The New NYC Retail Boom: Pilates, Pet Spas and Empty Storefronts

0:05Lilah Burke: Welcome to Deconstruct, a podcast from The Real Deal. I'm Lilah Burke. And I'm Hannah Kramer. We have a lot of news for you this week. We will be talking about brokerage competition in Chicago, a legal saga involving boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and an FBI raid in Brooklyn.

0:23Hannah Kramer: But first, we're going to talk about what's happening in New York's diverse and complicated retail market. Let's dive in.

0:33Lilah Burke: So for our main story today, we'll be talking about the retail market. Now, retail in New York has really been a roller coaster over the past decade, from the emergence of e-commerce to the pandemic. There was an idea that brick-and-mortar retail might be over in New York. Clearly, that's an old narrative now. With us to talk about the state of the market is Michael Miller, a broker at TSCG. Michael, welcome.

0:58Michael Miller: Good morning. Thank you.

1:00Lilah Burke: All right. So you represent tenants as part of your business. Can you tell us a little bit about who your tenants are? Who's looking for space right now in New York?

1:09Michael Miller: Well, the largest category or most active category would be food and quick service restaurants. REBME, which is a New York-based organization that tracks real estate, just quoted approximately 40 % of the recent activity is in those two categories.

1:25Hannah Kramer: And you are actually a partner in a couple of restaurants yourself, right?

1:30Michael Miller: Correct, yes.

1:30Hannah Kramer: So does that inform your thinking? And what do you think these restaurant tenants in particular are kind of looking for right now? Why are we seeing such an expansion in this sector?

1:40Michael Miller: Well, there's two parts to that question. One on the sit-down style restaurant, which is what I own or operate, it's costs, expenses. It's just a very fixed expense situation right now. And the strategy to overcome that on the quick service side, it's a smaller envelope. In other words, a smaller space. You have less fixed overhead because there's less moving parts to it. And people come in, get their food and leave typically or something similar to that. And that serves two purposes. One, lower costs or overhead. So you can pass that through to the customer better. In other words, you can price your product a little more favorably for the customer because you have less overhead.

2:23Michael Miller: The other is it's quick. So if somebody has 15 minutes or whatever it may be to get their lunch or their breakfast or even a dinner or something on the way home, it fulfills that need.

2:37Lilah Burke: Okay. So food, quick service restaurants, that's a big part of it. But overall, how is retail doing in New York? What's the market like?

2:44Michael Miller: So in addition to that, it's doing very well. One of the top, top categories is health and wellness. So that includes gyms, that includes anything to do with health and wellness. A big category now is what we call recovery, which would be infrared saunas, cold plunge pools, different modalities of massage or other techniques to quote unquote, help you recover from that workout or from that physical day, which could just be sitting at the office, you know. And so that whole category, as well as beauty services and personal services. So it tends to be a very service-driven retail environment right now from what we're seeing.

3:24Michael Miller: Because when you add to restaurants and quick service, personal services or health and beauty, you're really talking about a dominant part of the driving sector right now.

3:35Lilah Burke: Okay. So there's food and there are services. What about goods? What about department stores?

3:41Michael Miller: Hard goods or goods, two categories, supermarkets, food again, because of the high cost of dining out. And because of some of the cost pressures to consumers, consumers tend to be dining at home more or eating at home more. And so the supermarket sector is doing extremely well. And the other is off-price fashion, what we call all the TJX brands, but TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, Marshalls, on and on, as well as Ross stores, Burlington stores, Nordstrom Rack, less so, but are all very active.

4:12Lilah Burke: So people are eating, doing infrared saunas, and they're buying discount fashion, right?

4:18Michael Miller: Yes, and pets, pet services, believe it or not, especially in the city and such. Pet services are very important. Doggy daycare, veterinary services.

4:29Hannah Kramer: So we're talking about a number of kind of business sectors that are booming, that are coming in, that are looking for new space. We have our wonderful data team here at TRD Data, and they were reporting, you know, earlier this week that in certain parts of Manhattan, There are really record low vacancy and prices that are really starting to climb again. Does that resonate for you in terms of what you're seeing in the market? And do you think that makes it a landlord's market right now when it comes to retail?

4:56Michael Miller: 100 % based on specific trade areas or sub-markets, if you would. Calling Manhattan a market, and then we go into the sub-markets. The sub-market would be Soho. You know, very, very strong, vibrant right now. Nomad, north of Madison Park. Very, very strong, very vibrant. It's really the core of it is Broadway. And Broadway used to be the button and accessory shop corridor for the garment center. Quite different than what you see there today. All high-end restaurants and bougie matcha stores and so forth. So those would be two examples. And actually parts of Madison are very robust again and parts of Fifth also.

5:36Michael Miller: So in other words, on the luxury end, which really suffered, it has come back.

5:40Hannah Kramer: Yeah. Are there submarkets or particular niches that you're seeing right now that are struggling more? Were there more vacancy, more availability?

5:48Michael Miller: Yes. I mean, Times Square has never come back to be what it once was. It was trading conservatively,$1 ,000 to$2 ,000 a square foot, even up to$3 ,000 a square foot, which is extraordinary. I mean, it's just a huge number. Pre-COVID. Pre-COVID. And now, you know, they just can't capture these numbers anymore. And there's a lot of vacancy as a result. It's having trouble finding its way.

6:13Lilah Burke: And in these areas where tenants are fighting for space, what does that look like? I mean, you know, how does that change your negotiating strategy if it's, you know, quite competitive?

6:22Michael Miller: So that's a great question because everyone just assumes rent. Well, you know, if they want, you know, X and you offer Y, then you'll get the space. Not at all. The landlords can become more choosy in who they take. So the old adage, oh, bank on every corner. Well, the reason they were doing that was because the banks were the stalwart of the industry. They were very strong financially, would be there, quote unquote, forever. So the landlords can become more choosy as to what tenant they want. So the part I touched on first was the strength of the tenant, financial strength typically, but it could be operating strength.

6:55Michael Miller: One of the tenants I represent that we've been in business this year, 20 years, we've never closed a store. That to a landlord can have a lot of value. The other piece is the tenant brings something to the landlord. So a great coffee shop, a great fitness boutique, a Whole Foods, you know, potentially or Trader Joe's could add to the accretive, be accretive to the value of the property or to if I have a thousand units above me in my residential building that I have to lease, it can help me draw those type of tenants that I want for that. So you use the retail to make your greater asset more valuable.

7:30Mm-hmm.

7:31Hannah Kramer: And Lila, I mean, you did a story earlier this week that was really talking about how, you know, Michael, as you referenced, there used to be that bank on every corner, right? And for a while in New York, it seemed like there was also a pharmacy on every other corner. That's changing. You have quick service restaurants, you have pet shops, all of these different things coming in. How are you dealing with that as the broker, right? I mean, can you go to the landlord and say, hey, you know, I can put somebody in to this abandoned right-aid space that you have, but we're going to have to chop it up?

8:03Hannah Kramer: Does that complicate the conversation you have with them?

8:06Michael Miller: Yes, always, because it's expense. So the landlord has to put more money into what they see as a SOAR right now because it's an empty space. Sometimes when you go around and you see empty spaces, the entity that was on the lease, the company, the business that was on that lease, is still in business. They chose to close that particular location because of the cost of operating it. It could have been theft and pelfraged. Whatever the reason was, they just chose to close it and keep paying rent. So the store is closed. The windows are dark. But the landlord is being paid rent.

8:41Hannah Kramer: If you're a landlord, are you OK with that? I mean, I would think it still is kind of an eyesore. It's not a value add to your asset, really. I mean, the rent's coming in, but...

8:51Michael Miller: Landlords don't want that. But the alternative is I can spend a lot of money and hope to attract or attract two or three of these other tenants to take this one space. So I have to go further out on a limb and then potentially have to release that company from the lease. So that's some of the challenge when you go around Manhattan and see some spaces where former banks that might still be paying rents on them, former restaurants that are still paying the rents, former coffee shops that are still paying the rents. So there's quite a few examples around Manhattan like that. But the landlord does want to put a new tenant in them.

9:28Michael Miller: I don't want to suggest they don't. But it has to be attractive based on what they already have.

9:35Hannah Kramer: Right. It has to pencil at the end of the day.

9:37Michael Miller: Yes.

9:38Lilah Burke: Right. And I wanted to talk about the bank and pharmacy issue slightly. You know, I wrote the story that I quoted you and Michael about how banks and chain pharmacies are downsizing. And it was really interesting to hear about why that is, you know, a lot to do with how banking has changed. Dodd-Frank made mortgage lending less relational, apparently. And, you know, there's like a need for smaller spaces now. But one thing I know you mentioned in our conversation that I didn't have a chance to get into in the story was the vault. Apparently, all the banks are pulling out and they're leaving these vaults, right?

10:11Michael Miller: Correct. And they tend to be the older banks. The newer banks are not building vaults anymore. There are no safe deposit boxes. is practically available in New York City anymore. But on the older legacy banks, there are these large fortress-like vaults, and they're very expensive to remove. You know, if you have a space of 3 ,000 feet or 4 ,000 feet, they can occupy 500 plus square feet of it. It's a significant portion of the space. So it's something they have to deal with.

10:37Hannah Kramer: So are you seeing any retailers kind of get creative with what they can do with the vault space?

10:43Michael Miller: Formally, not as much anymore. You did see a couple of, you know, speakeasies at restaurants try to do something cool at the vault, make it a little, you know, private dining room or such, but don't see that anymore.

10:56Lilah Burke: And I'm going to ask you to be a little bit of an armchair economist here. But in the beginning, we talked about, you know, fitness being really big right now, discount fashion, food. What do you think is behind some of those trends? Why are we seeing wellness, you know, really big right now?

11:13Michael Miller: Well, you may laugh at this one. GLP-1s. And I'm dead serious. So GLP-1s have had an interesting effect. Obviously, they're for a purpose for someone who needs it for their health. However, they've migrated to vanity. And what it does is it obviously substantially decreases your appetite. I've never taken them, but what I understand is it kind of gives you an uncomfortable feeling after you've eaten, quote unquote, enough. But in addition, it does the same to alcohol. So after one or two drinks, especially wine or anything acidic, you don't desire it anymore. So consumption on that realm has really been brought down by GLP-1s, as well as the younger audience.

11:54Michael Miller: They tend to be more health-driven. They will hold events around health and wellness and things versus going out and having a good time at the bar. So there is a large trend in general moving in that direction.

12:07Lilah Burke: And that leads to people doing more of this fitness stuff.

12:12Michael Miller: Correct. Just awareness of fitness, awareness of food quality and the goodness of what they might be eating. You look at a Chipotle, which was probably one of the hottest quick service restaurants in the entire industry, if not the, had some of those internal problems and they've never come back. But in addition, there's new and fresh operators coming out all the time with just better quality ingredients. You know, this bowl, which I think is Australia, Farmer J's, you know, even a daily provision. So people just are more aware of what they're consuming and eating, hence the success of Whole Foods, Sprouts, the like.

12:51Lilah Burke: And so everyone is shrinking and they need new clothes and they're going to TJ Maxx, right?

12:55Michael Miller: Well, on the off-price fashion side, with the tighter budgets, you know, the consumer expenses and people having to pull in their discretionary spending, as we call it, you know, you go to Walmart or wherever for your essentials, and then you may go to resale stores, you know, secondhand or to off-price fashion for, you know, what's left on the discretionary budget. So there's a few things that are driving all of this.

13:18Hannah Kramer: You have some of these stores, right? Plethora of new fitness boutiques, right? Or even coffee shops. Like it feels to me like I see a blank street coffee on every other corner now. And I mean, you mentioned Chipotle, right? Which for years, it was, you know, a new Chipotle in this neighborhood, in that neighborhood, in that neighborhood. Now that started to pull back a bit, right? So I wonder if there are any of these little niches that are bubbling right now that you think will start to cool off or simmer in the next few.

13:48Michael Miller: They always will. Seems to be, in my opinion, our tendency is to overdo everything. You know, humans, I always tell people humans were followers. I know we hate to hear that, but there aren't many toll booths left. But when you went to a toll booth line, there's always one or two with a long line and the others are open because everyone gets on the line. So we're in the process of overdoing the beverage industry. You know, although the boutique coffee shops are great, I'm a big supporter, and many of them are doing very, very well. But we will overdo the quick service, in my opinion, food. We will overdo the coffee, and it'll settle itself out.

14:25Michael Miller: In terms of new trends, believe it or not, frozen yogurt is coming back.

14:30Lilah Burke: Everyone is telling me about frozen yogurt. I'm not buying it. I don't believe it.

14:35Michael Miller: Well, you know, we had about a 20-minute conversation about frozen yogurt yesterday at dinner. So it is coming back. I think the greatest thing about New York, and you'll hear this because maybe because we're New Yorkers, I don't know, but how Manhattan will always find its way, will always recover, will always forge its way through. And this was really going back to looking at COVID. I mean, New York was over. The debt on the office buildings was going to crush all the landlords, on and on and on. Five years later, we're thriving. So retail is a lot like that. It will change. There will be groups, banks or pharmacies in particular, Toys R Us back in the day that will come and go.

15:16Michael Miller: But then something will come and replace it. You know, the consumer will move. As you mentioned, this boutique fitness, that's very interesting because one of our clients is big on this. That's another category that's going to get overrun. But like right now, Pilates is the number one modality. Everyone's opening Pilates, Pilates. But one operator we represent, they're doing it in a larger format and they're focusing on offering five or six of those different, what they're calling studios, and the recovery and the full fitness floor. So that you're not going out and spending$200 or$300 for an Orange Theory membership, for a Club Pilates membership, and then for your Sweathouse membership.

15:57Michael Miller: You can do it all under one roof. So there are some innovative things being done around these changes.

16:04Lilah Burke: I'm hopeful that we do oversupply the Pilates studios and then Pilates becomes cheaper for me. But one last thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, when I talk to people outside of real estate, what they want to talk about is the loss of the sort of mom and pop businesses and the growing institutionalization of retail. Is that something you're seeing? Do you think that trend, you know, is just on a runway?

16:29Michael Miller: Unfortunately, yes. You know, the cost of being in business is such that it's very difficult for a mom and pop to survive. You know, as a small operator on the restaurant side, the overall costs, yes, rents, utilities, you know, oil, gas, whatever it is you burn, electricity, trash collection, of course, wages and overhead, inventory if you're a shop that keeps inventory, maintenance. And we haven't paid taxes yet. There's always legislative bodies. So whether it's a liquor authority or the health department, you know, there's so many costs and fees associated with running a business that most people wouldn't know about unless you ran a business.

17:10Michael Miller: And it makes it very, very difficult. So if you can't get scale or, you know, size or volume, it's very hard for a smaller operator to stay in business. The one thing I will say is in today's world with social media, if you have the wherewithal or the ability, it's a game changer. Because the small person player can make themselves large, which is something in the past you couldn't do. You had to be begged to do that because you had to take out print media or television media or, you know, I guess radio way back. But very, very expensive. Whereas now with social media, you can really hit an audience.

17:49Michael Miller: And I think that's going to be one of the keys to small retail because the internet and the ease and the price of how you can get goods delivered to your door really takes the wind out of the small operators' sales on the street level.

18:06Lilah Burke: So you are seeing more institutional big retailers change.

18:11Michael Miller: Clearly, yes. I mean, whether it's your Walmarts, your Amazons, your Whole Foods, TJ Brands or TJ Maxx, and they've got five or six brands. Probably most people only know two or three of them clearly are dominating because they can offer the best quality for the best price. And if they can't do it, Amazon can deliver it to your door. And that's why we're seeing service retail take such a predominant stage because you can't deliver that. You have to physically go somewhere to get that service.

18:42Hannah Kramer: So final question, Michael. Obviously, you know, we've talked a lot about what's happened in the last few years and a little bit about what you think might be happening in the future. If you had sort of a magic wand that you could wave and say, you know, I would love to see more of this kind of retailer or that, you know, who would you bring into the market that's not here right now? What kind of new retail tenant do you see come in that excites you?

19:07Michael Miller: I'm a big supporter of local merchants and operators. I'm a big consumer of health and wellness. So I like seeing the smaller new operators, whether it's the coffee shops we talked about quite a while ago or some of the boutique pet services. I'm not a pet owner. My kids are. And I've had great experiences with some of these operators. On the food side, I find the institutionalization of restaurants today in Manhattan is, for me, a little bit too much, where it's just about the bigness and the Instagram image. And it's not really about the restaurant experience. And then the creative side on the merchants and the retail, just going back to kind of doing what makes you great or interesting for the customer and bringing them back in.

19:53Michael Miller: But to put my finger on a specific thing like item or a category, that would be difficult.

20:01Lilah Burke: Well, I mean, I think, you know, with all these trends that we've been talking about, like you said, it's New York. Something always goes. Something always comes. There's a cycle to it, right? But it'll always be.

20:11Michael Miller: Always will be. And it'll always come back. And we won't always know and we'll often be surprised. I mean, we had the bubble tea fad, you know, and could I have predicted that? Never. It will be something and we'll adapt and migrate.

20:25Lilah Burke: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

20:26Michael Miller: Thank you very much.

20:30Lilah Burke: All right, Hannah, tell me about a story that you're obsessed with this week.

20:34Hannah Kramer: So for the last couple of months, really a lot of the story that we've been tracking in our coverage of the residential brokerage market across the whole country has been about brokerage consolidation, right? Big firms gobbling up little firms. But we have a couple of stories coming out of Chicago that push back a little bit against that trend and also just to stir up a little bit of competition and interest in the market right now.

21:00Lilah Burke: Okay, so what's happening?

21:02Hannah Kramer: So the first thing is that celeb broker Ryan Serhant is expanding to Chicago. He started his firm in 2020. He's built it up, you know, really very quickly, at least in part on the back of, you know, his own celebrity and his individual success as a broker. I think that has given a lot of people a sense of trust in him as he's rolled his brand out across the country. But so far, you know, he's expanded to a lot of these sort of buzzy markets that we know are really popping off, right? South Florida, Colorado, even some places in California where, you know, maybe the market in California is a little funkier, but there are still these really sky-high prices that you can demand for your home.

21:39Hannah Kramer: And that then, of course, you know, agents and their brokerages can benefit off of.

21:44Lilah Burke: Okay, so what is Ryan Serhan seeing in the Chicago market?

21:48Hannah Kramer: Well, I mean, that's kind of one of my questions, right? The Chicago market's been a little bit hot and cold. There are some super splashy deals that we've seen happen, especially on the north shore of Chicago. But there are some parts of the market that are a lot more uneven, right? The condo market in Chicago has long had this kind of cold spell. Maybe that's starting to break a little bit. But what's really interesting to me about this particular move is how much drama it has stirred up among the other local brokerages and particularly what we're seeing with clawbacks.

22:19Lilah Burke: Yeah, tell me about that.

22:20Hannah Kramer: So first of all, for those who are not in the resi sector, clawbacks are really kind of the way that a brokerage can hold you as an independent contractor back, right? You know, if you've been working for a long time with one particular firm and then you say, you know, hey, I'm an independent contractor. I want to move to this other one. What recourse does your first brokerage have? The answer generally comes in clawbacks. These are things that exist in the contract that you sign when you join a brokerage. So it's not that they're a surprise, but the degree to which they're enforced, you know, can be pretty different depending on the situation.

22:56Hannah Kramer: And what our reporter, Janani Janna in Chicago, said is that a number of people have come forward to her, right, saying, hey, my brokerage is enforcing these clawbacks in a really stern way, in a way that they kind of don't seem to have expected. And enforcing those clawbacks can look like, you know, demanding a certain percent of the split when, you know, you've closed a deal that you started under that first brokerage. And at least some people are saying, you know, that some of these brokerages are basically insisting that they hold on to the listings that this broker who's moving, you know, from one firm to another had sort of originated at the first firm.

23:36Hannah Kramer: And I mean, listings are lifeblood for agents. We've covered clawbacks for years. In fact, back in 2021, I think it was, we did a big story that was, you know, very controversial at the time, talking about how Compass was using clawbacks to sort of keep agents in who they had expected to continue to have on their books, even when those agents started to move around, right? So it's super interesting to see, you know, first, a lot of agents coming forward and saying, you know, I'm having these issues. This firm is enforcing a really strict clawback with me. And it's also interesting to see the reaction that some other people have given to that online, right?

24:15Hannah Kramer: I mean, when we posted the story on our Instagram page, there are a lot of brokers saying, hey, man, I don't feel bad for you. You should have read what's in your contract. This is what you should expect when you jump from one firm to another.

24:25Lilah Burke: Okay, so Ryan Serhant comes to Chicago. people are jumping ship from their brokerages to Sirhan and they're not liking how the brokerages are treating them. They're cracking the whip basically, right?

24:36Hannah Kramer: Yeah. And I mean, it's just interesting to think about, you know, if you are the brokerage firm, there is always this natural movement of brokers between firms. You know, when somebody leaves, how strongly do you sort of burn that bridge with them, right? If you've been at one firm for a long time and you say, hey, maybe I I want to try my luck with another. Like we see brokers leave and go back to other firms too. But I can imagine how if you are leaving your one firm and then they're not being as cooperative, let's say, as you would like them to be, that could leave a pretty bad taste in your mouth and might change the way that you think about ever going back there.

25:12Lilah Burke: And I did love some of the quotes in this story that Janani published about this from the resi brokers about this. You know, they're saying their exit fees were more than a pair of Jimmy Choo's. My brokerage is like an escape room. It just reminds me that residential brokers, it's a fun and outlandish world, I guess, compared to CRE, which I'm in more of the time. Yeah.

25:38Hannah Kramer: And I have to say, I definitely encourage you to read some of the quotes on the Instagram post that we post on this topic. I'll put a link to it in the YouTube page for this episode. They are extremely colorful. People have a lot to say about this. And it's interesting to see, you know, in a kind of residential brokerage world where in a lot of ways things are becoming less competitive, you know, larger brokerages kind of are in control of more of the market. Serhant coming in and really spicing things up in a market that's been kind of stayed. So it's exciting.

26:10Lilah Burke: All right. Well, thank you so much.

26:14Hannah Kramer: So for our first piece of news today, we wanted to talk a little bit about the latest with our friend, former boxer and real estate investor, kind of, Floyd Mayweather. Just to refresh your memories, Floyd Mayweather, over a year ago, announced that he would be doing some really large real estate investments. He was being advised by this character, Jonah Rechnitz, who's proven to be very colorful and an interesting person to follow. Jonah helped Floyd get involved with a number of real estate deals, including several with Josh Gottlieb's Go Partners. But things have gotten a good bit more complicated from there.

26:53Hannah Kramer: Lila, take us through the latest.

26:55Lilah Burke: Yeah, I mean, I would say the relationships between everyone in that deal seem to have deteriorated. Number one is that Floyd sued Jonah in May, saying that he was being taken advantage of by Jonah. That set off a chain of events where Josh Gottlieb's firms don't want to pay a firm that Jonah is associated with. So they haven't been paying him a cut of the distributions from that initial investment. So Jonah and Josh are now fighting in three different lawsuits. Okay, what are these lawsuits about? So they're fighting over these distributions that Jonah's firm believes it's entitled to. Josh doesn't want to pay them.

27:38Lilah Burke: Jonah is trying to get the distributions for the company. Now Josh is also saying that Jonah personally is defaming him and his business partner. So it's all very complicated. There's a lot of mudslinging involved. You can read more about it if you want all the details at therealdeal.com. Okay.

27:57Hannah Kramer: Tricky stuff. And then another sort of scandalous story that we've been covering on site for the last few days is about this character Bert I. Dweck, right? Remind us who Bert I. Dweck is and why we care about him.

28:13Lilah Burke: So Bert Dweck is a character from the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn who has been accused by several different people now of escrow fraud, basically. So there have been several civil suits. Several of them are already settled. But this week, we're able to confirm that there was an FBI raid on the place that Dweck was living with his wife. We don't know exactly what they were looking for. We don't know exactly if they took anything. We do know that Dweck was not arrested and he's not in custody, but that's the latest on that.

28:47Hannah Kramer: It's interesting to me because, you know, we've been covering these cases of mortgage fraud and escrow fraud across the country, but especially, I will say, in, you know, the sort of New York tri-state area for really a couple of years now. And we had seen for a while, you know, that certain localities were really going after some of these people accused of these mortgage and escrow fraud schemes. That had kind of died down for a while. So hearing that, you know, there was this FBI raid of somebody accused of one of these kinds of schemes. I mean, I wonder if that means that, you know, there are either local or federal prosecutors who are kind of interested in picking back up this thread of, you know, this particular type of real estate crime that, from our reporting, seems to be kind of rampant.

29:32Lilah Burke: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, we don't know if Dweck is charged or will be charged with any sort of a crime or what authorities were doing at his house. But it definitely leads to questions about what federal authorities are thinking about when it comes to this sort of allegations of fraud.

29:50Hannah Kramer: Yeah. The other thing that I think is interesting in this particular case is that we are talking here about Burt I. Dweck. And there are, we found out through this reporting, multiple Burt Dwecks in real estate. So other Burt Dwecks.

30:02Lilah Burke: You're safe for now.

30:03Hannah Kramer: You're safe for now. Burt Eidweck seems to be in a little bit of trouble. We will be following closely to see what, if anything, develops there. All right.

30:13Lilah Burke: And that's our show.

30:14Hannah Kramer: Thanks for listening. Our script today was written by Lila Burke and Hannah Kramer, edited by Kara Eisenpress, and our in-room producers were Mary Jaduk and Usha Sukai. Our sound engineer and post-producer is Mila Miller.

30:30Thank you.