The Secrets Behind Becoming a Trusted Voice in Real Estate Media

Aviva (00:00)
This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Mr. Mitch Roschelle. Mitch, thank you for being on the show today.

Mitch Roschelle (00:08)
Looking forward to our discussion.

Aviva (00:11)
I'm really looking forward to this. For all you listeners, this is a really exciting episode as Mitch and I were discussing how we connected. Initially was because I was watching him on TV and the opportunity that the internet brings us when it comes to connecting with other real estate professionals, any type of professionals is profound. So

Go out and try to get ahold of your heroes. With over 37 years at PWC, Mitch developed a deep expertise in real estate and business strategy, becoming a trusted voice in the industry. Now as the founder of MacroTrend Advisors, he shares his insights as a media commentator, public speaker, and co-host of the NOPO podcast.

Mitch Roschelle (00:41)
Ha

Aviva (01:06)
You have likely seen Mitch on Fox Business, Bloomberg, News Nation, and the like, breaking down key trends that shape our markets. Mitch, it is great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Mitch Roschelle (01:19)
I'm glad to be here and I'm really glad that Al Gore invented the internet because if it wasn't for him, you would have never found me. you know, it works. It totally works. I encourage people to use the internet more often.

Aviva (01:31)
I thought it was.

I thought it was Benjamin Franklin, but evidently it was Gore. Mitch, can you start by telling the listeners who you are, what you do, and how we got here today?

Mitch Roschelle (01:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true

Sure. I'll start with what I'm doing now and kind of work backwards. Why don't we do that? That's probably more fun. It reminds me of that famous Seinfeld episode, the backwards episode. So I'm currently for the last three years, the chief strategy officer of a boutique private equity firm called Madison Ventures Plus. And we'll talk more about what we do at Madison Ventures Plus. Same time you mentioned MacroSense Advisors, have a boutique.

financial advisory firm that helps mostly family offices with their investment strategy focused on real estate. And I would say that the average investor in America that has five million or more dollars of investable assets is probably under invested in alternative investments in general, real estate being the most attainable alternative investment. Prior to my retirement in 2020,

I was one of the founders of PwC's real estate advisory practice, which almost four decades there. Throughout, I started actually right before the savings and loan crisis. Yes, I'm that old. So I've seen booms. There was a boom prior to the savings and loan crisis. There was a bust as a result of the savings and loan crisis. And I've seen multiple cycles throughout my career.

So I think I have some perspective. It probably makes me a incredibly cautious investor slash advisor because I know what bad looks like. And in Excel, you can make everything look good. But in the reality, bad. But one last thing I'll say about my background is that there's one thing I learned in my entire career at DrillSafe is that being a landlord is a really crappy job.

Aviva (03:30)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (03:45)
So you got to figure out how to make real estate profitable for you. Because just the notion of being a landlord, you got to get paid for it. Phone calls in the middle of the night, whether you're a commercial real estate landlord or an apartment landlord, doesn't matter. Nothing goes wrong during business hours. So if you're going to dabble in real estate in any way, large or small, you have to figure out how to make it profitable.

because you gotta get compensated for the brain damage.

Aviva (04:20)
We have a lot of owners who listen to this podcast, so I'm sure that resonates with them. You know, you've got a really impressive career in real estate. What attracted me to you is your career in media in real estate. And I'd love to hear how you started and literally worked your way to the top, being a top commentator in our industry on, like I said, Fox News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

Mitch Roschelle (04:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's actually kind of an interesting story and I don't get to tell it too often, so I'm glad you asked. When I was at PWC, we publish two things. One, we publish emerging trends in real estate, which many of your listeners, viewers are familiar with. It's probably the most widely distributed piece of thought leadership in the real estate industry. And I've had the honor of being the publisher, co-publisher of that for

decades and as a result of that there was a media cycle so I got some exposure for the media. The other thing we published was something called the PwC real estate investor survey which is a survey that comes out four times a year that's very very popular with appraisers and assessors and people that need cap rate and stuff like that. I just did a commercial for PwC so hopefully they send me that Christmas card this year. But in any event and we did a

Aviva (05:43)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (05:47)
a media rollout in conjunction with that. is like 15 years ago or so. And so I was on talking about, and generally I've found that the media likes talking about forecasts at the end of the year. Like there's something about the end of the year that gets viewers wanting to hear about the next year. So I don't remember what year it was, but 15 years of doing math, like, you know, 2011 or something like that.

we issued a forecast and people wanted to talk about that. So I did that and it was good. It was the first time I'd been on television and it was what it was. And then I don't know how it happened, but we did something after that and I got booked again. And in my segment, I was talking about how we're starting to see an uptick in demand for real estate, meaning tenant demand for real estate. And I got into a back and forth with an anchor on Fox Business.

And she was saying, know, job growth isn't white collar jobs. It's all just people working in McDonald's and the job numbers or whatever. And there isn't demand for office buildings. And I said, you know what? Not everybody works on Sixth Avenue in New York City and there are tilt up office buildings throughout America that now that the mortgage business is starting to come back, there's lawyers that are title companies. Like think about the knock down effect from the global financial crisis. So I had this back and forth with the anchor.

Aviva (06:50)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (07:12)
And at the end of the segment, and this is like a little lesson to anybody who wants to do television. At the end of the segment, the anchor said, that was a really great conversation. We've got to go, but come back soon. Well, a good friend of mine was the next, coincidentally, was the next guest up and he Blackberry messages me. That's how long ago it was. He says, when are you going to be on again? I'm sorry. have no idea. goes, go and book yourself because, you know, they want you back. And I said, what are you talking about? And he she said, come back soon. I'm like,

She was just being polite. And he goes, no, dude, that's code for literally you're going to come back again. said, John, what the hell are you talking about? So I went to my PR firm and I said, I think they want me back. And he goes, no, they're just being polite. I said, not according to my friend John. says, that's code. Anyway, long story short, my PR firm that I worked with reached out and they said, what else can Mitch talk about? And so I literally looked at the economic calendar on Bloomberg for like what was coming out in the next two weeks. And I picked a whole bunch of things.

Aviva (07:43)
You

Hmm.

Mitch Roschelle (08:11)
jobs on Friday, retail sales, whatever, small business sentiment. And they circled retail sales and they said, can you come in and talk about retail sales? Well, that created a whole thing in my old firm because I wasn't the retail expert, I was the real estate expert. So I got some talking points from that person. But I wrote my notes and sent them to the producer on a Tuesday. My segment was on a Thursday. Back in those days, I sent notes two days in advance to the producers. In any event,

I predicted exactly what happened. I said that because the housing market was starting to come back, it's going to create demand and the jobs report is going to reflect the fact that home improvement retailers are going to start seeing uptake in furniture and stuff like that. That's exactly what was in the report. So the anchor literally waved my notes and said, this dude predicted this two days ago. And from there, they started booking me to talk about a whole bunch of stuff.

So here's my advice. If you go want to go on television and be a subject matter expert on something that this narrow, okay, then your place to talk about it is industry specific places, podcasts like yours, okay? Because television wants to talk about what's in the news. They do not want to talk about what you want to talk about. It's a news program, people. So if you can't talk about what's in the news that day,

then you're of absolutely no use to television because they need to put voices to something that's a news story. And I kind of mastered the art of being, you know, having a point of view on virtually everything that's going on in the news cycle. That led to me on Fox Business, I'm being on Mornings with Maria. So for five years, I co-hosted with Maria every Monday. And I do a fair amount of television still.

Aviva (09:54)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (10:05)
I'm pretty selective about what I do. just like kind of doing it with friends on the air because it's more fun. And, you know, when I get random inquiries, would you come on this when you come on that? I generally pass it on to somebody else if it's not something that makes sense to me. I, but I always say yes to podcasters, honestly, because you mentioned the intro, the NOPO podcast, which we currently have on hiatus, but we're actually in the midst of bringing it back.

But I love the podcast format because it's truly a conversation. television is when you have a producer in your screen, like your producer hasn't once said to me in my year, wrap it up. Right. But in television, like you have to figure out how to answer a complicated question in 30 seconds. And I'll say one last thing about, because I know people are listening and this is a question that I get a lot.

The late Roger Ailes once said when I was in his presence, not like I was meeting with Roger when I was in presence, know your audience. And that really stuck with me. So I spent time with folks at Fox in sales and marketing. I don't think too many guests ever reached out to people with marketing and sales and never. And I said, tell me exactly who's listening, who's watching. Like I need to know.

And I geared my point of view to them. If you look at CNBC and Bloomberg, they have a much different audience than Fox Business has. Here's the biggest difference between Fox Business, Bloomberg, and CNBC. The people who watch and listen to Fox Business have the sound on. The people who watch Bloomberg and CNBC in particular have the sound off. So they're looking at the ticker. They're looking at the chyron. They're not listening to the guests.

Aviva (11:57)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (12:02)
and Fox Business, people are listening to me. I have people when I go on the air who tweet at me about something specific that I said on the air. There's nothing to me more flattering than somebody hearing something you said. I don't care if you agree with it or disagree with it. I actually prefer you disagree with it. But that's meaningful, right? And that's why I like podcasts. And that's why I like going on platforms where I know the hosts and I know the audience more importantly, because there's a connection.

And so that's a little bit of my journey in media, but I guarantee there are folks in the real estate industry who are listening and viewing and want to get involved with media. But my best advice is, know, find a PR firm that will tell you the truth. That's a hard thing to do. And then figure out where you could potentially get involved with media, but podcasts are a great place to start and kind of find your voice.

Aviva (13:03)
fascinating and we appreciate you accepting you know I think humans inherently are so focused on you know and this is basic psychology their own desire their own best interest that we often forget in specifically in the media or any type of

Mitch Roschelle (13:06)
Yeah.

Aviva (13:25)
you know, content that we create that you're right. It's not about you. It's about the listener. And if the listener isn't intrigued, don't have, you don't have a pedal to, you know, you have nothing. So it's very, very, it makes a lot of sense and it's really impressive.

Mitch Roschelle (13:45)
You know what I find, you know, I do a lot of public speaking still. did a ton of it in my past life. I would find talking from a series of slides to be stressful, not intimidating, but stressful. Like was the stuff on the slide going to resonate with the audience? I found doing Q and a with an audience to be totally unstressful. The average.

public speaker would say the direct opposite, right? They would want to speak from their notes because they would find comfort in that. I didn't find comfort in speaking from my notes. In fact, I never use notes. I just would know what was on the slide and would talk to it. But to me, I found, always found Q &A to be way less stressful and at times way less intimidating with a large audience that you don't know.

because I knew I was talking to them about what they wanted to talk about. We once had Mark Zandi who run, I think he started Moody's analytics or Moody's economics before I think he sold them as just the Moody's. He's a big Democrat economic strategist. And I have a lot of respect for Mark, I always agree with him, but I love respect for him. But Mark would do his public speaking gig.

and have a whole bunch of slides, like 50 slides, start the speaking gig by saying, what do you want to talk about? And then like, almost like it was like he was, owes the mental edge, owes Perlman. Like the dude had everything that people wanted to talk about in his slides. And cause he was so good at it, right? Because he knew what people in audiences wanted to talk about. But how powerful was that, that he could listen to an audience so many times.

Aviva (15:25)
No.

Mitch Roschelle (15:39)
know what was on their minds and deliver to them what they wanted. To me, that's what you should do as a broadcaster. You should do as a guest, like talk to the audience about what they want to talk about because they're viewing, they're giving you their time, whether it's to listen to your podcast or whatever. When we had our podcast,

literally no po to the non-political news. We literally were like Seinfeld. We had like, we talked about anything. There was a show about nothing. We found ourselves falling into this rabbit hole, me and my co-hosts, John, we fell into this rabbit hole talking about stuff in Westchester County, New York where we both grew up. I lived in Florida, he lives in Connecticut, but like we would talk about it. We got, we picked up a guest.

that has a podcast and is a TikToker that all he does is talk about Westchester County, New York. His podcast is called the 914 Collective. That's the area code in Westchester County. He has millions of viewers. recorded our single most viewed listen to episode was the last one we did. We dropped the mic after it because all we were doing was talking about restaurants and pizzerias and restaurants. Because why? Because that's what the audience wanted to talk about.

We abandoned this whole audience that we had and we grew this audience of people that were talking about like what, that wants to talk about what they wanted to talk about. So I think that that's the most important thing to anybody who speaks or is on the air or whatever. Like give them what they want or don't bother. Right. You talk about what you want to talk about and not what they want to talk about. And the same thing goes for television. If you're a guest,

and you come on with your stupid ass pre-plan talking points and that's not what the host wants to talk about, the last time you're going to be on public.

Aviva (17:40)
You know, this is a decent segue into my next question. You know, I turn on the TV and I love finance. love learning about all types of investments. 95 % of the time when I turn on the TV, it's about the stock market. 5 % of the time, it's about commercial real estate. Real estate, commercial real estate. I'm a third generation commercial real estate.

Mitch Roschelle (18:02)
Yes.

Aviva (18:09)
lover. So it's in my blood and it's what I'm always looking for. But commercial real estate is so inherently necessary for our country, our world, et cetera. Why is it that the information that we get from the major media is, it's so limited overall.

Mitch Roschelle (18:33)
You know, I have this general rule when I do stuff like this. I never respond to somebody who asks me a question with the expression, that's a really good question. Because what that says, if you're paying attention, is that everything else you said was a stupid question. But I got to be honest with you, that is a really good question. And I have an answer. It's not sexy, right? And...

It's a total necessity. The studio is in an office building. Why aren't we talking about it? Commercial real estate only gets attention when it's controversial. Okay. When there's massive vacancies. I used to do Bloomberg a lot and I used to do Bloomberg Surveillance, which Tom Keene is the host of. He's like an icon in broadcast.

Aviva (19:07)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (19:31)
business broadcast journalism. And Tom used to always say this to me, like when I would come on like once a month to talk about housing in conjunction with the housing starts release, Tom would say like, we get such phenomenal, this is not about me, this is about Tom. We get phenomenal feedback associated with your appearances. Like you need to come on more. was like, dude, tell your producers, like the book being one. But everybody wants to talk about it, okay?

Aviva (19:55)
Yeah

Mitch Roschelle (20:01)
But the people who put television on the air don't do it because it's not sexy. I remember when the warehouse industry, when industrial, all of a sudden came into light. And people were realizing that if you're, if you're an e-commerce shopper, you need to get the goods to your house, which means the goods came from the warehouse. everybody figured out we don't have enough warehouse. Okay. Speaking of stocks, I don't know where Prologis' stock was, but it's probably here and it's up to here now.

Right? I had Hamid Moghadam, I think that was the name of the CEO of Prologis on a panel at a ULI event. After the event was over, people rushed to the stage to like talk to panelists. There was a long line to talk to him and the other dude who had like $5 billion of assets on the management, nobody wanted to talk to him. Okay? And I did a segment with, on CNBC when I used to do CNBC.

And I said to Diane Olick, who's still there real estate reporter at CNT, I said, everybody's gonna start talking about industrial, but it's the least sexy component of real estate. There's nothing sexy about a warehouse, okay? Nothing. An office building's cool, right? A big apartment building's cool. A shopping center, Mall of America, cool, okay? Warehouses, not cool, right? But.

Aviva (21:22)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (21:25)
The fact of the matter is that, know, investors should care less what the thing looked like. But it really goes to the sex appeal. know, blood and guts make the headlines of newspapers. If it bleeds, it bleeds. that is the story about the media. So the media doesn't care about something that's just not sexy. The housing market will get attention

because everybody identifies with housing, right? Because we all live or rent someplace, okay? Even if sleep on your parents' couch, like they own the home, or you aspire to have one. So I've realized if you want to get more airtime on television and talk about housing or talk about other stuff, and I talk about what's in the news cycle, no one wants, and every commercial real estate person who's on broadcast TV has some PR firm,

that's knocking on a booker's doors to get on the air. And they'll get their segment and then like six months later, they'll get on again. It's just not something that's terribly sexy. So it doesn't get on the air. It's unfortunate. And by the way, real estate, you are alternatives in general, alternative investments should be 20 % of your basket of investments, okay?

Real estate is the most attainable element of alternative investments.

They don't do it. It makes no sense.

Aviva (23:05)
I resonate with that. have a TikTok page. I have a million followers. And at first it was commercial, commercial, commercial. And I then posted one post about residential real estate and I got 450,000 followers overnight.

Mitch Roschelle (23:09)
Yeah. Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Aviva (23:28)
And I mean, obviously it makes sense, Residential pertains to a greater population. We're pretty niche in the world of commercial real estate, but it goes back to what you were saying in the beginning. It's what the audience wants. It's not what best suits you or best suits your.

Mitch Roschelle (23:31)
Right.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's

not, again, it's not about what I want to talk about. It's what they want to hear. And I'll get patriotic about it. I think the single, the single most important thing to families over time is the pursuit of the American dream. And I was going to write a book on it and like,

Literally, I wasn't convinced that there was a big enough audience for it. Same topic we've been talking about. I don't need to rehash it in the form of, know, print media or a book. But I wasn't going to spend a year and a half of my life writing a book that no one was going to read. Like talking about a tree falling in the forest. But the pursuit of the American dream is something, right? And that's why you talk about housing, people will listen. Look at, look at.

Aviva (24:30)
you

Mitch Roschelle (24:42)
what people do when they want to speculate in real estate, they don't buy a five store strip center. They don't buy a small warehouse building someplace. They don't buy a suburban office building. Maybe the entry price is too high for those elements. What do they buy? They buy a house, they fix it up and they flip it. So real estate investment to an entrepreneur

who wants to create wealth through real estate buys houses and flips them. And I think that's the reason. think commercial real estate is for institutional players and it's not for mom and pops. And even if you look at one of the mom and pop businesses that we're involved with is manufacturing housing properties. Okay. And you talk about a mom and a total mom and pop business, but again, it's housing.

Aviva (25:17)
Hmm.

Mitch Roschelle (25:40)
It's not a commercial real estate. And I think that it's probably the reason like, you know, a stock can be bought by BlackRock, the largest investor in the world, or you can buy a two cent fractional interest in the stock on Robinhood. Right? We've totally democratized stock investing. We haven't democratized bond investing. And how much time do people spend on the air talking about bonds? Very little.

Aviva (26:08)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (26:10)
Very little, okay? Way more. By the way, way more important than stock market investing in many respects, but we don't talk about it. We talk about things that people, again, and that's the issue. So what do you have? You have programs like yours that you scratch the itch of people who want to talk about it. And I think it's better product at the end of the day because you and your peers are to ask intelligence-informed...

questions of guests, know, the difference between cap rates and interest rates. That's something that only people who are speaking our language are going to care about and understand. There's no anchor on television that's going to ask the right question about cap rates and interest rates. I would say you and I have points of view, your other guests have a point of view, but like there's not an anchor on Fox Business that's going to put the word cap rate into a question.

Aviva (27:08)
That's interesting.

Out of curiosity, how has your involvement in media, specifically such a front-facing medium, impacted your real estate, your business?

Mitch Roschelle (27:24)
You know, it's really hard to quantify I would say this in Well, first of all, I spend most of my broadcast time on Fox Okay, so those three letters to some are four letters not to it Okay, so I have found that in some audiences. It's a credibility killer But I've gotten to this stage in life, you know in my 60s that I don't care. I just you know

I'm not doing something because it's politically correct. I'm doing something that I like to do and that gives me joy, like whatever. I don't care. So I would say in some circles, it was a negative. Okay, it is what it is. But moreover, I think in the circles where it's not a negative, it's a positive. So it's a credibility booster, right? It's like old days, putting an ad in Yellow Pages. Other than somebody calling

4A is plumbing in your phone rank because you were the first in the yellow pages of Plumber. You don't know what business you got because you had an ad in the yellow pages, but if you didn't have an ad in the yellow pages, you weren't a real business. But I have found that I'm in meetings and people know who I am because they see it. It just helps. When you're raising capital, it helps. I can't put a dollar amount on it. I can't say what business I got.

Aviva (28:23)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (28:50)
because have I signed up limited partners because they knew who I was from television? 100%. Like, okay. But like from a lead generating perspective. But I think you have bona fides that are sort of inherent with the fact that you're a regular guest on television. People say the network must know something that we don't know. That's why they have them on all the time. And it matters.

And I'll tell you, when I talk to people who are potential investors or what happened, or sellers or whatever, or buyers, whatever case may be, and they do recognize me from television, the last thing they want to engage me on is real estate. Don't talk about it. Like before the election, they want to talk about before the election. I'll go to, there's a lender investor that we do business with and I'll do a call with them.

on something like we have a specific call. We're talking about like a bridge loan on a project. And there's two other people on the call and I'll say, okay, and they'll introduce them. And I was like, they're only gonna be on for a few minutes, but they wanna ask you about, you know, like, so I think it matters, right? And again, not why I do it. And, you know, we can talk about it at the end. I know it your final question as you told me, but like, it's not why I do it, but it helps.

Aviva (30:17)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (30:18)
and you know, what I don't like on television is when people mention the name of their firm over and over again, where they have the banner behind them with the name of the firm a hundred times, like I'm not doing it for that. you know, that's not, that's not the reason. but I think you have not instant credibility, but you have enhanced credibility.

when you're a familiar face or voice in the media. And so it's definitely a plus, it's certainly not a minus. But let me tell you, there's been places where it's a minus when you're on Fox and somebody tags you with that. But I can't. I don't know that I want to do business with somebody that's going to not want to do business with me because I vote a certain way or I have a certain thing. Is that really somebody you want to do business with? That's pretty, seems pretty capricious.

Aviva (30:52)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (31:18)
investing and relationship building should not be about your political ideology.

Aviva (31:26)
Yeah, I don't know. Don't know why you'd cut your own throat, you know, it's business. Like you said, it's not politics like your podcast. Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (31:29)
Yeah, exactly.

And it's not personal either, right?

Aviva (31:40)
When from your time when you started commentating about commercial real estate in the media, it must have changed significantly since then with social media, like you said, these podcasts formats. Where do you see it going ultimately?

Mitch Roschelle (31:46)
We'll stay.

Let me just refine the question. Where do I see media going?

Aviva (32:04)
Media

and its intersection with real estate.

Mitch Roschelle (32:10)
There's gonna come a point where cable news, because all of the business shows are on cable, okay? There's gonna come a point where those programs completely intersect with social media, right? They're not even close, okay? So...

Cable News is trying to figure out subscription versus broadcast. They're all spending a lot of money on subscription-based product. CNN failed, but CNN Plus, that never even happened. Fox has Fox Nation, which is, I think, getting some traction. But they're trying to figure that out. They're trying to figure out their streaming future.

And then simultaneously, there's the social media thing. All of the on-air talent, and I'm giving them the foundation for it, right? But all of the on-air talent have some sort of a social media presence. They're relying very heavily on Gen Z producers to kind of help with that. But it's not content specific as much as it's behind the scenes, because people just demand for behind the scenes.

I think the true intersection is allowing people to curate and pick and choose what they want. I'm on a platform called CenterClip where I'm one of the founding shareholders and a contributor where we drop op-eds that are less than five minutes late. At five minutes you get cut off, okay? And they're on a specific topic. We have a topic of the day. We have a relationship with two different...

platforms where you can access our content, one's behind a paywall, one's in front of a paywall. But I'm finding that more and more people like my kids age, sure rate their own feeds. And I think there's going to come a point where you're going to be able to curate your cable news and go in and get a daily feed of like an hour's worth of from certain guests based upon hashtags of things that they said. Okay.

Aviva (34:27)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (34:28)
And you'll be able, so they'll have data on the most frequently accessed hashtags. Now, in business, they're going to have to narrow those down because in news, it's going to be drone. Drone would be the word of the last three days. OK, no question about it. What's going on with those drones? What's going on with drones? You have the Daniel Penny case. You have Biden's pardons. I'm trying to think of what's in the news.

Aviva (34:52)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (34:58)
Trump's appointees Army Navy like what are the stories of the last so that's gonna happen in news Israel Russia Ukraine like that's gonna be pervasive hashtags, but in business it could be Tesla could be Nvidia it could be Whatever earnings could be CPI could be jobs like all those things, but if they the mistake would be

Aviva (35:00)
Yeah.

Mitch Roschelle (35:28)
loading up on those and not sprinkling in a lot of other stuff, right? That's all turkey and not mashed potatoes, right? Or not stuffing or not gravy. And I think that they're gonna find when they get to that point that TikTok or Instagram Reels are playing a meaningful role in how consumers get their product.

YouTube they play in that space a little bit because they'll in the metadata there'll be stuff but I think Cable News is gonna slowly figure out that their audience is consuming their content my kids send me clips from Fox News that they better repackage by somebody else the Fox isn't getting a dime that doesn't have an ad on it. Okay of something somebody said on Fox like

Aviva (36:18)
Wow.

Hmm.

Mitch Roschelle (36:23)
Sometimes they're saying, you know this dude? But sometimes it's like content that my kids are interested in what the content is. So I think that's where real estate and other verticals are going to have their due. Right now, no way real estate is going to push Bitcoin out of the hashtag cycle. Bitcoin's what, 107 or something like that today? Forget about it. No one's gonna care about real estate. But there's gotta be things that...

There's got to be an element of the audience that put in their top 10 hashtags real estate. And when they do, that's when real estate will blossom. And not just real estate, like other commodities or other subcategories, private equity, whatever it is. But I think that that's what the future looks like. I don't know when that's going to happen, but that's what the future looks like.

Aviva (36:58)
Yeah.

Well, hopefully we'll look back on this in 20 years and you'll be right. But I do think you are right. It's so interesting how we're tailoring what we consume to the specific niches that we're interested in. My last question for you, Mr. Roschelle, what makes you happy with what you do every day in real estate?

Mitch Roschelle (37:34)
Yep.

Final question.

You know, so I'm a partner in a private equity firm. are Uber focused on workforce housing. And I don't mean, I don't mean affordable housing where HUD is involved. This is market rate housing, but we try to build better, faster and cheaper so we can pass that savings along to the customer. know that sounds ... but that's what we're doing. Okay. I used to say in professional services that there were three things you could do good, fast and cheap, and you can only have two of them.

Aviva (37:56)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (38:17)
I think we built a mouse trap where we can deliver good, fast, and cheap. And watching that happen, I remember when I met my first real estate developer, was probably in the workout days, I saw these human beings of tremendous vision. I was with Steven Ross from Relating Companies. I was in his office and he was showing me Hudson Yards in his office, the schematic of it. Hudson Yards was like nothing, okay?

Aviva (38:45)
Hmm

Mitch Roschelle (38:45)
The fact that Stephen Ross envisioned that with others and made it happen, like that's phenomenal. Being in that world now, being a principal in real estate development, but focused on something that we as a country really need, we have a supply problem with real estate. And governments never gonna fix that problem. They're just too stupid to fix it. So we're finding a way to fix it. To me, while it's frustrating, dealing with the capital market.

dealing with uncertainty, dealing with lender, all that stuff is frustrating. Dealing with sellers, all of the pieces of the puzzle are frustrating, but the goal, the mission is definitely exhilarating. I so much so that I've pulled one of my kids into the business who's following me nonstop right now. So I think that that's the thing. And you got to look past the frustration to the end goal and knowing that we're doing it Los Angeles.

giving people access to homes and to rent in neighborhoods that they wouldn't have gotten access to at that price. To me, that's the thing that is really, puts a smile on my face in real estate. The hardest part is looking past all of the things that are pop-ups in the road, right? And the big picture, you know, that's the thing that's exciting, gets me out of bed in the morning.

And I'm a lot happier when I'm in Florida. I have a home in New York too. Not happy when I'm in New York. But I'm in Florida and you got sunshine and palm trees behind you. You can't help but smile.

Aviva (40:20)
Yeah

I'm going to tie this back to what you said in the beginning about how being a, you know, there are stigmas behind being a landlord, being a developer, and generally they're not good stigmas. But the reality is as a landlord or as a developer, you can help people. And when you talk about building workforce housing, your help, it's like you said, not all developers are evil, right?

We need developers, we need landlords, and it's fascinating and I hope you do nothing but create more and more workforce housing nationwide.

Mitch Roschelle (41:11)
Yeah, well, we're doing it in California. We're doing it in Florida. I'll do a 30 second plug. We have a company in California with a long name. It's called Angeles Madison Residential. We have a company based in Florida called Modrn Living. It's M-O-D-R-N. It's spelled that way. All of it's Googleable. Our company is called Madison Ventures Plus. That's our sponsor entity. And what we do is we don't raise funds.

we actually build companies. The reason why it's called Madison Ventures is we use the venture capital model. We're actually trying to build a company, two companies in this case, that are like sustainable companies that will be a place that investors can invest in a company as opposed to just an ideal. And it's a unique operating model. And we also have a company called M2 Communities that's in the MH space. also, by the way,

Aviva (41:55)
Hmph.

Mitch Roschelle (42:07)
Manufactured housing maybe kind of lower on the food chain people kind of live someplace and little nugget for your audience for Conversation for another time the average length of time that somebody lives in a MH Park where they own their own Home not trailer their own home and they rent the land where the land rental business 13 years. Okay people got to live someplace. Okay, and I think that that's another thing so

Madison Ventures +, that's the place to find us. It's plus with a plus sign, but it's PLUS on Google. And you can read up on all of our portfolio companies there. And thanks for having me. I really appreciate the time and the conversation.

Aviva (42:52)
Mr. Roschelle, the feeling is mutual. We really appreciate your time, expertise, et cetera. So thank you for being on the show today and for everybody listening. We'll see you next week.