Self-Storage Success in So Cal with Adrian Berger

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: Self-Storage Success in SoCal with Adrian Berger Guest: Adrian Berger — Managing Director of Acquisitions, Cypress Equity Investments (CEI) Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Published: October 24, 2025 (live) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUhk_xTvdls Key topics: CEI background (25 years, LA multifamily + affordable housing), pivoting the storage platform, SoCal barriers to entry and moratoriums, storage tailwinds thesis, Santa Monica office-to-storage scrape-and-rebuild (7+ cap going in), Glendale / Santa Clarita / North Hollywood pipeline, first acquisition (Sun Valley, ~20K NRSF), 90/10 institutional JV structure, underwriting (mid-to-high-7s untrended yield on cost, high-teens LP IRR), California entitlements, Surplus Land Act mixed-use plays, LA housing headlines vs. micro-market reality, concessions in downtown LA vs. Santa Monica, what LA needs to thrive. Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from YouTube captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Welcome to the Self-Storage Report. I'm your host, Chris Berg. Joining us today: managing director of acquisitions at Cypress Equity Investments, Adrian Berger. I've had a great opportunity to see him speak a couple of times now in Beverly Hills and LA. So Adrian, great to have you. Welcome to the show. Adrian Berger: Thanks, Chris, for having me. Great to be here. Chris Berg: So let's give people some background on you real quick, just so they can realize, hey, this guy's got an extensive resume — and then we'll dive into the meat of our conversation. Adrian Berger: Sure. I grew up in Australia. My family was in real estate, and I got into the business a little bit later in life. I was living overseas in Asia — I was living in Hong Kong, working for an investment property company there, and with that company I moved to the US. That company was very focused on condos and international real estate. I spent some time doing that in New York — I moved to New York at the end of '08, a very tough time. I was able to work my way through that first year, and then I ended up pivoting and going to work for a broker in the city, focusing on commercial real estate, doing mainly retail investment sales. I was in that business, plus some consulting, for about six or seven years before I moved to Los Angeles around 2015 and started working at Cypress Equity Investments. CEI has been around for 25 years — predominantly a housing-focused company historically, both doing investments (buying existing apartment buildings in LA) and doing large-scale, institutional, ground-up Class A developments. We also have a very strong affordable housing business. And we got into the self-storage business about seven years ago — built a couple of projects locally — and it's an area of our company that we really want to grow. I've been fortunate to live in five cities outside of Australia, and I've worked across acquisitions, business development, and a little bit of asset management. My role day-to-day is really to find deals, work with new equity and capital partners, and create joint ventures and things like that. Chris Berg: So let's get into the self-storage piece. You guys have an incredible portfolio across these different asset classes, and what's been fun to watch is watching you speak at these different events. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of the people in LA are like, "Man, office in a moment like this..." — you can just feel the tension — and then you sneak in, like, "Yeah, we're doing this self-storage thing, and the numbers are kind of working." So your take on that — and then what are you seeing right now in SoCal storage? Adrian Berger: Yeah, I think it's interesting. We've been doing Class A multifamily development for more than 15 years, so everybody kind of knows us for that — especially locally in LA, where we've built 3,000 units. But we have been very active in the self-storage business; we just haven't really been that vocal about it. What we decided to do a couple of years ago, when we were looking at what was changing in the marketplace — market-rate development for multifamily was kind of on pause and wasn't working — was to look at our other business lines and think: what do we think has good tailwinds? What do we think has high barriers to entry? And how can we take our team — we have a very strong in-house development and construction management team — and utilize it for a tangential asset class that we think has a lot of legs? Historically we'd been doing one or two deals here and there on the storage side, but we decided to really rip the platform down to its roots and start from scratch, identifying ways we could grow the business. We took a very sharpshooter approach, the same way we did on the land side in LA, and spent a lot of time understanding different markets, understanding rent dynamics, demand dynamics. And because of the changes in the macroeconomic factors — interest rates, cap rates, things like that — we felt like coming in now and tying up land, or buying land, to do storage development at a reset set of metrics made sense long-term. What we like about the dynamic in Southern California — which is the only place we're developing right now — is that there's a very high barrier to entry. A lot of the cities in Southern California don't want new storage; some of them have moratoriums on the use. That naturally creates a supply-demand imbalance and limits the amount of supply, and I think that's really interesting. I also think there's a lot of demand — in storage, everyone always talks about demand being such a key driver — so that's been a critical element as well. So we feel pretty good about the idea of being able to execute: tying up land in the right locations, getting it through entitlements — which we're very good at — and then having this demand behind us, as well as hitting metrics we think we can get capital for. That was the thinking around really growing this business, and we've had a lot of success in the last 18 months in transacting. Chris Berg: I want to get to your successes in a minute. First, though, let's talk about the tailwinds in your thesis. As you look over the landscape — why do you think there are strong tailwinds behind storage? Adrian Berger: I still think the big driver for storage is, like I just said, the barrier to entry that prevents large amounts of supply coming to the market. It's not like that everywhere — and I don't like generalizing in our industry, even though we all try to generalize. There are pockets in Southern California, specifically, that have too much supply, and there are pockets that don't. We're trying to focus on the places that don't have a lot of supply, but where, in the greater neighborhood, there is single-family home growth, there's household formation, there are larger rental pools, there is still pent-up demand for multifamily housing, there's good job growth — sort of secure, sticky neighborhoods. There are a lot of headlines around people leaving California, but there are also a lot of people coming back to California, and I don't think all those statistics are created equal. You've got to really get into the nitty-gritty. Real estate is a very localized business: what might work in Santa Monica doesn't work in West LA, even though they're next to each other. So we take a very granular approach to understanding the places we're targeting, and we stay very disciplined. Part of what allows us to feel good about the tailwinds is that LA is still a very big city. And Southern California, I think, has generally performed pretty well in terms of the broader economic landscape — the industries that are here, the jobs that are here. Chris Berg: Yeah. With that being said, I saw a really good article this morning — you've got the eVTOLs, I don't know if you're following some of these flying cars, but that industry is starting to grow some legs. Archer is now going to be the official eVTOL for the Olympics and the World Cup, which I think is going to be really strong. Aerospace is coming back. So as much as people beat up on SoCal, there are some industries starting to creep back in and show some life. You talked about successes over the last 18 months — what have those looked like for you? Adrian Berger: Yeah, we've really had a good run the last 18 months on the deal side. We were able to identify an opportunity in our backyard here in Santa Monica — an existing office/commercial building that was rented for a short-to-medium-term period, sitting on a land parcel that we knew could be a potential candidate for a storage site. Which is really tough in Santa Monica, because they don't really want it, and they're very much on the forefront of growing housing — and we've been very involved: we have 11 projects in entitlements on the multifamily side in Santa Monica, so we have a very good relationship. What made us feel good about it was the fallback position: if we weren't able to successfully get our entitlements, we'd own a strong cash-flowing asset. We bought that deal going in north of a seven cap. So we felt pretty good about that, and we felt we had a good chance of getting it entitled. That was a really great deal we closed in January. We also were able to tie up a couple of other deals — one in Glendale that we're moving forward on entitlements on, a couple of others in Santa Clarita and North Hollywood that we're under contract or close to under contract on. And then we just recently closed on a very small acquisition — our first-ever self-storage acquisition. A small deal: only 20,000 net rentable, about 200 units, in the Sun Valley submarket. But a very interesting opportunity, because it was a deal that had been on the market for a couple of years, we thought it was pretty mispriced, it went in and out of escrow a few times, and we were able to get it under contract at a really good price and perform. Our reputation as creative dealmakers who perform under contract allowed us to get a great deal there. We had a great investor we did the deal with, and a great manager that signed up with us. So we're really excited about that opportunity and about getting into the ownership and value-add side of the storage business. Chris Berg: Let's back up to the Santa Monica asset. Is that going to be a conversion, or were you going to keep some of the office and build on the land? And are you using third-party management, or managing it yourselves? Adrian Berger: The Santa Monica deal will be a scrape and rebuild. The good thing for us there is that we have a tenant in place providing a lot of positive cash flow right now. We're entitling that one, and we'll be ready to go probably in a year or so — right around the time that tenant's term is coming up. That was really what was so attractive about the opportunity. It was another one of those deals that ran in and out of escrow a few times; we were hanging around the hoop, the brokers knew us very well and said to the owners, "If you want to close, this is the group to close with." So that was great execution. And we always use third-party management — typically the larger institutional players. That's been our MO. Chris Berg: Nice. So talk about your capital stack — for example, with the Santa Monica project, how are you setting up the capital? Adrian Berger: We typically capitalize our deals with institutional joint-venture equity. That's been our company's history since its formation — we've done probably more than 120 joint ventures with institutional equity: a lot of it with insurance companies, private equity firms, some of the REITs. On the Santa Monica transaction, we closed with a private equity firm that really liked the deal and that we know very well. When we go vertical, we might go vertical with them, or we might roll forward with another provider — we'll see. But our typical structure is construction debt, and then a 90/10 with an institutional JV, where CEI is the 10% GP partner in the deal, and that GP is capitalized by our principal. The one in Sun Valley was much smaller — like a $6 million transaction — so we transacted that one with a family office on the LP side. That was our first transaction with them — someone I've known for a long time, and we got our first deal done together, which was really exciting. But we're always bringing in third-party LP equity. Chris Berg: Was the acquisition a 90/10 structure as well? Adrian Berger: It was 90/10, yeah. Chris Berg: Nice. And are you focused mainly on IRRs, yield on cost — what's the metric you're really using? Adrian Berger: Yield on cost is really important. I think it's different for development than it is for value-add. For development, we're very yield-on-cost and IRR focused — we're trying to get to a mid-to-high sevens untrended return on cost for a development deal in SoCal. Depending on the market and the deal structure, it might creep up or down a little bit. And we're trying to hit a high-teens IRR to the LP — that's the goal. On a value-add deal, it depends. The going-in yield is kind of irrelevant in many ways, because you might be going in at a sub-five cap but there's tremendous mark-to-market opportunity in the rent roll. Generally speaking, we're trying to stabilize those types of deals into the mid-sevens as well — seven to eight, depending on the submarket and the business plan — and targeting probably more of a mid-teens IRR. Chris Berg: I want you to talk about your experience with the entitlement process, because you and I were chasing a similar asset in Santa Clarita. I actually just got an email from a gentleman out of Texas — they've had an asset in Santa Clarita for a long time, and he commented it was the worst entitlement process ever. Being in California, I don't think a lot of people, even in the industry, can appreciate how you just bang your head against the wall. Since you've done a lot of these, and you're in Santa Monica, I'd love to hear some of your stories or experiences. Adrian Berger: Yeah — every city's different. Every city has its nuances. Sometimes you get lucky with the right planner, the right person in the city who's proactive and responsive and trying to help a process through — and sometimes you get the opposite of that. The tone each city has, from their city council down to their planning department, really helps you understand how challenging or easy it's going to be, because it's so localized. What Santa Monica wants to do versus LA versus Santa Clarita versus Glendale — all these cities are next door to each other. Greater LA is a funny landscape like that, with the number of little cities there are. We've always been really proud of the way we work with cities. We're always going in trying to do what the city is trying to do in terms of the code and the development standards. We're not in there trying to run roughshod over people and force our way in — it's more trying to build what the code and standards allow, and then getting a really good understanding of how they like to work: what the process looks like, what their issues tend to be. We ask a lot of questions about how they approved previous deals. A lot of this happens before we've even made an offer, before we go under contract — and obviously during due diligence. And then we have a great development team with a lot of experience. They understand how to ask the right questions, they work well with the city and collaborate rather than being adversarial. We also rely on consultants in the right markets where we need to. But it's a slog. A lot of these cities are understaffed. A lot of them haven't fully recovered from the COVID layoffs and furloughs. A lot of these cities aren't back in the office five days a week. So there are a lot of logistical dynamics you've got to deal with — and that's why we have great development people who want to bang their heads against that wall every single day. I like to bring the fish into the boat, and then hopefully the rest of the crew takes care of the blocking and tackling, right? But if you've got a good reputation and you're persistent, people know about that. A lot of people jump city to city — someone who was the planning director in one city ends up the planning director in another. So you've always got to be mindful of that. Chris Berg: Adrian's been really nice about it. I'll be more blunt: if you're going to take on California, just make sure you have very patient capital. It takes a very, very long time. If you're up for that game, kudos to you — but most people aren't. Let's talk about — one thing that I believe really gives you guys an edge is you understand multifamily so well. This is maybe my own hallucination, but your ability to go into a city and say, "Hey, we can do sort of a mixed use — maybe we'll put some multifamily here, but we really want the storage asset." I'll share with you in a minute: there's a really unique asset up in Santa Barbara where a guy did micro-apartments and storage, and the storage obviously makes it pencil on paper. So are you leading with multifamily and backing it up with storage in some of these cities? Talk about how you're trying to use even some of the new laws here in California to help you build better cash-flowing assets. Adrian Berger: When we're doing our storage strategy, we're very focused on land that will support that use — that's our first priority. Can we actually do a storage facility on this piece of land? We lead with that. Sometimes the code does allow you an ancillary use that's not housing — it allows you to get that use approved if you're doing housing — and we have played around with that a little bit. We haven't executed on that micro strategy yet, but it's certainly something we're mindful of. I think it's beneficial that we're a housing company, because we have a very strong understanding of the housing dynamics that drive so much in these cities. We understand what they're looking for, and we do both market-rate and 100% low-income housing tax credit development — so 100% subsidized housing and 100% market-rate housing. We can come to a deal, or a city, with a lens of: what combination of uses here could be worthwhile for this city, and is the city open to doing something like that? Where we see the most interest in that strategy is when the city has city-owned land. In California, under the Surplus Land Act, you have to run a process and offer that land first to affordable housing developers. So sometimes you can utilize that to explain to the city: hey, you're trying to monetize this land, and the way for us to do it is a mixed-use project — or a master-plan project if the site is big enough. It's a very steep mountain to climb, honestly. You take the challenges of California and add on the challenge of negotiating essentially a wide-open development agreement with the city. It's not for the faint of heart, and it doesn't work everywhere — but those are the situations where we've thought about it. Chris Berg: Have you executed on one of those deals? — Okay, I was going to say, man, kudos to you. Adrian Berger: When we do, we can do another podcast, and that will probably be a two-hour podcast on how it happened. That whole story, start to finish, would take us — literally a decade. Chris Berg: I'm curious — do you ever lead with multifamily, or is it just, hey, we want to do storage? Walk me through some of the other creative ways you're looking at assets to put storage in Southern California. Adrian Berger: The benefit we have is that I'm very involved in all aspects of our strategy — I'm overseeing the multifamily side and the storage side. So when a broker or an owner comes to me, it allows me to think about the highest and best use of the property. Is this a housing opportunity? Is it a storage opportunity? Is there a way we can get creative here — can we do something creative with the seller? Is there a different way of transacting than just DD and whatever closing period you can get? There certainly are situations where I've seen opportunities that lend themselves to housing and storage. Second, we've looked at office opportunities and how that might be a possibility. We're certainly looking at some industrial opportunities and how that can be parlayed into storage. Those are a little more challenging, because anytime you're not just getting a piece of land and building — which is the easiest, most effective way of doing it, because you have a GMP based on new plans rather than inheriting somebody else's building and its issues — it adds complexity. But there's also opportunity there. So we're open to being creative, and we certainly kick the tires on things that are non-traditional. Chris Berg: I want to learn more, because I think it's fascinating to watch how people underwrite these assets — and that Santa Monica asset, where it sounds like you're going to demo the office building, is super intriguing to me. For it to work, you're taking on those demo costs. So walk me through: how did you underwrite that? What are the metrics you're looking for, and what made it make sense with this particular asset? Were the rates just so strong in Santa Monica that, hey, we can spend the money on demo and still be good? Adrian Berger: That asset was pretty unique — probably a once-in-a-cycle type of opportunity. Where we were macroeconomically, where we were from a sentiment standpoint in the wider market, what was going on for this particular seller, our unique knowledge of Santa Monica — like five things all came together in the right moment to make it a very unique opportunity that we don't see every day. The rents are very strong in Santa Monica, and that allowed us to feel confident about the vertical project. Then it just became: at what touch point, in terms of dollars on the land and the pre-development, does it work or not work? And then the tough job for me is to go sell that to the brokers and the sellers — listen, I know you want X, but I can only pay Y, for these reasons. That was the genesis of that one, which is pretty unique. But generally speaking, the way we look at a site: we do a lot of upfront work. We'll do a quick back-of-the-napkin, and if we think there's a path there and we're in close proximity to what the seller wants, we'll go out and do a massing of the building — we'll spend some real money massing the building, talking to contractors, understanding the pricing for the hard costs. We'll do a very thorough market analysis on supply, demand, rent comps, operating budgets, so we can really understand how the deal looks. And then we're targeting, like I said, those returns on cost, those IRRs. Once we get approval to chase the deal, then it's up to me to make the deal happen. That's really a process we've taken from our multifamily years. We've done a lot of multifamily land deals in LA — I personally did 17 land deals in Santa Monica during COVID. What we did was refine our process, the one I just described, so that when we made an offer, there was a lot of confidence from the brokers and the sellers that what we were offering was based on analysis we'd spent money on. Mentally, for a seller, that means a lot — that we went out and spent three grand, five grand, ten grand without even having an LOI really demonstrates we were serious. It demonstrates that the LOI was based on real analysis — preliminary, but real — that we could stand behind. And then we performed: we'd clear due diligence and we'd close. When you have that reputation in the marketplace, it helps. We've taken that process and brought it into our storage business and done the same thing. We spend a lot of time up front vetting the deal before we put pen to paper on an LOI — and that allows us to have a much higher success rate. Chris Berg: And because you've got such good relationships in Santa Monica — going back to this particular example — were you willing to close with entitlement risk because you thought, hey, we know the city well enough and we can probably get this done? Or do you wait until you get fully entitled? Adrian Berger: Generally speaking, we're trying to close once we pass any discretionary entitlement risk. Obviously we'd love to close with a permit in hand — nobody wants to carry land at 12, 13% on a land loan today; you're just giving money away for no reason. If you can make the seller understand that, and put some more money in their pocket for giving you more time, that's the best result. But on this particular occasion — again, a very unique opportunity — we felt good about the entitlements and getting through them. What gave us the best confidence was that even if we struck out and spent the pre-development dollars, the basis we were buying the building at, the condition of the building, and our ability to re-lease that property if we needed to were very strong. That allowed us to say: you know what, we're going to close this quickly and take some risk here, because our fallback position is solid. And that was the only way we were ever going to get a deal done with that seller. So we had to get a little creative and out of our comfort zone, but we assured ourselves. And then, once we showed capital — this is always the test, right? You show capital, and if you get four or five term sheets, you know you've got a good deal. Because right now, getting term sheets from capital is really tough. When you have a bunch of capital saying they want to do that deal, then you know your business plan makes sense. That's always the key of it all: is there an LP willing to do the deal with you? Chris Berg: You led into my next question. Do you have different LPs for different underwriting? Here's what I mean — I'm going to make up some numbers — are you saying, okay, if it's 250,000-plus people in a three-mile radius, I'm going after institutional money, I've got this LP; but maybe this family office deal you just did — walk me through your underwriting process. Is it based on the LP, or do you underwrite first and then go find the LP? Adrian Berger: It's a little from column A, a little from column B. We're always talking to our LP equity relationships. We have a whole team that's focused on capital markets only — we're a little unique in that we bifurcate acquisitions and capital markets, even though we bleed across each other. We have a team constantly talking to institutional equity about what they're doing in the marketplace, and we have a lot of those relationships already because of our multifamily history — and a lot of those big companies have an arm that does storage. So we're very much getting educated on what their investment box looks like, what their appetite for risk is, when they would come into a deal and when they wouldn't. We have that in the back of our heads, and we're basically going into deals without having a partner in place — tying it up or getting under contract because we believe that at the metrics we're achieving, we're going to get equity, we're going to get capital. That's always how we've done it. We've never really had a fund; we've never had that model. We've always been more of a deal-by-deal group on the JV equity side. So it's really understanding what they want, going out and trying to find it, and then going to them and saying: hey, we found the thing you wanted — what do you think? Chris Berg: That's great. Anything else you want to share about stories? Because I do want to dive into your thoughts on Southern California — more specifically, LA. Adrian Berger: I'm happy to talk about LA. Chris Berg: With your experience, let's start here, because I asked you this earlier and I want to help people understand some of the dynamics — at least based on what I'm seeing anecdotally; you've got much more experience in it. What's been fascinating is you read the news headlines — oh my gosh, housing shortage, housing shortage, we need all this new housing in LA — and yet on socials I'm seeing three months free in downtown LA, four to six weeks free in Santa Monica, Silver Lake. Number one: are those concessions accurate and true? And if so, what am I missing? Adrian Berger: I think they definitely are true. And I don't think it's an unusual thing — I'll tell you why. Like we talked about earlier, everything's micro-market related. Think about the same thing in storage: when a bunch of supply comes into the market at the same time, there are all these deals just to get people in the building, and then you play the slow game of ratcheting up rents, improving economic occupancy, retaining occupancy, keeping your buildings full. When the market started to shift, a lot of investors and owners went into the mode of highest occupancy possible — that's what they want, the most occupancy possible in their property. So naturally, you lower rents. And if you're a new building competing with people looking at existing inventory, you've got to incentivize them to get into your building — and then the hope is that 12 months later you can re-lease to them and hopefully not have to concede on rents. Then what happens, in a more micro situation — like a certain pocket of Santa Monica where we have some product that was delivered a couple of years ago — is a lot of supply came on in that pocket at the same time. All of a sudden you have two or three buildings that all delivered at once. It's not a lot of units — probably 800 to a thousand — but they're all competing for the same tenants who want to be in that market. So they're trying to win that tenant any way they can: more concessions, sign-up bonuses, gift cards, whatever it is. Now, Santa Monica benefits from still being a place with strong tenant demand. Despite what's happened downtown, it's still a place people want to be. Unfortunately for downtown, it's gone through a bit of a reputational hit, and because office down there is massively vacant, there's just not the same demand driver — but there was a lot of supply delivered. That's why you'll see concessions there that are much, much higher: more units came online that need to be filled, and they're trying to incentivize people to come. Chris Berg: So what I'm hearing you say — correct me if I'm wrong — is, hey Chris, there was a good amount of supply that came on, thus the concessions. But then why do we continue to see these headlines about "we need more housing, there's a housing shortage"? Is it that the media just doesn't understand the dynamics linked to the demand side? Adrian Berger: It's really the asset execution of trying to get the building leased up. When you deliver a new, empty building, you're trying to get it leased up as quickly as you possibly can. And what's also happening with some of these assets delivering here is that they were built at a much higher cost than what the value is today, so there's pressure to get the building leased up. That's why owners and developers are incentivizing people to rent in their building by giving away concessions. Chris Berg: I totally get that — it's the same thing in storage, right? You chase occupancy. I guess what I'm trying to understand — maybe the headlines are just wrong — is they make it sound like we are flooded with humans here in Southern California, not enough space; yet you're saying, hey, I've got to chase occupancy because maybe there aren't as many people to take the units. Is that the missing piece? Adrian Berger: I mean, if the headlines are correct, there is still an undersupply of housing in the market — but again, like I've said a couple of times, it's all micro-market dependent. There might be a lot of demand for housing, but not so much demand to be in downtown LA. There is demand to live in the South Bay — there's a waitlist to get into buildings in the South Bay. In downtown LA there's not a waitlist, and on top of that, many buildings delivered at the same time. And many properties that delivered previously — those renters got a great deal, their year is coming up, and they're playing the concession-jumping game: "I'm just going to move to that building because they're offering three months free," and a year later they move to the next building. The tenants in that market are going out the back door and into the next building, trying to get the best possible deal. So I don't think all submarkets are created equal in that way. Chris Berg: Well said. Let's talk about LA as a whole. You've got ULA, you've got all these stories about how challenging LA is, situations with safety — but then you've also got the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Olympics coming. If you were mayor or governor, what would you be doing to help LA thrive? Because it doesn't feel like it's humming on all cylinders. Adrian Berger: I don't know that I'll ever be running for office — that's a big responsibility. Look, I think process is an important thing: getting projects approved in the easiest possible way, which means being development-friendly — which I think is a hard mental state for a lot of people, because there's a perception that developers are just in it for the money, even though there's so much risk we take to do projects, and oftentimes we don't make any money, through no fault of our own, and sometimes through challenges we face with cities. I would put a lot of money into infrastructure — making sure the utilities have what they need to execute and provide water and power and gas to all these projects that want to get built. I don't think it's that people don't want to build here; it's that there are so many different things being thrown at the development community that it slows down the ability to do it. And it's also turning off a lot of investors. That's a tough thing, because if you don't have investors to invest in the market, you don't have developers who can at least make a profit — because they are for-profit — then you're not going to have housing production, you're not going to have new projects, and it starts to spiral. I think these big events coming are great. I'm from Sydney — I remember when the Sydney Olympics came, it was really exciting and fun. A lot of those infrastructure projects ended up not really having a useful life afterwards, so that's a bit of a downside of winning some of these big events. But anything that's going to bring people to the city and the state, create more revenue in the community, help fill the coffers the city needs — that's going to help unlock some of the challenges they've had. The idea that we need all this housing, but then putting up roadblocks or hurdles that stop us from doing it profitably, makes it very hard to convince people to invest and to keep investing in the city. But I do think there's tons of opportunity here, because I feel like we're at a bit of a trough in the historic market. Basis has come down a lot. LA is getting hit pretty hard reputationally, which I think is a little unfair — it's still a great city. There's tons of opportunity here, it's a great place to live, there are lots of jobs here, lots of industry. And there are asset classes that do work, niche strategies that do work. Sometimes the headline catches all the attention, but with the work we're doing on the ground, we're finding opportunities every day. Chris Berg: I want to be respectful of your time — we said 30 minutes and we've gone beyond that. Anything else you want to add or share that I haven't asked you, Adrian? Adrian Berger: No, nothing that comes to mind — certainly happy to share my thoughts. I don't know the answer to everything. We're out there trying to figure it out in a really difficult market that seems like it's not really improving — it feels like it improves, and then it doesn't. I'm talking more generally: some of the job numbers, consumer confidence, what's happening in rental markets around the country — it makes for a unique time. But we're optimistic that we can figure it out and that there's still a lot of opportunity here. I really appreciate you having me on the show, and all your great questions. Chris Berg: Thank you, man. It's great to have you — and your insight, because there are these headlines around LA and what's going on there, and to hear something from you, boots on the ground doing it, very consistently — I think that's very powerful. If anybody wants to reach out to you, how can they do that? Here's your website as well — that's an easy way. Adrian Berger: Yeah, for sure. Anyone can reach out if there are questions they have, or opportunities they want to talk about, or to understand more about some of our strategies — I'm more than happy to field those. They can reach out via the website; that will get to me, and I'm happy to interact with people and answer any questions. Chris Berg: Awesome, man. Thank you — appreciate it. Again: cypressequity.com, go check them out. Adrian's been doing this now for quite some time here in SoCal, so it's great to get this insight. Again, this is the CRE Report — building generational wealth with real estate. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —