go into a multifamily building in this area, between the amenities and the level of finish in the unit, I think they stand up head to head.

Toby Millman 01:37:42  And in fact, a lot of cases they provide for a stronger amenity package and a lot of condos don't do a lot of amenities because they amp up their, their, their condo fees. Right? Yeah. So they're trying to limit the amount of amenities. Whereas with an apartment building they're able to more easily cover those costs.

John Coe 01:38:01  Urban development at least in the D.C. area currently is driven first by residential demand, with either for sale or for rent projects, usually including retail and other amenities. Office development has come to a halt, primarily unless driven by a bill to suit or part of a mixed use project. Do you see a resurgence in office development? Should the federal government decide to vacate many of their underutilized buildings in the city? We talked a little bit about that earlier. The new administration may impose back to work guidelines for federal employees, and several class B buildings downtown may become more suitable. Your thoughts?

Toby Millman 01:38:38  There's so many dynamics at play here, I think it's impossible to predict what the future of the office market is going to be here.

Toby Millman 01:38:47  We did internally a little back of the envelope analysis of what the impacts might be of job cuts. And the the Washington area has about 400,000 Federal jobs. These are you know, the non-military job or non non uniform military jobs, 400,000 federal jobs. This is in a market where there's 3.3 million total jobs in the area. So already sort of a relative I think 12% of the workforce in the Washington area is federal 75% of those jobs. So about 300,000 jobs are defense, civilian defense, security intelligence. So probably as the signs are, that those are largely going to be untouched, those jobs. So you're talking about 100,000 jobs that are potentially at play in terms of being, cut. And they're not going to they can't cut all of them, right? I mean, the people working at the Social Security Administration, I mean, they have to have some people working. Yeah. So let's just assume 20% of those jobs can be cut. You're talking 20,000, which is about 0.6% of the total employment base in the Washington area, and the job growth in this area, even in the face of declining federal employment.

Toby Millman 01:40:07  I mean, the federal employment that's been going down over the last.

John Coe 01:40:09  Ten years since 2013.

Toby Millman 01:40:11  Yeah. And so job growth is consistently 35, 40,000 jobs a year. I mean, for the last pretty much on average for the last 20 years, right, in the Washington area. So just assume it's 40,000 jobs on average. We will make up for 20,000 lost federal jobs in six months. Right. And that's it. That's the only one cut, right? I mean, I mean, it's not like they're they're continuing to cut new jobs. Once those jobs are gone, they're gone. And, you know, we'll make up for it in six months and we can move on. I mean, in terms of the back to work, I mean, I think that alone could offset some of those cuts. Yeah, I think my understanding is about 15,000 people whose federal jobs are based in the Washington area, but they live outside the area. They've been able to move away. So, you know, those folks are required to come back to the office.

Toby Millman 01:41:02  You know, that also could offset any potential job cuts.

John Coe 01:41:09  Shifting to company cultures when you interview people for your company what characteristics do you look for. And you know professionals.

Toby Millman 01:41:18  I mean number one thing is intelligence and it's an easy thing to say. But when I'm when I say intelligence it's just it wraps up the knowledge of the industry knowledge, you know, sort of expertise on what we're looking to hire for and just sort of innate intelligence and the ability to think for yourself. I'm very much a believer of and I'm a manager where I let folks do their own thing. I'm not a heavy handed supervisor, and so I want people working on the team that can kind of go off and self-starters, self-starters who can do their own thing. So that's that's the number one thing for sure. And then you know, after that and it's you know, it's not far down the list. It's it's a close second is just a cultural. And that's an intangible. Right. It's just sort of in talking to somebody, do you feel like they're going to be a good fit, have the right sort of temperament and personality for for the organization and, you know, and going and going along with that is sort of an innate curiosity and excitement and interest in what we do.

Toby Millman 01:42:25  You know, development is hard, really hard. And and it's getting harder and harder to do every day as there's more regulation and more NIMBYism. And, you know, everything is kind of getting layered on top of development to solve, you know, a lot of the world's problems and, you know, having people who are just excited about being in this business and naturally curious about learning more about it is as a characteristic, certainly look for.

John Coe 01:42:55  Shifting to your personal philosophy, Toby, when you were fully engaged in multiple projects, how did you see balance the balance among family business and giving back anything you'd like to share about that?

Toby Millman 01:43:06  I've never mastered it, and I think, you know, we may have, I think, talked a little earlier about this sort of two front living arrangement I have where I'm working down here in DC, but my family is, for the most part, living in upstate New York. So there's a little bit of back and forth with that going back between those two places, which is both, you know, the pros and cons of that.

Toby Millman 01:43:30  You know, I think while I'm working, you know, pre-retirement a lot of my time and energy gets invested outside of my job. My day to day job is getting reinvested back into the industry. So I'm I'm on the executive committee for the CBA. I'm active in July. I am a mentor through the Cornell Real Estate Council, so I'm trying to build up and help our industry. I mean, it's to some degree it's self serving, obviously mentorship, things like that. But I enjoy it and I feel like that's an area where I can add a lot of value. I also from a kind of like cultural standpoint, I am on the board of the DC History Center. I'm a big lover, as I know you are history, but DC history and and, regional and national history. So I love being part of that up in upstate New York. You know, we there's a gallery there. There was a, there was an artist named John Barrow who was active up there. So we support that.

Toby Millman 01:44:39  there's there's obviously the Finger Lakes, which we like to support because there's some of the cleanest water bodies in the world. And we'd love to continue to see maintain that. So we support those efforts. So it's, you know, it's a wide variety of things that myself and my wife attribute it to you and that's it. But the things that are meaningful to us.

John Coe 01:45:01  What lessons would you share both in career planning and in business performance to the young leaders in the listening audience.

Toby Millman 01:45:10  So I've had that question a lot. I entertain a lot of young people, especially Cornell or UNC folks, you know connection to academically. They call me up cold call. So I get those kinds of questions a lot. And usually what I tell them is if you have a choice between, you know, if your first job is, you know, working for a large company, and if you're if you're going into the real estate industry or a small kind of mom and pop, you know, entrepreneurial situation, I recommend for their first job, they actually take the go to the larger company because they're going to learn some discipline, some systems, they're going to learn.

Toby Millman 01:45:49  They're going to meet a lot more people. And maybe even more importantly, they're going to have probably a brand name on their on their resume. And I saw this firsthand. You know, when I worked, my first development job was with Toll Brothers, right. That job, that Toll Brothers, you know, stamp of approval with was very meaningful in terms of finding the next job. So that's, that's that's good advice. Often my recommendation, I also notwithstanding how my career has gone, I also people need to recognize that in in real estate to make money you need to build equity. And and the way you build equity is through tenure. And so there's value in staying at a place as long as you're happy there and things are going well, stay at a place as long as you can. Now, the first few jobs, you know, there's always job bouncing and you should actually try a few different places early on, but find a place that you can kind of settle into and ride out because you'll build, it'll come kind of compound on itself.

Toby Millman 01:46:49  Sure. The the the wealth creation. And then the other last piece of advice I typically give folks is if you if your goal is to have sort of control over the outcome of what you're trying to do, the development project you're trying to create, the closer you are to the decision about how money is being invested, the more control you'll have over that project. And so being in an organization and sitting in a seat where you're have, you know, maybe not necessarily day to day communication with, but, you know, week to week or month to month communication with the folks that are making investment decisions. That's going to generally be a more satisfying, career where you're feeling like you have some level of control of your destiny.

John Coe 01:47:41  Yeah. So the more bureaucratic situations you were in were more challenging for you then to some extent.

Toby Millman 01:47:47  Yeah. And I think in general, right where you're sort of, you know, you can be, you know, toiling away and if you're not sort of in regular contact with the folks that are making the investment decisions, a lot of your work could be, you know, for not.

John Coe 01:48:03  How do you see the advantages, disadvantages to acquisitions versus development and to long term holding and merchant building. You market cycles have the most impact of those decisions.

Toby Millman 01:48:15  I mean it's obviously acquiring operating assets if that's what you're referring to is a is a totally different business than development. I get why folks do that. And certainly there's pension funds and insurance companies that buy operating assets to tap into cash flow or family offices or. Yeah, right. So there's a reason to invest in those things. It's not something I'm interested in doing because I'm a you know, if you trace again, going back to the very beginning of the conversation, I'm in this business at the foundation of it because I'm interested in creating, building and creating value through, through, you know, construction. And so I'm committed to that. You know, there may be periods where buying operating assets is a more accretive part of the business. I'm sticking to my lane and sticking with the development.

John Coe 01:49:15  I get it, and it's interesting that there's so many people out there that have a wholly different.

Toby Millman 01:49:19  Perspective, you know? Yeah, again, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, in many cases they're probably making, you know, more money doing it. But, you know, you got to stick with what you know and what you where you can add the most value.

John Coe 01:49:31  That's great. So tell us some of the the biggest wins, losses and surprising events that happen in your career Toby.

Toby Millman 01:49:41  So I'd say I was thinking about this and that probably the biggest win and the biggest loss are the same thing, which was, you know, when I started my own company and there's nothing I'm more proud of that than what I created there. The company itself, seeing through the business model, the business plan, seeing it actually work and do what I hoped it would be and, and could be giving me, you know, a tremendous amount of pride and satisfaction at the same time. You know, as I mentioned before, you know, the projects that I worked on during that period with the most challenging by far, they were the least financially successful projects, in part because of the unforeseen challenges that I faced on those projects.

Toby Millman 01:50:32  And so it's just sort of this like within one, you know, episode of my life, they're both the best and the worst. Morse.

John Coe 01:50:40  What about surprises?

Toby Millman 01:50:42  I mean it's a surprise frankly, is like just my career in general. I mean, again, I set out to be an urban planner. Right, right. And you know, not only did I completely shift gears to be in the real estate development industry. I'm, you know, leading a team here for a major company, national company in a major metropolitan area. I didn't I did not foresee that that was not, you know, where I would have thought my career is going to go. And I'm very happy that, you know, I am where I am.

John Coe 01:51:13  Well, you've had quite a winding path.

Toby Millman 01:51:15  Yes, I have. Not always by design, but yeah, I mean, going back to the. I wish there were more opportunity for some more extended tenure and I'm, I'm hopeful that I'm out at a place that I can kind of stick around for, maybe set a new personal record for years in one place.

Toby Millman 01:51:31  But it has been a winding path for sure. Yeah.

John Coe 01:51:34  It's interesting, as I look at your career and I look at mine, and there's a lot of similarities to it. As far as movement, yeah, I had 120 year stretch with one employer. That's pretty good, but we were sold twice. So in essence it was three different employers because there's three different owners, but it was the same entity that was just sold twice during that time. But other than that, I've been, you know, one, two, maybe three years, most at other enterprises. And sometimes, as you say, it's not necessarily by choice, but opportunity comes. Yeah. You never know.

Toby Millman 01:52:09  So no, I mean, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've had a tremendous, you know, experience and I've met some amazing people. So it is what it is.

John Coe 01:52:17  If you're a 25 year old self were sitting here, what would you tell him?

Toby Millman 01:52:23  You know, this is a hard one because I am definitely not a person with like regrets, right? I do not have regrets.

Toby Millman 01:52:29  I don't look back and say I would, you know, I made decisions based on what I knew at the time. But if there's one thing I probably would do differently. And what I would tell myself to do differently is instead of going to get a master's degree and planning of going to get an MBA, and and that was because I had to learn, especially the sort of analytical side of the business piecemeal. I never got sort of a comprehensive academic instruction on how to analyze a real estate deal. And so I picked it up over time. And I think, you know, I'm pretty good at it now, but I think it would have jumpstarted things if I had been given a really good analytical real estate underwriting foundation. It would have sort of cut out a lot of the headache. Now, if I had done that, of course I wouldn't have met my wife. And, you know, because I mean, our planning school, I mean, there's all the Kenan.

John Coe 01:53:26  Flagler school there.

John Coe 01:53:27  Right.

Toby Millman 01:53:27  Well, true. Yeah. I mean, you know, so like, you know, obviously that means other things would have been different. And and I do value tremendously my planning background because I think I do. I do bring that to bear. It's not like I went to medical school or something completely different. There's an aspect of everything we do that has a planning component to it. So but that's probably the one thing, one piece of advice I would have given myself. And it's a piece of advice I frankly tell for some of these kids who call, you know, like I recommend going to getting an MBA or going to, you know, a good real estate program, undergrad, undergrad, or even graduate program.

John Coe 01:54:05  Well, I talked about it in my introduction, but I have a community that I've started that I kind of am helping people think that through, and career planning and thinking through those ideas. And often college doesn't give you that. Yeah. So sometimes it has to after school and while you're working is there are skills you can learn along the way which I'm trying to help people do.

John Coe 01:54:27  That's great. But yeah.

Toby Millman 01:54:28  That's much needed.

Toby Millman 01:54:29  Yeah.

John Coe 01:54:30  So if you could put a billboard on the Capitol Beltway With a message for millions to see. What would it say?

Toby Millman 01:54:35  Told me it would be a very.

Toby Millman 01:54:36  Simple message and it would say, just simplify with a period and, and you know, and a lot what I mean by that or the sort of meaning behind that is that, you know, again, real estate development in particular, I think is one of the most complicated industries out there. I mean, there's this, you know, there's there's legal issues and design and construction and you got people fighting you from every angle. And so development is just inherently complicated. Why overcomplicate it? Right. So I mean, I've had situations where, you know, we could have acquired a neighboring parcel to add, you know, a 50 more units to a project. But just by bringing in that neighboring parcel, you know, maybe made the project bigger, you're just introducing a whole nother level.

Toby Millman 01:55:30  There's another, you know, entity that you're having to negotiate with. It almost never pays off in the long run, those kinds of things. And then just from a personal level, you know, I strive to make my personal life with my family as sort of simple as possible so that, you know, my work life can be this, you know, cauldron of activity. And if it's contained by a very simple, straightforward life where we've sort of shedded unnecessary, you know, appendages, then it just makes life a lot easier. So simplify as my word of wisdom.

Toby Millman 01:56:08  That's.

John Coe 01:56:10  something a lot of people can learn from. Life gets too complicated. Yeah.

Toby Millman 01:56:15  Absolutely. Thank you very much for your time and energy today.

John Coe 01:56:20  I really appreciate it.

Toby Millman 01:56:22  Thank you. Once again, it was an honor.