Welcome to the first episode of the distribution podcast by Juniper Square for 2026. I'm thrilled you're here. Whether you're a first-time listener or you've listened to every episode, thank you for being a part of this journey. Before we get into today's episode with Willie Walker, Chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, I want to take a moment just to make sure that you know how to stay a prize of all the upcoming episodes that I'll be dropping throughout this year. The first thing that you should do is make sure that you subscribe or follow this podcast in your podcast player. And if you're so inclined head over to YouTube. If you do at Juniper Square, you'll find all the videos from every conversation posted in YouTube. And I find it can be really effective to watch some of the guests that I'm interviewing and follow along in the conversation that way. We've got a great lineup for you this year and I'm super excited for it. As always, if you have any suggestions, questions, comments or things that you want to discuss, feel free to drop me a note. You can find me at
[email protected]. And of course, if you want to follow along on my content journey, you can follow me on LinkedIn or over on my substack @BsedLawth. Thank you so much for being a part of the journey. I hope that you enjoyed this season as much as I am enjoying working on it. Let's get into it. So the theme was Survive to 25. And a lot of people, the majority of people have survived to 25. We haven't seen a lot of defaults. There are defaults. We haven't seen a lot of portfolios go belly up. There have been portfolios that gone belly up. But everyone was like, let's wait until 25. What has happened though that was somewhat problematic is that once there was all this deal activity in 21 and into 22, everyone started putting shovels on the ground to build properties in 23 and 24. And what that then means is that in 24 and 25, you get all these deliveries. So there's been an unprecedented amount of new supply of multifamily delivered into the market in 24 and 25 when fundamentals weren't that good. So adding supply into the market only makes fundamentals worse. And so everyone was sitting there saying, get through to 25 and the excess supply is going to be absorbed and we're going to start to be able to get occupancy stabilized and then push rents. Occupancy has been stabilized but rents have not been able to be pushed. Welcome back to the distribution by Juniper Square where I sit down with leaders across private markets. I'm your host Brandon Zedlov. On today's episode I sit down with Willie Walker, German and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, a leading US commercial real estate finance advisory firm that provides capital markets, investment sales, valuation, loan servicing and investment management services, helping clients finance sell and manage properties like apartments affordable housing and industrial spaces with a focus on creating communities through capital and ideas. Walker and Dunlop is one of the largest firms in the country known for their technology, deep market experience and diverse offerings across various sectors. During my conversation with Willie, we talk about his unconventional career trajectory. We talk about the lessons that he's learned and instilled in his team around leadership. We talk about the market fundamentals and Walker and Dunlop's current business model. And lastly we touch on the success of Willie's podcast, The Walker Webcast. This conversation has something in it for everyone. Let's get into it. Willie, welcome to the show. Thanks Brandon. Nice to be here. Great to have you on the other side of the mic. I think a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with who you are and maybe even your Walker webcast. But do me a favor and just take a moment and introduce yourself, your organization just to set the context for today's conversation. Great. Willie Walker, chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, commercial real estate, finance company firm was founded by my grandfather in 1937. I took the company public in 2010. So we've been listed on the ark stock exchange since 2010. And other than being chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, I've been on the board of and chairman of a bunch of other both private as well as public companies spend a lot of time exercising. So do a lot of was a competitive marathoner and then do a competitive triathlete. Today it's mostly recreation, but I do a lot of skiing and a lot of biking. I have three boys who are all in college and I nothing pleases me more than both going to see them at their various universities. I've spoken in the past year at all three of their universities, which has all been fun. And if you find me on a chairlift with three of them, I'm about the happiest you will find me. And now that I'm an empty nester, I have a dog Simba who does a tremendous amount of traveling with me. Simba and I last week went from Denver to LA, to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Irvine and Irvine back to Denver and Simba had some fun doggy day care sessions as well as went out of her and hung out with one of my colleagues dogs during the day when we were in Irvine. So that's awesome. Well, there's a lot there and I'm sure we'll weave it into the conversation. A lot of people I think know you from your success as chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop and your perspectives on the market. But I want to just kind of go back, you mentioned think you're the third generation of a family business. You know, often I ask, how would you get into real estate? I think in this case it's it's maybe obvious, but maybe isn't. So then it talked to me about growing up in the family, the family business and kind of at what point did it become clear to you that you are going to end up in real estate or or you know, how did that, how did your journey of all? It came became clear to me that I was going to end up in real estate about six months before I came to Walker and Dunlop. And prior to that moment, I had no interest in either Walker and Dunlop, commercial real estate mortgage markets, anything. I'd grown up around Walker and Dunlop and it was, you know, my grandfather was alive when I was growing up and my dad was running the company and it was a small family company based in Washington DC with one office and I watched it and thought it was interesting and used to go down to the office with my dad and see the place and it was fun, but it was never anything that sort of attracted my attention. I got out of college and went straight to Latin America and worked in the nonprofit world for a number of years and ended up running a nonprofit foundation down in Paraguay, came back to the States and went to business school. When I was at business school, I really wanted to become an investment banker, work for Morgan Stanley between years at business school and thought, you know, God, I got the great job and this is exactly what I want to do and I went to Morgan Stanley and realized I didn't really want to be an investment banker. I was getting out of business school and wanted to kind of get every offer I possibly could, Brandon. I was insecure enough and clueless enough to like spend how weekend of recruiting, running around and me with every single investment bank and every single consulting firm and every single company that would talk to me and I ended up getting a lot of offers coming out of business school and consulting and banking and all over the place. I was literally on graduation day, no idea what I wanted to do. I had offers from all these consulting firms, all these banking firms and my brother and I went back to my dorm room and my brother had gone to, he'd gone to the Ed School at Harvard the same year that I was finishing the business school at Harvard and he was trying to decide whether he was going to go teach a school in California or teach in New England and I hadn't decided what I was going to do and we're sitting on the floor of my dorm room and I said, you know, he said, what are you going to do? You're going to go work at Morgan Stanley, you're going to go work at, you know, Bain, you're going to go work at McKinsey, what are you going to do? And I said, you know, I don't know, none of it really excites me that much. I got this offer to go work for a venture capital firm down in Chile and my brother was like, you know, Latin America is what kind of got you into business school. Why don't you go back down to Latin America and just go do something different. So I flew back down to Latin America and went to work for a venture capital firm in Chile, launched an airline for them, had an incredible general management experience launching an airline and all those while, no interest whatsoever in commercial real estate, in Walker, none-lop, anything like that. And so then I kind of bounced around. I started the airline that I went to work for TPG, the private equity firm, doing buyouts in Latin America. And then I did a weird thing, which was that when I was starting the airline in Latin America, I wanted to outsource our customer service. And there was no good third party outsource server customer service for us to outsource it too. So we had to get a call center and hire people to answer the phone and talk about tickets and all that kind of stuff. And I saw this, I saw the privatization of the telephone industry in Argentina. And then the growth of commerce and the need for more service made me think that the call center she was going to explode in Argentina. So I went back up to Harvard on a week's vacation from TPG and I actually studied the call center industry. And it's the geekiest thing I've ever done in my entire life, ever. I sat there in Baker Library and read annual reports of these companies and really did a deep dive on the call center industry. And I flew out here to Denver, Colorado, and I meet with a guy who was named Ken Tuckman, who was one of the founders of the call center industry, took his company, Teletech Public in like 1993. And I kind of talked about funding my startup call center company in Argentina. And he said, I'm not going to fund you to go start up a company and compete with me. But if you want to come to Teletech and build out Latin America, I'd love to have you do it. So I left TPG, whichever one thought was the stupidest thing anyone could ever do. I was flying around the country in Latin America in first class and making a lot of money and enjoying doing what I was doing in private equity. And I joined Teletech to run Latin American and build it out. And so we bought companies in Mexico and in Argentina and Brazil and put together a Latin America call center platform to be able to work with big note T-Natch
companies down there. And then after I'd done that, my boss asked me to go run Europe and so we moved to Europe and I was building out Europe for Teletech and running that. And I'd been there for five years, Brandon, and I had great success in Latin America and had some good success in Europe. And I was like, the only job left for me is to VCO and my CEO's can be here for a long time. And so I kind of picked up my head a little bit and sort of like, do we want to stay in Europe for like if we move, if I move from I'm Telitex, some other company, I kinda got to give it five to seven years to really create value. And as I was kind of thinking that through, and we just had our first child, I went back to a walker nala board meeting because my dad had put me on the board of walker nala, and I was enjoying it. And I did a strategic offsite with his management team. And after working with them for two days, I kind of turned to my dad and I said, there's a lot to be done with walker nala. And I kinda looked at me and he said, I know, and I was like, well, maybe I could help you. And he kinda looked at me and said, I've always known you could, I just didn't think you had any interest. And I kinda looked at him and said, I never have, but maybe I do. And so that was 2000, end of 2002. And in September of 2003, I came in join walker nala. And it was a family owned company and under capitalized and not a big brand and competing with all the big guys and through a lot of different capital stuff that we can dive into and some strategic stuff and some a lot of hard work. We've grown the company from one office and 48 employees to 50 offices and 1400 employees and 25 million revenues to a billion three in revenues. And our company that we thought was worth about 25 million dollars to getting to a market cap of $5 billion in 2022. We backed off of that number now, but we're very focused on marching the market cap back up towards the 5 billion and taking it on to something even higher. So that's in kind of as condensed a manner as I can. That's kind of the career trajectory and the punch line to your question is, this was never designed. This was not what I thought I'd end up doing, but boy, is it been a great honor and pleasure to take a family company that's been around for 88 years and be able to take it from being a very small family owned company to being a rather large publicly traded company. Yeah, what a cool that's a very cool story. There's a there's a theme that I can't help but notice, which is Latin America, especially earlier in your career out of curiosity. How did you end up in Paraguay before you went to Harvard and why did you go, obviously it was a good experience. Why did you go back? I mean, you kind of mentioned the conversation with your brother, but what was it that was attracting you to South America back then. Yeah, this all goes back to me having no plan and no clue what I wanted to do because I had as I told you when I was at physical, I wanted to be an investment banking. I wanted to be investment banking coming out undergrad. I had an offer to go down to a, an analyst cell day at Merrill Lynch, my senior year in college. And I called my parents and I said to him, Hey, I've been invited by Merrill Lynch to come down and they're going to tell us all about being an analyst at Merrill Lynch. And I'm really excited. I'm going to go into their analyst training program and my parents said, don't go because I had been home for vacation, Christmas vacation just before that. And a family friend who was a career foreign service officer had been named by Ronald Reagan to be the US ambassador to Paraguay and ambassador to Towell. It said to me, what are you going to do next year? And I said, I think I want to go to Wall Street. And he sort of mused and said, why don't you come to Paraguay? And I literally at that time, Brandon was like, his parakeet Africa or Latin America. I mean, I was like, and I wasn't like I was some Spanish major. A matter of fact, I took Spanish three in high school and said, I will never speak that God for sick and language again. And so my parents to their great credit said, you know, you can always go to Wall Street. You can't always go to Paraguay at the invitation of the US ambassador. And so I didn't even really have a job. I didn't have the language. I just got on a plane in September of dating myself here in 1985 and flew down to Latin America and flew down to Paraguay and then started to learn the language and started to get myself plugged in and then got a job and then got fluency in the language and then was asked to run this this foundation and got an incredible general management experience that it would have never ever been able to get had I stayed in the United States. But I happened to be a college educated American who was trustworthy, who happened to know from the United States, the funders of this foundation. It was a very wealthy family that the wife had been born in Paraguay. The husband was American. They got married. He was a very successful banker in the States. They funded the foundation. I was in kind of in the right place at the right time and they said, you want to run our foundation for us. And I just had this amazing two year general management experience. And that is basically what made my application to Harvard kind of if you will hit the radar screen and say, hey, this is someone we might want to have here. And it sounds like it wasn't intentional that you ended up back in South America after college as well. Right. I mean, that was just kind of a similar situation. Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that I was very concerned with actually after I'd done Latin America after undergrad, Latin America after business school was whether I was going to get kind of branded as the Latin America person. And so because I spoke fluent Spanish and there's some fun stories that I could bore you with as it relates to kind of meetings with Carlos Menum, who was the president of Argentine at the time. And there were a bunch of TPG executives, including David Bonderman and other than the country had. Realio Pagano, nobody else in the room spoke Spanish. And so we're sitting there talking to Menum and everything's going through menum because we're trying to buy it only in his arphantinas. And I trip up in fluent Spanish and start talking to president menum in Spanish. And I think everybody else at the table is sort of like, hold it, you're the you're the lowly associate here. You're not you're not supposed to be speaking here, but because I spoke fluent Spanish, Menum and I started going back and forth on the deal and what we were looking to do. And I think everyone other than David Bonderman was just like, would you tell that guy to stop speaking fluent Spanish and Bonderman was like sitting there looking at me like, that's pretty cool that he can communicate and he's kind of pushing this deal forward for us. And it might differentiate our bid over American Airlines who was always bidding about also bidding to buy it. It was just a it was a differentiator, right? And so then when I got out of business school, I was like that Harvard graduate who worked at Morgan Stanley who spoke fluent Spanish and they're just not a lot of those running around Latin America. They exist and other schools and more fluent than me and more talented me, but it made it so that I could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, which gave me the opportunity to do a lot more than I would have had the access to had I stayed in the States. Makes perfect sense. And I think some of our listeners know I had a similar journey. I spent seven years living in Asia and I won't bore anybody with that, but it's the exact it's a it's a bigger fish in a smaller pond and access that you wouldn't have. And it was a truly incredible experience also very unplanned in my situation. So I appreciate you going deep there. And one thing Brandon that I would put forth though, which I would say you know you and I both say that and people look at you and people look at me and they say, oh great, that's like you know that's sort of the that's a piece or a component part of both their success, right? And there's no doubt of that. But I'm pretty sure that you had the same type of lonely nights that I did where after undergrad after business school all my friends went to Boston, New York San Francisco, they were having parties, they saw their friends, they had a normal life and I'm sitting there in you know, Paraguay out of undergrad and Santiago, chili out of business school in an apartment in a town where I know nobody with nothing to do other than read a book. And that was my Saturday night activity and that was my Sunday entire day activity and it's it's lonely and it pushes you and it stretches you in a way that a lot of people who haven't actually put themselves out there don't quite appreciate. And it is those lonely moments where you really do not only learn about yourself, but you learn a lot of new things about the world you live in. I read more in Latin America living alone than I read my entire high school and college career by orders of magnitude and that wasn't because all of a sudden I became that much more intellectually curious because I was, but at the same time I just didn't have anything better to do with my time to be perfectly blown. Totally agree and in that moment for me was I spent a year back backing around the world actually it was it was in South America probably somewhere between Paraguay and Uruguay and Argentina, you know sitting on buses overnight and just reading. Non-stop and being super super disconnected from the world and this is obviously pre pre iPhones and technology and easy means of communication. So I mean I think that's an interesting segue because you know you fast forward September 2003 you join Walker and Dunlop. You have some leadership experience from your prior roles but kind of what was it like coming into this family business and I guess I'm interested in and of how how were you received and what did you see as the opportunity then and maybe we can kind of talk a little bit about both your evolution as a leader but also the evolution of the business under your leadership and you know we can kind of put some of the pieces together. So how I was received is funny my dad and I just did a fireside chat at the University of Virginia where my dad went to go to college and they asked me to come back and speak and I said how about how about bringing back my dad and they were like 100% in the two of us had this really fun conversation. Something we'd never done before Brandon as I'm doing I'm asking him the questions and I'm interviewing him of sort of like the transition of the business from him to me and what it was all like and this and that. And so I asked him in front of 700 people at UBA how did your management team what they think of me when I joined Walker and Dunlop and I said to everyone in the audience I've never asked him this question before and it was funny because my dad was really happy.
I kind of paused and he looked at me and he goes, not much. And everyone laughed. And anyway, it was not an unexpected response to be honest. And it's not like I showed up and everyone's like, no, you know, organ rejection. But I didn't have any experience in the mortgage fan space. And, you know, these people at all built their careers in the business and they knew a ton of bad and all of a sudden this guy comes along. But they all knew me. I'd been on the board. They also knew that, I mean, the teletech operation that I was running in Europe before I came back and joined Walker Nullop, it was a $200 million PNL with $3,500 employees. Okay. I was going from a $200 million PNL to a $25 million PNL and from 3,500 employees to 48 employees. Okay. So it was not, I mean, one of the reasons that I think the transition from my dad to me was so incredibly well done on his part was that he'd seen me run much bigger organizations and had watched my career for a decade before I joined Walker Nullop. So when I showed up, he's like, here are the keys. Have that. And so it put, you know, I mean, clearly there was a little bit of who's the new guy on the block. There was plenty of, is the only reason that Willie's getting this job is because of his last name. And if you want to talk about one piece of the fire that sort of sat inside of Willie Walker when I first joined Walker Nullop was just, I will never let anyone look back on my time here and think that I just got this job because I didn't have anything else to do and my dad gave me a job, right? So I actually, I think, made big mistakes in not giving my dad and the team at W&D at that time, enough credit for the incredible company that I was stepping into, the incredible culture that I was stepping into, the great, incredible track record that I was standing into. Have we taken it from being a small company and being a big company? Yes. Have we done lots of great things in doing that? Yes. But I was way too insecure and way too doubtful in what people would say if it didn't go well that I would sit there and just be like, you know, for a long period of time, I would want people to just think, Walker Nullop started in 2003 the day I started, which is just awful. There's so much that my grandfather did and all the people who worked with him and all the things that my dad did and all the people who worked with him. And I just sort of kind of said, oh, no, let's just start the history here. And that was just my own insecurity, to be honest. I didn't want anyone to think that I came back to the family company and had any head start on it. And I obviously did. I think the other piece to it is what I saw was a couple of things. One, working for my own equity. So when I was at Tel-Attack, if I, after I was a senior executive for five years, you had it up all my stock options and all my equity and I own 20 basis points of the company, right? So I, okay, great, I can make a big impact, but I only own 20 basis points of this pretty good size public-trader company. And I was like, why don't I go back to my own family company and work for percentage points? And why don't I work for a dad who owns over 50% of the company? And so that was one thing of just working for our own equity rather than working for other people's. The second thing was just, I had, from having worked at Morgan Stanley, having worked at TPG, having worked at Tel-Attack. I had a pretty good sense of how you could, what you could scale too. Not necessarily the building box on how to do it, but I built a pretty good size business, $250 million business for Tel-Attack in Latin America. I was running a $200 million business in Europe for, for, for Tel-Attack. So I kinda, as I built those businesses up by acquiring smaller businesses, bolting them together and building them, I had a pretty good roadmap for how we could build Walker and Dumb-Up. And so, given that and wanting to work for our own equity, I was like, let's maybe give this a shot. I think the one other piece to it, which a lot of people thought was happening was, they thought I was coming back to W&D to dress it up and sell it. And so there were a lot of people, when I first joined, who were sort of like, he's just here for a year or two, clean things up, get it to grow a little bit and sell it. And we got an offer for the company, the second year, I joined in 2003, and halfway through 2004 into 2005, we got an offer in a big step up in value from where it was when I joined. I joined, we thought the company was worth $25 million, and we got an offer to buy it for $65 million. And my dad was like, done, like, take it. And during the negotiations, I, we continued to improve the company, and I went back to the potential buyer and said, since we started these negotiations to now, I think we've added another $20 million of value, I think it's worth $85 million and they told me to go pound-san. And they said, you've done a great job, you haven't done that great a job, goodbye. And I learned a lesson there, but obviously given the value we've created, thank goodness we didn't sell there. - Yeah, I think there's a lot of lessons. It sounds like that was a very good decision with the benefit of hindsight. But I'm curious to go back to something that you said earlier about kind of this chip on your shoulder, fire in your belly or whatever it was. Like, when did you realize the importance of kind of giving credit, paying that respect, if you will, to the company that preceded you? And kind of like, what changed in you as a leader where you went from being, you know, I think you described it as insecure to, you know, seeing that there was a different, maybe a different way to show up or a different way to lead. - That's been a long journey. There's no, there's no sort of one seminal moment where I woke up one day and said, "Oh, hold on a second, dude." Like, get real, have perspective, reflect, be honest, be open, be revealing. There are a couple moments in it, but just to, you know, I grew up in Washington DC and went to a very, very good gay school called St. Albans. And when I was at St. Albans, I was a perfectly mediocre student. I was a really good athlete and I was a leader, but I was a great student. And at St. Albans, St. Albans, this was extremely academically rigorous school. And when I was heading off to college and all my buddies from, I went away to boarding school 'cause my parents both had careers and wanted me to be boarding school, which I didn't want to go to boarding school. So it was a little bit there sort of like, I don't want to go to boarding school. I want to stay at St. Albans and my parents were like, "You're going to boarding school?" And then when I was going off to college, all my friends were going off to Ivy League schools and I went to St. Lawrence. And so, you know, my freshman summer, I went out west and was working with two buddies in mind. One at Yale and the other one at Duke and we go to these parties and we'd walk in and people were like, "Where'd he go to school?" And my buddy at Yale would then everyone be like, "Whoa, that's really impressive." And my friend would say, "I go to Duke." And they'd be like, "That's really impressive." I'd go to St. Lawrence and they'd be like, "Where? What's is that?" "What is that?" And so that chip on my shoulder of sort of like, not stacking up kind of built and kind of continued to gain kind of this, you know, at some point, I really want to show everyone that I'm capable of keeping up. And so when I got to business school, a lot of my friends who went to Stanford and Yale undergrad showed up to business school, they're like, "Great, this is just another step on my career path and they kind of showed up and they kind of either worked hard or not that hard." But it wasn't like, "Do or die." For me, when I showed up at Harvard, it was like, "I'm gonna show everyone that I belong." I'm gonna show them that I'm like, I actually should have this seat. And so, you know, I was an honor student and worked and did everything you could possibly imagine. You know, I burnt the bacon, if you will, Brandon. I mean, I was on the hockey team, on the lacrosse team. I was student government. I was my section president. I was an honor student. I mean, I did everything at HBS to sort of say, like, "I belong here, right?" But then everything I did in my career was to sort of say, like, "I can keep up, I can do better, I can like beat everybody." And after you've done that enough, and by the way, you burnt some bridges, you've had some discussions with friends who didn't make you feel that good when, you know, one of my buddies who went to Harvard College who kind of constantly like reminded me that I'd gone to St. Lawrence and that like kind of testing whether I belonged at HBS. And when I got out and like, you know, a decade after we'd been out, and I'd had some success in his career, it kind of been poking along, and I saw him at a reunion, and I said something stupid to him of sort of like, "Ha, you know, who's had a good 10 years since HBS?" And it's like, "Grow up, Willie, like, you know, "seriously, but at the time, I was like, "I want to put it back to him, "I want to make sure he knows like that I won, right?" And win anything. And after that, I almost lost a friendship by it. So there's that, there's also, you know, I mean, taking a company from 25 million to five billion in value, it's hard for anyone to sort of say, I haven't been successful, right? So there was a lot there of like, what's the scorecard? But remember, this is also a guy, like, I mean, when I was, when I had three kids under 10, I was chairman of the board of the DC Water Authority, I was chairman of the board of a publicly traded European company. I was taking Walker and Dunlop public, and I decided to go compete in the Olympic distance trathalon national championships and was fourth in the country, and I'm on the podium looking out at this field of people who are there to support people at nationals, and I have no friends there, I have no family there, my wife is home taking care of my kids, and I said to myself,
What the fuck are you doing? Like, what are you trying to prove? Like, there's, it's not even, there's no one even here to see it. And so, you know, that's another one of those moments where you start like, what's this demon you're chasing? Like, okay, great. You're a really talented endurance athlete. Like, so what? So, I think as time has gone on, I've just gained perspective on a lot of these things that just sort of says, the ghost you're chasing or the chip on your shoulder that you're trying to rebuild, kind of get over it. Like, take a deep breath, be accepting of the fact that you're not perfect, that you're, that you're, you know, you have a lot of flaws that you can do things poorly. And that's been really helpful to me to being able to kind of live in my own skin because I ran on that treadmill for a very, very long time as fast as I possibly could and I paid a lot of prices. I paid a very high price in losing my marriage with my, with the wife of my kids. And there are plenty of other things I told you about potentially losing friendships and things like that. And I'm, you know, I'm very mindful of that. And I just, you know, one of the things that I hope when I do a lot of speaking at colleges these days and I try and be as open and as revealing and vulnerable as I possibly can because I don't want anyone else, young man, young woman sitting in the audience to sit there and say, I got to get on that treadmill and run as hard as that guy's run for as long as he's run it because there is a high price to running at that pace for as long as you do. - I appreciate you sharing or saying the quiet part out loud 'cause I know that in my conversations with leaders, this comes up a lot privately. And I think to your point, it is super important for people to hear and learn from experiences and, you know, what, you know, what's actually happening under the hood of a, you know, high profile business leader as they're building families and businesses and, and legacies and what it entails and, and the real, real cost. So I appreciate that perspective. You took Walker and Dunlop public in 2010. Maybe let's kind of start with what I think our listeners know, but how would you describe Walker and Dunlop today, your different business lines? And then, you know, maybe let's talk a little bit about kind of the milestones or the lessons you've learned as you've kind of, you know, pre-public company through to where you are today. - So the biggest difference between being a private company and a public company is that in a private company, you have the luxury of managing things in the river mirror. You can look at what you did last year. You can look at what you did last quarter. You can look at what you did last week and sort of say, okay, let's try and improve upon that next year. Let's try and grow a little bit more than that. Let's do this, let's do that. But it's all kind of a, the here and now. As a public company, all investors want to know is where you're going. And the only thing that they're gonna give you multiple for is where you're going. And so that transition from private to public was super eye-opening to me as it relates to not only what we needed to do from a strategic planning standpoint, but then also a communication to investor standpoint of, here's the company today, but this is what it's gonna look like tomorrow. The second thing is that, you know, when we went public, we had a market cap of $220 million. So remember, again, kind of tracking the numbers. When I joined the company in 2003, it was about a $25 million company. We took it public seven years later at a 10X valuation, almost eight and a half, nine times. So we'd had good growth between 2003 and 2003 and 2010. And by the way, we took it public as the first mortgage company, single family or multi family or commercial, since the great financial crisis, which was caused by a mortgage crisis. So we were very much a leader there in thinking that we could take this company public after the great financial crisis. So when we went public in December of 2010, which, oh, by the way, we will celebrate our 15th anniversary of our IPO day after tomorrow. But 15 years ago, the after tomorrow, I'll never be going up there with my family and sitting on there and ringing the bell. And the world didn't need Brandon micro-cap $220 million mortgage finance company in any way. So getting large investors to invest in a $220 million small cap company was very hard. I mean, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse did a great job building the book on our IPO. But fidelity or T-Row price or any of the big institutions, they're like, this is basically an ill-liquid security with only a $220 million market cap. So hard to get big institutions in. And on our first couple years as a public traded company, getting float in the stock, because we had a bunch of L overhang by both my family holdings as well as we bought a company from Credit Suisse. So Credit Suisse had a bunch of stock in Walker and Delma. And then after Credit Suisse got out of the stock, we bought another company from Fortress. And Fortress took a lot of stock in the company. So from 2010 to 2015, we had a pretty big overhang in the stock of Walker and Delma that said to investors, at some point Credit Suisse or at some point, Fortress is going to want to exit. And I don't want to be a holder of this stock when they start dumping their stock on the market. And by the way, both CS and Fortress were extremely good at the way that they disposed of their stock. And so that concern was unfounded, but nonetheless, it's a very legitimate concern where 30% of the stock in a public traded company is held by one individual or one enterprise. The other thing about it was that when we went public, we had this amazing business model of working with the GSEs, the Fannie and Freddie, the government sponsored enterprises. And we had amazing margins and just tundered at that time, 30% operating margins and net margins in the high teens low 20s and we were just printing money. But Fannie and Freddie had just gone into conservatorship because in the great financial crisis, they were taken over by the US government. And so in 2010, 2011, Fannie and Freddie, you know, had a huge role in the market, but Republicans on Capitol Hill wanted to put them out of business. They wanted to wind them down. They wanted the government to get out of having Fannie and Freddie. And so while we were doing really, really well, a lot of investors were like, "Fannie and Freddie might not be here tomorrow." And Walker and Dunlop's business is originating loans for Fannie and Freddie. So while our numbers were fantastic, the markets out there and said, "I'm going to put an eight to 10 times multiple on you because you've got too much risk on Fannie and Freddie and your business with Fannie and Freddie." And so it frustrated me dramatically in 2011, 12, 13, where our big competitor firms, CBRE, JLL, and at that time a firm called HFF, which is now part of JLL, were all trading it 22, 24 times earnings, and we were stuck trading at eight times earnings. Couldn't, I mean, we would print great prints and we just stuck at eight to 10 times earnings. And so I was wildly frustrated that we were doing really, really well from a financial standpoint, but because of the risk on the agencies, we couldn't get our multiple up and therefore our market cap up. And so we then started to diversify the company in a very big way. And so after gaining scale from 2010 to 2015, we said, "Let's diversify the company from 2015 to 2020." And so we started to get into the debt brokerage business in a very big way. We got into the property brokerage business in a very big way. We started to invest in technology in a very big way. We moved into the appraisal business in 2021. We moved into the research business in 2022. And so over the last decade, we've been broadening the platform so that now we are looked at like CD or JLL, where we aren't just an agency lender with Fannie and Freddie. While those are still big businesses of ours and we do really, really well, and we're the number one Fannie Mae, Gus Lender, and we're the number two Freddie Mac optical lender in the country. And that might be two or three by the end of the year. I'm hopeful we're two. We might be three with Freddie, we'll see. But the point is we've got really big scale with Fannie and Freddie and they're huge component parts of our business. We've broadened the platform a lot so that as investors look at us today, they don't sit there and say, oh, they've got a lot of risk to Fannie and Freddie. The other thing about it is that Fannie and Freddie are about to go public. And so unlike back in 2010, 2011, where everyone's like, are they gonna be in business tomorrow? It's the complete inverse today where Bill Poultey, who's the director of FHFA, which is the regulator over Fannie and Freddie is focused on taking them public. And the Trump administration wants to see Fannie and Freddie do more in the housing market, not less. So that's a very different backdrop to our reliance on slash risk around Fannie and Freddie. - So with that context, how do you describe, those are kind of the component pieces that make up what Walker and Dunlop is doing today and kind of how you got there. How do you describe your business to the market or to clients? Like how should we think of Walker and Dunlop given the breadth of business activities and services that you offer? - If you, I mean, we were just in Las Vegas with all of our colleagues doing an all company meeting. By the way, a plug for the Funtum Blue Resort in Las Vegas. We stayed there and it was over the top. Such a great place and all of our reviews afterwards have just said, man, what a great place to stay. So if anybody on listening to your great podcast, Brandon wants to either go to Vegas,
or take a group of people there, I can not recommend the Funtum Blue enough. But we had a graph up on the screen that talked about plotting, walkering, done law against the big real estate services companies versus the real estate capital markets companies. So there's some players like the investment banks and a couple other, both private as well as publicly traded companies that compete in the real estate capital markets. So they're going to provide debt financing, equity financing, they're going to sell assets, they're really capital markets companies, and then there are services companies that do everything from maintained properties, they value properties, they sell properties. So JLL and CBRE are the two biggest in a combination of capital markets as well as services. And so they're in the upper right hand corner of that graph. And you have other players like Newmark and Cushman and Wakefield and East Hill secured in a bunch of other players in the commercial real estate services and lending space who we plot on that. We think walkering done law is in the upper right but not nearly out there where CB and JLL are as far as the services on the X axis. And then we're pretty high up on the capital market side on the Y axis, but not as high as the CVs, JLLs and an East Hill secured for instance. And so those are the services we provide today. And our strategy over the next five years is to continue driving up on the Y axis, keep moving further up on capital markets, sell more properties, finance more properties, raise more capital in our fund business that allows us to control capital that we can then put into our distribution network to allow owners and operators of commercial real estate to get the debt capital, the equity capital that they need to either refinance a property by a property, build a property or sell a property. When you think about capital markets, you mentioned you have an investment management business. When did that come along? And you know, it's interesting because I want to I want to also talk about some of the trends that you're seeing in the investment management space. But when did you decide to bolt that on to the strategy? We started looking at it in 2015 when we said we got a diversify. We kissed a lot of frogs in trying to find a company that we could acquire. There would be a creative to us because the investment management business trades at a higher multiple than we did back then and due today. And so we were trying to find an accretive acquisition acquired a company in 2017 and it was a small asset management company and had smaller institutional investors who were writing small checks. And we thought incorrectly that we could take those capital relationships and scale them given Walker and dollops institutional platform and institutional relationships. And it didn't it didn't scale to the degree that we wanted it to. And so we have had to go and bring on both talent to raise new funds. We bought another company in 2022 that brought with it about $8 billion. No, $11 billion of AUM but all in the tax credits indication space. And so if you take what we bought the organic growth and that $11 billion that we brought in in the acquisition and tax credits indications, we have around $16 billion of AUM today. So that's not that's in no way, you know, that's a good size asset management business for having started it in 2017 or walked into the market in 2017. In the last, there's only about $5 billion in there that is either separate accounts or commingal funds, which we have any kind of discretion over and some of it is nondiscretionary, quite a bit of it is nondiscretionary, where we have discretion to be able to put capital into deals that our bankers and brokers bring us. One of the things we've also been very careful of is not competing with our clients. So for instance, CB and JLL both have scaled asset management business that compete directly with their clients. And so Lissal, JLL and CBRE global advisors at CBRE, they're buying properties, owning properties and competing directly with the people that they lend capital to sell properties for, manage properties for, etc, etc. We've made a decision not to compete with our competitors or with our clients. Will we ever cross that line? Potentially, but it's been a line that we just haven't wanted to. So when someone comes to us for debt capital out of one of our funds, we're just lending to them as a debt capital provider. When someone comes to us for equity, we're going in as a JV. When someone comes to us, we're going to do preferred equity, but we're not going in bidding on an asset against the client of Walker and Dolop and saying, "We're going to buy it, we're going to manage it, we're going to make money off of it." And so that has been one of the nuances of our asset management business that is a little bit different from some of our big competitors. But oh, by the way, they've been really successful and have had no problem continuing to sell debt financing in property sales, even though they're going head to head in competition in those two business lines with their client base. Yeah, I think it's super interesting. And that dynamic plays out in a lot of different places in our industry with, you know, penching consultants having their own investment manager, you know, their own independent investment management businesses as well as their advisory businesses. So, you know, that's probably a different conversation for a different day. But from an asset class perspective, for our listeners who aren't familiar, remind us, where do you focus? I mean, obviously on the residential sector, but kind of, how do you, how do you kind of, where do you draw the line in terms of, you know, what's in focus versus out of focus for the business? Yeah, we're really big in multifamily, right? So we're, as I said previously, we're Fannie Mae's largest lending partner on multifamily properties in the country. We're Freddie's second or third largest partner. We're HUD's second largest partner. So we do a tremendous amount of both debt and equity in multifamily and also sales of multifamily properties. So 80% of what we do at Walker and Dunlop is focused on multifamily. The thing to keep in mind on that is that there's about $4 trillion of debt outstanding to commercial real estate in the United States, $4 trillion. And half of that, $2 trillion is on multifamily. So all commercial properties, office retail, hospitality, multifamily, industrial and data centers and all the other subclasses of $4 trillion of debt outstanding, $2 trillion is on multifamily. And so while, so we're really big in the largest asset class, okay? And then at the same time as we've grown and scaled, even though it's only 20% of our deal flow, we're still doing billions of dollars of lending every year on office properties, on retail, on hospitality. And then in 2025, we started to do sales on hotels. So that's the next asset class that we've gone into on a sale standpoint, bringing a team and we're now selling hotels. And then likely we'll go into the industrial space, so we'll start selling industrial properties. And then likely we'll go into the retail space and start selling retail properties. But that's, we sort of, we built the business around our agency lending platform. And we expanded out in debt and equity capital markets. And then we added on top of that the sales business. And now we're moving into new asset classes in the sales business. So let's segue into multifamily because I think it's interesting. We've talked a lot about it on this show with other guests, but from your perch, your seat, kind of what, how would you kind of set the landscape for what's happening as we record this at the end of December of 2025 in the, in the multi space in the United States? So everybody, there, there've been a big saying brand in over the past couple of years of survive, survived to 25, right? Interest rates started going up in 2022 into 23. The great tightening was upon us and interest rates shut up and we had a massive number of properties that have been bought in 2020 and 2021. Super low cap rates are very high prices and a lot of people have put really cheap debt. And in some instances, floating rate debt on those properties. And now all of a sudden your debt cost has gone up, your value has dropped and a lot of people were sitting there going, uh oh, what do I do? And so the theme was survive to 25 and a lot of people, the majority of people have survived to 25. There are defaults. But it was like, let's wait until 25, the, the, the, the, what has happened though, it was somewhat problematic is that once there was all this deal activity in 21 and into 22. Everyone started putting shovels in the ground to build properties in 23 and 24. Occupancy has been stabilized, but rents have not been able to be pushed. It's a really good thing from an inflation standpoint. Everyone's been reading the CPI and saying the cost of housing and the cost of rents has gone up tremendously. Here I will tell you flat out the numbers on rent growth that are inside of the CPI are completely aromias. There's, there's not a chance that we've seen rents grow the way that CPI thinks that rents have grown, grown because I see it every single day. Okay. You've got some markets that are under supply that have been able to grow rent two to three percent. at the exact same time you've got.
It's like Denver, Colorado that T12 trailing 12 months through Q3 were down 7.4%. Austin, Texas T12 through Q3 down 7.7%. So real ranked degradation, which has been great for the consumer. If you live in Austin, Texas, you want to run an apartment. It's on sale. And oh, by the way, the over supply in Austin, the over supply in Denver and driving down of rents has also driven down home prices. So that's really good from an inflationary standpoint and a cost of living standpoint for homeowners. It's not great for owners of single family homes or apartment buildings. So what we're seeing now in 2025 is a couple things. One, the capital markets are totally back. So there's plenty of debt capital and equity capital that's been flowing into the asset class in 2025. One thing that there is a misconception in the market that cap rates and interest rates are closely aligned, if you will, as interest rates go down, cap rates go down, which means prices go up. Not true. What drives cap rates is capital flows. When more capital is coming to the asset class, cap rates go down, prices go up. When capital flows out of asset classes, cap rates go up, prices go down. And so what we saw in the great tightening in 2023, 24 into 25 was capital came out, cap rates went up, values went down. And what we've seen in 25 is capital started to come back in. Therefore, cap rates have stabilized and started to go down, values have started to go up. Looking at 26 as a very with a very positive outlook as it relates to financing activity, sales activity and stabilization into growth of rents once again. There are still plenty of markets, particularly in the Sunbelt, which got overbuilt heavily that are still trying to absorb over building. I said, negative 7.7% rents, teeth 12, Q through Q3, it's at 86% occupancy today branded. Okay, 86% occupancy is a very difficult market to make money in. You got to get that up to 94, 96% occupancy to then start pushing rents. So the Austin market is still over supplied. But once you see that supply get absorbed, Austin's got all the growth drivers of it. Any market that you would ever want to own commercial real estate and multifamily it. So there are a lot of people watching Austin saying, do I wait until absorption gets to 90% 95% because once it gets to 95% in Austin, cap rates are going to go from 5% down to 3.5% like that. And you're going to have to pay the buy in. So a lot of smart buyers are trying to watch various markets to say, San Francisco was completely out of favor San Francisco now actually has a bid. Let's go and invest in San Francisco before cap rates come collapsing back down to where they were previously. And you know, we just sold an asset here in Denver yesterday at a 425 cap rate. Denver has not been a 425 cap rate market for the last three years has not been. We just sold an asset yesterday to 425 perspective cap rate. That says to me that people are sitting there going, okay, Denver is going to get its mojo back. It's going to get its growth back. And now before cap rates compress even further. Where are you seeing capital flows coming from, you know, because there's this we talked a little about before we started recording. I mean, there's a few kind of mega trends happening. But you know, one is a lot of owners of assets, the buyers that you mentioned in the, you know, 2020 19 to 2023 vintage, you know, haven't. So they're not performing as well. And so there's there's a lack of of DPI, you know, there's not a lot of capital being returned to investors. So is there a dry powder sitting out there, you seeing new entrance come in or kind of how are you seeing this recycling of capital play out in the transaction flows. So one of the main reasons we saw the volume of transactions in 2025 that we have seen is due to. Recycling needs, if you will. So to exactly what you just said, there are a lot of investors in commercial role state private equity. Who have said. I invest in your fund in 2016. And I haven't gotten any money back from that fund. I need a return of capital. And so before you go raise your next fund, I want money back. So that's forced a lot of transaction volume on the sales side. There's over $600 billion of capital that's been invested in funds in commercial role state for over five years. That needs to be recycled back to their investor base. Then there's another 200 billion of capital that was raised in 21 and 22 that had not been deployed in 23 and 24 that needed to get deployed in 2025 or 2026. So it was it was those two sources of equity capital that sort of forced transactions in 2025 and not because rates had fallen to a level where everyone said great let's go refinance or cap rates had gotten to a level where everyone said let me go sell. So you're just identifying the driver of activity in 2025 as we looked at 26 and 27 as it relates to trends and where the capital is coming from a. The US you know tariffs made a lot of people say whoa or foreign investors still going to love the United States. They still love the United States as we all know investors want return and the United States economy is growing and they all want return. So while there's been noise and people are like whoa I don't know about this or that. You still have a lot of foreign investors who want to invest in the United States. The interesting thing is the growth of the large private equity first. The aggregation of capital in the black stones and the Apollo's and the KKRs of this world they just continue to get bigger and bigger and the funds that they're raising are just getting larger and larger and so the issue now is that continued institutionalization of asset ownership and of capital aggregation is going to continue. And they really I think have a big big advantage over sort of the middle market and it's hard for me to think of these firms that raise billion dollar and two billion dollar commercial real estate private equity firms funds excuse me as middle market because they used to be really big. But when you have starwood raising eight billion dollars in black stone raising $12 billion in a single fund. And so the question with them would be what do they do can they continue to raise capital can they continue to be asset aggregators can they continue to stand it do they get folded into some of the big p firms and then so much of the market is still owned by you know institutional families. And what you would call it's not it's not a drawgatory but kind of mom and pop owners someone owns a retail center they own you know two eight million dollar retail centers in demoin island power to you know reason for the cell and they have a great business they manage them really well will put a loan on it for them. So we bifurcate our coverage groups by the large institution the middle market and then the private client which is someone who owns those retail centers in demoin island and we go to market to bring them solutions that are appropriate for all those three sort of market segmentations. I think it's really it's really interesting to hear how you describe it is consistent kind of what we see and what we hear from from our clients as well. I guess just specifically on the multis I just sense there's so much chatter about you know the markets and the fundamentals are you seeing. Distress in multi today and if so where and if not why do you think you know this survived till 25 hasn't resulted in any distress so there's been distress but not. Not anything close to what we saw on the great financial crisis and that didn't that actually didn't turn out to be that you know didn't have a ton of distress coming out of the GFC our portfolio is performed exceptionally well as we said in our last earnings call. We we have a hundred and forty two billion dollar servicing portfolio of that about 70 billion of it has risk on it. Okay we have about 70 billion in our portfolio that is we take no risk on and we have about 70 billion that we take risk on of that 70 billion that's all multifamily properties. We have seven. Defaults in the portfolio as of the end of q3 that's what we told investors so. Our portfolio is amazing I mean it's it's really really good quality multifamily are there. Owner operators who bought properties at a low cap rate with floating rate debt in 2021 who have gone upside down and had either sell it throw the keys back to the lender or trying to figure out how to today 100% they're there. But not anything that's caused a banking crisis not anything that's caused you know any major operator to you know tip you look at you look at. Brookfield who's been an amazing amazing investor and commercial real estate Brookfield continues to have these funds that do incredibly well but if you look at the paper you see one Brookfield office property after the next that like is you know. Gone BK they threw back the keys they defaulted on the loan whatever else and again i'm not trying to throw darts of Brookfield because lots of others have as well the point is they got the scale at Brookfield they've got the capital of Brookfield that they can take their lumps. And still keep moving forward and get really good returns back to their investors they're just they've got that scale to do it and you can say the same thing about you know think about blackstone with the hilton by out back in 2007 I just had with at that UVA.
Conference that I was talking about were my dad and I did our thing. Chris DeSetto was just before us and he talked about the dark days of the great financial crisis when Hilton Thank goodness they were owned by blackstone But they almost went belly up and it was only due to blackstone size and scale that they could cut that out and turn out to be the best Best private equity deal blackstones ever done But few could have done it the way the blackstone did it and it came that close to like tipping right So my only point here is that there are blemishes on the market but nothing that is systemic and there have been plenty of Sort of distress funds that were raised in 2021 and 2022 that will not get deployed They have not by any mean found the opportunity to do a just rest investing that they thought they were going to And I would put as well on that One of the big reasons that multi has been such a great asset class is because fanny and freddy are in the market in good markets and bad markets So there's always access to debt capital in the office market A year ago there was no bid There really wasn't it's amazing which 12 months is done to the office market the office market is gone from you got an office building I don't care what coupon rate you're not going to get alone Today you can get lots of financing on office because it's gotten a bit so There's distress but it's not you know, it's not a huge opportunity It's clearly not something that systemic is it relates to a potential Problem for banks or for big lenders on commercial real estate So in our last few minutes together. I want to just change gears You're the CEO terminus CEO of a public company so you're out there But I also think if I look across our industry You've done as good of a job or a better job than almost everybody I can point to and building a personal brand That kind of helps to drive Your your business forward and I'm talking specifically about the the Walker webcast that you launched I think during the pandemic But I'm curious Ken why did you do that and you know, we talk a lot about I talk a lot about we talk a lot about on the show the You know the importance of differentiation the the need to be able to tell your story and increasingly We're talking about the importance of building personal and professional brands as a way of cutting through the noise So you know kind of what was the story behind the Walker webcast and what have you learned along the way that might be useful for some of our listeners who are Not really sure what it means to build a personal brand or why they should think about doing it So the Walker webcast was not started to build Willy Walker's brand in any way the Walker webcast was Started because we wanted to communicate with our Clients when we went into the shutdown on the pandemic to try and say to him what we were seeing It was a stroke of luck I made the decision on the very first Walker webcast to not have myself or Walker and Dunlop employees bankers brokers Be the guests I went outside our very first guest and every guest up until now there are a couple exceptions where Either I'm being interviewed or I interview one of our One of my colleagues whether it's Ivy Zelman who runs our research division or Chris Mikkelsen who runs our capital markets group or Aaron Powell is one of our big bankers But very rarely do I bring on Walker and a lot people but at the outset Branding one of the great strokes of luck was to bring in outsiders so that people weren't like oh Walker not just talking their own book They just they want to promote themselves So by bringing in third parties It it gave I think the platform center to the a different view than all of our competitors who went out and said hey This is the perspective from X bank from X services firm etc etc Which everyone did everyone did There was in a consulting firm. There wasn't an investment bank. There wasn't you know CBR EJLL all of our competitors went and did it right But then there were a couple things that made it so it wasn't sustainable one a lot of times they were talking their own book Be they moved it around on the calendar See they didn't have a consistent rhythm to it. We did every Wednesday at 12.30 So Walker webcast Wednesday 12.30 every week Outside guests and people got to rely on it. It was like it's there And then the other piece to it was that I was fortunate enough to have Friends who people wanted to listen to and that was a huge huge advantage Because we've never paid a guest on the Walker webcast and as you very well know I've had some very very very famous people who make very very very high Speaking fees who were you know if they were asked to go on some other podcast They would say you know pay me 20,000 bucks to come on or whatever the case might be we've never paid a fee We paid one We paid Katie Ledecki who was going to the Tokyo Olympics and she was training in California And I got to her through the United States Olympic Committee. I was I'm on the board of the US OPC foundation and They have a she has a stipend of four thousand dollars per speaking fee that the US OPC would have to pay her And I said no no no no no no I'm not gonna have the US OPC pay or all pay her so I paid her four thousand dollars speaking fee But Katie Ledecki is the only person who's come on the Walker webcast We've had 280 guests that we paid And so having access to my rolodex and my friends to say hey come give me an hour And the types of people who have been on Senators and governors and CEOs across the industry and and authors and Educators and presidents of universities and I can keep on going that was a huge advantage to us to be able to bring on great guests and have great conversations And it's just built and built and I think one of the other things about it is that as you well know Once you build a listener base and once you start to you know get the wraps and people say hey Brandon's a really good host he asks great questions It's not like going up against the press or he's not gonna like you know say something about me that I don't really want to hear or whatever else It then builds on itself So if you look at us versus anybody else in the commercial real estate space who has a podcast we have had over 22 million views of the Walker webcast We are every week seeing somewhere between the low end 125,000 at the high end about 350,000 views on a weekly basis on YouTube our closest competitor Has a million cumulative views So we've got 22 million they've got a million cumulative and so as long as we stick at it and keep building and getting great guests and great great content It's going to be really hard Not impossible and anyway, but it's going to be really hard for anyone to kind of Match the audience that we've been able to build and and so As you can imagine and as you know exceedingly well takes a ton of time takes a ton of my time I like you do a tremendous amount of research on my guests I I research everyone myself. I don't outsource it and I also can't outsource the guest getting business I still when I I mean I went to two super super influential powerful people today Saying to me would you join me on the webcast in q1? They're only gonna come on because I've asked them they're not coming on because Either someone on my marketing marketing team asked them or because we hire Some firm who's gonna go out and ask them because if the firm goes and ask them to say great I'll take a $20,000 speaking fee So that's sort of the way it's been built and as it relates to the personal brand that was never the intention But it you know, it's I have to say my my girlfriend and I were in Europe this summer I'm walking down the street in London someone walks up and says I listen to the webcast every day So I was like that's kind of cool. I'm in Milan walking down the street outside of a Sephora working on an email Someone comes up to me says she might my girlfriend walks out. She's been talking to someone. She's like his friend I'm like no you watch as the webcast And then and then the final one brand and which is fun though is the next week we're on vacation We're in a bisa. It's three o'clock in the morning at at a disco in in a bisa And I'm walking through this crowd at a at a at a packed disco and some young guy turns around his eyes Look up and he's like Willie Walker and I'm like not tonight I'm not and I just fuck great by him. I was like no way. I'm not in Gigi right now But that piece of it's been fun and obviously I really enjoy when people come up and talk to me about it How much they like listening to it? Well as a listener of the podcast. Thank you for what you do I think it's fascinating and and I'm consistently impressed by the guests that you have on and the quality of conversation and Yeah, in many ways it's an inspiration for what we're doing here So we could go on for many more hours, but unfortunately we're out of time I really enjoyed the conversation. Willie. Thank you so much for joining me today and look forward to our next conversation Brandon it's a pleasure. Thank you so much Really enjoyed it and thanks for taking the time and thanks for putting me on your platform Thanks for listening to the latest episode of the distribution by Juniper Square If you like today's podcast, please share it with a colleague or a friend and don't forget to subscribe and rate the distribution on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts You can connect with me on LinkedIn by going to www.linkedin.com forward slash i n forward slash b said loft or you can find me on Twitter @b said loft You can also find a video recording of this conversation on demand at juniper square.com forward slash the dash distribution until next time [BLANK_AUDIO]
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