What would lead a Harvard history guy into real estate?
[Laughing] I needed to make money. What would make you stay? One of the reasons I stayed in real estate so long is I thought the people were so colorful, and much more so when I got into the real estate biz out of college 35 years ago. There were many more colorful ‘bet-a-million’ type characters running around. They were big risk takers, larger than life, very flamboyant and full of bravado, making strong statements about how they’re going to crush the market. They were like movie moguls. How does that compare to today’s commercial real estate market? In those days, you could take much bigger risks. An individual could borrow much more money than he could ever pay back in a million years. So when an office building would go broke, there would be a spectacular personal flameout. When Wall Street took over the real estate business after the last crash in the early ’90s, they didn’t let individuals take those kinds of personal risks anymore. So these flamboyant, Pharaonic figures became
