- The new normal in Montreal [1:50]
- Covid-19’s impact on Montreal’s hospitality industry [10:29]
- Luciano’s thoughts on working from home [15:21]
- French language requirements in Montreal [23:07]
- Why Luciano got into real estate [24:27]
- Luciano’s first three years in commercial real estate [26:35]
- Advice for new real estate agents [28:29]
- How analyzing the news can help you win commercial clients [29:51]
- The need for human interaction [38:25]
- How to break through your goals.
- Plus so much more.
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Aaron: Real Estate Rockstars. This is Aaron Amuchastegui. Today, I get to
interview someone that’s really, really interesting. He comes from Quebec.
Luciano D’Iorio is Managing Director at Cushman & Wakefield. I think a lot
of you guys know Cushman & Wakefield is primarily only a commercial real
estate broker. I’m hoping to talk to Luciano today about what’s happening up in
Canada. What’s happening in Quebec.
We’ll talk a little bit about the three asset classes
that are the primary ones that they focus on, and his journey from being an
agent, being a broker to being the managing director. Luciano, thanks for
coming on.
Luciano D’Iorio: Hey, thanks for having me, Aaron.
Aaron: Glad we could make it. You’re up in Montreal. Tell us a little bit
about what’s life like in Montreal right now with everything. Are people back to work? What’s everything
like?
Luciano: Actually, this week I’m pretty excited because we’ve actually opened up
our office on Monday. We’re basically operating at 25% of our employees. The
rest of the gang is still working from home and we are ready to go within our
guidelines. We’ve been working hard over the last couple of months for reentry,
and a proper reentry and a safe reentry.
This week on Monday was our first day back into the
new normal, if we can call it that. Montreal in general we’ve been hit hard.
We’ve been one of the hardest hit cities in Canada with COVID-19. A lot of our
seniors, unfortunately, were struck by this virus. Our provincial government,
which is equivalent to your state government, our premier basically had us on
lockdown beginning in March 13th. Now slowly we’re starting to reopen.
Shopping malls reopened on, I believe it was the 22nd
of June– Sorry. The 19th of June. 22nd of June was food courts. Non-essential
businesses and offices I think are taking an approach of a staggered approach.
We are deemed an essential service. We were back. We could have been back in
operation in mid-May. Of course, like I said, we want it to be ready and make
sure that our employees were safe and that we felt comfortable before coming
in.
Which is why we came in on the 29th of June. It’s been
a long haul.
Aaron: I live in Austin, Texas, and Texas started reopening six weeks ago.
Probably. It was mid-May restaurants started to open. We could start to go out
again and do some normal things. Right now, we’re starting to lockdown a little
bit more again. It’s reversing some of those actions. I was really glad six
weeks ago we could go out, and you guys have taken an extra pause. The future
will tell us what are the best methods with all of this.
When you say 25% of the people at the office, is that
something that your company is doing or is it still a state mandate? You guys
just decide, “Hey, we’ll let 25% come back in. That’ll keep everybody
safe. Everybody else work from home.”
Luciano: Exactly. That’s a maximum of 25%. Not all days we have 25% of the
people in. There are some people that have decided not to come in. If they do
decide to come in because they’ve got to pick up a laptop or they’ve got to
pick up some sort of a document, then we arrange it that they are in as long as
they’re not exceeding the 25%. We’re really trying to monitor things, make sure
that everybody is safe and everybody is okay before we go out there.
Of course, our business exposes us to a lot of people.
We’re on tours and things. It’s interesting because I started an industry group
a couple of weeks back, with fellow brokers of competitive firms and also major
investor landlords in the city in terms of, how did we want to reopen things as
we were going to come out of the confinement? It’s interesting because we take
it for granted to show space. We’re used to doing office tours and showing
space in an office building.
Now, of course, if elevator access is restricted and
you’ve got to jump from one building to another, you want to make sure that
you’re not impeding on the normal operation that the building has for its own
tenants. We’ve actually worked with the landlords and said, look, if you want
us to come in and do office tours afterhours or before operating hours, and
that’ll alleviate your stress on your elevators, then we’re happy to do that.
It was interesting to see how we came together as a
community, to make sure that we’re up and running and as smooth as we can be.
Aaron: To adjust. For people that have never been to Montreal, what US city is it most like? You’re pretty
close to New York, right? Across the border, a drive and maybe that’s why
Montreal was so hard hit because New York was definitely a hard hit. How would you describe it compared to any
US cities?
Luciano: I would say it’s a mix of Austin, believe it or not, in terms of just
the live music scene and just the general eclectic mix that you have in Austin.
Certainly, a mix of New York. We’re about 3.5 million people, 4 million people
in the Greater Montreal area. We compare– Boston I would say is, although big
rivals on the hockey side, but probably closest to Boston in terms of look and
feel.
Luciano: Montreal, we are 45-minute drive to the US border, to New York State.
In the past, our past, certainly at the beginning of the 19th century, there
were a lot of families that had investments in Montreal from New York and New
York families that were involved in Montreal and vice-versa. I think it’s still
the case. That connection between Montreal and New York is very big, and
anywhere East Coast and Northeastern US for sure.
Aaron: Let’s talk about commercial real estate. There have been a lot of
different reports out here that break down performance levels. There was a
statistic that came out of how many people were in default. The hospitality
industry were the most amount of loans that were in default. Hospitality is
like hotels and things like that. That commercial asset class has taken a
really big hit in the US.
Over 30% aren’t paying their mortgage right now or are
in some form of a default, which is pretty major. Then there was also the other
office classes were– Commercial class or office space. Office space where
people like you, you have your office there and people just go to work, and
then retail where businesses go. That could be restaurants and things like
that. There’s a lot of different outcomes. Some of the office-retail results
that we’ve seen here definitely depend on the area.
Hospitality across the US is hurting, but office and
retail depending on the city is hurting in different versions, and strip malls
and things like that, especially where they have a couple of restaurant anchor
tenants. What have you seen so far due
to COVID in that market, and what do you think is going to happen across those
three markets?
Luciano: If I look at it, hospitality we haven’t– and I’d have to look at what
our latest studies are, quite admittedly I haven’t seen what we’ve done but I
can tell you anecdotally what I’m seeing in Montreal. Montreal has been known
as a festival town, a bit of a party town certainly in the summer.
We have a few big events in Montreal that make or
break it for most hotels and restaurants, and that’s the Grand Prix, Formula
One Grand Prix which is an international event which draws certainly billions
of spectators on television, but millions of dollars into the city over a
weekend in June. That was canceled. They’re talking about maybe having it in
October, but those are– right now they’re not confirmed reports. I highly
doubt that there would be any attendance at that event.
I think they’ll try just run it on the tracks without
any spectators. The Grand Prix is a big event. The Jazz Festival is a big
event. That’s something that’s been going on for over 30 years in Montreal, and
that happens during the summer, around this time actually. That’s been
canceled. Then we have the Just For Laughs Festival. Those are three big events
that draw people from across North America and certainly from the US, into
Montreal, that unfortunately those hotels and restaurants are not getting any
of that revenue.
The restaurants are hurting, the restaurants were
actually allowed to open, their in-dining rooms, as of last week, some of them just
weren’t ready so they’re opening up this week. It’ll be interesting to see on
how that goes down. In terms of offices, most office buildings were still fully
operational, and allowing their tenants to come in and out of the building from
a landlord perspective. We heard at the beginning from our landlord clients
that, our investor clients, they said that some of the tenants were calling
them for some sort of a rental break.
Some landlords gave some rental breaks and they said,
“Just pay the operating expenses or taxes, and taxes rather and not pay
the net rent.” Some others insisted that full payment was due. Some were
getting a break on certain things like cleaning and parking and so on because,
obviously, if people are not there then those fees don’t have to be taken, but
the office side, actually it wasn’t so bad. Now, what we are hearing from the
investor clients is that, there’s a government program in Canada by the federal
government that’s basically helping pay for rents.
The government kicks in 25%, the tenant kicks in 25%–
Sorry, the tenant kicks in 25%, the landlord kicks in 25%, and the federal
government kicks in 50%. That looks like that’s going to be renewed now as a
program for July. I don’t know what it’s going to look like for August, but
since the pandemic hit that program has been in place.
Aaron: That’s for office space or?
Luciano: Yes. Commercial tenants. Either office or retail, anyone who has to pay
rent. That program also it’s interesting because, I have a hard time keeping up
on it because, at one point the building that you were in had to have a
mortgage, and then they changed that and said, “No, you don’t have to have
a mortgage, it’s open to anybody.” That’s constantly evolving but right
now we’re seeing that the federal government is going to give a helping hand to
retailers and to office tenants and industrial tenants. Any commercial tenant
they are getting a break.
Aaron: That’s very different in Canada than in the US right now. There is
stimulus out here and there’s been some different things but nothing that’s
been long-lasting specifically for that. We’ve had PvP where people could get a
certain amount of money to pay payroll, and a portion of it could be used to
cover rents, but we have seen a huge decrease in office usage in Austin. Then,
have you seen any, of some of the big companies here, Facebook, Twitter,
companies like that have now announced that people can work from home forever?
A certain percentage of people could be– They were
going to change their pay and they were to do some different things based on
whether they work from home or not, but then everyone was going to be allowed
to work from home. That instantly to me says that is going to dramatically
impact office space because, even if there was stimulus, the big company like
them would realize, “Hey, we only need half the space we needed
before.”
Have you seen anything like that in Canada? Do you
think it’s going to happen? What do you think the long-term outlook of
businesses like that that are saying, “Hey, you can work from home
now?”
Luciano: We have seen that in Canada. We think that there’s going to be some
companies,
— No, they were doing it before. Before the pandemic,
there were some companies that said, “We’re going to allow our employees
to work from home and we’re going to set up hotelling in our office space, our
workplace, we’re going to provide you with a space if you want to come in, but
if not, you’ll work from home.” We saw that transition pre-COVID,
pre-pandemic, but I have to say that there’s going to be some companies that it
just won’t fly.
It won’t fly because I look at how much money we spend
as corporations on trying to build culture and build teams, and right now the
beauty of everyone working from home is we are all working from home. We’re all
in the same boat. We’re all in the same storm, however you want to describe
that, but the moment that some people are going to start working from the
office and some people are going to work from home, I think it’s going to make
an interesting dynamic.
I don’t want to play psychologists or sociologists but
just being a manager of a team of people, I think that there’s people in my
team that want to stay connected to the corporation and they see that a
physical place is important. Also, and maybe it’s not so much in the brokerage
world because everybody is an entrepreneur, but in a situation where you’re
trying to go up the corporate ladder, I have a hard time seeing somebody
working from home progress, let’s say in the corporate ladder, because at one
point it’s the law of see and be seen.
It’s the law of, if you’re not in someone’s face
you’re going to be forgotten. That is for companies where it’s important, a
corporate culture is important, where there’s a team spirit and a
team-building, that’s important. They’re going to have a hard time with
everybody working from home. We saw that earlier, maybe about 5 or 10 years
ago, I’m forgetting which company it was, but it was a big tech company that
had people working from home, and then realize that this isn’t working anymore.
For some it’ll work, for others, I think that they’re
going to want to have a mix and a hybrid. Will we be in the office five days a
week? I don’t think we were in the office five days a week prior to this.
There’s some people that for whatever reason, the dirty little secret was that
they were waiting for delivery at home and so they said, “Well, today I’m
going to work from home.” You don’t have this in Austin but in Montreal in
the winters, our winters are pretty rough, and we get some big snowstorms.
When there’s a snowstorm coming in, most people decide
to work from home on a day of a snowstorm because just between traffic and
coming in and out of the city, it becomes almost impossible and not productive.
That’s what we’re seeing right now, it’s– Interestingly enough we have a very
strong tech sector in Montreal that’s based on artificial intelligence. There
was just a group out of New York that announced just this week that, they’re
going to be taking almost 30,000 square feet, 400 employees that they’re backed
by SoftBank out of the US.
They’re coming into Montreal in a big way. They’re
committing to a lease in Montreal in the middle of a pandemic.
Aaron: That is really interesting. One of the differences are, right now, as
people are looking at where to invest, and I’ve seen Canadian investors invest
in the US for flips and things like that because they say, “Hey, if I make
$20,000 in the US, it’s really like making $ 25,000 here” because in
Canada and vice versa. The other side of that too is if you’re in the US and
you’re investing American dollars up in Canada, the exchange rate is like 1.3
or 1.4. A million dollars, US, buys you something for 1.4 up in Canada,
something like that. Does that come into
play a lot for investors that cross the border, back and forth?
Luciano: Yes, that’s exactly it. Certainly, the dollar right now, our dollar is
weaker to the US. The Canadian dollar is weaker to the US dollar. Definitely,
there’s some deals to be had in Canada just based on the exchange rate. Now, of
course, there’s other things that factor in, and there’s taxes and there’s also
some language barrier certainly, if you’re doing business in Quebec. In
general, money will follow where it can grow. Right now, our markets in across
Canada but especially in Montreal, have been undervalued.
We never really built on spec in Montreal when it came
to office space or industrial space. We never really built on spec, so the
demand was very high coming into COVID back in March and the supply was low. If
I think of the on the industrial side, we still have some older buildings that
don’t have the clear heights, the 18 foot ceilings and so on, which for the
benefit of people listening here, an 18 foot ceiling on an industrial building
is obsolete today, because of the way we store things in warehousing and so on.
You want 24, 28, sometimes even 32 foot clear so that
you can palletize in a warehouse. Those don’t exist as existing buildings–
There are but certainly, the demand is higher than the supply, so you’ve got to
build. That’s what we’re seeing right now, especially on the industrial side in
Montreal, the markets on fire. The markets in Toronto and Vancouver have
similar situations where there is demand for that type of space.
Aaron: You mentioned language. Montreal mostly
French?
Luciano: Montreal is mostly French. If you’re opening up a business here, I
always like to use these two examples. One is Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC in in
Quebec is PFK and PFK means Poulet Free Kentucky. It means the same thing,
except we brand it as PFK. If your listeners are looking for KFC in Quebec,
that’s what they’ve got to look for, PFK instead. The other thing is Hollywood
films, Hollywood blockbuster films, whenever there’s a big blockbuster film, I
always use this as an example, as the Star Wars series.
If the Star Wars were to launch a movie on May 4th
around the globe, it would have to be dubbed in French first before launching
in Quebec. That basically is, it’s a law but it’s also respectful of the fact.
There’s over 80% of the people in Quebec are French speakers and French native
tongue. Certainly, you have to know your market, wherever you are. If you’re
doing business in Quebec, you certainly want to have a knowledge of French or
at least, have people on your staff that are knowledgeable in French.
Aaron: Yes, indeed. How did you get
into real estate?
Luciano: Graduated from McGill University at the age of 23. I wanted to be an
entrepreneur and I saw this as a good way of being an entrepreneur, having less
risk because if you open up retail outlet, you have to rent space, you’ve got
to pay rent, you’ve got to stock the store, you’ve got to hire employees and
you haven’t made a dime yet. Most businesses, they say, it takes about five
years for it to start making money. I saw real estate as a good way of being
your own boss, being in control of your own situation and relatively
low-barrier of entry.
That was it, I was 23 years old. I didn’t know square
foot from a square peg but then here we are.
Aaron: Did you start in commercial?
Luciano: I did, right out of school. I didn’t want to do residential because I
felt that I really wanted to control my hours. I didn’t want to get involved in
a business that would have me working until 10:00 PM at night and on weekends.
Nights and weekends, I really wanted to use to do philanthropic work, to do
other things that interest me and I felt that residential, although I probably
I would have done well in it, and I respect a lot of my colleagues who do that,
because I think it’s a grind.
It certainly is a grind but I fell in love with the
business to business aspect of the commercial real estate.
Aaron: I have never heard somebody bring up the difference between commercial
and residential, the hours that you get to work but it’s a great point, because
in commercial, you are dealing with people that are mostly working during
business hours and business things and showing stuff at those times. With
residential, it is primarily different. It’s primarily when people aren’t
working. It’s primarily evening work and weekend work and it definitely is
different.
It’s an interesting perspective for listeners out
there, when you’re thinking about the differences between commercial and
residential. Luciano, how did you do your first year when you got into it? Did
you make any money your first year in commercial?
Luciano: Are you checking my income tax?
Aaron: Yes, I heard that it’s so much harder when you get going.
Luciano: I hear that people are not allowed to reveal tax papers. I made $9,000
in the first year. That’s what we call our T4, here in Canada, basically. I
made more money working part time and going to university than I did in the
first year in real estate. That’s $9,000 Canadian, which is, I don’t know, five
bucks US or something. It was a-
Aaron: You were working full-time that year and
just didn’t have a whole lot of financial success?
Luciano: Yes. Truthfully, I was working half the year because from January till
May, I was working and I was going to get my license. I was making sure that I
was licensed. There were certain things I couldn’t do without a license. I had
to be very careful but at the end of the year, I started in January of 1999,
and at the end of the year my T4 said $9,000.
Aaron: How did you do on year-two?
Luciano: Year two, I made about $45,000 and then year-three, I got into the six
figures and started making some serious money, enough for me to buy my first
investment property. I bought a fourplex of four units. That was actually, I
bought a fourplex before I bought a car. I didn’t have a car but I owned a
fourplex. Don’t ask me how I got to the fourplex but-
Aaron: That’s how you end up paying your car payment later, is you get the
fourplex and the rent buys your car.
Luciano: Exactly.
Aaron: First year $9,000, second year $45,000, by your third year, you were
starting to realize that you can make some money and have a good, high,
good-paying career. What did you learn
those first few years? How did you get from zero to nothing and if you were
going to redo it, what would you have done different?
Luciano: You know what? I think I would have been, if I were to redo it, I’d be
less afraid. There was a fear of, certainly, when I didn’t have the license, it
was a fear of getting caught. It was a fear of also, a bit of a fear of a
rejection because our business, you’re calling out of the 100 phone calls you
make to business owners, 90 of them are going to tell you to go away and 10 of
them are going to listen to you. My pool of calls were in places where I
thought I can get a yes, but the yeses were on small transactions.
If I were to do things differently, I would say you
know what? The calls are the same, the amount of time that we spend are the
same. We’ve all been given 24 hours in a day. That’s what makes us all equal.
How I use those 24 hours and how– I guess, I’d be smarter. I’d be smarter in
which pool, which pond I’d be fishing in. That’s, I would say that would be my
advice would be, let’s do it differently by being smarter about searching for
prospects and searching for clients.
Aaron: Commercial prospecting, if somebody came to you right now, and said,
hey, I want to get involved in commercial real estate, how do I get my first clients? What would you tell them?
Luciano: I would say a few things and we’re luckier today than we were in 1999,
because the search engines are more powerful. Information is readily
accessible. Back in ’99, which doesn’t sound like that long ago, we were still
using yellow pages. We were still using paper lists and stuff to find people.
My advice would be, number one is start your day, by keeping up to date with
news, and finding out what’s going on in terms of news. I’ll give you an
example.
Right now, during COVID, a lot of people are
investing, a lot of the businesses have to get plexiglass. One of the questions
that I would say to a young broker is, think about that story that you read in
the paper about how businesses are getting Plexiglas. For us, as brokers, I
want to see who are the people that are supplying Plexiglas, these people may
have issues because their warehouses, either they can’t keep up, they’re going
to need more space. When I read a story in the paper, I read it diagonally.
I try to look at the beyond the story, because most
people will read that and say, “Oh, well, people need to get plexiglass,
that’s great.” When I read it, as a real estate broker, I’m thinking,
“Well, wait a minute, there may be a problem there.” This person is
obviously being inundated with orders, they’re probably going to have to open
up a second plant, or they’re going to have to open up something, they may have
a real estate problem, they may be running into a real estate problem.
Vice versa, people that said– at one point, we heard
that restaurants were storing their chairs and their tables off-site because
they weren’t allowed to open unless they had gotten rid of their tables and
their chairs. For some of these big restaurant chains, they actually rented
temporary warehousing. Those are the type of questions that as a young broker,
you should be asking yourself when you’re reading a newspaper, or now
everything’s digital, but when you’re reading an article or a story, dig and go
beyond the story.
One of my favorite stories is one year, there was a
lot of snow in Montreal. I read a story that the city was running out of places
to store the snow. Well, I called my contact and said, a contact at the city
and I said, “Do you need help finding a place to store snow?” He
says, “Absolutely, we need help.” That particular day, I was
searching for a place to store snow. That’s just from reading stories, reading
stories, and reading them diagonally.
Aaron: Did you end up finding a place to store the
snow?
Luciano: I didn’t actually and I’ll tell you why, because snow is very difficult
to store. If you have clean land, you don’t want snow on it because of the
residue, the environmental impact that snow can have on the land. Despite the
covenant, because of course, as somebody who’s– If you call a landlord and
say, the city of Montreal would like to store snow on your piece of land,
they’re going to pay the market rent, and they’re going to pay you on time
every month. Obviously, no, we didn’t get interest for that, because there was
a contamination issue.
Aaron: That is very interesting stuff but I think it is a great point. I also
hadn’t heard that tip on here before. Listeners, as you’re listening,
especially when it comes to commercial retail serving people in business, the
news helps out a lot. The news also helps out when they say, there’s a new
plant getting put in over here. Tesla might be putting a new plant in at
Austin. It hasn’t been quite been confirmed yet, the story broke that it was a
certain neighborhood, but then the confirmation came back that they’re just
looking at permits, and they still don’t know if they’re going to buy the land
there.
Well, that instantly changes the value of the real
estate nearby. It instantly changes– it’s phoning to people and say,
“Hey, have you thought about
selling or not?” Maybe it’s telling investors, “Hey, go buy up in
this area, because there’s going to be a high demand. There’s going to be a
factory a mile away that has 3,000 people working in it daily.” There’s
pros and cons, all sorts of stuff. Listening to the news and reading the news,
but reading it in a way that you say, “Hey, how can this affect the business?” Reading it diagonally like
Luciano said, I think that’s a great way to put it in perspective.
Luciano: Yes, just in terms of, to get back to that Tesla plan. For me, how I
would think is I would say, “Okay, well, Tesla’s coming in, who are
Tesla’s suppliers? Who services Tesla that needs to be near them, and needs to
be nearby?” To your point, also in terms of the neighborhood that were if
Tesla is looking in a certain neighborhood, then who’s in that neighborhood and
maybe is ready to sell or willing to sell, because timing is everything in our
business. Location, location, location, and timing are two big things in real
estate that I truly believe in.
It’s funny, there’s a neighborhood in Montreal, it’s
called the Little Italy neighborhood. For the longest time, it started to, it
was declining, restaurants were closing, no one was interested in going there.
A block away, they’ve built a hub for artificial intelligence. You can’t get
space in the neighborhood now.
Aaron: Yes, it is so quick. I know that years ago, it was trying to figure out
where Costco was going to put in their job. As soon as Home Depot would apply
for something that became a good city to invest in, because Home Depot would
invest so much money into figuring out what places were going to grow, people
would say, “Hey, if there’s a Home Depot getting put in, you want to go
invest in real estate in that city, because that is city strong.”
There are all sorts of news out there that can impact
the future, it’s getting the tag along with the research that they’ve already
done. If you can’t pay a team, Home Depot can just go where they go.
Luciano: Just to be clear, I don’t only read the business. I read the sports
section, I read the political section and the city news, because all of that
affects what’s going on, and what’s going on in your city. If you’re serious
about doing business in your city, and you want to understand the ins and outs
of what’s going on, I think that’s the best way.
Aaron: How many people work at Cushman Wakefield in Montreal and what volume
you guys doing?
Luciano: We’re over 50 people in Montreal, and we are basically doing, we do
office, we do industrial, we do retail, we do some investment sales as well. We
are basically out there. Also, we do tenant representation, we do agency work,
we also do project management, valuations and advisory services, and asset
management. We’re really a one-stop-shop in terms of full-service brokerage. We
don’t only do transactional, but we also have consulting services, and service
lines that help our clients.
Aaron: Well, it’s really interesting to get a perspective from Canada and a
perspective from Montreal, all about what’s happening in business and from
people that are– like I said, at the beginning, a lot of people are talking
about commercial, and how hard commercial has been getting hit and the
different things. It sounds like the government in Canada has taken a very
different approach so far, to the government here.
One of the interesting points that I heard from you
today that I hadn’t heard previously that makes a lot of sense is the idea of
people working from home. A lot of businesses now are going to work from home
all the time, but as far as getting seen and getting promoted– You can be the
one that works the hardest at home, and you’re going to get promoted that way,
but in really, really big businesses, it will be difficult for people that work
remotely and just do a one hour daily stand up to actually move through the
ranks. I get that point.
I understand that point. I think a lot of businesses
are going to be moving to mostly virtual, but I could see why someone would–
because part of me says, why would you
live in San Francisco, a million-dollar condo, if you can live a three-hour
drive away and live for 100,000?
Luciano: Well, the other thing, Aaron, is that people need people. I laugh
because we could have all ordered out, we could have all ordered out during the
pandemic from our favorite restaurants. Except, what happened the moment we
were able to have deconfinement, people ran out and wanted to go to cafes, and
wanted to go to the restaurants and wanted to go and see and be seen and just
meet other people, because people need people.
I think that’s an important point.
I look at my own office, people want to interact and
the things that are said at the watercooler as much as sometimes it’s just
sports scores or whatever, but that interaction that you have amongst
employees, and that interaction that you have with your colleagues, is what
makes the environment and what makes it different. I can’t imagine somebody
starting a new job in a new company during this pandemic, how hard it must be
for them to feel like they’re part of something.
Short term it must be very frustrating because you
don’t know anybody in the company. We all know each other right now but the
newbie that’s coming in, it’s hard for them to integrate.
Aaron: Yes, I think it’s much easier for people to go from an office to remote
because they already have the relationships, they already have the expectation,
they already have the skillset and the training to actually start as remote.
Yes, so much more difficult to feel that same culture. Luciano, if somebody
wants to reach out to you, if they have a question about real estate up in
Montreal, or want to talk to you about helping them with some investing, how can they find you?
Luciano: They can find me on Facebook, they can find me on LinkedIn, Luciano
D’Iorio on LinkedIn on Facebook as well on Instagram and my email is probably
the best @Luciano.dIorio without the apostrophe. D-I-O-R-I-O@cushwake.com.
That’s probably the best way to get in touch with me.
Aaron: Great, we will have that in the show notes for the people that are
listening. If you’re watching us on YouTube we’ll have it in the links down
below or if it’s from any of the podcast download sites. Thank you Luciano for
coming on here. Listeners, I hope that you guys learned a lot about some
different perspectives on commercial real estate today, and a more positive
outlook and some opinions from a different side, from a lot of stuff we’ve been
hearing lately. Luciano, I appreciate you coming on and maybe we’ll have you on
again soon.
Luciano: Thank you very much. Thank you Aaron appreciate it. Bye.
Aaron: Bye.