In today’s episode, host Ali Jahangiri, speaks with Kyle Walker, CEO of NewGen Worldwide, about successfully including EB-5 funds in real estate hospitality investments, particularly those with unique outdoor experiences.
Kyle Walker: One location. We went in and had to buy basically the entire town. So now in that experience, it’s okay. You bought this kind of rundown, rural, smaller location and you’re making the entire town, the resort, the destination, and doing a lot of work to integrate the local communities and employment opportunities for growth. These are truly sustainable properties that are focused on being a steward in the community, both of these iconic landscapes and the community that’s around them and the folks around them and trying to be a viable piece of the economic development framework to create opportunities in these rural locations.
Ali Jahangiri: This is the voice of EB5 by EB5 Investors magazine. Each week we sit down with experts in the EB5 investment space to get valuable insights and the latest EB five news. Welcome to the voice of EB5 with your host, Ali Jahangir, CEO of EB5 Investors magazine. I have a special guest with us tonight, Kyle Walker. We met each other in China many years ago. Kyle Walker is CEO of NewGen Worldwide, which is the parent company of Green Card Fund and a brokerage arm, a finance arm, a consulting arm and a couple different businesses in that. One of them is a real estate holding fund. And I want to introduce you to the podcast. Kyle, welcome.
Kyle Walker: Ali Thanks for having me.
Ali Jahangiri: Appreciate it. Kyle jumping right into this. Give us a little big picture overview of the entire new gen platform and what you’ve been doing over the last 7 to 8 years.
Kyle Walker: Yeah, So New Worldwide is a vertically integrated hotel investment platform, have always specialized in hospitality. Myself and my two partners, both of them deep background in the hospitality industry grew up in it, have owned them, built them, managed them. We have NewGen Advisory, which is our brokerage arm, doing nationwide hospitality brokerage for buyers and sellers of hotels. NewGen Finance focusing on the debt brokerage side for those buyers of hotels. We then have new Gen Capital, which is where Green Card Fund is structured, where we deal more in the equity mezz debt structured finance type of areas there. We’ve done some outside of hospitality, some work in health care, museums, education. But these days, back to that core focus of hospitality. Then we have Hestia research where we have brought in Wall Street researchers that had covered publicly traded hotel REITs and really turned that on its head a little bit and focused on how do we provide research that is actionable for hotel owners. Right. And so bringing this research down to the ground, bringing it more to the private markets and giving hotel owners unique insight into markets that allow them to make better investment decisions. And that’s obviously beneficial for us through the rest of our platform as we underwrite our own deals, as we help lenders underwrite and understand opportunities as they’re looking at debt placement and as we help our buyers and sellers engage in the marketplace. And then finally, a background. Our entire lives in real estate as the three partners, we do have some holdings ourselves, both hotel assets. And then along the way, we’ve invested in technology that’s synergistic to our businesses. So always trying to find ways to leverage technology, to provide a better customer experience and better back office operations.
Ali Jahangiri: Recently we met up at the Hotels conference in Arizona. I know you’re intimately involved in hotels, but back when you started early on in China, learning the ropes of EB5. And what do you think has changed since then? How have you changed? How has the industry changed in terms of EB five?
Kyle Walker: Yeah, so we started in this space in 2009. After that got moving into China. We were actually some of the first entrants also into India. I think in 2010 when we were doing our roadshows a bit too early for that market, it still had a lot of education to do. But as everybody knows, during those times, China was really the behemoth of EB5. When we started, I think they were about 50% of the visas. When they grew to the peak, more than 90% of the total EB5 visas. And during those times we set up offices in Shanghai. I lived there more than I lived in the United States, and we built out some real infrastructure on the ground. And during those times you had some very large migration agents that really had significant infrastructure and could move capital very quickly. So they just had larger than life marketing presence, oftentimes through multiple cities in China. They could fill the auditorium with interested investors and help guide those investors to filing as quickly as possible. And that’s provided a certain predictability to our industry. I always said those medium and large size agents for us as regional centers, they kind of provided a floor, so to say, of predictable monthly flow that you would see. And then you were always developing distribution partners and referral sources. But those large Chinese agents really helped bring predictability to the pace of the capital raise after the backlogs really started and became more extreme. Come 2016, you look at the legislative lapse that we had here recently where we didn’t even have authorizing legislation during those times.
Kyle Walker: Eb5 was effectively pulled out of the foreign market and these brokers were then focusing on the other invest to emigrate programs around the world, whether that be Portugal or Ireland or St Kitts and Nevis. I mean, take your pick of these different programs and for whatever reason it may be, I don’t think those programs maybe are quite as lucrative for the agents. I think there were probably some other undercurrents in the market that I won’t speculate to, but it seems as if today some of those larger shops market has really fractured. So today in China, one, they aren’t the biggest in the space, right? I think since 2020 India has been the largest EB5 market. So one, the China demand has dropped and I think too the agent network has fractured into a lot of small pieces. And so with that you have to have more distribution partner relationships and those shops tend to be a little bit smaller, not producing as many investors in a given year. And that just changes the dynamic as a regional center. There was a day where really big EB five projects were popular and that’s what the agents wanted to see today. That’s changed. The very large deals are going to be hard to fill out in a predictable manner and that creates friction for everybody involved, from the investors to the project Sponsor.
Ali Jahangiri: It’s a pretty thorough analysis. Kyle and I love how you talked about the larger infrastructure of the agencies. I recently got word that things are picking up again in China, and not only has the agencies come back, but I think the affinity towards the United States is coming back. Have you felt anything in the macro sense affinity towards the US and building that rapport again that we used to have prior to COVID?
Kyle Walker: Yeah. I mean, look, this is a complicated one, and I think so often kind of the general public or people who aren’t engaged in this space are just jumping into it. They mistake national Headline News for how people on the ground feel. And I’m not making a political statement in this. I’m not talking about any one US administration specifically. But if I sat down in a conversation and name your foreign country and somebody right away looked at me and just kind of read the headlines about what the US administration is doing and say, Well, Kyle, you must believe exactly the same thing and have exactly the same positions. That wouldn’t be accurate, right? My government is not necessarily me and my exact views, and I obviously don’t have control over the government and what they do. And so I think a lot of folks read national headlines. They hear about whatever the spy balloons and the geopolitical frictions and all these things that are going on in a very complicated geopolitical world that in some ways doesn’t have a clear leader. Right. Everybody’s jostling around and they say, oh, well, tensions are at an all time high. Must be difficult. I don’t see it that way. Right. As wildly when you spend time on the ground. These are all people with families and very personal decisions to be made. And when you get to that level and you look people and the whites of their eyes and you press your palms, you get much different conversations. And so I would agree. I think the interest is increasing. There’s no reason to talk around it. I think during COVID here in the United States, unfortunately, we did see some less than savory behavior towards the Chinese American community that created some level of fear. But I think that’s blown over. It was it was kind of, again, something that consumed the media narrative but wasn’t always the reality that folks felt on the ground.
Ali Jahangiri: So going to your current plan and I know not looking in particular offerings in that I know that there’s securities laws and regulations around looking at offerings or discussing them and being public about them. In the big picture, how is your company taking a position in the market and what is the overall plan? I think that’s really important for everyone to know. The big picture plan.
Kyle Walker: Yeah, so look, we are working with our hospitality platform and working with really strong project sponsors that we’ve developed relationships with over a decade plus decades, honestly, and with that, helping them on projects that are really filling an unmet need in the marketplace. And some of that work is taking place in US national parks and delivering what I call the safari lodges of the American national parks, But doing it in a way that’s accessible to families isn’t exclusionary like some of the very high end properties we see in these remote location zones and truly delivering a concierge level service to the way that people then experience the outdoor activities that surround these properties. So that is an area where we found we can put into the market these what I call right sized projects that in this new distribution environment they can get filled out and get completed. But at the same time there’s a template and a structure that is very familiar from deal to deal. And so then you’re really just moving locations. The general mechanics and structure follow that template and are easy enough to talk through. So that is really been our focus. Now in the lull of EB5 here, we really scaled up our brokerage business on this hotel investment platform and with that expanded a lot of fantastic strategic partnerships. And I think also with the support of our research arm really being able to understand markets that don’t traditionally have coverage and dissect those markets and find those business niches that have a moat around them, high barriers to entry that are very difficult for competitors to come in and disrupt.
Ali Jahangiri: I want to hear more about the Jurassic Park vision, the looking forward into this, all the different locations, Grand Canyon or Park. I want to kind of look into that and say, Hey, what was the market needing there and what are you guys going to fulfill? Is this a Ormond type resort? Is it more accessible? Give me some details about how it feels, Kyle, when you walk into one of these locations.
Kyle Walker: Yeah, good examples. Let’s start with you mentioned the Amman properties, and so let’s take an iconic one and I’m on Gary. That’s at the southern end of Utah, near Lake Powell, near the north rim of the Grand Canyon, near Zion and Escalante, That is a very high end property. Children are not allowed. When you’re talking about room rates and the thousands of dollars a night, that’s a wonderful experience, but it’s available to very few. Now, at the other end of that, if you were going to that area of the United States and you were wanting to get a hotel room to stay in, you’ve got the AM on at the very high end. Then if you went into page Arizona, for example, that there by Lake Powell, you might have an option of staying at a courtyard or a Fairfield or a Hyatt place. And these are common corporate branded flags that we all know what we’re going to get when we rent a room there. So I’m on at the very high end. You’ve got this exclusionary thing, a beautiful curated experience. At the other end, you have a limited select service hotel that might provide you a free continental breakfast. There’s not really a concierge around to help you navigate anything that you want to do in those outdoor environments. It’s a place where you’re parking your vehicle, laying your head at night to get some rest. But getting very little else out of that hotel stay. We believe there’s a space in the middle and that space in the middle one using very efficient prefab construction technologies and methodologies to deliver these facilities in a timely basis that are on budget. But then you have these things that feel more like a luxury feel in accommodation. I mean, I’ll lead you, travel the world and stay in a lot of nice places. When you think about your nice places, what really matters. I want a really nice bed. I want nice linens and I want a nice bathroom with some nice fixtures. And that’s nice and clean. Right?
Ali Jahangiri: And so I’m going to ADR Kyle So is the ADR on these? Is it upwards of what almond is in the market or are you looking for more of a boutique Marriott feel?
Kyle Walker: I think if you were to liken it to something that that people might know better, think about your autograph collection or your luxury collection that sit within the Marriott family, right? These are what the hotel industry calls soft brands. So the developers get to really envision a unique brand concept with a bit more flexibility than you usually have in a franchise system. But then they sit there, they deliver this unique experience and look, those room rates when seasons are low and demand is low might be in the 250 neighborhood. When you’re in high season and demand is high, those things could run up to touch under $600. And so I know that’s a fairly large range. But again, depending on which location you’re in, depending on the season you’re in, Right. That’s the kind of bandwidth that we’re talking about, that kind of mid two hundreds to six hundreds. But what’s incredible about that is when you compare that to Amon in the several thousands, when you compare it to the paws up or these other things that actually charge per head. So now if you’re going there with your significant other, you’re paying a price for both of you that are staying in one hotel room and that might be 1000 a person. Right. And that’s been the common way that when people go to these outdoor iconic locations that sit right at the national park, they’re paying top dollar for that.
Kyle Walker: And what they’re doing oftentimes Paws up is in temporary structures or these tents. Right. We’re seeing in things like auto camp, these Airstreams, and they’re charging very similar prices. Paws Up will actually now say, Och, let’s do all our outdoor activities. We’ve programmed that within and what a lot of folks do when they do that, it’s an all inclusive rate. So now maybe between you and your significant other, you’re spending 2000 a night because it’s 1000 ahead, all your activities included where we’ve gone in that to make it more accessible is let’s focus in that 250 low season, 600 high season room rate range and then on an a la carte basis, you’re sitting there and picking your activities. You want to go right, rock climbing, you want to go whitewater rafting. Then there’s the staff there that are your adventure guides that help curate the experience that you want, as opposed to imposing on you the experience that’s in an all inclusive package at the property. And so I think that’s an important piece as well. It’s kind of funny to think about it this way, but I think you achieve a better luxury curated experience by giving the consumer the choice as opposed to simply saying, I know better. Here are all the activities that are in your package and take your pick, right? I mean, it starts to feel sometimes to me to be like.
Ali Jahangiri: You just came back from I believe you came back from a Livingston Lodge experience, right? And that’s kind of as a package type experience, right?
Kyle Walker: Kyle Well, it’s it’s funny you bring that up. I chose this specific lodge, so we went to Victoria Falls border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. There’s a safari game drives around. There’s the waterfall that you can see. There are boat cruises on the water. And when you look at the kind of property options you have there, you have some stuff at the very low end that doesn’t include any of the activities. You have some higher end stuff like I think you’ve stayed at Alley and the Matodzi that that the Gates Foundation was a part of at that higher end range. Again, they’re doing a per head pricing and all the activities are included. And so you’re then sitting with them and saying, okay, I want to do game drives at these times, I want to do these things in the all inclusive package, the Stanley Livingston Lodge, which is part of this more collection of hotels that’s pretty active in South Africa in this region, they did something very unique. They offered this property, I think it was about a $650 a room night that was for myself and my wife. Right. So a single room, night fee, food, drink, activities weren’t included, but that was all on property available, all on an la carte basis. And I’ll tell you, it was a beautiful experience. I mean, we’ve done safari before. I didn’t want to wake up at 5 a.m. every single day. We were on our vacation and go on a game drive. I wanted to do it once or twice. We wanted to do something a little different at the Waterfalls. We had the ability to choose that. And at the time of checkout, as I’m looking at that bill, I realize this whole experience was better suited to me because I got to choose and it was cheaper than the other option. And yet it was in this very nicely done property that was had the feels of luxury, but at a much more attainable price point.
Ali Jahangiri: It’s almost easier when you have animals on property and cool experiences on property. You kind of don’t even have to leave the place.
Kyle Walker: Right. And the question is, is what are you trying to do on your vacation? Right. I think at different age points, sometimes when you’re younger, you want to fit in as much as possible and check everything on the checklist. Now I’ve got a little one. When we get when my wife and I go on vacation and we’re away from our daughter, there are days I just want to relax. And to your point, Allie, I’ve got giraffes and zebra off in the distance, and I would just kind of like to take a slow day amidst that vacation and not feel like I’m just throwing money in the wind because I chose not to do that all inclusive experience that I was paying for. And so I think in general, the hospitality market has been moving this way in a lot of regards, where the consumer wants more control over their experience and they don’t want to be paying for what they’re not using.
Ali Jahangiri: But now you transpose that into the kind of the Livingston Lodge experience, bringing it forward to your projects. You’re trying to set up an experiential experience and give the consumer more time to choose what they want a la carte, correct?
Kyle Walker: Correct. And so when you look at these properties, you see there is an adventure center, right? And so you leave your hotel room trying to bring the outdoors in. The greatest amenity of our properties are the fact that they’re sitting adjacent to a national park and these iconic landscapes. So how do we bring that outdoor all the glory of the outdoors into that property as an amenity, bring people into these communal spaces and as they want to experience and engage something, they have an expert there that can say, okay, let’s build this out exactly how you want, right? And that’s where that starts to have a very luxury experience, like the five star concierge that can make anything happen for you.
Ali Jahangiri: Yep. It’s almost like the big box hotels. Kyle, have shifted to what you’re talking about right now.
Kyle Walker: Yeah, they have. And we’ve watched an industry. I mean, if you look at, for example, Pebble Brook Hotels, it’s a publicly traded REIT. They have made a business model out of buying these old big box hotels that are now feel kind of functionally obsolete from a structure for these brands and then creating independent properties out of them, creating a unique narrative for the property and experience. Now they tend to be in more urban locations, right? I think it’s the other thing that’s just breathtaking to me. When you look at the US national parks, we don’t have this like what you see in Africa with safari lodges. You can’t just pick a national park, have something close to the park and expect nice accommodations, right? And so that leaves a lot of time. People are either using an RV, they’re staying in cities that are kind of far away or obviously you can do the backpacking and more of the rugged outdoor experience in the stuff that has popped up as of late. I mean, really, COVID forward I call has been a temporary structure movement, right? The glamping, the trailers. And to me, that has a bit of a novelty. He feel that can wear off after enough time? Right. If I’m paying five and $600? I don’t know about you, Ali, but I may do that once to be in a trailer and tell everybody I’ve done it. But I can’t say I’m going to go back and do that time and time again.
Ali Jahangiri: Yeah. And based on what you’re saying, we don’t have the infrastructure built up around the national parks at all. So there’s a void in the market. Yeah, right. And this is what the brand is supposed to kind of sufficiently go in and do is to add infrastructure to areas with not much infrastructure.
Kyle Walker: And look, I mean, they’re to acquire these sites and to be able to create these experiences in these markets. And one one location we went in and had to buy basically the entire town. I mean, it was the post office, the apartment building, the few homes that were there, the motor lodge, the general store and the airstrip and all the surrounding land. Right. And so now in that experience, it’s okay, you bought this kind of rundown, rural, smaller location and you’re making the entire town, the resort, the destination. Right. And doing a lot of work to integrate the local communities in employment opportunities for growth. These are truly sustainable properties that are focused on being steward in the community, both of these iconic landscapes and the community that’s around them and the folks around them and trying to be a viable piece of the economic development framework to create opportunities in these rural locations.
Ali Jahangiri: Yes. So these are rural deals, correct? Most of them.
Kyle Walker: Are generally they are rural deals. There are a few. There’s one spot with exception that falls into a high unemployment today and because of a very strange nuance, is deemed to be part of an MSSA and therefore not rural and EB five. But generally these are all rural projects and quite frankly, rural is the amenity, right? I think that’s one of the things that’s rare about this. Rural is what creates the business opportunity in the asset value.
Ali Jahangiri: So it’s like a rule attraction almost.
Kyle Walker: Exactly.
Ali Jahangiri: That’s great. So Kyle, on this, what is the brand’s name and who is the founder of this brand?
Kyle Walker: Yeah, so this brand is called Tara v t e r a v i and Rajan, Hans G of the Hans G Corp who is hotelier with 40 plus years of experience with the Family Business and Hospitality award winning developer for Marriott and Hilton, phenomenal manager of hotel properties with great efficiencies and profitability, has built this brand from the ground up really as a deep passion project of his and he’s worked closely with gentleman that’s now his partner in it named Ken find can find in his brother have a company called Fine company their website we are fine dot com and fine is this exceptional mind for brand building I mean Bill Kimpton, when he wanted to design the Kimpton brand, turned to Ken Fine, the likes of Joy de Vive and Ritz-Carlton and the Pebble Brooke I mentioned turned to him to Invision and enrich their brand concepts. And what’s so special about Ken is it’s not just branding from a purely marketing side of words and nice glossy brochures. They’re focused on the nitty gritty of the operations, the technology that’s used to deliver that customer experience. And the brand is operations. And operations is the brand that reinforced cycle. There is what not only delivers a phenomenal brand concept, but a brand that executes on its promise and really excites the customer and exceeds expectations. And so the work that they’ve done together here is exceptional. It’s something that that excites me a lot and it fills a completely unmet need in US national parks.
Ali Jahangiri: No, it’s an exciting project and it’s always about inspiration. Colin I feel like you live your life through inspiration, which is that’s one of the draws you have that people are drawn to you. And I know you just recently hired a CEO that’s been in the industry, so maybe talk about a little bit about your team and your new hire.
Kyle Walker: Yeah, So look, New Jim Worldwide, given all the different business lines, we have a very deep bench and my function as the CEO of New Gen Worldwide, I think for a lot of people in the EB five space when Green Card Fund was kind of in its heyday in the last go around, call it 9 to 2016, I was largely the face of the Green Card Fund brand. I was always out front and very active. I was doing more work in Green Card Fund than in the other areas of the new gen. Worldwide business. Since then, I’ve really enjoyed being the CEO of the parent company, building out this platform and bringing in exceptional leaders to take the lead of these various business units. And that’s where like you, Ali, knowing you for eight, nine years, I’ve known Adam Green in the EB5 industry for over ten years, and he was this exceptional participant in the industry, a leader that had sat on the board of I.O.U.S.A. With me. Now he’s the secretary Treasurer at I.O.U.S.A. And he had led regional centers and raised and I don’t have the exact number, but in excess of $500 million of EB five capital and deployed it to some fantastic projects. So really excited to have Adam on the team, really driving green card fund and being able to be supportive to him and really wield the resources of New Japan worldwide and mobilize them behind him to hopefully do something far greater with Green Card Fund than we even did in the last iteration of EB five.
Ali Jahangiri: These are great, great people to have working with and good team members that are the key to success here. We have a couple of minutes left on the podcast. I know you’re hotel driven, I know you and I have that in commonality because we also have the Hotels magazine and I see you a lot of the hotel. What drives you in the space? Is it the hospitality? Is it the finance background of it, the number crunching? What’s your driving force there?
Kyle Walker: It’s a good question. And I think on a given day that might have different answers. But I think at the base of it all, I like solving puzzles, looking at situations, looking at them differently, finding unique solutions and driving through. And to do that one, you have to lean on an area that you have deep subject matter expertise, and we have that in spades when it comes to the hospitality industry as well as EB five, right? I mean, been key parts of the industry, trade associations of legislation efforts. We follow this all very closely. So one in that kind of puzzle solving landscape that excites me as a person, right? And inspires me looking for areas where we have deep subject matter expertise. Second, I like to work with people that I really enjoy that are excited and passionate about their work and that they themselves feel like they are doing something unique that is providing value to their customers in the community. And so in the tier of projects and the Green Card Fund team, these are groups of people that I have a great deal of respect for. There are people that that inspire me to work harder, but I know that they are deeply passionate and committed to what they do. And we can’t control the economic markets around us.
Kyle Walker: We can’t control geopolitics around us. But when you have deeply passionate and committed people, they find a way through those disruptions as they occur. And for me, people is a big part of it. And working with the right people that quite frankly, you enjoy waking up every day and getting into the trenches and working hard with. So, you know, that puzzle solving, subject matter, expertise, the right people and solutions that have an impact. I look at this and what Tara V properties can do to those communities. They’re in their significant they could be some of the biggest economic development activity that these communities are seeing in generations and engaging in those communities in that way, seeing these properties and look driving them to very successful outcomes. I like to see these opportunities that have big upside potential that you can engineer a high floor to them, right? And that just occupies these niches that have high barriers to entry around them. I think, Ali, I mean, you know this so well. You’ve been successful in a lot of different businesses. When you can get into space and really occupy it and get market share quickly and there’s big barriers to entry that gives you real staying power to focus on it and create value over a long period of time.
Ali Jahangiri: Yeah, no, I agree with you, Kyle. And the other thing you kind of said that resonates as you want to work with the people that you like. And I think it’s such a small, such a kind of a brief statement you make or people kind of glance around it and say, Oh, that’s true. But it it really makes a difference day to day. So even with your clients, like you pick the clients you want to work with and their personalities and everything about them, you know, and that’s really important to work with people you like. So I appreciate you saying that on the side of New Gen and you building the company with your partners would. Is the next phase. I know you’re doing the EB5, the Tel Aviv hotels and whatnot, but is there another aspect that you’re also focusing on that you kind of want to share with people on the new gen side? Or is your sole focus right now building out the EB5 platform?
Kyle Walker: Look, I’m heavily focused on the Green Card fund and EB five side of the platform, but within that larger new gen umbrella, I’d be remiss to not talk about advisory, our brokerage arm. It is a piece that we have grown tremendously over the last few years. I mean, just in that exponential growth period, almost on a monthly basis, we’re adding new agents, new teams, new locations where we have offices. We’re transacting in all 50 states. We’re increasingly working with sophisticated folks in the hospitality industry that are doing larger portfolio transactions. And look, in a time period like right now where interest rates are high, where we’ve got CMBS debt maturities in the market, there is potentially a lull in transaction volume here at the start of 2023. But I think it’s a calm before a storm and there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity there. We’re scaling it, but I’ll tell you, I’m lucky in my position as CEO of Newton Worldwide because like I have Adam Green at Green Card Fund, I’ve got Serge Bhakta, who used to be our general counsel, who’s the CEO of New Gen Advisory, and he has been a phenomenal leader there who’s absolutely done an incredible job of building out our infrastructure, building out our back office systems. And the way we approach that business is that the agents are our customer and how do we help these agents make as much money as possible in the hotel brokerage business? How do we reduce friction in the way they operate day to day so that they can best serve their customer, the buyers and sellers of the hotels? And so there starts to be a lot of shared infrastructure with the marketing machine that you have to set up to do that with the back office systems that you have to do to efficiently manage.
Kyle Walker: I mean, last year we were closing a transaction every two or three days, so just a huge amount of volume going through there, a huge opportunity of what we can do in front of us. And again, this is a space where we’re laser focused. We are hotel brokers, we know our audience exceptionally well. We have deep subject matter expertise. And look, it’s really hard. Hotels are not the traditional commercial real estate asset class. It’s really an operating business wrapped in real estate. And so for those buyers and sellers to be working with a broker that intimately understands what it is to be a hotel owner, it’s a big difference. You go to some of these big multinational publicly traded companies that fill the brokerage space, and these brokers have never owned a hotel property, They’ve never managed a hotel property. They’ve never sometimes really been in there and understood what it takes to make those properties successful. And so I think this is a place where we continually have this theme of focusing in areas with deep subject matter expertise, and through that subject matter expertise, we really focus on that human relationship and the unique connection and bond we can form based off of a shared understanding of the industry. So you’ll see a lot of growth there. And alongside that, what we’re doing in the research side as to your research, I think is doing something entirely different in the industry. And having a research company might not be our biggest profit center. But again, it goes back to subject matter expertise. It goes to having deep, real time knowledge on these marketplaces that help us be better at everything else we do.
Ali Jahangiri: I think that on some great points, Kyle especially, we’ll have to expand the conversation on our hotels podcast, on our hotels magazine podcast. But you definitely would fit in there and hopefully you can talk about some of the hotel opportunities as well as we go forward. Lovely having you on the podcast and I look forward to spending the next couple of years with you in the space.
Kyle Walker: Really appreciate the time, Ali, and your leadership in the industry for EB5. So look forward to talking again. Look forward to our work together.
Ali Jahangiri: This has been The Voice of EB5 by EB5 Investors Magazine. To learn more about this episode, please visit EB five investors dot com slash podcast to stay up to date with the latest EB five discussions. Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast and if you like the show, please consider leaving us a five star review. It helps us out a lot. See you next week.