Daniel Satinsky: How did you get the apartments to lease?
Bill Lane: Oftentimes it was a couple Russian friends of mine, or people I developed relationships with that would find the apartments, and we would find the expats that would rent them. And then we’d just split the fee.
Daniel Satinsky: Had apartments started to be privatized by that time?
Bill Lane: Yes. And that’s a huge, huge part of the story for Russia that I think is overlooked by a lot, in the fact that Yeltsin allowed people to privatize their apartments. People just don’t appreciate what that did for the mentality of people in Russia. They didn’t own—because we come from different backgrounds. These people didn’t own anything for 70 years. And then Yeltsin said you know what? You guys can privatize your apartments. Now of course there was some abuse and some other things that happened there. I mean, it would happen anywhere in the world. But the real story is people like to talk about oh, this person was cheated, and that and that. Of course.
But the real story is all of a sudden instead of the government telling me that’s my apartment, and I don’t own it, and so why should I take care of it, it’s like I own this thing, and I can sell it, I can rent it, or it’s mine. And that’s really something. It’s mortgage-free, so there was that whole piece of the story. And then the mentality piece of it, which was huge. And so yeah, so people said yeah, they start to, you know, I can rent this apartment for a couple thousand bucks a month, and I’ll go move out to my dacha
*, or we’ll move in, you know, I don’t know, go somewhere out of the center. So, we did that for a little while, but we really focused on the—we started to focus on the office sector.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Bill Lane: And we started to meet a few of the other entrepreneurs in the market. We started to communicate a little bit, which is natural in any real estate market. And some of these guys I’m still friends with today, and I still speak with them today. And we ended up, Jack and myself ended up forming a partnership with two other guys, one other American guy and a Russian guy. And so, there were four of us, and we moved out of the apartment—we were all in apartments—and we got an office.
And at that time the international, big global brokerage companies like JLL, and Cushman, and CBRE, their clients—AT&T and General Motors and everybody was like we need office space in Moscow. And so, all the entrepreneurs like myself started to form associations with JLL, or Cushman, and we formed a relationship with Richard Ellis, which became CBRE, C.B. Richard Ellis, CBRE. And that was in the mid ‘90s. And so we started to get some very interesting office requirements that came in from CBRE, and also other ones that we developed ourselves. And then you had some more professional groups start to develop office space, and the legal infrastructure started to improve a little bit. It wasn’t perfect, but—
Daniel Satinsky: Meaning Russian professional groups preparing office space that you could then lease?
Bill Lane: Yes, Russian and foreign. Hines was one of the early groups in. They initially weren’t developing. They came in as a property manager, but then they started to develop, so you had some—McHugh out of Chicago—you had some of these groups come in, and then you had Russian groups that had access to buildings. And at that time, you could get one year rent upfront, and so when you can get it—and they were some of the most expensive rents in the world. And so, you get that upfront, you can use that money. And a lot of these groups had their own construction companies from their Soviet time, and so they could very quickly take that money and renovate a building. And if you said well, I want to wait until you actually do it, they would be like okay, next. Because someone else was going to sign it. In the very early days people were signing leases for whatever, six years, and they were paying six years upfront rent. That was what was happening.
Daniel Satinsky: So that’s your construction finance then.
Bill Lane: Yeah, because the banks weren’t lending any money. The banks, all of that stuff…everything was ru—it was dollar denominated rents and all this stuff. I don’t want to…I’m happy to go into a deep dive of the specifics of the real estate market because there were a lot of different things happening during that period of time. But what we did was we started to grow with the market. And so initially with brokerage, but then we started with the construction management, project management, and so we brought in professionals, architects and other professionals where we started to be construction managers and project managers for some pretty big projects in Moscow. And then—
Daniel Satinsky: And so those were Russians you brought in or foreigners?
Bill Lane: Mostly…very few foreigners, mostly Russians.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Okay.
Bill Lane: Yeah. So, I mean, that’s one of your questions. I mean, I speak Russian. I didn’t have a big expat package. I was there in the dormitories and in the Metro and trying to find food at different places and stuff like that, so I was much more interacting with Russians. Of course I had plenty of expat friends, and still do, but I was not in the expat compounds with a bunch of people that may or may not want to be there that are being paid a ton of money. And they are, you know, and a number of them are my friends, they’re great people, what have you, but it was a big deal to go to the Bolshoi Theater and maybe bump into someone there or talk to a Russian. It’s like my experience was completely different from that. So I was, you know, so my partner—I had a Russian partner. He remains one of my closest friends today. And the vast majority of our employees were Russian. Of course there were some expats.
And so yeah, we built the business up. Then we ran into the ’98 crisis which was quite challenging. But it was…the market came back very, very quickly, which saved us. So some people left. That was it, we’re done, meaning in my industry. We stayed. One of my partners left. We called everybody into the room. We probably, at that point, already had like 50 people, I don’t know, something like that, and we said look, this is not easy, we’re not taking any salaries, we can’t pay you guys salaries this month, next month we’ll pay you half, those types of things. No one’s paying us anything right now. We’ll be the last ones to take anything. We’re going to do the best we can. If you want to stay with us, great; if you don’t we understand it. And the vast majority stayed.
And lucky for us, by the end of Q2 ’99, all of a sudden, these Russian companies that had sort of been a small player in the class A office market took up all this empty space that was there. And also, all the foreign companies that had leased a few years earlier, there was an opportunity to renegotiate because the market conditions had changed, and so we focused on that.
And for us, as long as the market’s moving, you can make money. If it stops, that’s when you can’t do it. So it froze for a minute because it was pretty catastrophic when the ruble devalued, but then all of a sudden it moved down, so it was moving and we could do something. It’s not the funnest thing to do, but that’s what we did. And we recovered quite quickly, and my competitor colleagues in the market did as well. And then we built our business up from there. We almost sold our business in ’98 before the crisis to Richard Ellis.
Daniel Satinsky: You had already sold it by then?
Bill Lane: No. No-no-no. We almost sold it. And I’m so happy we didn’t. At the time I was extremely disappointed, me and my partners. We had a term sheet with them, and I was extremely disappointed that we didn’t sell it. Of course, they pulled out of the discussions because the market collapsed, so no problem, understood, but it’s like wow, you know. And we ended up selling between 2004 and 2006 at a completely different multiple and with completely different numbers. And so, I look back and I was like I was upset at that point, but very happy.
So, we built our business up to a market leadership position on the office leasing, and we had a big, robust property management business, and construction management business, did some retail and some industrial. And one thing we didn’t do is we never really…we did a fair amount of business up in St. Petersburg, but we never opened up an office up there. And we did some business in Kyiv, but we never opened up an office. And I’m glad we never did. I mean, those are nice cities, and important cities, and St. Petersburg is one of my favorite cities in the world, but we just made associations with other real estate companies there. Because some of our colleagues in the market, they opened up offices, and they had to put partners there. And it’s really, those aren’t—they’re a fraction the size of Moscow.
And so many people, again, you and I understand this, but you ask them what city in Europe has the highest population, and they’re like oh, London, Paris, I don’t know. I say no, it’s Moscow. And then someone who’s really smart might say Istanbul, and then you get into well, half in Asia, half in—we can do that. But it’s Moscow. And people just underestimate the size of it and what’s going on over there, how big the city is, how robust it is. And especially now, you know, how, you know, smart city, how advanced it is in so many different ways over other cities around the world. It just doesn’t get that exposure.
So I’ll do it real quick and then you can ask me the questions, get into this. But we sold the business. Definitely we partnered with Rich. We sold part of our business to Russian private equity with the strategy that myself and Jack would go over and work and partner with Rich to set up a fund. We knew CBRE would buy us when they were ready. And we very quickly together sold the business to CBRE.
And then I was with Rich for a number of years. We set up an institutional real estate fund, $321 million. And then after that there was the financial crisis, and some of our U.S. partner had their business globally negatively impacted, and they sort of just rejected Russia at that point. And that unfortunately was the end of the fund because our U.S. partner pulled out.
And that was absolutely the best time to invest. Absolutely the best time. And Rich and myself and the people there on the ground, even the U.S. partner’s people that were there on the ground, they were like this is the time to make the acquisitions. Because asset prices and things, the market got out in front of itself before that in 2006. We were like looking at this, and like cap rates were compressing down, so getting rental rates in like West End of London, and cap rates approaching, you’re like wait a second, there’s got to be a delta there, and things are overpriced here. So we were very—we put a little bit of that money out, but not all of it. We were not comfortable with these asset prices. And when the financial crisis came, that was the perfect time to go in, and that, unfortunately…
So I ended up, I rehooked with my original partners from my brokerage business which we sold to CBRE—that was called Noble Gibbons—which we sold to CBRE, and we set up a development business, boutique development business, and we started to develop warehouses in the suburbs of Moscow, because you have all this retail going on, and so you need the logistics. And so, we did that.
And we built a very nice, 400,000 sq ft warehouse out near Vnukovo. We partnered with a Russian landowner. They contributed that to a JV, we contributed some money, and then we run the whole thing from concept, construction management, leasing, etc. Then you run into the oil crisis in 2014-15, and at that point everything froze, banks stopped lending on projects. I had been there for whatever number, 23 years, and I decided to come back to Boston in 2015.
Daniel Satinsky: So, what’s the difference between 1998 and 2014 in terms of your commitment to that market? Was it personal or was it some other analysis of the difference? Because in 1998 a lot of people left, and you stayed, and it was the right thing to do, but you couldn’t know that at the moment that it was happening. You had to have some reason that you had confidence in that market that you didn’t have in 2015. I’m just curious about that.
Bill Lane: Yeah. You know, in ’98 it was…you’re right, there was no way for us to know if this was the end of the world or what was going on. It just came back so quickly. If you wanted to pack your bags you could, and get out, but we saw movement, and so we’re like we can do something here. One of the other Western real estate groups, we acquired their business for like almost nothing, because they had some buildings that they were managing, and we’re like we’ll take that portfolio. You know, they just were leaving, and we’re like okay. And so there was like things to do, and then it came back quickly. And then in 2010, or whatever the—’09, ’08.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, ’08, ’09 when the financial crisis, right.
Bill Lane: The financial crisis, you know, that financial crisis was not Russia’s crisis. Obviously, the world was impacted by it, but that was Lehman and all the craziness, people buying, selling things that they didn’t believe in and buying—
Daniel Satinsky: Subprime mortgages and other things.
Bill Lane: Yeah, buying things they didn’t understand and that. And so that was not fun because we—and Rich will say the same thing—it’s like we were right there to like do this, and we on the ground knew it, but when 50% of your partnership says no, then that’s the end of it. So, we saw this opportunity in logistics and doing development, and we knew we had the skill set and relationships to do that.
Daniel Satinsky: You had clients in mind when you did this that you knew that there were people who would use this warehouse space?
Bill Lane: I mean, we knew the market extremely well, and so, I mean, that’s all we do is just—I lived there just straight on the ground living and thinking about real estate. So yeah, we knew it was—and my partners were the same way—so we knew there was an opportunity to do it, and we knew we could do it if we find—you know, the challenge is finding the right partner. And so when I talk about my partnership with the guys I’d been working with together on our consultancy business, but then we’re partnering with someone who owns the land.
And you want to do this in an institutional way so you can build it, and lease it, and then sell it to a fund that’s going to pay you that premium because you did it right, as opposed to cutting all these… That’s the thing. You can… The market in Russia, almost from the beginning, you can make a thousand mistakes and still make a gazillion dollars at the beginning, you know, and along the way. And especially some of these groups, the Russian groups, they got the land for free. So if you don’t have to—you can ask any real estate—if you don’t…if you can put a zero for land cost, you’re like doing pretty good. And if you have a bank, if you own a bank and you’re going to get a loan that doesn’t require you to put up security, then that’s pretty good, too.
We couldn’t do any of that stuff. So, you find the… So, a lot of… There’s sort of two groups. And again, not faulting anybody, but if you can do this and not have, you know, these are your inputs, and you don’t have to care about like doing everything perfect because you know you’re going to make a lot of money anyways. That being said, there were a number of Russian developers and investors that said okay, I get it, this class A office asset right next to mine sold for a seven cap or an eight cap and no one wants to look at mine; why? And then we explain. They’re like okay, I get it. This next one, let’s do it like that. So, you’ve got to find the right partner. But that’s anywhere you’ve got to find the right partner.
Unfortunately, some groups—this is not necessarily real estate, but it happened a little bit in real estate, but in a lot of other industries—people come in, they fly in business class, they stay in one of those fancy hotels, they go to the Bolshoi, they go to a really nice restaurant, they do a couple shots of vodka, and they shake hands, and they don’t really know what they’re getting into, and all of a sudden, they didn’t do the right due diligence, they got caught up in that moment, and of course the JV falls apart. And the
New York Times, what do they write about? That. Not about the successes. They write about that, and then everybody, you know, you can’t, as an entrepreneur, if someone wants to listen, great, but most people, all they can—well, wait a second, I read in the
New York Times that XYZ Fortune 500 company got screwed in Russia, so I’m not going there. And that was the thing. So, like our fund with Rich, every, you know, it was an institutional fund. We had university endowments, pension funds.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you had a high standard for due diligence, obviously.
Bill Lane: Right. But to get that money to Russia, it was not easy. And if someone said, you know, when we were doing our fundraising, well, I’m just reading this
New York Times article about how bad it is, and there are bears in the streets, and you don’t really live there, if we can get them—there were some saying wait a second, there’s something going on over there, and if it’s priced correctly, yeah, let’s take a look at it. If we could get them on a plane and get them to Moscow, they’re blown away. They see Ikea. You know, you’ve been. You see Ikea. And Auchan. They’re like what is this? I didn’t know about this. They see people moving around with their grocery carts filled with products, and they start to see the office buildings and stuff. No one ever talks about it. I mean, of course if you want to figure it out you could, but the majority of people were like… I would come back to…I was invited to whatever, I don’t know, Carlisle’s annual investment conference, and it’s like the people up on the stage are like, when it came to Russia, they loved to talk about China. You know, China’s great, this. And like Russia, oh, you know, they make matryoshka dolls. No one wanted to… And it’s like…
And then I’m at a table, you know, having dinner at one of these events with, I don’t know, the Ohio Teachers Pension Fund, and they’re like…they’re blown out—they couldn’t believe that we were raising this fund for Russia. They’re like there’s no way in hell we would ever even consider. So, we couldn’t go out and I’m like okay, I’m not going to try to convince you. I’ve got to find groups that have done things in Eastern Europe or a way into… And if we got them on the plane, we would take them. We’d go to Ikea, the mega malls. We’d go to Auchan. We had a set thing. And they were like, you know. We’d go to the nice restaurants, of course. And they’d say wow, this is interesting, and it’s priced…there was that spread over London and Paris, and so yeah, we’re not going to put all our money here, but we’ll put some of it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah. Well, let me go back in time a little bit. In terms of, you know, my primitive understanding of some of the market there is sometimes tied to certain projects. So, I know that there was the, what was it, Pokrovsky…
Bill Lane: Pokrovsky Hills.
Daniel Satinsky: Hills was one of the first Western style developments. Were you there when that was first developed?
Bill Lane: Absolutely. Yeah, we almost bought that with Rich.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Bill Lane: Hines developed that. They got themselves… Hines is the big U.S.—they’re international, out of Texas. They’re still in Moscow, thankfully. A lot of the foreign institutional groups have left, but Hines is still there. They still own properties. They’ve been there the longest. They went in, they partnered with GlavUpDK
* in the early ‘90s, you know, the diplomatic part of the government that deals with embassies and housing for foreign diplomats and all that. They had Park Place down in Yugo-Zapadnaya
*. And so, they built…they’re trusted. They build good product. They did some office buildings.
And they had an opportunity to acquire a unique piece of land. As you know, this is inside the MKAD
* in—not within the Garden ring, but not far from it. They got a big piece of land and they partnered with the U.S. Embassy, Canada and the U.K., and they said well—there’s an Anglo-American school. It was not there. It was somewhere else. But like we’ll build you the school and there you go. And they realized if they built the school, then all the expats, especially those that are on the big packages, that can spend $10,000 or $15,000 a month on an apartment—a townhouse is the best way to put what was there—they had a captive audience. It was brilliant.
So, they built the school. My kids went to that school for a few years. And right next to it they built the Pokrovsky Hills townhouses. And they leased them all out. And a lot of times it was who’s the tenant? Exxon, with a corporate guarantee. The U.S. Embassy, Shell Oil. So, when they wanted to sell it, it’s like we can…this is almost like a bond. This is a unique asset. And you’ve got the anchor right next to it. It’s all…that’s owned by the U.S. government, Canada. And so, it was a home run.
Daniel Satinsky: When was it developed? In the early ‘90s, right?
Bill Lane: Yeah, in the early… I can get you that. Mid ‘90s. Mid ‘90s it was built.
Daniel Satinsky: But you’re saying they did it from conception to construction. That was all Hines?
Bill Lane: Yes, Hines.
Daniel Satinsky: So, are there other iconic kind of real estate developments that were important in terms of how the market developed in Moscow? Was there like a breakthrough office building or a period in which there were a number of sort of modern office buildings that sort of began to signal the change in the market?
Bill Lane: Yeah, I think, I mean, that started in the mid ‘90s, where… Early ‘90s was the institutes that we talked about. And then sort of immediately after that where was the mansions, the oso bnyaks. Like Perestroika, these Russian groups that had access to these small buildings where they could do a quick renovation on them and rent the space out. And then you got people actually building an actual office building. And there were some, like McHugh and Hines—McHugh is a general contractor. They weren’t taking…they weren’t owners.
But Hines, like Gogolevsky 11 and Ducat II
*. That was with Ben LeBow. You know, Ducat is right on Ulitsa
* Street Gasheka, right off of Mayakovskaya. Ducat I—so Ben LeBow is a well-known businessman who had a big tobacco business, and he had a partnership with Apollo, which was huge. And I don’t know what form the money came in, but they went in and bought the Ducat cigarette factory. And this is a theme that’s still going on. These factories that are in the central part of Moscow didn’t need to be there, but when you have a Soviet central planning, they don’t really pay attention to that. So you’ve got right off the garden ring a huge plot of land with a bunch of buildings on it that was a tobacco factory or something, cigarettes, Ducat.
So then LeBow said I’ll build you guys a state-of-the-art facility within the MKAD, but out on Kaluzhskaya shosse
*, and in return—so you’ll be able to do all this fancy equipment and all this stuff—in return I get this. And so, they did three projects there. And this was big. The first one was Citibank’s headquarters, which was more or less they did a façade retention and did a significant renovation, but it wasn’t a complete new build. And then Ducat II, where they brought in New York architects, Ted Liebman, who I am still in contact with, Liebman Melting Partnership, and they built a class A office building and leased it out. We did the leasing there, and others. And then across the street they did Ducat III, which is now owned—has been sold a couple times—is now owned by O1 Properties, our first client. And if you walked in there, I mean, it’s a class—you know, you’ve got Boston Consulting Group in there, and other—Goldman Sachs in there. So that’s important.
And then Moscow-City, everything that’s gone on there, it took a while to get going. And ENKA went in first, and we leased up their initial building, put General Electric in there, and IBM. But it’s hard to get to, and there wasn’t any infrastructure, and it was an ongoing construction site. And slowly but surely, then you get off the mall, and they bring the Metro in, and then all the other skyscrapers go up. That place is booming. If you walk—last time I’m in there, and I thought, I’m walking around, if you don’t look out the windows you have no idea where the hell you are—New York City, Boston, you’re in Dubai? It’s like you don’t know where you are. The people are all well dressed, very professional, and it feels like you’re in some big metropolitan city. And so, everything, that Moscow-City is a huge, huge part of the story. I’d have to do some—
Daniel Satinsky: Who initiated Moscow-City?
Bill Lane: Mayor Luzhkov.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay.
Bill Lane: It was his vision. It was never master planned properly, and all that stuff. I’m just looking at something here as we’re speaking to help my memory a little bit. But Mayor Luzhkov, he had that vision. It’s very central. He said we’re going to do this. It would have been nice if they master planned it a little better. They never figured out how to connect everything there, and it was always like where do I stop and where does the next guy begin. So you have like these passages, sometimes the tunnels don’t match, so they had to fix all that stuff. Now the Metro, there’s, I don’t know, three Metro stations that go in there.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I know, what is it, Professionalnaya or something, one of them. I can’t remember the names of the stations, but yeah, I’ve taken the station to get there. I remember when it was under construction how difficult it was to get there. You couldn’t do it by Metro.
Daniel Satinsky: Now ENKA, the big Turkish group, big, big Turkish conglomerate, E-N-K-A, they had a huge impact on the market. They are contractors. They do huge oil fac—they do all the big stuff. But they started to do office, and they got into retail as well. They have shopping centers. But their story tells—I mean, what they did, if you look at them, that sort of tells the story. They started with a joint venture with Moscow, just like McDonald’s did, and they called it Mosenka, and they built, I don’t know, six buildings. But they were renovations, and they were small buildings in the center of the city.
So, ENKA was doing big infrastructure projects and things like that, and then they formed a joint venture with the city, and they took a couple small buildings, and they either just renovated them or like oftentimes you have a historical component at the front line and then they could build up behind. And they were extremely dependable. If they said the building’s going to be ready on April 7th, it was ready on April 7th. Probably ready on March 7th or February 7th. And so, the market is like I’d rather these guys, and they honored—if the lease said this, there was no issue, that’s what it is, we’re not renegotiating. And if you need more space, we’ll try to help you. And they were very professional.
These buildings now, they were class A buildings in the mid ‘90s. Now they’re class B buildings, because it’s normal. They’re older buildings, and that’s what was built to meet demand at the time. And you wouldn’t build a big skyscraper or anything like that. It just didn’t make sense. And so they did six or seven of those. The city liked them. The city liked that cash flow. And then like yeah, we’re going to start doing some of our own. And the city knew them, and they’re like yeah, why not? Go ahead and do it. You can buy that site there. And so, they built that, and they built another one. And then they built Paveletskaya Towers, and they did some others. And they did some others as joint ventures. Riverside was a joint venture with the Ministry of Culture. And then they built Moscow-City’s first office building.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so they were the first office building there.
Bill Lane: First office buildings in Moscow-City, Naberezhnaya Tower. And then they bought, just like McDonald’s did, bought the city out, out of the Mosenka building. So, they own those now. Just like McDonald’s bought the city out. So, it’s normal. So yeah, so the building, any time ENKA had a building, we represented ENKA. We did tons of deals with ENKA. And they were a great client to have in the market. And that was huge cash flow for us. And they’re still there, and they’re still doing things.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, so in this period what’s driving the market is the integration of Russia into the world market, the influx of foreign companies and expats and so on, and the raising of the standard of Russian business, so to speak. So that drove the market at that point, correct?