I attended New York University’s 10th Annual REIT Symposium today at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. My boss had me go to learn more about REITs (real estate investment trusts) and because she assigned me a feature on that topic for the upcoming issue of the magazine. It was a daylong event, and on my way there, crossing Fifth Avenue around 7:30 in the morning, I was amused to see some hardcore Irish fans dressed in green and already lining up for the city’s infamous St. Patrick’s Day parade, which didn’t even start until 11:00 a.m.
The symposium was a series of expert panels that answered questions from a moderator, then a few from the audience of about 250 people. There was a lot of overlap in the topics discussed, but I learned a lot about the globalization of REITs and who most of the major players are, and even hit a few folks up for interviews.
The session that generated the most laughter, yet was the most surreal, was the one right after lunch that featured three old-timers known by everyone in New York real estate: Bill Mack, Steve Roth and Sam Zell. These are genial, seemingly easygoing guys, grandfathers who opened the session with some off-the-cuff cracks about their age and their grandchildren. But the similarities between them and your average grandfathers ended there. Your average assembly of three grandfathers, for example, is unlikely to be referred to as “a troika,” as these guys were by a subsequent panelist. Their sage remarks on real estate were liberally quoted by other subsequent panelists, like they were the golden words of Warren Buffet or something. And although your average grandfather may on occasion purchase you a generous gift, that purchase is unlikely to be on the magnitude of, say, the $6.6 billion Roth paid yesterday for the entire Toys “R” Us corporation in order to get his hands on the chain’s valuable real estate. So I found it wild that these guys were as flippant and lighthearted as they seemed during their discussion of the real estate market, peppered with meandering old-guy anecdotes about what it was like in the ‘60s.
After that session, which ran over its allotted time as the guys kept chatting, about half of the audience left, which took a lot of the wind out of the last two sessions. They seemed to drag and which were likely scheduled last in the program for a reason.
I was happy to blow out of there at 5 p.m., noting the area near Fifth Avenue was still swarming with partygoers in their greenery and various degrees of drunken stupor, despite the fact the St. Patrick’s Day parade ended around 3 p.m.