E185: Why Institutional Investors Invest into C-Class Real Estate w/Amy Rubinstein

I spoke with Amy Rubenstein, CEO of Clear Investment Group, about how she built a thriving real estate platform by focusing on one of the most overlooked areas of the market: distressed C-class multifamily housing. Amy didn’t come from institutional real estate — she taught herself everything from Excel to underwriting by reverse-engineering models, and built a company that now serves both high-net-worth and institutional LPs. Today, her firm consistently delivers 30%+ IRRs by stabilizing mismanaged assets and restoring them to market performance. We talk about her journey from buying a single six-unit property to leading a vertically integrated investment platform, her thoughts on risk and inflation, why C-class housing remains resilient, and how she thinks about scaling her team and her impact.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  So tell me about the strategy for Clear Investment Group.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  All right. So we buy very distressed, large, multifamily workforce housing assets across the country. So when I say distressed, I mean from a management standpoint. So things like high vacancies, high delinquencies. We stabilize those assets, return the value or restore that value back to those assets. After we're stabilized, then we go out and resell the properties back again.

• 0:29David Weisburd?

  Presumably, nobody wants high vacancy rates and everybody wants a stabilized property. What does it mean that you guys go in and stabilize the property?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  So for us, stabilization is literally fill up that occupancy with viable tenants who are able to pay their rent and get the property back to the way that it was before it started to deteriorate. So we're trying to stabilize back to current submarket economics. So if the average occupancy rate in that particular submarket is 91%, then we're aiming for 91%. If average rents for C-class workforce housing in that particular neighborhood is $850, then we're trying to get to that approximate $850. So we're not trying to max out rent rolls. We're not trying to exceed the market. We're just trying to fit in with everyone else.

• 1:22David Weisburd?

  And how do you go about doing that?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  So there are lots of ways. Usually, the property has become distressed because the management has fallen apart for whatever reason. So it starts with the staffing and the management and communication back to the tenants. Most of the time, tenants have stopped paying rent because management has stopped communicating with them, or they're not getting their basic needs met. So we're going to get those lines of communication functioning again. We're going to start taking maintenance requests, start to...

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Send out notices to tenants, really just let people know that we're there again, that we have a staff, we start to staff and hire people. And then we start to clean up deferred maintenance. And we're going to start with anything that is life safety issues. Then we're going to start with a little bit of cleaning up and beautifying. So things don't look like they're falling apart again. And then we're going to get into some unit turns. And then we're basically looking at how can we start to occupy these units and getting those up to speed.

• 2:24David Weisburd?

  From a psychological perspective, it's like reciprocity. You're not taking care of your part of the deal, so I'm not going to pay my rent essentially.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, we get that from the law of tenants. And there's various reasons as to why people aren't paying rent. Part of when we're doing our due diligence, we're talking to the tenants and finding out why they're not paying their rent. And a lot of people stop paying rent because people stop asking for rent. A lot of people stop paying rent because their neighbor stopped paying rent and nothing happened to them. They didn't get evicted or anything, so they just stopped paying their rent. And a lot of people stop paying their rent because nobody's fixed their toilet for six months. So things like that.

• 2:57David Weisburd?

  Taking a step back, how did you get into this industry?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I started in this industry about 23 years ago. I fell into it by accident, which I feel like a lot of real estate people do. I bought a house and it appreciated in value. And I didn't understand what I was doing, but I understood that there was value added to the house. And so I did it again and I bought a condo. Value was added again, and then I thought, well, maybe I should figure out why value is being added. So I started to study real estate a little bit to try to understand what it was. And I ended up syndicating my first deal, which was a six studio apartments in Hollywood, California. Bought my first deal, fixed it up, occupied it. Six months later, I sold it and bought two deals. And this was 2003, so the market was going up.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I wasn't the most brilliant person. It was literally I was riding an upward market.

• 3:51David Weisburd?

  Sometimes these up markets for a manager, maybe you weren't as experienced as you are today, but they provide that buffer of protection. So you can make some mistakes, still make money. And as the market continues to go up, your skills go up. So by the time, you know, it might go down and is flat, you now have alpha in the trade via your skill set.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Learn in the market between the years of 2003 to 2008 was a very forgiving time period. And so that was really nice to be able to have that.

• 4:21David Weisburd?

  So you're in the C-class real estate asset. Tell me about the historic performance of the S-class.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  The historic performance has been very, very strong, which is why we ended up in this particular class. So when I started in 2003, it happened to be a somewhat distressed property. It was fully vacant when I, when I bought my first property. But I started dabbling in all sorts of, of real estate, mostly multifamily, but I would say I was in Cs and Bs. And then some office, some retail, some industrial. And after having gone through some uptimes, some downtimes, what I really found stayed strongest was affordable housing, was that C-class asset. We're, our tenant base are renters by necessity. We're not fighting against a housing market.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  You get B-class or A-class, and those are lifestyle renters. They're choosing to rent or to go buy homes. There's always going to be a need for affordable housing. There are always going to be people that have to live somewhere and don't have another option other than renting. And so therefore, it really does stay strong on the ups and downs. And historically, it's performed very steady over the years. And so it is really what I like the most. That's not to say that there aren't downturns that have hurt us. Or caused pain or caused, you know, the, the market to deteriorate a bit. There certainly are, but I still think that it stays the strongest.

• 5:48David Weisburd?

  As part of your strategy, are you somehow trying to predict interest rates and market conditions? Or are you always leaving yourself enough of a margin to make sure that no matter what happens, you have a embedded return in your investment?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  We don't like to speculate on any macro changes that are going to occur. Interest rates are the most common thing that people talk about, trying to kind of time interest rates or time the market as far as where are you at in the market, up and down. We're looking at each and every variable and we're making sure that we're conservative in each of those variables. And so when we're underwriting, we are stress testing for interest rates to go up. We will never speculate that interest rates are going to go down. Even when everybody's saying you're going to get cuts, we're going to ignore that. We're going to look at how does a deal look with interest rates today? And what were to happen if interest rates go up 100 basis points or 200 basis points? Can we sustain ourselves through that time?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  We find ourselves to be somewhat insulated from macroeconomics because what we're doing is increasing NOI so much that we have the wherewithal to be able to sustain ourselves through some turbulent times. We're taking what is usually negative cash flowing assets and we're turning them into positive cash flowing assets. And we have a huge delta in that NOI that we're restoring. I say restore because it did exist at some point. This is a hard asset. You have units that are already built. There are places for people to live, but it's getting them back to market terms. Where is that today? And it's bringing back that asset to whatever the market is right now.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  So we do try to stay away from speculations as to what's going on as far as appreciation, as far as interest rates, as far as we're going to underwrite some natural inflation. But we're underwriting things to get a little bit worse, but to kind of stay the course. And if we're buying in a downtime, we're underwriting to sell in that downtime. And if we're buying in a good time, we're underwriting to sell in a downtime. So we're trying to ignore as much as we can the benefits of what's going on in the marketplace and then underwrite for things that could tear us down.

• 7:58David Weisburd?

  Tell me about your LP base.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  We have a range of investors from high net worth individuals up to institutional investors, pension funds. We started with just high net worth individuals. So, you know, the first deals were started with friends, family, then friends of family, family of friends, and so on and so forth, until we no longer knew all of our investors. And then we had a lot of high net worth individuals that we didn't necessarily know, but that would join along with us. And then as we started to build and grow as a fund, as opposed to deal by deal structure, then we have the ability to bring in larger investors, hedge funds, pension funds, and so on.

• 8:37David Weisburd?

  And you've gone the full life cycle. You even had your first, your own money, then you had a syndicated deal, then you had high net worth, friends of high net worth institutions. When it comes to institutional investors, tell me about the sales cycle. How long does it take for you to get a check from an institutional investor from the first time that you meet?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I would say nine to 18 months. It's a long process. People have to get to know us and feel comfortable with us. And then there's underwriting that just takes time. It passes through a lot of people, a lot of departments. We get people to come out to our offices, visiting us, interviewing our staff, looking through our audits, looking through, you know, we had, we had an investor that pulled the deed of every purchase and sale of assets we'd bought from the beginning of time and then laying it out against our track record, against what we had, what we had submitted as our track record. So it's like very, very tedious stuff. We've gotten used to it now, so nothing really shocks us anymore.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And we've got a huge database of information and due diligence on us, but people ask us new questions all the time and we just, we're just used to producing back the answers. And it's easy, if you can be an open book, then it's easy to respond to those answers.

• 9:57David Weisburd?

  I remember the first time I got an institutional investor, it could be a brutal, brutal process, especially in the beginning.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I stayed away from it for a really long time because I felt like...

• 10:08Speaker 01

  You know, in my earlier years, I didn't want to give up any control on everything I was doing. And it felt like very constricting. It felt like all of a sudden you had a boss again. And then I kind of gave into it because at some point, there's only so much you could grow. And you can certainly have a model that is all high net worth individuals, but it is very helpful to have some of those larger checks. And so at some point, I sort of gave into it. But it's easier when you have a larger staff, when you have people to handle those kinds of questions and that kind of due diligence and the kind of communication that it takes. And if you're, you know, if you're only a couple of people in an office, you just can't take it on.

• 10:47David Weisburd?

  Was it easier after the first institutional investor? You could kind of point to them and other people got much more peace of mind and you kind of started with this benefit of the doubt?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because people then get that confidence, someone else did their due diligence, they had the confidence to come into this. Nobody wants to be the first. It's very, very hard to get your first.

• 11:10David Weisburd?

  So now, putting on the hat of an institutional investor, why would they be interested in C-class real estate?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Because it's where the pure alpha is. You know, when we're taking NOI and growing it so greatly, it's such a different model than a traditional value add model where you're trying to tack on a little bit of rent, you're maximizing that rent roll. You know, we're producing returns that are large enough that it's hard to ignore it. It's a, if you have a lot of very stable A-class assets, you're producing single-digit returns. And probably on the lower end, the nicer those assets are and, you know, the more stable they are, the lower your returns are going to be.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And when you take deals that have so much room in NOI, our average return to investors is over 37% IRR over the years. That's because we're taking things that are so broken and bringing them back. On the other hand, you know, one might look at this and say, well, then it's super high risk. And we don't see this particular strategy as high risk. And the reason is, we're sitting on hard assets. We're sitting on hard assets that had real value that could be proved out just, you know, a couple of years prior. As soon as those assets are filled into market conditions, those assets are producing Very significant cash flow.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  And so for us, we don't look at them as particularly risky investments. Now, there is a lot of work that has to be done to get from point A to point Z, where we're going to end. Tons has to happen, but the asset's going to stand. It's already there and we are buying these assets so far below the cost of replacement that we're very comfortable about the value of them.

• 13:02David Weisburd?

  Real estate is known for 1031s, for tax advantaged structures. Are there any tax advantaged aspects to this type of strategy?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We produce lots of losses in the very beginning of our holds. So first couple of years, investors get to benefit from those losses and those write offs. And then we use cost segregations to also accelerate those losses. We've been benefiting off of bonus depreciation, which may or may not disappear in the next couple of years. 1031 exchanges are absolutely a great way to be able to defer taxes. It's hard to take advantage of all the time in a fund structure, but we have the ability to in the very beginning of the fund. And then our gains at the end are long-term capital gains. So different than getting ordinary income.

• 13:57David Weisburd?

  So you're a solo GP in a difficult to understand asset class. How did you go about learning what it took to be successful?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  It was, it's trial and error, a lot of it. You know, I taught myself a lot of what I did in the beginning, but there were lots of helpful people along the way. And I think I'm not a person that's afraid to ever ask for help or to tell someone I don't understand something. It's something I tell my team all the time. I learn every day. We're very good at this office at doing one thing. We're very, very specific in what we do. But even within that, we come across new things all the time. And I have no issues on the, in the middle of a call with someone saying, I have no idea what you're saying or I don't understand that term or I've never heard of that before. Can you explain that? And I think that that is very helpful. There are things we try to do every day that are new because it comes up and it happens.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  We're going to buy something where something has happened that we've never experienced before and we'll learn from that. And a lot of it is continuing to build a network so that I have people to call on.

• 15:03David Weisburd?

  That's interesting because a lot of these quote unquote dumb questions or simple questions are actually, most of them are not dumb. I asked you, for example, about tax advantages. And of course, I've heard about 1031 exchanges, but you talked about cost segregation studies, which I've heard about. I haven't done a deep dive. You talked about bonus depreciation. So something that sounds like a very obvious topic that you should know. You should know 1031 exchanges and real estate. There's actually more to it oftentimes than what meets eye.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yes. The wonderful thing about real estate is the basics of real estate are very, very simple. And then you can layer on all these complications, but it's easy to start to get a grasp of it, to start to understand what it is. It's very tangible. So the concepts are simple. It's just laying on the many, many layers of complications that sort of start to add to the complexity of a deal.

• 15:56David Weisburd?

  You mentioned you have mentors in the industry. How did you cultivate those relationships?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  I've always been great at keeping up relationships with people that I buy from or people that I sell to, or brokers in the industry, or lenders in the industry. And I use that, the network of those people that I come across all the time to ask questions to. There's a guy who bought a portfolio from us once, and then I ended up buying a portfolio from him once. And he's someone I'll, like, every once in a while, I'll text him and say, hey, have you been in this market before? What do you think about that market? Or, you know, I have other friends who have bought or sold in areas that I hadn't bought or sold in. Or it's just constantly sort of keeping up a network through working and then also through

• 16:45Speaker 01

  business organizations or people you meet at conferences and stuff like that. I'm actually not the most extroverted person, but I think it's important to constantly be networking to be able to have that library of information.

• 17:09David Weisburd?

  There's a real estate aspect to what you do. But there's also the part of being a GP fundraising, investing and learning, the fun side. How have you become better at being a better investor?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  The hardest part of running a company is figuring out your team. How do you maximize your team's potential? How do you get your team running at all cylinders? And I think it's the people part that's the hardest. The buildings are going to throw you curveballs all the time. You're going to have a fire, you're going to have a code enforcement come in. You're going to have problems that happen, but you have to have the team that's able to take on those problems. It's nimble enough to pivot and come up with new ideas. But there's only so much you can do on your own. And so I think for me, the biggest learning curve is always about the people. How do I help foster our team?

• 18:05David Weisburd?

  What's been the biggest lessons about what kind of people you should work with? How to manage those people or any people issues?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  I read a lot about business management, teamwork, unlocking potential. And there is a Patrick Lencioni book about the ideal team player. And it talks about how people, the ideal team player is someone who is hungry, humble and people smart. And for me, that is something that I would have loved to have learned earlier because I can't agree with it more. I can't work with a team that is not hungry and humble and people smart. People smart cuts out the drama, but the humble and hungry is so crucial.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  We all have to just be.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Ready to hear someone else's ideas. And when I was younger, I thought that I should try to be the smartest person. And then as I got older, I realized it's way better if I'm not the smartest person. I need to have people that are way smarter than me at in my office. And I do, I have, I have teammates here that are way smarter than me in each of the divisions that they work in. And that's such a gift. But when that comes with, when you get those smart people and that comes with people who are humble, so that you can have conversations, have disagreements, and be able to come up

• 19:44Speaker 01

  with which strategy is the best and not care whose strategy it was, we're just looking for what is the best strategy? What is the best answer? And I don't care if it's never my answer. And I want all of our team to feel that same way. Where, you know, we have a policy here in the office that if two people disagree on something, they have to sit and take the time to communicate to each other what they disagree on and, and state their case. And then listen and try to get the other person to understand them and try to understand the other person's side. And if they do it well, without ego, almost always, both of them will agree on one of the ways that is better. And that is the way decisions should be made.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  As opposed to the person in the highest position gets to make the decision.

• 20:31David Weisburd?

  There does seem to be a right answer for a lot of questions. It's a little bit paradoxical to say that, but in terms of strategy or micro things, there does seem to be a right answer in that if two people without an ego, put all the facts on the board, the answer most of the time, 90 plus percent of the time is obvious. Me and my partner Curtis, we, we almost annoyingly get to the same answer. And we've wondered, do we both have the same blind side? Are we basically systematically like fooling ourselves? We almost have a paranoia about why do we keep on coming up with the same answers? Do we have group think? Do we access the same information? So kind of live in this paranoia. But I do think that for most topics, if you take away the ego, the answer starts to present itself.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And when you and your partner are speaking or analyzing a problem, do you both analyze it in different ways and get to the same end?

• 21:22David Weisburd?

  For sure. He'll say something like really brilliant.

• 21:27David Weisburd?

  Orthogonal that I never thought about and then sometimes I could add to that. Or I might say something and as I'm saying it, I'm like, no, that's not true. And then we both kind of laugh and I correct myself. So there's this kind of discovery and two minds with different kind of data sets evolving on this topic together.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the best way. It's great when you're coming across it from different mindsets and still can get to the same answer.

• 21:53David Weisburd?

  Another thing that I've started to implement this kind of form of delegation where if somebody is responsible for something like the editor of the podcast, I tell Wellrose who runs the podcast, basically, I work for you. So you have a schedule, you need to do three episodes a week. You tell me what I need to do. And it's a powerful frame, both for Wellrose, but also for me, because I don't have to be doing somebody else's job. I kind of think about it like I work for her. I'm like the on air talent. You tell me where to show up, you know, who I'm interviewing. And it's a, it's a beautiful kind of symbiotic way. And it's a very scalable way to, to build an organization. It's not something that you see that much in organizations.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  It's so important to do that because if you don't give someone ownership, then you end up taking it back on yourself. Or if you don't have buy-in from someone else and they don't have their heart in it. And it's something to constantly be reminding ourselves as managers or leaders, but you have to give that power to the other person to run their own show. I'm literally in this situation to run their own show, but to run their own, their own division, their own ideas, their own projects. And then you step in to, they get to ask you what they need and you step in to assist them. I agree with you. It is a way more productive method of getting people to really rise to their full potential.

• 23:18David Weisburd?

  A lot of high achievers, they think they're, you know, control freaks and all those things. But what I like to point out to them is they have somebody on their team that's really top notch and they have no issues delegating to that person. So the issue is not actually them or they're controlling or they're quote unquote, high standards, which are an asset. It's actually, they don't have the right people in the seats in order to give up control to them so that they could carry on that standard. And ideally you have people that have even a higher standard in this specific domain.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  That's a really, really hard balance to get to that point where you figure you can trust that person to lay everything off and delegate everything off and know that it's going to come back the right way or that they're going to take it on the right way. But if you don't give it off in full and delegate it in full, then you're never going to see what can come back at you. So it is a hard balance in the beginning when you're first starting to work with someone to figure out what can they do and what is their potential and how do you take those risks with them to delegate out and know that it's okay to let go.

• 24:19David Weisburd?

  Where do you see your business in five, 10 years and how do you think about the opportunity set and also organizationally how you expand?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  There is so much wonderful distressed real estate out there. And so we have a lot of room to grow within the exact asset class that we're in right now, doing exactly what we do. And we love that. In that sense, that growth is just more of the same. It's scaling what we already do. And then when you ask about, you know, years out, what are our goals, there are other things that we would like to do at some point. So I think in the next five years, what we would like to do is have a parallel fund that is a debt fund that operates off of the same asset class. So it would be the same process up to the purchase. And at that point, someone else takes it on because you're just providing

• 25:10Speaker 01

  the debt. So being the debt instead of the equity and within that same, you know, C-class distressed real estate. And then there are a lot of deals that are great deals that we pass on because they're just not distressed enough for us, that we're not seeing those 30% IRRs, we're seeing, you know, 22% IRRs. And we would like the opportunity not to have to pass on some of those. And so in that 10-year range.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  We would love to be a one-stop shop for multifamily investing. I don't know that we're ever going to be A-class owners because I struggle to wrap my head around the concept. D-class is a whole other thing, too. But that middle range of multifamily, I think, is a great place to be. And I think we'd like to be even more well-rounded in that era, in that arena, over the next 10 years.

• 26:07David Weisburd?

  We'll get right back to interview, but first, we're looking for the next great guest. If you or someone you know is a capital allocator and would make for a great guest, please reach out to me directly at [email protected]. What is C-class real estate correlated with? And what is it negatively correlated with?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Multifamily real estate is a really great hedge against inflation. And so it fits really nicely in the portfolio in that period of time, for sure. We have assets that, you know, the individual rents are about 12 months in length. Your rental period, your lease period, is 12 months. So you can adjust to inflation really quickly. Now, of course, the market is adjusting with you, right? You're not raising rents when everything else is going down. But typically, when you're in inflationary periods of time, you're going to also see those rents go up as well. And so you're in an asset class that can react a little bit faster to something like inflation than other asset classes.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  So I think multifamily is a really strong piece of a portfolio. You also are sitting with a hard asset that has tangible value, regardless of what's going on with rents. There is some inherent value in just the asset itself. So you've got some stability in that. But right now...

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I can't imagine a better place to put my money than in, I mean, of course, it's easy for me to say that one. It's the one asset class that I understand the best. But when you see the market volatility that has been happening, you know, year to date. We've seen our ups and downs and sure, it's in a good place right now, but the, the market's been unpredictable. And you don't get that unpredictability in, in multifamily real estate. And especially in multifamily real estate that C class. And the reason being is we're not fighting against a housing market. We're, we're renting to renters by necessity as opposed to lifestyle renters.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  So there's always going to be a need for affordable housing, no matter what. It doesn't matter what happens to interest rates with the housing market because our renters are not going to go buy homes. There are always going to be people that are working class people that need a place to live. And right now also, when you do have inflation, when you do have tariffs, what happens is construction becomes very difficult to put out new construction because there's costs that are unpredictable right now and very high right now. And so low income housing is not being built. And so it makes our asset class even more important and even stronger at a time like now. So I'm a huge advocate of C class assets.

• 28:57David Weisburd?

  It's kind of like a staple good, like milk and eggs. It's almost inherently a, a hedge against a downward economy. What do you wish you knew before starting as a real estate investor 22 years ago?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, in some ways I was very lucky that I didn't know anything or I probably wouldn't have done it. So in some ways that allowed me to grow. I just didn't know all the things that I should have been scared of. Sadly, I did take risks that were, that I would not take today. And they worked out well for me. So I wouldn't suggest that you take risks because you don't understand them.

• 29:40David Weisburd?

  So you might have not known all the challenges, call it like the hundreds of challenges. But you also probably underestimated your perseverance and your ability to go through those challenges. So the reason you may have not done it is because your brain would only see those hundreds of challenges and it wouldn't price in your perseverance. And as you went after these challenges, your perseverance kept on going up. So you solved these issues sequentially. So if you had really understood your human mind, you might have actually went through it. But if you were just looking at this mountain of challenges without knowing that you'd grow on that journey, it would seem insurmountable.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So we got through 2009, 2010. We didn't lose any money for any investors ever. We did, we did fine through that period of time, but it was so painful and it was very physically painful, too. I no longer feel the physical pain of stress. And I think that the reason for that is that I have this intense faith that we will get through it, just like put your head down and keep working, like you just said. You know, that perseverance gets you to the other side of it. And having, if I would have had that faith back then or that understanding that we're going to make it through this, maybe that time would have been less painful. I grew so much from that stuff, too.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what I should have, what I would have liked to have known. I studied economics, but it wasn't my major in college. And so I came out of school without all of the tools I needed. And so if I were to go back, I would have learned Excel better and I would have learned finance better and I would have, you know, taken different classes in college that would have gotten me, that would have helped me learn in a more productive way as opposed to the remedial ways that I taught myself. And I could be smarter today and I could be better at math and I could be better at Excel and I could be, you know, I could be better at these things. And so maybe that would be something that I would go back and change.

• 31:41David Weisburd?

  Dare I ask, what are these remedial ways that you taught yourself these skills?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I didn't even know what Excel was and I was sent an Excel sheet when I was Trying to understand what real estate was. And I had this Excel sheet and I was like copying, like looking in the cells at what the formula was and then like copying it into another cell, into another sheet to try to teach myself what Excel was. It wasn't even a class. I didn't even take a class on it. I literally took a model and copied.

• 32:12David Weisburd?

  You're recreating the model.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  So, yes, and that was how I taught myself Excel. So that's pretty remedial. Um, there had to have been a better way to do that. I did the same thing with teaching myself, um, QuickBooks. There was one night when I, I had a, I had a very small staff. I was a couple of years into it. I had a bookkeeper who worked for me and one night she just left. And I thought, what, what am I going to do? I don't know what QuickBooks is. At that time, we were on QuickBooks. I, I took one accounting class in college. I know nothing. And I literally spent the night teaching myself QuickBooks so I could run my own books the next day. And I did, but there's better ways to do these things, you know?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  We don't have to do it that way. We could take classes and learn things in a different way. And, uh, you know, I didn't have those luxuries.

• 33:06David Weisburd?

  What would you like our listeners to know about you, Clear Investment Group, or anything else you'd like to share?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  We're super passionate about what we do. The thing that I feel the luckiest, I guess, about my career in general and about our company in general is we are able to create great returns for our investors. But naturally, we're impact investors. And we didn't set out to be impact investors, but we are. And it is, I would say, the one thing that makes me always happy to come to work. So I feel really good about what we do. We change communities for the better constantly. We support our tenants and the communities that our tenants live in.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  And that's without sacrificing any of our profits. And I think that that is the most sustainable way to make a difference in the world. When you get to do your job every day and you feel like you're making a positive impact on the world, it's, it just feels great. And so we love what we do.

• 34:10David Weisburd?

  It's like the opposite of traditional virtue signaling, where you're signaling that you're virtuous and you might be hurting somebody. You're actually signaling that you're capitalist and you're actually helping somebody.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. We never talked about it or advertised it before until this thing called ESG became very popular for a very short period of time.

• 34:31David Weisburd?

  That's rebranded.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  The other sign again, so we don't talk about it again. But there was this like teeny little window where some people would be interested. I, you know, we would get on calls sometimes with investors and, um, you know, we'll go through our whole pitch and our pitch never has anything to do with ESG or impact or like, I would never until two years ago have said that we're a women-owned business. It's just, to me, that was only going to be a negative, not a positive. And so then, like at the end of all of our pitches, we'd say to people, you know, do you, do you want us to talk about impact investing? Do you guys care about that at all? And most of the time people will say, no. We say, okay, no problem. You know, it's very rare that anyone cares about it. But it's not for anyone else that we, that we do it.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  You know, it just is what we do and we're proud of it and happy about it. But sort of like the silver lining for us.

• 35:24David Weisburd?

  Well, Amy, it's been a pleasure to chat and look forward to sitting down very soon.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Likewise. Thanks so much.

• 35:30David Weisburd?

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