All right, well, hello, thank you for joining us today. My name is Meg Natter, and I'm a Cases Director of Community Colleges and College and University Foundations. You are here either live and hello, or this is recorded and you're watching us from wherever you may be. This is the Real Estate Investments for College and University Foundations webinar, and wow, we sure have the dream team today. Greg Willems is President and CEO of the Kansas State University Foundation, and Rod Grabowski, Senior Vice President for Advancement and Partnerships at the University of Central Florida, and he's also the CEO of the University of Central Florida Foundation. Both gentlemen serve on our College and University Foundation Leadership Committee. Greg serves as its chair. I just can't thank them enough for volunteering their time and their expertise to support our members. You can see that today's webinar is set up as a workshop. It's not just the kind where you have a sage on stage just talking to you. Greg and Rod really want this to be a discussion, so after their presentation, you'll be able to raise your hand using the tools at the bottom of your screen. You can unmute, and maybe you'll even, you know, be brave and use your video too and ask your questions so we can see you and hear you and participate in what we hope will be a lively discussion about the best real estate strategies for you and for your foundations. Feel free to use the chat also. I'll be monitoring that for questions, but we really would just like to have this as a, I don't know, it's kind of a roundtable discussion, but I'm going to hand it over to you, Greg, to get us started, maybe give some context as to how this all happened today. Thank you, Meg, and thanks to all the members out there and the virtual land for joining us today. Rod and I are excited to share a little bit about what we're doing at our institutions, and so the setup begins with Rod and I's service on the CASE National Committee for College and University Foundations, and our mission is to provide valuable content, wisdom, and insight to the membership that helps strengthen what we do for our institutions, and so excited to share and showcase a little bit about what we're doing in the real estate realm at UCF and at Kansas State, and so, Rod, why don't you introduce yourself and offer a couple of introductory remarks as well? Well, welcome, everyone. I am pleased to be able to be a part of the CASE Committee for University Foundations in that I've been on this committee now for, gosh, just under a year, and that Greg and I got started talking about this on this topic, and part of the reason is that I've been here at UCF now two and a half years, and I've worked at a variety of different institutions, president of the University of Cincinnati Foundation, been at the University of South Florida, University of Buffalo, and every single foundation that I have encountered is different, and UCF is different from a lot of yours, and I think that we all can learn something from each other, and that's how this got started. So with that, Greg, do you want me to go right into some of my slides, or do you want to introduce yourself? Absolutely. Okay. Yeah, I think it's the way we've got this designed. Hopefully if Rod and I do this well, we're going to share about 20 minutes of kind of background and content from our institutions and then have a two-way engaging conversation with you. So, yeah, take it away, Rod. So if we could go to the next slide in that... Oh, hold on. Sorry. There we go. Little meg issue there, but we're on it. Go ahead, Rod. You know, one of the things that we really wanted to talk about is the ownership, the type of real estate assets that we're talking about that our foundations have. You know, the ownership of buildings and land is something that is a topic, property, land leases on property, the public-private partnerships that we have entered into. And I also want to talk to you when you start seeing some of the revenue that comes off of it. Now, so to give you an understanding of the University of Central Florida, first of all, we're only a university that's 63 years old. We were established in 1963, but we had this expansive, really massive growth period of the late 90s through the 2000s where we went from probably 20,000 students to now we're 70,000 students. And the reason why the foundation started collecting, quite frankly, real estate was because we couldn't build buildings fast enough. So you'll see in a later slide that where our buildings are located are actually in the research park that's adjacent to the university. And we've had academic programs that get started up here. So of our office buildings, we have 12 buildings, primarily in the real estate park in that, you know, just under 500,000 square feet, just under $100 million of appraised value. And I share that is that our endowment is only $250 million, but we have also another $100 million in property. But we do generate about just under $10.5 million a year in annual revenue off of these buildings that we have and the leases that we have. In addition, we have some land. We have two parcels of land, about 25 acres of land that has about $10.75 million in appraised value. I will share with you, we just sold one of those pieces of land for $7 million. And the reason we sold it is because of that very bottom bullet is there's $0 in annual revenue off of this land. And because it was a piece of land that did not have an immediate value to the university, we felt more important that we liquidate it and that $7 million is now going to be put into our endowment and we'll actually have some spin off of it. One of the other unique things that we have is we now have three public-private partnerships. And if you don't know what these are, basically these are where a developer wants to get the nonprofit bonding rate and real estate tax benefits of being a nonprofit. So they get to operate these facilities for the period that there is a bond on them. And so what happens is, like for instance, we just have a piece of property that is next to our downtown campus. We get the land as part of this deal. After the 35 years of the mortgage is satisfied, we then get the building and all of the improvements that are an asset. But during the interim period, once that property starts making a profit, which is probably 12, 15 years in, we start getting residual off of it, or we call our waterfall payments annually. So we don't have to wait 35 years to get an asset added to our books. We actually now, with two out of these, we're generating about $5 million a year in income off of them that comes in just to our operating budget. So those three public-private partnerships are about $400 million worth of appraised value. You can see the number of beds and our occupancy rates and our annual revenue off of that. If we go to the next slide, I'll show you, once again, I mentioned this, our endowment. While our endowment now has gone down a little bit, I say the endowment was at $262 million when we did these slides, but the economy hasn't been good to us. So it's shrunk a little bit. We're hoping to rebound. And you can see the $103 million there that we're pulling out, $92 million of it in real estate property, and then $11 million in property. And the next slide just kind of gives you an idea. This is the research park where you will see that the yellow dots represent the buildings that we own. The red dots indicate the buildings that the university owns, and the unique nature of that is the state gave us the money to buy them outright, so the university just kept ownership. And this research park, just above the very top of the screen, that green line where you see the little car, that's actually campus. So campus is right there. We're adjacent to it. You don't even know you're leaving one to go to the other. I think with that, next is Greg Ura. Great, Rod. So a great overview of kind of the real estate empire at UCF. So I'll offer this context. Rod's foundation, fundraising, investment management, and real estate, the same here at K-State. I would say in a different order. We started with the fundraising and investment management, and real estate was our side hustle, and now it's become a greater part of our three-part mission today. So like Rod structured in his kind of overview, we've just kind of laid out for you what are the different assets we have in terms of real estate. So we have a collection of office buildings that are in part of what we'll talk about as the Edge District. The Edge District down below there, the bottom left-hardened part of this slide, is 130 acres of land that we, the foundation, have acquired over time to develop the Economic Development District for Kansas State University. It's about $44 million in appraised value just for the dirt. It's got seven distinct zones, and I'll show you a map in a minute of those unique elements of structure there. And then we also have quite a bit of agricultural land. Where we are in Kansas, a lot of ag production, crop production, range land management. So in the last many years, we've also started taking land. We always took land as a gift that we could liquidate and create endowments or outright expendable gifts, but we also hold land as an asset now long-term as an investment. It's not in our endowment, but we do have income generation from it. So in the last decade, we've acquired tens of thousands of acres of ag production land that has balance sheet value, but also an income stream to the institution. About $85 million there. And then much like Rod's Shop, public-private partnerships, we've done a few of these. One in particular we did with a branch campus for a dormitory, where we facilitated the financing facility. We actually did the construction, executed that, and then handed it to the institution to lease and use. And at the end of the lease, they'll own the asset. So that's a little bit of the outline of our assets. So just in the context of total balance sheet, the foundation's a little over $1.7 billion in total assets. That's our endowment and all of our real estate. And this slide really shows you kind of the last 20-year journey of real estate growth. Probably in the last 15 years is where we've had aggressive growth with the Edge District and acquiring agriculture land that we hold. So today, just shy of a quarter billion dollars in real estate assets at the foundation. So this gives you kind of an overview and a map of what we call the Edge Innovation District. Kansas State University's way of developing a co-location site for corporate partners. And we have these different colored zones that really highlight what we call a comprehensive economic district. So we wanted a work-live-play economic development zone. And so these are color-coded by the different kinds of assets. The yellow is our research park with a lot of custom-built facilities. In blue, the biodefense is where the federal government built a $1.2 billion national laboratory protecting our food crops and our animal resources in this country, our food production, basically. And then our athletics zone, all of our Division I athletics, football, baseball, basketball facilities there. Up at the top, Champions Gate, is the live-play dynamic condos, hotel, restaurants that are there. We're actually in the process of that development now. And then we've got an orange zone. So a lot of our advanced next-century agriculture, agronomy innovation research going on there. Purple is our office park, the epicenter where a lot of these companies co-locate to work with our faculty and students. And then the red zone is our animal science gateway. We're building performance arenas, competition facilities, economic draws for the community. So just a little bit more highlights on the impact that this is bringing to Manhattan and the state of Kansas. It is the most comprehensive district with that work-live-play dynamic. We've created, this slide's a little old, almost 2,000 jobs in the last decade. And we believe that we'll create another 3,500 jobs in the next 15 years of journey here. Attracted over $2 billion in infrastructure investment to date from kind of 2010 to 2020. And we believe another $3 billion is absolutely possible between now and 2035. And the bottom, we're really excited. We've not tried to take advantage of our not-for-profit status to only serve the institution and the foundation. We want to serve our community. So our assets pay property taxes, sales taxes that benefits Manhattan as we grow. So now is kind of where Rod and I will probably dive into, what are some of the considerations for enterprises out there when you think about getting into real estate? As I mentioned from the beginning, this is the third leg of our stool. It's not our core mission. And we want to be smart. So I think first and foremost for us is role clarity. We're here to be a fundraising organization and manage an endowment. We have to do that a really high level first and be squared away in that role to give ourselves permission to do the other things. So we're always paying attention to that with our board. I think we also want to be very strategic and very particular about deals. And so we do deals that make sense in Manhattan, Kansas. And we build assets that can add to the university and our mission. But we're not into retail and a lot of other things that would be out of our core. Deals have to stand on their merits. So we have a famous saying here, we're not for profit, but we're also not for loss. So we don't do deals for the sake of a deal. A lot of foundations fall into the trap of feeling like, well, let's just do a deal and we'll learn from it. If it doesn't make economic sense, we just don't do it. And then I think the last cautionary tale is be aware of partners looking for favorable terms at your expense. P3s, outside development partners are always looking for an advantage or to mitigate risk. So that's one of the things I think Rod and I caution our fellow colleagues out there against is making sure that this is good for the institution, good for the foundation, as well as the partners that you bring in. So a couple of other considerations we think are really, really important. Real estate development and managing a portfolio requires investment. And Rod and I agreed on this. We've got a lot of specialized talent that we've acquired or either that we contract with outside to be able to do these things. All the financial planning and the investment management, putting these financial structures, all the legal counsel that we need to engage, and even construction management we hire outside. So we're very particular about what we hire full-time versus what we bring in on project by project. Financial and risk management, again, the income from these assets can be subject to unrelated business income tax. So you want to learn how you manage that. And then you also want to structure and position these assets legally so that you protect the foundation as well as the asset from certain kinds of risks. So we're very particular in compartmentalizing these assets based on what they are, whether they're agricultural land or a commercial leasing asset. And then last but not least, I think it's important to have an exit strategy for these assets. So you want to know what is your long-range plan? What are we doing to make money from these that's good for the institution? When they've run their course or you feel like there should be a liquidity event or an exit strategy, we think of those things upfront. So that's part of our plan about how we acquire an asset or build an asset is what we're gonna do down the road. So, other cautionary tales, I don't know, Rod, do you wanna walk into these or do you want me to walk through some of these? I'll walk through some of these. I think that the ongoing property management and leasing is something that you really need to think about. You know, I would say, if you get one building, don't think that you can just do it as a side hustle, that you can just manage this because there's so many other things that you need to deal with. We actually have a property management company on site. We actually use CBRE and that they are actually involved with all of our leasing, filling, empty space and working with the university's Assistant Vice President of Real Estate so that we have one concise real estate initiative that is the university and the foundation, you know, as well as that marketing management. How do you fill space? And it can't be, you just put a placard up by the side of the road and say, you know, office space for lease. I mean, we really are working with our, what we call Orlando Economic Partnerships, OEP. It's basically our version of a chamber of commerce that is region-wide and that we want them to know what assets we have and what opportunities there might be. Lease terms, I will tell you, I have seen, I've inherited a lot of this and lease terms, some of them that we've, part of our challenges is that even the university is our client and the university wants very favorable lease terms where there's no notice or basically two or three months notice on some of our contracts and that doesn't help us fill space. So we really want to get everything to a standard one year. You know, you have to give us notice or you pay the rent for a year. I don't care if you're in it or not. But those, also those tenant improvement costs, when you have new entities come in and these buildings start aging, there, you really have to factor those TI costs into your financial pro forma because while the building looks nice now, five years from now, it's going to start looking tired if you don't pay attention to it. That whole return on investment piece, this was a challenge when I first got here two and a half years ago. We could not, my finance team was only looking at it from our entire real estate portfolio, what the ROI was and I made them get down to per building and they fought me on it, but now they understand the value of why, because we have some buildings that are making money and some buildings that quite frankly are losing money. And, you know, this is where I think one of Greg's previous slides about where you're talking about, what's your exit strategy? Because if you have a building that's losing money and you don't see where it's going to turn the corner anytime soon, it's better to sell that asset when it's full before it gets empty because you're going to get a better price for it. Capital improvements tie into all the stuff that we've talked about, but also cash reserves and that you're always going to have something. And here in Florida, you know, we have that thing known as a hurricane and that while we don't get direct hits here in Orlando typically, we still get a lot of water and wind damage. And it's amazing what happens when you're even in the middle of the state when you have something like that that comes through. So those cash reserves are really needed in making sure that we are properly protected for those catastrophes. Our contact information, I think if they were at this point where we can probably stop screen sharing and really start just taking questions from people and what are you experiencing? What are you challenged with? And one of the things that I would say to you is if you're being encouraged to go into real estate, really slow down and think about it before you jump into it. Not that I would discourage it, but you'd really need to make sure that you've thought through everything before you get into it. Thank you, Rod. Thank you, Greg. A lot of numbers, a lot of scary stuff for many of the folks here. And a lot of you are saying we can do this. So let's hear from everybody. You can either just unmute and start talking or you can put something in the chat if you're a little shy. So anybody wanna start us off? And you can speak about your particular situation too. I asked Rod and Greg if it's okay if we get a little personal into your specific institutions and that's fine. I'm happy to go first. John Hooten from Allan Hancock College. We're a community college in California and I'm ED of the foundation here. Talk to us a little bit more about risk mitigation and limiting liability. How do you all keep everything segmented? We're just on the front end of looking at student housing, which is a big need for us out here. How do we help the institution provide housing? Looking at master lease agreements, spinning off third and fourth nonprofit organizations. But tell me how you all work about limiting risk with acquiring new properties. So John, I'll start and Rod certainly jump in. I think of that question, it's a great question from two points of view. One, how do we either build, own and hold assets and then how do we do risk mitigation based on that kind of asset? So whether it's being leased for students, et cetera. So I would say at the foundation, the Canada State Foundation, we have a 501C3 corporate entity that we operate through. And then under that umbrella, we have a charitable real estate foundation that is a subcorp entity. So that's one level of compartmentalization for all of our real estate assets and activity. And we have a board, a subset of our board that serves on that subcorp entity to again, exclusively work on our real estate kind of activity. So that's one layer of compartmentalizing or separating real estate assets from our endowment and all the other balance sheet assets. Then with under that structure, every one of these assets is in its own LLC or corporate entity that gives you another veil of protection for dealing with income, loan and other financing facilities, et cetera, as well as compartmentalizing what might be risk from tenants, whether they be students or corporate tenants. So I think, depending on your state and where you are, setting up these legal structures in that architecture to position assets the right way to deal with the income, the debt, as well as that risk is appropriate. We look at each asset and what else it needs beyond just those corporate structures to manage risk. And that's with what security we hire, how we operationalize property management of that asset, use guidelines, policies, those kinds of things. So I think it starts with the top of compartmentalizing based on the asset and financing, and then cascades down as to how that thing lives and breathes is the way we do it. Rod, you wanna add something? Yeah, what I would say here at UCF, in particular with our student housing that we are in partnership with, is that we don't officially own the student housing yet. We don't want to, the university doesn't. The university actually signs a contract with this other legal entity so that they're feeding students in. But for me, it's more about, I don't want any liability on the negative side so of what happens if the building falls apart or those types of things. And that we require an annual review and they are required by law to maintain it at class A status. And so, and if they don't, the bank can seize it and then we could take control of it so that it maintains its quality of standard. Because the one that's at our downtown campus is there's some academic space, there is residential space, there's a parking garage and there's some retail space all in one building. So it's a multi-use facility that gets a lot of foot traffic and I wanna make sure that it's maintained. Thanks so much again for the question, John. Oh, did you wanna say something else? Thank you. All right. Other folks, other questions. Adam. Yeah, go on Meg. Hi Meg. I'm Adam Quinlan from the University of Rhode Island Foundation. Thank you both. It's a great presentation. Very helpful. My question is largely about getting started. As we all know, the first step is often the biggest, hardest step to take. And as you scale up and generate revenue, you can sort of recapitalize and scale up further. Taking that first step, can you walk us through how you initially capitalized that separate entity? Did you turn to donors? I know there's debt markets you can turn to and things like that, but how did you sort of get yourself going and getting the board comfortable in terms of allocating capital? Rod, you wanna say what you know? Yeah. No, I was gonna say from UCF's perspective, we're probably a little bit unique because we were growing as a university so quickly that 93% of my leases are with the university's academic departments. So that was much more stable, secure, and source of funds coming in so that we didn't feel like it was a high risk. Now, the problem though we're having is the university has done a space allocation study and how much space is needed because of post-COVID, there's more people working remotely and they're retrenching and bringing people back to campus. And so we're losing some of those leases and that's what we're worried about. Thank you. Yeah, Rod, that's great context. I mean, again, UCF, a very young institution emerged very rapidly and the rate of scaling they needed to for the demand they had warranted some of this commercial asset and acquisition and other things. And whereas K-State's very different, we're over 180 years old and we started as a core academic enterprise and a foundation emerged in the 40s. And again, all we did was fundraising and investment management for the first, call it 55 or 60 years. So really in the last decade, other than acquiring a few assets that were donations, hadn't been heavy into project design, development, financing. And so it was baby steps for us. So we had to convince the board that there was a unique opportunity for us to add a third leg of value creation for the institution that was worthwhile, that it couldn't be uniquely filled by another developer in this community. So Manhattan is a small town, not a lot of commercial developers that could do this at scale. And another way for us to use our balance sheet and ability to be creative, to create value for the institution. So, but it was about starting small. So that first bit of land acquisition that we did, that was the foundations of our research park was a 20 acre swath of land on the periphery of campus that was easy to acquire with a longer range vision and baby steps into it. So our first, what I'd call finance design, build and lease deal was with the state of Kansas. And it was relocating the department of agriculture for the state of Kansas from Topeka to Manhattan. Made more sense being where we had an academic program and a talent tie for them. They had antiquated facilities and that deal was gold plated for us. They needed a new headquarters. So we borrowed the money, designed the building, built it and leased it back to them on a 30 year guaranteed lease. So that was easy for the board to see a locked in term with a stable entity and a very manageable deal that we could understand it wasn't that complex. And from their learning, what would be the next one we did? And then we brought their laboratory assets. And so for us, it scaled to, from what I'd call custom built, purely locked in deals to now are more speculative stuff. But it was a journey over a decade of learning and building confidence from the foundation board and the institution that we had the capability to execute these as they got more complicated. But first step, baby step. Do one that's simple, straightforward, makes a lot of sense for the institution, makes a lot of sense for the foundation. And if I gave people one piece of advice, find a deal like that, because the first time you stub a toe or you make a mistake in one of these, getting back to a place of trust to do this would be hard to recreate. Very, very helpful answers. Thank you guys. I echo that. And I will say then what happens is that you do and you have those successes and then there's more appetite as Greg mentioned. And to the point that I will consider any opportunity, but doesn't mean any opportunity is a good opportunity. And you also have to realize what's your capacity to handle. We have a major international company that wants to co-lay, wants to be in our research park and they don't wanna own the building. They want a 250,000 square feet of office space and 150,000 square feet of research space. And they are willing to sign a 30 year lease with us and they're good for the money. The problem is I don't have the capacity to do a $400 million deal. That's what this really is. But the university does and the university has a piece of land that they're offering and so that's where, I mean, even building a 400,000 square foot office building project in a very tight timeline is not, my team is not equipped to do that. And so you really have to understand where your capacities are. All right. Oh boy, Adam, good luck with those first steps but you have some great advice here. All right, good luck Rhode Island. Gentlemen, there's a question in the chat from Lisa Bradley at Louisiana Tech. What due diligence process do you use for non-traditional real estate investments? I would say what I look at is how much does it relate to our mission? And then what's the pro forma look like? It has to make financial sense and you have to weigh what is the volatility of that pro forma? Meaning, our leases, what are the tenants look like if there's existing tenants versus do you have to go out and get new tenants? It's really understanding what that pro forma looks like because we're not in the business of, we need to make money with these and we are with ours so that it's actually putting a bottom line net positive to our foundation operating budget because like K-State, UCF's first and foremost mission is to be philanthropically focused. Yeah, I'd echo Rod's comments. For us, I'll go back to one of my comments. We don't make deals for the sake of deals so there has to be great alignment with this asset in the institution. So we have filters that we flow these things through to make sure they're gonna be value add for the institution for advancing K-State's mission. If we can define that and see that there's a clear value proposition for both sides, then we go to the next step. Then it's gotta make financial sense. It's gotta be, so this is about for us quality too. So we're assembling a quality book of assets that have enduring resilience capability. We don't want niche or boutique assets that take unique kinds of enterprises to come in and out of. And so it's quality, it's the right focus, it's the right alignment with mission and impact. And knowing that we've got a viable assets that's not gonna be a liability or drag for us. So I think that's the filter I'd put any potential proposition through to say, does it align with our strategy for assembling assets for the institution? One of the things that we also pay attention to, we would love to accumulate all the land that's adjacent to the university and have either control or ownership. And we had the opportunity for a piece of land that was about 13 acres right here in the research park. And we were close to saying, yes, we want it. Didn't jump on it quite fast enough. Part of the challenge is that getting a piece of land and using our limited unrestricted assets to buy the land because the university is not giving me the money, but how can I then turn around and make a profit on that? And what's that profitability period? You know, am I willing to float it for two or three years before then, you know, we built space and then we start seeing income because I don't wanna just buy a piece of land and hold it for 25 years because then it's a, you know, it really may increase assets on my book, but it's taking liquidity assets like cash, tying them up in land that is not showing any type of return on investment besides being a net asset increase on your books every few years when you have it reappraised. Christy Devesol in Illinois is wondering if you have a due diligence checklist that you might be willing to share either here today or could we post it as a resource later? You know, I don't have one of those necessarily that I can think of. It's been, you know, Greg, I don't know if you have one, but I'd love to see it if you do. Yeah, I'd say it's pretty loose here. I think between myself and our foundation's CFO, we have, you know, and it's committed more to memory of what are the elements, the attributes that we're looking for in our diligence process of a particular either piece of land or a project that we run through. And then as we sit down with the KSU Charitable Real Estate Foundation board and walk through it, we kind of walk through that. And then, yeah, I would say it's a little bit looser and not a living document. It's a living set of things that we've gone through for every one of these deals that everybody just understands there's probably a dozen different steps and qualifiers that have to be asked, answered, and validated for us to continue on. So we could probably memorialize something pretty quick and share that back, but I can't say we have a written document here. We don't either. All right, thank you anyway. And by the way, Lisa says, thank you very much for answering the due diligence question. Adam has another question for you. Do you get pressured by the university to purchase property that they may want to own but does not make financial sense? And if so, how do you handle those issues? So the answer is, you want to go first, Rod? Go for it. No, no, you go. I want to hear your answer. Very carefully. You know, not as much anymore. I would say when I arrived here a decade ago, and I would say in our previous presidential administration, there was more of a philosophy of that president wanting the foundation to acquire property on the periphery of the institution. Just thinking about decades down the road, they'd love to have it. So didn't want to miss out on that. I think we got out of that mode of saying, well, we're not just aggregating these properties on the balance sheet with no way of generating income and managing the debt on those. So we got out of that. Now, anytime there's an opportunity, it's a strategic discussion with the institution about whether or not the foundation wants to acquire it for development or the institution wants it for some strategic purpose. And if the answer is yes on the institution side is, all right, well, what's your plan? What do you want to build? What do you want to do? And how quickly are we going to move? So we're not in the position of just acquiring property with them saying, well, a decade down the road, we may want to do something. So if it's front and center and there's a strategy and a viable use of financial resources from both partners, we do it. And if not, we don't. And what I would say here at UCF and here in Florida, all of the public university foundations are officially direct support organizations by Florida statute to the university, which many of you are in your respective states. But I only say that is because our, well, the university in many ways is the parent company. So we do have to pay attention and listen, we are interdependent. We are not independent in any way. So, and Jen Sarasa is on the line who's now at Indiana. And she knows, cause she was here at UCF about some of our nuanced structures. And that I would say that what's interesting is we don't get as much pressure now because they understand that it's taking up some of our cash reserves in order to purchase this property and what's the long-term viability of it. But I actually say, I actually had the opposite problem happen about six months ago. There was a piece of property and Jen, you know this, a company called Luminar who does the LiDAR for cars that's right here in our research park. And they were gonna pull out of one of the buildings and it was right at the corner, right as you're entering campus. And the university said, oh, we don't want it. And I'm like, oh, they never told us about it because we could have bought it and we could have leased that space so easily because I've had companies coming to me and say, we want in and we want to be in the research park adjacent to the university, but we don't want to build. And we want to be there right now. And we could have leased that space because it was very much designed for research. A lot of ours are office buildings that are not. Yeah, I'd add one other point. I think what helps mitigate this, you know, here at the KUHU Foundation, we're not using unrestricted assets or anything like that to buy land. So at the end of the day, if we're acquiring land or building a project, we're using debt. We're going outside commercial lending, new market tax credits, a lot of other incentives, but this is not the foundation using cash in our pocket to buy land conveniently for the institution. So I think that slowed their role a little bit about saying, well, let's just casually suggest the foundation just buy it and hold it. Again, we're about maximizing the balance sheet of this institution and this foundation and what we do. And that doesn't happen when you're using cash reserves to buy land that doesn't have a return. So if they want to do something, they need to know they have a plan. We're going to go out and use debt to finance it and make this thing work like a viable economic business deal that a private sector developer would. And that's mitigated a lot of that for us. Yeah. And in our situation, we do sometimes do debt. Like for instance, we have some debt on some other properties in our medical campus, but anytime that we issue debt as the foundation, we're required by state statute to go through the normal process, just like the university issuing debt. So the board of trustees, the board of governors has to approve, so it has to go up to the state level. And so we really try not to do that too often unless it's a big project. All right. Lots of thank yous in the chat. Are there, I don't see any other questions though. Anyone else here like to raise a question? We have time. And by the way, there's a special shout out to you, Rod, from John Gillin at Seminole State. He's saying thank you to both of you, but especially you, Rod. You Florida guys stick together. I get it. That's right. Tribal like that. That's right. Adam, I see you unmuted. Well, I don't want to take too much of the airtime here. So I'm trying to be mindful of other people, but just if there's no other questions, do you utilize any third party firms like a BlackRock or something like that, that might be able to sort of add a deeper bench to handle some of these projects if you don't have team capacity? So I'll answer while Rod's kind of thinking about it. So we do not here. So we've not had a capacity problem at this point. A lot of our projects that we've developed, the financing, tax credits and other incentives, project design and management, we hire all of that outside in terms of design, construction, even construction management, we hire outside. Financing, financial planning, we do all in-house. We have the capacity between myself, the CFO and our team to do that. Occasionally we might get a consultant on a particular project, depending on what it is and some of the design. In terms of identifying outside financing, again, we've got our own network here. We're not doing anything at a scale that what I call commercial or regional local lenders can't handle. If I look at our office buildings, those have been kind of in the 30, $40 million range, very manageable by local financing entities. I think our next largest scale project, I mentioned earlier in the presentation, this Champions Gate area that's gonna be about a $65 million condo building, $70 million hotel, some restaurant pads, all together, that's gonna start getting into the couple of hundred million dollar range. We will have some joint venture partners in that on the hotel side. So I think most of it, we've been able to deal with financing capacity and partnering and have not needed to go out to larger scale developers or private equity funds for that. Thank you. Yeah, and here at UCF, because our trustees want my real estate side and the university's real estate side to be kind of co-managed by the, or managed by the university's AVP of real estate, we don't wanna get into any construction management. They will actually do all of that. We can potentially be, the financing and all that stuff, like Greg stated, we have the ability to do that in-house, but the financing or the construction, that type of stuff would happen with another entity on campus. Thank you. I would just need more people that specialize in it and that we don't quite have that expertise yet on most of the properties that we have, we've purchased, we didn't build. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else? I have a question. Jason Willoughby at Fort Hayes State. I'm Greg's neighbor in Kansas. Good to see you, Jason. Hi, Greg. I'd love to hear this from Rod and from Greg, although we've met Greg's ear a lot on this. Our institution's run by a very smart team of academics with, I would say, no business experience outside of the academy. We've been unable to pitch them this in a way that they can understand. And I'd love to hear, Greg, from you again, but also from Rod. Anyone else on the call that has been successful convincing the academic leaders that the third leg of the stool is valuable, is normal, and is something the university foundations should be doing for them. Yeah, it really comes back to the business case and that I go back to the pro forma. You can start seeing where the cashflow flows back into the foundation operations. And so does it enhance your ability to raise more money that then ends up flowing back to the academic side of the house? I mean, I know that we wouldn't have the number of fundraisers that we have. I mean, two thirds of my budget is really funded between gift fees and the real estate income that we receive. And the university is only funding a third of my budget. If I had the university to fund me completely, we would be a skeleton crew. And if you're getting all university funding now, I think one of the things that you might be able to pitch is to say that, okay, maybe we all are asking for more budget dollars every single year, but maybe that slows a little bit as the other income stream starts coming in and they can start seeing what the benefits to the program would be. Yeah, I'd add to Rod's comments and Jason, thanks for the question. We've had some discussions on this. If I had to point to how did we get the institution, the academic leaders to have faith and confidence in our ability to do this in the early days, it was our executive teams partnering with our foundation board, who the foundation board had a lot of outside expertise, wisdom, and confidence in us and leveraging them to help us inspire the academic leadership that look, we're a separate private entity here to advance Kansas State in our case, in a meaningful way. You know, you have to start somewhere sometimes with new initiatives and things. We think we're starting in a smart, very scalable kind of a way. Take a little risk with us, let's go on this journey together. And so I think the board provided a lot of confidence from their expertise, either in financing or managing large-scale projects on the outside that there was kind of a lifeguard on duty and somebody else that beyond myself, our CFO and others brought some support and some wisdom and knowledge to the table. And then as we did things and scaled up and consistently produced, that confidence was just built. So I would say we really used our board to our advantage to help inspire the institution the right way. And I think the other side of it is, what was in it for the institution? Well, we've done investment management and fundraising for a long time, but they want more, always want more. And so we can only scale those first two legs of the stool so fast. And here's another opportunity that won't be filled with a developer here. And it is a real natural opportunity for the institution. Let's take advantage of it. So I was probably pretty good at showing them the pro side and the advantage side of trust, have some confidence, go on this journey with us. And over time, you just, the momentum builds. And as you've seen with us, we perform projects all the time, consistently on time, on budget, and they're seeing the benefits. So I would say to you guys, you gotta get your board on board to help that academic leadership believe that this should be important for Fort Haye State. And Jason, I'm just gonna add, as a former dean and faculty member, sometimes it just takes one of them, just one person to grab the others and say, you know what, this is a great idea. It's the talk behind the scenes. And if you can just get one champion to support this, it will make a difference. They're looking for a colleague who gets it and that they can trust because it's a little bit of a leap trusting you. But if you can get one of them to agree to this, it helps a lot. So, but thanks, Jason. Anybody else? We have enough time for another question. And I would just say one other thing I wanted to, when it comes to our P3s with our student housing, I'm very fortunate whoever decided to do this 20 some years ago, because two of them, I think were in the last seven years of the 35 year bonding. You know, we're now getting $5 million a year in waterfall back to the foundation. And my overall budget's only 32 million. So that's a significant chunk of a benefit that we're now getting back. And that, and it cost us nothing. They have to buy, you know, by statute, they have to, in order to get those nonprofit tax benefits and bonding rates, the property has to revert over to a nonprofit at the end of the bonding period. And we are the lucky recipient. All right, Greg and Rod, and I'm going to share your contact information again. And do you have any final comments you'd like to share? I'll just, I'd begin by saying thanks to CASE for what you do to provide these venues and opportunities for the membership to, I mean, anything Rod and I shared with you today is something we learned from somebody else in this sector before us. And so, you know, copy and share everything is what we do. The acronym is appropriate, the acronym is appropriate. So we're happy to provide something that's helpful to others. We continue to learn every day from other members. And so thanks for this opportunity and thanks for the audience for joining us. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. It's also copy and share excellence. And that is provided by you guys and all of our members and volunteers. So thank you very much. Thank you for joining us today. And again, if you have any questions, just let Greg and Rod know their emails are right up there. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody.

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