Q&A with Willy Walker
Willy Walker: Good morning to those people on the West Coast. Good morning, Danny and thank you very, very much for doing this. A couple of things before we start. I've been avoiding this webcast for quite some time and I'm excited to do it and I'm very excited to do it with my friend Danny Gabriel. Danny, beyond being an incredible entrepreneur, an incredible dad, and an incredible athlete, sits on the board of the Challenged Athletes Foundation, which is a fantastic organization. I have gone to San Diego a number of times and done the Challenged Athletes Triathlon with Danny, and it's been a true joy to both raise funds for the Challenged Athletes Foundation as well as do that race with Danny. So anybody who's listening in today who wants to make a donation to an incredible organization, https://www.challengedathletes.org/
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, or come to San Diego to do the race.
Willy Walker: Or come to San Diego to do the race. Second thing, I got a lot of great questions. I mean, a lot of great questions. Thank you, everyone who wrote in questions. I've left it to Danny to figure out which ones he's going to ask me today. There were some really fun ones that came in. We're going to avoid the questions about no, we're not going to completely avoid questions about politics, but we're going to certainly avoid questions about me in politics. There were a couple of fun ones from my training buddies who asked about times that they beat me on training rides or training runs or in races to Dave Narrow and Stefane and others who have beaten me handily at various times in our racing careers. Consider your question asked by me, giving you a shout out here. To my friend Michael Arougheti of Ares, who wrote about the game called Lobsters, where he said, If you roll four doubles in a row, does that mean you get double lobsters? No, You just keep on rolling doubles and to a bunch of other people who took the time to write in, thank you. It's a real pleasure.
Final thing I would say is that it is that time of year when we all look back and most of the people who are watching this webcast live incredible lives. While the economy has been challenging, inflation has been challenging., I have a group of friends on a WhatsApp group, and all week long we have been just talking about random acts of kindness and doing something nice for somebody in your life, whether it's making a donation to an organization that wasn't expecting it, whether it is putting a family member who fell off your Christmas list back on your Christmas list, or just giving someone a tip that quite honestly is not expected at all and saying thank you. But just doing those random small acts of kindness can be a really great thing to do, particularly during the holiday season of Hanukkah, Christmas. So anyway, with that, Danny, I'm going to turn it over to you and you've got the mike.
Danny Gabriel: Okay. This is dangerous. All right, So let's start off with a quick speed round getting to know Willy. Can I just say for all your listeners that Willy just got off the ski mountain, he's already done an hour of skiing and rushed in to do the podcast, and I guess the rest of us are preparing. So here you go. Okay, quick questions, Willy. Ocean or mountain?
Willy Walker: Mountain.
Danny Gabriel: Gravel or road?
Willy Walker: Gravel.
Danny Gabriel: New York Times or Wall Street Journal?
Willy Walker: Wall Street Journal.
Danny Gabriel: Hardcover or audio book?
Willy Walker: Audio.
Danny Gabriel: Sports car or SUV?
Willy Walker: Oh, sports car. My kids would kill me if I said SUV.
Danny Gabriel: I got that one wrong. Commanders or Broncos?
Willy Walker: Ooh, I got to say Commanders have a new ownership team. And while Dan Snyder was the owner, I said I would never support them again. With the new ownership team, I think I got to go back to the Commanders. But my Broncos are playing pretty well these days.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah. Otherwise, you're a traitor, I guess. Yeah. Caps or hats?
Willy Walker: I got to go with caps.
Danny Gabriel: Vail or Aspen?
Willy Walker: Aspen's just a better mountain.
Danny Gabriel: Ooh, a lot of people will fight you on that one. London or Paris?
Willy Walker: London.
Danny Gabriel: I threw this one in: Led Zeppelin or The Who?
Willy Walker: Oh, Led Zeppelin, hands down.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, that's what I thought you said. Patagonia or Stio?
Willy Walker: Stio.
Danny Gabriel: Coke or Pepsi?
Willy Walker: Coke, even though it's terrible for you.
Danny Gabriel: You can't do Jack and Pepsi. Whoop or Oura?
Willy Walker: Whoop.
Danny Gabriel: Okay. And last one, humor or caring?
Willy Walker: Caring.
Danny Gabriel: All right, interesting. So now I'm going to flip over some questions. You have a lot of smart listeners, I actually had to Google some of the questions to understand them. But all right. So starting with a little bit more of getting to know you, and this one comes from your buddy Mike Altman at Cortland, one of the best personalities in our business, I think. How do you start your days and also, what time do you wake up?
Willy Walker: Oh, I wake up pretty early. I used to work out in the morning, but the pandemic completely flipped it. I used to get up really early and go straight to the gym but because of the pandemic, and no need to not be able to carve out time at the end of the day, I now work out at the end of the day rather than the morning. So morning is up, dog walk, cup of coffee and basically read the Wall Street Journal and catch up on emails. And I try not to have calls before 8 a.m. because if I have a call before 8 a.m., it's hard for me to get into the office to do an 8 a.m. call. So I typically start Zoom calls and meetings at 9 a.m. and then the day goes.
Danny Gabriel: Your days are pretty consistent when you're traveling too, right? I mean, you're pretty consistent with your schedule.
Willy Walker: Yeah. The one thing when I'm on the road and particularly on the East Coast, then I will wake up in the morning and go to the gym before the day gets away from me. Because when I am on the road, I don't control the afternoon in the evenings. And my assistant McRae, who is fantastic, typically schedules in gym time every single day. And so my calendar has time blocked out for me to do that. And I take it as seriously as any meeting that I have.
Danny Gabriel: All right, cool. So I like this question. This comes from Sarah Frances at Outsmart. She has a great PR firm. “What's your greatest fear and what lifts you up?”
Willy Walker: So, my greatest fear? I got plenty of fears. Uh, I think I am coming to grips with my humanity and the fact that I am actually going to die someday. But I'm trying to live my life so that I pushed that day off. But I clearly lived for many, many years with a) If you're dying, I get nervous in airplanes because I thought the plane was going to fall out of the sky. And I think I've now come to the realization that if I'm on a plane and it falls out of the sky, that's the way I go out. I also have consistently had a fear of failure. And that's got some scars from failure as a kid and being kind ashamed and then running from shame and fear of failure. And that's been a big driver of me throughout my life, whether it's from a business standpoint, academic standpoint, athletic standpoint, etc.
Then what lifts me up is we had an executive committee call on Monday at Walker & Dunlop, and we said thank you to Howard Smith, who has spent 43 years at Walker & Dunlop. At the end of the call I asked everyone what we're going to miss about Howard. And we went around the horn and just the words, the care, and the love that everyone expressed for Howard, that teamwork, that sense of collaboration, that gives me fuel in my tank for a very long period of time, that lifts me up tremendously.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah. I mean I see the way you talk about your colleagues and the smile that brings to your face and sometimes the tears that it brings to your face. That you can see how much everybody at Walker & Dunlop means to you, which is amazing.
Willy Walker: I cried on that call, and I tried really hard not to cry on that call. I don't like go in and say, oh, I'm going to show my emotions here. And there's just certain times where they just take me over. And I think about the 20 years that Howard and I have spent together building this company and all of the great times and the difficult times and all the hard decisions, and as I'm saying, thank you to someone for all that time, I can't help but get emotional about it.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, which is amazing. So I have a question, I'm going to ask it now. You know, we've done a lot of things together: ride bikes, ski, swim. I've always done it behind you because you're always so fast. I looked at the time you ran the Boston Marathon in 2:36, which is insane. So, I mean, there's type A and like all of us joke, then there's Willy at a whole different level. What's that chip on your shoulder that drives you just to push yourself so hard, you know? I mean, for me, it's always, I was born with one hand. And I think for me, it's always been showing everybody I can do everything with one hand. But, you know, honestly, you take it to the next level. So what is it that drives you so hard? And also in your work, you take your work to the next level.
Willy Walker: I'm sure if there is a psychiatrist listening today, he or she will have a field day with my response to this. I guess I developed a chip on my shoulder in my sort of youth formative years of just being I went to an extremely good day school in Washington and all that. All the kids there were extremely talented and capable. And so there was this big drive to be the best athlete, to be the best student, what have you. And if you weren't, you kind of got shamed by the teachers, by your fellow students, what have you. And so I kind of had that built in early. And by the way, I got shamed. I failed. I was not the greatest student. I was a pretty good athlete, and I was president of my class and prefect and things like that and captain of my team. So I was a leader and an athlete, but I wasn't a great student.
It wasn't until I really kind of clicked in to learning after I got out of college that I realized that actually I was pretty smart and that just learning in an academic situation, I was perfectly good, but not great, and that I could actually learn a lot on my own. But when I went to Harvard, Danny, I think I was the only student at Harvard who went to St Lawrence. There was one somebody ahead of me who had gone and graduated in my same class as St. Lawrence, who was also at HBS, and she was a second year. But we were like two people that were the only two at Harvard who'd gone to St. Lawrence. And you know, there were tons of people from Cal where you went to school and a thousand people from Harvard and Yale and Stanford and all these other places. And so I showed up with this, like, do I belong here, and can I make it? And so, you know, when I got there and realized that I was actually doing really, really well, I made first year honors and ran the marathon in 2:36 and was on the hockey team and the lacrosse team. I sort of had this sense of, wow, you know, you can run, you can run with the bulls, if you will. You can keep up with these people. I think that that sense of accomplishment just really stimulated me to the point where I've just constantly been going for the next challenge, the next opportunity, what have you.
Then the final thing I would just say is that I am honestly really lucky that I have a ton of energy. I'm in good health, tap wood. I wake up early. I stay up not too late. I get plenty of sleep, but there's never a day where I just sort of say, I really want to just relax. And it was kind of funny because my girlfriend was with me at a board meeting a month and a half ago. And Jack Balaban, who you know, Jack and I woke up and had breakfast and my girlfriend was sleeping in and Jack said, “Where’s Sarah?” And I said, Oh, she's sleeping in. And he says, “Oh, I thought she always kind of woke up with you.” I said, she typically goes for about two days on my pace and then she needs a full day to recover and then she can come back and keep up in my pace. And Jack kind of looked at me and goes, “That makes perfect sense." And that's, you know, I just run fast.
Danny Gabriel: You said something there. And in the beginning, you said when you showed up to Harvard that it was like proving to yourself that you belong there. Do you have any of those feelings running, Walker & Dunlop or in the beginning as CEO. Those feels like you have to prove to yourself, I belong here. I can be the CEO of a big finance company.
Willy Walker: Well, the one thing that I was never going to allow happen was that someone would say that I kind of stepped into the family company and just was sort of a steward of the company and wasn't doing anything with it. So to my fault, when I got to Walker & Dunlop, I very clearly wanted to put my footprint on the firm and did it in a very dramatic way. It was probably a little bit too fast for some people who were at the firm. I clearly, clearly, clearly was not thankful or respectful enough to my father and the amazing firm that he had built.
As I have gotten older and look back on that, I have said that many times - I have said it directly to my dad. He was exceedingly mature in handling the fact that his son had stepped into the company that he had built, and that was very successful and took it to a new level. And he loved seeing that. But I think that in those early days, I was a little bit too much like, this is my show. I'm going to show the world that I'd like to build this place when I was super lucky to step into a firm that my grandfather had founded, my father had run brilliantly, and that I had this incredible culture and platform to then go build upon.
So if I look back, I will clearly criticize myself for running little ruff shot during that period of time. But that was my own insecurity of wanting to make sure that everyone knew that Willy had done great things and that I hadn't just stepped into the family company and was just a steward of the family company. And that was just my own insecurity.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah. I think we learn more from the things we do wrong than the things we do right in life. Okay. Let me move on, I wanted to ask this question because I think it's cool that one of your professors from St. Lawrence asked a question in the group. (So if I say people's names wrong, I apologize.)
But this comes from Jillian McKernan-Walley and she asks, “Your commitment to self-care is a model for our students. Is there a moment in your life that inspired this? Was there any moment in your education and development at St. Lawrence that was pivotal to your development as a leader?”
Willy Walker: Oh, yeah. Two different things. One, being a college athlete as you were Danny, was a huge help. A lot of people, if you will, lose their health in college. You kind of take a high school sport, you're in pretty good shape. You get to college, you start to party, forget about athletics, you forget about taking care of yourself. And then you created the kind of habits that keep it going.
I was fortunate to play college athletics, but I did lose my health when I moved to Latin America, and I remember distinctly that I was eating too much, and I put on a bunch of weight. In Latin America, as you know, Danny, because you spent a bunch of time down there. Latinos are very direct in giving you feedback. If my hair is getting a little bit gray, they'll say, Oh, you're getting a little gray in the hair. If I'm putting on a little bit of weight, they'll say, Hey, Gordito, what's going on? And I remember sort of being, you know, they were joking with me. In the United States, you never walk up to somebody saying, “You're looking a little fat these days.” But in Paraguay, where I was living, all my friends would be like, “Dude, you're getting fat.” And then they talk about it. And I was like, I don't want to be fat. I don't want to. I was kind of getting shamed to it. So I went out and started to put health and exercise into my daily routine, and that was really where I built it in, waking up every single morning, getting healthy and taking care of my fitness.
As it relates to leadership experience, we had a really bad situation in my fraternity. I was president of the fraternity, and we had a woman who almost died of alcohol poisoning at a party. We fortunately got her to the hospital. I wasn't drinking that night because I had a lacrosse game the next day, so I was stone sober, got her to the hospital, and fortunately, she was fine. But we had to take disciplinary action after that, as you can imagine. Having to kick out two of my brothers out of the fraternity was one of the most unpopular and difficult things that I ever had to do. But doing what you needed to do as a leader and not as a friend, I learned that lesson very early in a very personal way. Plenty of my fraternity brothers say, “Dude, you can't kick that guy out of the fraternity.” And I was like, I don't have any choice, because if I don't do it, we're going to lose this house. And so learning at an early age, those types of tradeoffs of leadership was an indelible lesson that I learned.
Danny Gabriel: I feel like every one of your friends I've met from St. Lawrence, they're just like great people that go to that school. Don't you think just going back onto your exercise, I mean, there's a mental health aspect to your exercise, wouldn't you say, and I think that's important. I've done a lot of things with you where I feel like when you go exercise or do long ride and stuff, there's a mental rejuvination of the brain. I feel like that's your peaceful time.
Willy Walker: Yeah. Quite honestly, I wish I was more religious. I know in my later days, I need to get more spiritual. Whether that takes a formal religious identification or whether it is spirituality in another way. I do think that my exercise, I mean, that's my church, that's been my church for many years where I go to decompress, to think about what I'm doing personally, professionally. So, yeah, that has a lot to do with my mental health and being able to stay relaxed. At the same time, I would also tell you if you if you pulled Howard Smith on here, he would say there have been plenty of times over the last 20 years when we've worked together where a lot of people wish I'd gone and done a little bit more of a workout and chilled out a little bit more.
So as I get older and reflect upon that it's super helpful to have that time every single day where I get away and can go think about what I'm doing and how I'm impacting the people around me and what I'm doing with my own life.
Just Arthur Brooks and his book “From Strength to Strength.” I can't recommend that more for people who are in their midlife 50 to 65 as it relates to transitioning from an active career and being an active parent and all the things that we take as far as structure and excitement in our lives to then finding meaning in other things as we transition out of a career and into life after work, life after kids. And Arthur's book, “From Strength to Strength,” is as good a manual or thought piece as you will find.
Danny Gabriel: In fact, that was a question. Garrett Bowden from a Heritage Venue asked, “What book has had the most impact on you?” I didn't know if that would be one of them or if there's more.
Willy Walker: Yeah, there were a bunch of books back in the day. I mean, I read “The Fountainhead.” I want to go read it again because that had a massive impact on me. “Den of Thieves" by James Stewart talking about Michael Milken and the junk Bond kings of the 1980s. Ivan Boesky had a lot of insight into Wall Street barbarians at the gate in the first RJR Nabisco buyout by KKR is a fascinating view of Wall Street and private equity and what sort of launched the whole private equity world. “The Power of One" by Bryce Courtenay, about a young boy in South Africa (where Danny, your family is from.) at boarding school, is just an amazing book. And I mean, I could keep going on and on and on. As you know, one of the things that this webcast does is I basically have to read a book a week. I'm very happy that you're doing the questions today. And I actually got a week off to be able to answer these.
But I was at dinner last night with a bunch of friends, all very, very talented, sophisticated business leaders, and we were all talking about how much you read. And everyone's like,” Oh, I get in a book every month, a book every year.” And I was like, I read a book almost every week. And everyone was like, What? And I was like, Yeah, the webcast, basically. If I'm not reading a book, I'm doing research on my guest. And that need to do that research has been incredibly beneficial to me as a person, to my leadership, to ideas I bring to my executive team. I think I was doing a pretty good job of running W&D before we started the webcast. But the need to constantly expand and read new things and take in information has been a real gift.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, it's like a whole new education. So, you know, it's interesting aggregating a lot of questions. A lot of your crew at W&D had a similar question. I don't know whether it's admiration or concern, but the question revolved around burnout. Bryan McGrath, Rob Johnson, Dan Woodward, where they all asked kind of some things you know about your daily routine, but they all got to: “What do you do to not burnout?”
And Rob even asked: “What do you do to prevent yourself from injuring yourself?” Rob, I can attest to that Willy injures himself all the time. So he's not perfect.
Willy Walker: All the time. As you well know, Danny, the only two doctors I go to see or my GP for my annual physical, which I actually get excited about, and then my orthopedic surgeon. But my orthopedic surgeon, RJ Rudzki in D.C. and Jamie Genuario in Denver are literally the two most important people in my life almost because they keep putting me back together. So I clearly don't do a great job of taking care of myself from the orthopedic surgery view.
Danny Gabriel: You make it appear like you do, at least.
Willy Walker: I've got a really low resting heart rate and blah, blah, blah. My health is very good, but I obviously take crashes and falls. But I would say as it relates to, “burnout”, I am blessed and I believe, Danny, just like you are. I don't consider what I do work. I love what I do. I love working with the people at W&D every day. I love engaging with our clients. There are hard days. Someone's done something wrong, and you've got to discipline them. And that's not a lot of fun. Sure. But what I have learned is, there are certain people who like conflict. There are not many people who really like conflict. And what I've learned as I've gotten more mature and sort of seasoned as a leader is that that phone call you don't want to make is exactly the phone call you must make, and you must make it quickly. Don't think about how I am going to say this perfectly or whatever else. Just, you know, get on the phone. Like I had someone just the other day who was sitting there and got an email from somebody and was perplexed about the email and was ready to shoot off this response that was like right back between the people's eyes. And I said, pick up the phone and call her. It will go much better than zapping back a flame mail because you get into flame mail and you're not resolving anything. You need the emotion, you need the fact that the email surprised you. But people want to avoid that conflict. They want to avoid me calling you Danny. And, you know, you saying, you know what, your team really screwed up on this deal. We need that feedback. We need that honest feedback. We don't need, Hey, you know, it was all good, whatever. And then you turn around and go use somebody else on the next one.
And so the thing that I love is working with the team. I love what I do. And then quite honestly, I don't know how many PTO days I have built up. I don't take a lot of vacation, but I feel like I vacation, like today, I'll do a mix of work and play. As you said at the top, I went skiing this morning for a couple hours. I'll go to work for a couple hours. It all blends together for me in the sense of not feeling that I am “burned out”. And I get asked by investors all the time how long I'll be around Walker & Dunlop. And I say until I'm not having fun anymore, but right now I'm having a great time.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, I’ll just give a plug on my personal perspective. The honesty is that when you have a positive impact, when you get that great call, I think that as you said in the beginning, it lifts you up. It keeps you going for a long time. I've just seen you on those highs, which wasn't getting a big deal done or something. It's like something really great you were able to do for someone. I think that keeps the burn out. It's just like all the positivity that you get back from your team.
Danny Gabriel: Okay. We will be real quick on government because we have a lot of real estate and W&D stuff to go to. I got like core questions from this last night, from RV to Altman, to all these guys that you ski with and hang out with. Would you ever run for political office?
Willy Walker: Oh, God. I mean, I get asked that all the time. Look, I grew up in Washington, D.C. If you grow up in New York, it's the bankers, if you grow up in Hollywood, it's like the movie producers and actors. In DC, the cool people are the people who are involved in government. So I grew up with the sons of senators and congressmen and women and the vice president of the United States and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I always loved politics. I know a lot about politics. I follow it very, very closely. I have a lot of friends who were intimately involved in the political industry. And I use that term purposefully because it is an industry. So I've always toyed around with it. Being in politics both excites me and scares the you know what out of me. I like being liked. I do. I don't like it when people don't like me. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who don't like me, and I don't try to hang out with them. And I really you know, I can't do anything about the fact that they don't like me.
But the concept that you run for office and have essentially 50% of the people you represent hate you – I don't know whether I've got the backbone for it, Danny. I really don't. I have the passion for the issues. I'd love to help lead for really good change in America and at the same time, I don't know if I have the backbone to do it. And then the third thing is that I love my job. I love what I do. I love leading Walker & Dunlop, and I think we do a lot at Walker & Dunlop to change the world that we're in.
But clearly, if you're a governor of a state or a senator in DC, you have a huge amount of impact. You know, that's 150 people other than the president, the vice president basically, who really run our world. Being one of the 152 people, you can have a massive impact. So it's always been something that I've thought about, maybe at some time in the future when I've got W&D in the hands of somebody else to run it at some point. But right now I have too much fun doing what I'm doing. And I love our team and everything that's going on to even really contemplate it very seriously.
Danny Gabriel: All right. One more government question, which is rather specific, but I thought it was pretty interesting. And this comes from Jeff Dean at W&D. “Are the days of long term federal budgets passed? Are we now in the era of only continuing resolutions from Congress? How does that impact the market?”
Willy Walker: So there are a couple things on that one real quick. The first is you can blame aviation deregulation, which, by the way, I'm all for. And it's great that we can fly on Southwest Airlines for $110 from San Diego to Denver or whatever the cost of the trip is. But airline deregulation and the growth of Southwest Airlines allowed every member of Congress to basically commute. When I was growing up and living in Washington, D.C., congressmen and congresswomen lived in Washington, D.C. Senators lived in Washington, D.C. And so what did that do? It made it so that they lived in D.C. They had kids at the same school. They had dinner with one another, whether they were a Republican or Democrat. And they actually talked about the issues.
Today because of the ease at getting home and the cost to it. You go to National Airport on a Thursday evening and the entire airport is flooded with congressional delegations from every state in the country hopping on airplanes to fly home. And they fly back to their red district and their blue district. They hang out with their red and blue constituents. They hang out with their red and blue friends, and then they come back to Washington on Monday night, and they go to their caucuses, and they hang out with their red Caucus members and their blue Caucus members, and they stay in their lines, and they don't talk about issues. They don't compromise.
I'll give you one quick example. Roy Blunt, great, great senator from the state of Missouri. Wonderful person. What am I really good friends. Roy and I don't agree on a lot of things politically, but his son, Charlie and my son Charlie were best friends at St. Albans School. We would sit at dinner, and we would sit on the sidelines of soccer games, and we would talk about everything under the sun. And I will tell you something, I have all the time in the world for Roy Blunt and anything he thinks about politically, because I respect him as a person. If I didn't have the ability to know him as a person, it's very hard for me to take a political view that he has and try and reconcile with a political view that I have. So first of all, deregulation of the airlines is the reason why we have commuters in government. And the computers in government is what kills the dialog, the understanding and the compromise.
Then to the specific question as it relates to budgets. Boy, oh boy, we really have a fiscal mess right now where we continue to go from continuing resolution to continuing resolution. I mean, obviously, if you can get yourself to have the House, the Senate and the White House all controlled by the same party, you will get back to a normal budget cycle. But as long as you have a division of power, you probably have one party holding up the other party, which then does keep you in these continuing resolution cycles.
And then the final thing I would say is that the downfall of Speaker McCarthy is a really sad statement on American democracy. The idea that his own party with an eight person majority kicked him out and that the other party that got him to compromise on the debt ceiling didn't step in to save him. Really shows you the partisan divide that is in Washington and makes it so that really good people and I could spend a minute running down a list of really good people who are basically saying, I'm done. This is a joke. This is not any good. And the bottom line is that we all then get that. We get the representatives who aren't the people who don't have anything better to do with their lives than go to Congress. And that's a real shame for both left and right.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, for sure. I mean, and as an operator, I mean, you're talking about politics up here. I mean, the level of red tape in our system, the amount of friction is so crushing, we're becoming so inefficient. Okay, So let's move on to like, a segway into more W&D stuff before we get to some real estate. This one comes from Chris Ndikumana from GMF. (I hope I pronounced that right.) “How often do you go out to meet your local teams in person?”
Willy Walker: I don't think that was a planted question by Ndik. But I spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. I'm on the road all the time and I'm meeting with our clients all the time. And to me, there are two things that are key there. One, it keeps me up to date on how we're doing and what our clients need from us. And then second, it also allows for me to understand the W&D culture and make sure that the people who are on the team and in offices across the country are hearing from me and seeing me face to face. Our entire executive team and all of our managers in the country do an amazing job of maintaining the culture at Walker & Dunlop and growing the culture. But I as CEO obviously have a large role in that. And I find being out in the field, if you will, is a big part of it. I don't know how many miles I've flown this year. I was actually going to go look it up. But, you know, it's probably getting close to 200,000 miles. I crossed 100,000 well, in the middle of the summer. So I think I'm close to 200,000 miles on airplanes this year.
I was with one of my big competitive company CEOs, and he had just come back from a trip to Europe. And he had been to France, Germany, and the UK. And I asked him how much time on that trip he spent with clients. He kind of looked at me. (And by the way, I have massive respect for this CEO.) He was like, “I don't spend any time with clients. If I pick five clients to go see, I'd have another five who were pissed off that I didn't go visit with them. So I just go and visit with my teams and work with them, and then I use them as our voice out to the clients.” You know, to be honest with you, I sat there and listened to that, and I said, first of all, if I had his job and I had as many employees and as many clients as he does, I probably have to do the same thing. But I also sat there and sort of relished in the fact that we were a small enough firm that I have the ability to go out and meet with a lot of clients and our bankers and our brokers and the rest of our teams and really get a good sense of what we're doing right, what we might be doing wrong, and how we can do better to meet our clients’ needs. And it's a big advantage for W&D.
Danny Gabriel: A couple more W&D questions, and then I'm up to the next three. This one comes from our buddy Scott Alter at the Standard Companies. This was a verbal one I got from him Saturday night. “You look at a lot of companies, you see a lot of companies and you get to look under the hood. But what do you see some of those companies getting right and what do you see some of those companies getting wrong?”
Willy Walker: Is that specific to real estate or is that more broad?
Danny Gabriel: I guess you could answer it however you like, but I probably would say more real estate.
Willy Walker: So I do get to see a lot of companies, and I'm marveled at how successful so many of them are. Some of the best as it relates to commercial real estate understand the tax code as well as they understand commercial real estate. I marvel at their use of the tax code to be able to minimize their taxes and maximize their returns. As a C-corp at Walker & Dunlop, we don't have the opportunity to do that. But particularly the kind of long hold strategy of plowing capital back into your assets, holding the assets, refing them and holding the long term. There are plenty of our clients who have funds. They buy assets, they sell assets, they pay taxes on it all. They return money to shareholders or LPs and on they go. Amazing. No criticism whatsoever of that.
But if I think about those people who sort of just have created massive amounts of wealth for themselves and their investors and their families, it's those long term holders who not almost never sell, but who have that kind of long term hold view. The second thing is the five-year business plan. I've talked about it plenty of times before. It has been fundamental to W&D’s success. But I do see a lot of companies, sort of back to that question about our federal budget and whether we're going to be continuing resolutions all the time. We all know how detrimental that is to the long term investments that need to be made at a federal government standpoint to build the infrastructure, build the investments in the United States of America that our government should be investing in.
Similarly, there are a lot of companies that we work with who do a one year business planning. They're like, “Let's just react to what the market is doing today.” We'll plan a year – not doing three and five year business plans and setting the team to achieving them. They're hard to do. They have to be highly ambitious and bold. But that five year business planning process has been a fundamental management tool at Walker & Dunlop. And any time I have the ability to engage with another CEO sort of saying, what could we do here? And we're trying to grow and scale and what have you. That's the one very practical, very tangible change, if you will, that someone can implement that, at least as far as Walker & Dunlop is concerned, has been fundamental to our growth and our success.
Danny Gabriel: Okay. One word answer as I ask the next one. “IQ or EQ when you're looking to hire someone?”
Willy Walker: Ooh depends where, but typically EQ.
Danny Gabriel: Okay, good. All right. I want to ask this question because I think you'd have a passionate response if something meaningful to you. And it comes from Kenge Malikidogo-Fludd at W&D. And she says: “Elon Musk just called for DEI programs to die. What would you tell a fellow CEO and business leader that is torn on whether to move forward with such programs in today's climate?”
Willy Walker: Look, first of all, Elon Musk, we've all seen say pretty much anything he wants and keep on moving forward, including telling his customers at X to do you know what and I don’t even have the thought to do that, but much less the luxury to be able to do it. So on things like that, I don't put a whole lot of weight behind Elon because I think that Elon is a genius. But I actually don't think he's not a very good manager or leader.
I asked David Faber in my interview two weeks ago in New York, I said to him, clearly, he's a genius. But what I don't get is how he has all these companies operating at such a high level, because I don't view him as being this great leader or manager. And David said, “I don't really know the answer to that question either.”
But here's what I'd say. First of all, ESG. Let's go broader – Environmental, Social and Government. As Paul Tudor Jones said, ESG shouldn't be ESG, it should be SEG or, you know, SG and E is kind of the environmental piece, it is such a hot button issue that people hear about the environment and they kind of get into this: Are we in a global warming cycle, etc., And it's such a politically sensitive issue that people kind of get lost in the following thing. Climate change is happening, no doubt about it. There's not a person in the commercial real estate industry who's trying to get insurance on an asset that has any kind of exposure to the climate that doesn't understand that it's costing you money in the market.
If you're a big market-based person, just look at what your cost of insurance has been to figure out whether global warming and climate change is happening, period, end of statement. So we've got to deal with it. So “E” is important that all of us be mindful of the environment and what we're doing to contribute to global warming I think is important. S on the social side. And diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) sits underneath that. It's good business. It's good business.
Danny Gabriel: I want to interrupt. What gets me on this subject is there's a ton of data points that will show you it's more profitable.
Willy Walker: Yeah, this is good business. You have to be able to care about the environment. You don't necessarily have to be a tree hugger to care about social. You don't have necessairily be this person who loves the Technicolor Dreamcoat and being wrapped up with massive amounts of diversity. What you need to understand is that a diversity of experiences and a diversity of opinions is healthy for any company, period.
When I joined Walker & Dunlop, it was 40 predominantly, a bunch of white males sitting around the table making decisions who all came from the same background, viewed the world in the same way. And what you get is a homogeneous viewpoint on the world. As we all know, the world changes every single day. So getting a diverse set of opinions and input is super important. It's good business.
And then on the governance side, just look at Sam Bankman-Fried anyone who hasn't read Michael Lewis's new book, I'm hopeful. Michael said that he would come on the Walker Webcast when his new book comes out in paperback. And I'm reading it right now. You want to talk about governance? Sam Bankman-Fried is a brilliant dude. He just missed the entire chapter on governance. If he'd had good governance, I don't think he'd be going to jail.
And the bottom line is that he had no governance and therefore he had no sort of discipline of behavior and no discipline of money. And guess what? He is going to spend the rest of his life in jail because of it. So governance, we all know, is super, super needed. I would make one final point on that, Danny, which is we need good governance – we don't need additional regulation.
In my conversations recently with Faber, I took off on Gary Gensler, the SEC. I think Gary Gensler is steering any company that would even contemplate going public to stay private because of the added regulatory burdens and personal liabilities that he is putting people like myself and other public company CEOs at. It's like every single quarter I sign our financial statements. Do I sit there and read every single dollar and cent in our financial statements? Of course I don't. I trust my team. What they're giving me, and it's been signed up by my CFO is documents that I can sign off on. I take massive personal liability because of that. The idea that if we ever have a restatement of any number at W&D, I can personally have my compensation over a three year period be clawed back when it was no fault on my part, but we restated something because we didn't do it right from some accounting policy. I'm in no way saying that we should give hall passes and we should be held accountable from a fine standpoint.
But the concept that my own compensation be clawed back, that's where Gary Gensler in the SEC is going right now. So the big irony of all this and I'll make one final point is that Elizabeth Warren wants to protect the common investor, the common American citizen, and what she is doing with this regulatory burden that she's putting on banks and publicly traded companies is she's putting everything into the private market. And as you and I know, Danny, the only people who can invest in the private market are qualified investors who by definition are rich. So she sits there and talks about the fact that we need more quality in the world. We need to get income disparity down. And yet she pushes more and more companies into the private sector and private equity backed companies and hurts companies who are in the public sector where the common investor can invest and make returns and make equity returns on their investment. I find that to be really, really, really disappointing.
Danny Gabriel: I can tell, I love watching you get worked up.
So I'm going backwards because you said something there. And then I'm going back to some questions I skipped. One was from Derek Lamarck at Apex Builders, and in fact, we had like three or four of these questions and it's a simple one. “So in today's climate, would you rather be a public company or a private company?”
Willy Walker: Look, we benefit greatly from being a publicly traded company. We've now got scale. We've now got float in our stock. Being a public company is great. If we were a private company, there would always be that question, when's really going to sell the company? And given how much we've grown the company, that would have been a constant question. Now that we’ve public, I don't get that question any more. No one's sitting there going, Well, when is he going to sell the company and when he's going to retire? Right. It's just that it provides you with a lot of optionality if you will. So I love being a publicly traded company today.
At the same time, when we went public, if I had to replay the history, we wouldn't have gone public in 2010 as a micro-cap mortgage finance company with a market cap of $220 million. The world did not need a $220 million micro-cap mortgage finance company in 2010. Period. End of statement. I was stupid enough, arrogant enough, and excited enough to do it, but as I replay the clock, you know, it was really lucky we did it, though, Danny, because as you know, we use the currency of being a publicly traded company to acquire a ton of companies. And so it's been a huge fuel for our growth. So I'm very happy that we did it when we did it. But at the same time, you can get just as much from private equity as you can from the public markets today given the billions and trillions of dollars that are managed by private equity firms.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, I could ask you a zillion questions on that one, but let's keep going. I'm going to ask you two questions together. So let me ask both. “Do you think the U.S. is facing a medium to long term labor shortage? And if so, what do you see as a consequence?” That's from David Dubrow at ArentFox. And then on top of that, “How do you think AI impacts this issue and how do you think it'll impact the multifamily space in particular?” And that comes from Abou Bakayoko from Fannie Mae. And I just want to plug Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...
Willy Walker: You want tighter pricing on your next deal?
Danny Gabriel: No. In the multifamily space, they're so critical to our space. And I think the people of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae work so hard, and I just don't think many people give them the credit for the work ethic that as organizations they put in and how meaningful they are to our space.
Willy Walker: I got to tag on behind that because as you know, we have massive relationships with both Fannie and Freddie. We are deeply thankful for the people who work there every single day and how good they are as professionals. But the other thing that I think everyone needs to keep in mind, Fannie and Freddie cost the federal government $190 billion to bail out in 2008. We've gotten back $190 billion, and we've got another hundred billion. It's been one of the best investments the federal government has ever, ever done. Okay.
And yet, go back to 2011 and 2012. And there was a massive move on Capitol Hill by Republicans to take down Fannie and Freddie, do away with the federally guaranteed mortgage finance system. If we didn't have Fannie and Freddie, 80% of homeowners in America today would likely have floating rate short term debt on their home. It is thanks to Fannie and Freddie that 80% of homeowners in America have a fixed rate mortgage under 5% today and don't even have to worry about that side of their balance sheet. They don't have to worry about that input on their income statement on a monthly basis. We have gotten through the soft landing, the great tightening, whatever you want to talk about over the last two years incredibly well thanks to the consumer. And the consumer has done incredibly well because they don't have floating rate mortgages on their homes. They've got fixed rate long term mortgages, and that is 100% thanks to the Fannie Freddie, period. So have we gotten away with them and done what the Republicans wanted? We wouldn't be benefiting from them today. And people forget that. And they shouldn’t.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, for sure. It's a model of public-private partnership, right? I mean, Freddie and Fannie are incredibly efficient the way they work.
Willy Walker: 100%. And by the way, as you well know, Danny, in the multifamily space, private capital is in front of government capital on every single mortgage. We take the first loss position on all of our Fannie Mae DUS loans and B-piece buyers take the first loss position on all Freddie Mac K series. So they got it right. We as a country have it right. And we all ought to be thankful for that. Okay. On to your other quick questions as it relates to AI.
Danny Gabriel: AI and labor.
Willy Walker: The labor side of it gets into the you know, someone just heard me saying Republicans were terrible for trying to take down Fannie and Freddie. I’ll flip around on the other side, I don't get why Democrats don't want to seal the border and have legal immigration in the United States. I don't get why Democrats think that illegal immigration is good for the United States of America. I just don't get it. We ought to seal the border, we ought to allow two million people a year to come into the country legally. They ought to pay taxes. They ought to be part of our society. And the problem that we've done is we've conflated the two issues as it relates to illegal citizens. They're not citizens, but they're living in the country, illegal residents and the border. And we need to separate the two. The Democrats continue to conflate these two issues to make it, so a decision doesn't have to be made on it. They sit there and say, well, what are you going to do? Are you going to expel the 11 million people who are in the country illegally today? Park that, those people are going to be here for good. We've got to figure out how to get them naturalized. We've got to be able to get them on tax rolls and we need to be able to integrate them in the United States. Everyone says that's amnesty or whatever else. Deal with it.
But as far as the order right now, the amount of illegal immigration is putting a lot of new entrants into the country, which is providing labor, but at the low end of the labor spectrum. And so as it relates to do we have a labor shortage? I mean, look, we're at 3.8% unemployment right now? I mean, the people are talking about the fact that the Fed might cut if the unemployment rate gets up to like 3.8-3.9. Remember, please, people, everyone who was on the Federal Reserve Board, they were trained that the inflation rate that you would have as your target is between 5% and 6%. Like all their models, as far as 2% inflation, all their models say 5% to 6% unemployment is like what the run rate should be. Do not think that they are going to get the 3.9% unemployment and say, ooh, the market is slowing down. We got to like goose this thing to make sure that we stick at 3.5%. 3.5% is an anomaly due to the labor shortages that we have many people retiring and not coming back to the marketplace. And then as it relates to an AI look, it is the great unknown. The only thing I would go to tell me that it's going to actually be an adder and not a subtractor of jobs is that when Microsoft came out with Excel, everybody on Wall Street said, Oh, there go the abacus is there, go the Hewlett-Packard 12 CS and we can now use an Excel spreadsheet that's going to make everyone much more efficient. We're going to lose all these analysts. All it did was grow financial services, grow the opportunities. So I think that AI expands the world, doesn't contract the world.
The only other thing I'd say there is you got to think about Elon Musk in 2015 saying that we would have autonomous vehicles by 2022 and that 60% or 70% of vehicles would be autonomous by 2022. Well, guess what? We're heading into ‘24 and we have one little pilot study with one manufacturer in San Francisco still alive on autonomous vehicles. I'm not saying they're not going to get here, but they're going to take a lot longer than we planned. And part of that autonomous vehicle survey, if you will, was that we were going to do 6 million driving jobs. Taxicab drivers. Uber drivers. Truck drivers. 6 million blue collar jobs. Didn't happen. UPS just signed a new contract with UPS delivery people where if you're at UPS for 20 years, you can make $185,000 a year as a UPS truck driver. That is the complete antithesis of what Elon Musk was predicting in 2015. So any of these projections, as it relates to AI, just put a little bit of an asterisk next to it, saying let's see how this evolves. Let's see how it's used.
Danny Gabriel: All right. You and I have some sort of talking points over dinner next time, but okay, we got it. We're running out of time. And there's two questions that I know people want to ask. One, your thoughts on interest rates. You already told me last night. I don't know what the f*ck interest rates are going to do. So we're answering that one. I don't know if I’m allowed to use that language, but the other one, again, Avi and then some other people asked it in a roundabout way is where do you think interest rates need to get to bring institutional capital back into play?
Willy Walker: All right. So on interest rates, I know no more than anybody who watches television on CNBC and reads The Wall Street Journal on a daily basis. Yes, I do watch the trades that we do, and I watch the ten-year probably more closely than most. But that doesn't tell me anything that I'm going to know any better than anyone else. I have a bet with my friend Bob Nichols at Monarch, where I have sort of been saying that I think the ten year in 2024 sits between four and 450. Bob came in last week, said, I'll bet you a beer that it's 350 by your summer conference in July and you've got 425 closest to it gets the beer. Obviously, we all saw what happened last week to the ten year and I sent Bob a case of beer saying, I think I owe you more than this by July. Given where it's gone. So I don't know anything. I would say this: there was nothing in that CPI report last week that said that we are doing the job the Fed wants us to do as far as killing inflation. It was a standstill month from October to November. It was a standstill month. It key’d expectations, but it wasn't continuing down towards their 2% target. And so unless we stay on the 2% target, there's no reason for the Fed to cut rates. And so I just sit there and say the whole thinking was recession rate cut. Now recession is off the table and it's, oh, they're going to get to their 2% target and then cut.
Well, if inflation stays in the system and we don't see it get to their 2% target, there's no other reason for them to cut other than politics. And there are plenty of people out there saying, hey, leading into an election, they're going to cut because of politics. Jerome Powell had a lot of pressure on him by Donald Trump to do things and he didn't do them. I'm not exactly sure why this time, he thinks there was political pressure on him to cut rates and he'd go do it. But, you know, I don't know, that's my view. I think we have a ten year between four and 450. I think there's a lot of business to be done there.
Final thing on institutional capital, what institutional capital needs is rate stability. It doesn't need the ten year to be at 392 consistently, but it needs to get in a band. It needs to get a band so that people understand where cap rates need to be and then we can get transaction volume back and going. And so the only other piece to all of that of some type of band on rates is you also need redemptions in the odyssey funds and the B-REIT and the SREIT to dry up and they've come down significantly, but they haven't ended from the last time I checked on it. And so once you get capital saying… I was just at the JP Morgan Asset Management Conference week before last in New York and when they were talking about big macro trends, one of the things that was really reassuring to me was the chief economist at JP Morgan said, we are right now seeing a lot of conviction on new capital to commercial real estate. There's still plenty of pain that we're going to see in ‘24 of deals that were done in ‘21 and ‘22 that are upside down with floating rate debt and were bought to low a cap rate and too high a value that need to be worked out. But there is a huge demand for new capital coming into commercial real estate and I think a lot of the institutional capital is going to start coming back in once we get some stability on rates and cap rates.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah, I would just plug from my side. Interest rates are half the equation and operations are the other half, and you can have interest rates stay the same. And it's perhaps that turmoil in operations that's keeping people on the sidelines.
Willy Walker: That's a huge point. And that's one of the things that I think.. there are people who invest in commercial real estate as a trade, and there are people who invest in commercial real estate as an operating company. And I think you very clearly at Colrich and many, many other people who are listening to this, who ask questions today, operate companies that operate commercial real estate really, really well, and they add value by operating the assets. There are other people who view it as just a trade. I buy it at this financing structure and that cap rate, and I'm going to make money over time. And those are very distinct business strategies. And some if you bought wrong, you're not going to be able to operate out. You can also buy wrong and operate out. So I totally agree with you.
Danny Gabriel: Yeah. And if you wait for operations to get really good again, you've missed the boat. I agree with a lot of people in your firm who think you know right now while operations are in turmoil is a great time to invest. We certainly think that. And I think a lot of people are going to wait too long to take advantage of some great opportunities.
We're pretty much out of time. This one final question that came from a whole host of people. But the debt funds and clearly there's a lot of noise around debt funds and instead of naming all the people. But do you think there is going to be this crisis in the debt fund world that everybody's talking about? We certainly haven't seen a huge amount hit the market. We have seen some. And then some other people ask, like Mark Grace from W&D, what fills that gap where a lot of funding was coming from debt funds. Where do you replace that funding from?
Willy Walker: So it's a reasonably complex answer. A couple of quick data points. $55 billion of commercial real estate debt outstanding originated by debt funds in 2021, 2022. And there's a lot that matures in 2024. MF1 and Arbor, the two of them alone have $9 billion of predominantly multifamily floating rate debt that matures in 2024. So a lot of that debt needs to be refinanced and there are lots of question marks as it relates to how much of that is underwater and how much of it is actually performing.
We've done an analysis at Walker & Dunlap on that overall $55 billion. And we have in the really bad bucket of the $55 billion, we have $12 billion that is completely underwater. And then we have about another $12 billion that is somewhere around 1.0 debt service cover. So you could sit there and say, okay, with rates a little bit lower and you get some type of rent growth back in there and good management, you can get that back to something where you can refi out at par. But we clearly have identified $12 billion that are completely underwater. So someone's going to tap into that paper. And so, yes, it's going to have to be worked on.
The issue with it Danny is a couple of things. One, the banks are well capitalized right now and don't have a lot of pressure on them to foreclose on loans. And so while banks are upside down on a lot of the bonds that they bought back in 2021 and 2022, they have relatively strong balance sheets and they're getting a lot of run off in those portfolios. And they're going to have to go and redeploy capital. Whether they're going to put it into commercial real estate or other investments is TBD. But they've had $16 billion of bonds roll off in Q3. So there's a lot of capital that's being recycled by the banks right now that could come back to commercial real estate.
The second piece to it is that a lot of these debt funds have warehouse loans and that provides them with liquidity to be able to take loans that are in CLO structures, put them onto a warehouse line and work them out rather than having to actually foreclose on the loan. And so that's one of the other things that some of these debt funds have in their back pocket is they've still got liquidity. Had the banks pulled those warehouse lines, a lot of these debt funds and CLOs would be in real trouble. But because there's general liquidity in the banking sector today, those warehouse lines are in place and that gives the big CLO issuers a lifeline to pull assets out of the CLO, put them on a warehouse line and work them out.
Now, if you get a huge number of loans that they have to pull off the line, out of the CLOs, they're going to get swamped and they're not going to be able to use warehouse lines to fund all of that. That's where you could get one of these big debt funds tipping over. But right now, given the outlook and how there's a lot of equity capital that steps in to help these deals out, and I could give you example after example of deals that we've been working on at W&D. It seems like with this rate rally and liquidity the banking sector is providing to the debt funds that there are going to be problems? Yes. Is it going to be a wipe out scenario? I do not believe right now. Rates revert and a 350 or ten year turns into a 5% ten year bank starts to get strangled. Debt funds run into a really big problem because those lines are going to be pulled and all that floating rate debt is going to be refi’d at a much, much higher rate with no coverage. They're going to have to go back to their investors for big, big equity checks. Unlikely that they come. And you get a lot of carnage in the market.
But right now, that's not what we're seeing. So, 2024 is a workout year, but it's a workout year with equity capital being very discriminatory as it relates to what kind of deals it'll do. It'll sit there and say, I'm waiting for that perfect return, and it will be a year where people can no longer wait to refinance. Multifamily refinancing volumes go up 73% between 2023 and 2024. All the people who sat around in 2023 and said, I'm just going to wait. I'm going to wait. That time happens in 2024. So they will either refi or sell in ‘24. And that's going to create a lot of deal flow and generate a lot of opportunities for fresh equity and fresh debt to step into the market and be deployed.
Danny Gabriel: Well, I haven't done a good job of managing our time. Susan's telling me we need to wrap things up. I think I could do this for hours with you. I want to say, Willy, I've listened to a lot of your podcasts, almost all of your podcasts. A lot of people have. They've been awesome. I appreciate as a friend all the things you've done for me and our industry. And I know a lot of people appreciate everything that you do, and we all hope that you don't run for office and that you are here for another 30 years. I've watched how you take care of your body, and how you live. And so I think it's possible. And I just want to wish you and everybody listening just a great holiday, whatever you're celebrating.
I think 2024 is going to be an awesome year. I think we're going to put all this B.S. behind us and there's going to be a lot of positivity in 2024. So, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add.
Willy Walker: I do. I have a couple of things. First of all, Danny, thank you. I put you on the spot to do this. And I greatly appreciate you taking the time to not only read through the multitude of questions, but to pick ones that allowed the two of us to engage on some really important issues. So thank you very much.
Second, I have dodged this bullet for three years, and I finally took it right between the eyes. I hope those who listened in today found it to be in some ways worthwhile and interesting.
Third is it's a real honor for me to have the team that I work with at the Walker Webcast that puts this together every single week and to have incredible guests come on to talk about things that I normally wouldn't be able to talk about. And so thank you to everyone on the W&D team who makes the Walker Webcast, what it is.
I went down to do a thing in Vegas, Danny, last year and the introduction for me was to interview the head of MGM Grand for Walker Webcast, as well as for the Mortgage Bankers Association Convention. They said Willy Walker, CEO of Walker & Dunlop but the real reason we have him here is the Walker Webcast. And then it was this long bio of all these things about the Walker Webcast. I got on stage, and I said, Let's just be really clear. The only reason I'm here and who paid for my flight here is Walker & Dunlop, not the Walker Webcast. As much as that might be why you have me in this seat today, let's be really clear that the platform that I happen to run is what pays for all this stuff. So I'm obviously extremely thankful to everyone at W&D that we have a company that allows for me to do this on a weekly basis and bring in the ideas that we get to share with so many, many people.
Final thing is, you said, Danny, happy holidays to everyone. This has been a challenging year for many and it's been a challenging year in the markets, but it's also been a challenging year the suicide rate in the United States hit an all-time high in 2023, folks. More people took their own lives in the United States in 2023 than ever before. That is a sad statement about the mental health of our country. And so as we talk about, oh, interest rates are up, inflation is pinching, going to the grocery store, all that kind of stuff. Let's be really clear about the fact that there are people who have real problems and are really suffering. And let's just keep them in mind and try to help them at this time of year, where those people who hopefully are listening have the ability to help others do that random act of kindness today, help someone just a little bit more than you typically would and watch their reaction. It's a really good feeling to give back.
So, Danny, thank you. Happy holidays to everyone. We will see you back with the Walker Webcast first thing in the New Year. And have a great one, Danny.
Danny Gabriel: You, too. Thanks, everybody.
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