Business, law make profitable combination: Pavan Reddy

For Pavan Reddy, chief counsel at Auburn Ventures, a law degree was an ideal complement to his 2010 Harbert degree. As the commercial real estate company has grown, his dual background has allowed him to see the business from a legal perspective as well as a business viewpoint. 

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Currie Dyess. Today's guest is Pavan Reddy, general counsel at Auburn Ventures, a commercial real estate firm. Reddy is a 2010 Harbert graduate.

Currie Dyess:

Pavan Reddy, War Eagle and welcome to the show. We're so happy to have you on today.

Pavan Reddy:

War Eagle guys. Thank you for having me on. I'm happy to be here.

Currie:

Pavan, you have a really interesting path to being an attorney and working in commercial real estate as well as getting yourself here to Auburn University. Can you walk us through that just a little bit and kind of explain how you found yourself in the position you're in now?

Pavan Reddy:

Long story. My family immigrated from India to Canada. My father was getting his PhD in plant pathology, which is essentially the use of pesticides and fertilizers and growing crops. He ended up working with a subsidiary of Exxon in Canada and over time, I guess grew a little weary of the corporate world and decided he wanted to start getting back into teaching. He had some friends and students that he got his PhD with who ended up at Auburn. One I believe was the dean of the College of Agriculture at the time. He connected with him and decided to uproot the family, go from Canada to Auburn, Alabama, which was quite the culture shock for eight or nine year old me. Thankful we made that move. It was a big life changing decision for the whole family. I'm very glad where we ended up.

Growing up in Auburn, I quickly adapted to the south and really enjoyed it. I loved Auburn sports and choosing a college, it was always going to be Auburn. I considered some other SEC schools, but as a diehard sports fan, it was just too much a joy to watch Auburn sports. I was like, "I have to go to college here. I have to have that college experience at Auburn." That's how I ended up at Auburn University and so glad I made that decision and didn't stray from my hometown.

Currie:

Your father, he made that transition out of being in the academic world. He bought some commercial real estate, which is kind of how you got into the role. Tell us how you went from Auburn University. You decided, okay, college business, this is what I want to do, but then switched it up a little bit and went to law school, let's very interesting transition and then back into commercial real estate. I think you're our first attorney on the show. At what point did you know I'm going to law school, but I also want to do, I work in the business world.

Pavan Reddy:

I always grew up reading John Grisham books, was always very interested in the law. I don't think I really knew what that meant as when you're younger, you think lawyers are what you see in movies and TV where they're in the courtroom saying you can't handle the truth and stuff like that. And obviously that is a very small segment of the law. And so as you get older you kind of become more realistic and you're like, okay, what I actually want to focus on in the law. Like I was saying, when my dad moved back to Auburn or moved to Auburn, I should say, he was working as a professor for numerous years and I guess got the itch to get back into the business world and have a dual role. Initially, they bought a gas station that was on the corner of College and Glen, an old Chevron, and it was a big decision for them.

I think my mom was not necessarily a big fan of the move. She thought it was a big step and a big change from being a professor to doing that. He initially purchased that Chevron and it went well. He was still a professor and so he would go from working as a professor during the day and sometimes at night he would've to pull a 12 hour shift as a cashier at the gas station. These are things I didn't necessarily appreciate as a 10 to 12 year old, but now I look back and I'm like, "Wow, that was a lot." Leading from there, they ended up purchasing The Goal Post, I mean a few other gas stations and back to my career and how that impacted it. I wasn't necessarily like, "Okay, this is something I want to do long term."

You don't go to college and law school thinking I want to work in gas stations. Nothing against that, that's just not sort of your early mindset. In 2008 they sold a gas station and ended up using what's called a 10 31 exchange, which is it's just a tax guidance shelter to avoid paying large taxes on sales and purchased a real estate property, which is Glendean Shopping Center. If you're an Auburn local, you'll know it for Good Times Bowling Alley and Chappy's Deli and CVS, they're all in there. It's a great property. When that purchase happened, as I said, I was probably in middle of my college career, so I was a little older and able to understand and be a part of that purchase, the thought process behind it. Because as a kid, or if you're just driving around town, you see all these properties with various businesses that you go to and you never really think about the mechanics behind it. "

Who owns that building? Does that business own the building? Do they rent it from someone else? That's not really anything I thought about. You go through life, that's just what you see these buildings around town. Seeing that the entire process and purchasing a real estate property and how to be a landlord, all of that was so fascinating to me. It's because again, it's something I never really thought about until that stage. Of course, this is a family business. It was something that I had the great opportunity to be a part of. I thought, How can I add value to this family business? How can I really take it to the next level and how can that impact my education?" Knowing that I wanted to go to law school and already being in the college of business, I thought, how can I combine in these two things and maybe I can go to law school and become a real estate lawyer and learn that aspect of the business and then that add value, be able to draft agreements, draft leases, really understand that the transactional side of any kind of real estate purchase.

That's what kind of led me to my path in law school and what I did after law school, I worked with two firms in Birmingham, and one, I was a commercial real estate transactional attorney. And what that is you draft leases, draft purchase agreements, oversee any kind of sale of real estate. Then the other firm I worked at, I was actually on the litigation side. So if you're a lawyer, there's kind of two tracks you can go on. One is litigation and one is transactional. Again, transactional, think of contracts, sales, that kind of stuff. Litigation is what your traditional legal roles are. You're in a courtroom, you're dealing with actual lawsuits between different parties. In my litigation role, I was representing architects, engineers, general contractors. My mindset was, "Hey, look, I can learn both sides of this so that in the future, if I'm in the family business, I can understand both the transactional side of real estate as well as any pitfalls coming from litigation."

If we ever sue anybody or are sued by anybody, I can kind of understand that as well. That was the overall thought process. I'd like to look back and say, "Oh, this was exactly what I thought was going to happen, and this was great mapped out plan that I had." I'm not sure it was exactly that. I think part of that is good fortune and luck and being able to fall into roles that really helped me in my current career. That was the roadmap I'll say and kind of a broad strokes look at it.

Sarah Gascon:

Aside from drafting legal documents, what is your role in selecting new properties and can you walk us through how you assess what you will purchase?

Pavan Reddy:

Sure. Right now, my specific title is general counsel, but really I have a lot of hats in the company because, again, it's a small family business. There's not a big payroll with a lot of employees where we have different people able to focus on different roles. You kind of have to do everything. It's just like any small business. You wear a lot of hats. You might be a bookkeeper, CEO, general counsel, all that. That is one of my big functions on a day to day basis is if we ever look at a new deal, I need to assess that deal, analyze it, and see if it's a good purchase. In looking at that, the old real estate adage is location, location, location. That really does prove true for the most part. At the end of the day, if you're in a great location, for example, if you're in downtown Auburn, no matter what over the course of time, that location will probably prove to be successful.

Even if you have one business that fails, one restaurant that fails, you'll likely have another one that takes over because of that great location close to students, close to a busy intersection, that kind of stuff. Number one I would say is looking at location, we really focus on college towns. We have properties in Auburn, Oxford, Mississippi. The reason for that is let's say you have a recession in 2008, the great financial collapse colleges usually are better able to withstand that. People always are going to go to school and sometimes in recessions they get even more degrees, they get masters and PhDs and whatnot. I would say college towns are a little bit more recession resistant is what we like to call it. Again, a lot of students are able to rely on loans or parental resources to spend money, which is again, something that's important during potential recession or an economic downturn is to still have that disposable income.

I would say that's number two. Again, that's part of location is being in a college town. Then obviously we look at the tenants within a shopping center. Most of our purchases have been already developed, constructed, fully built shopping centers with a robust tenant mix. That means they're already built, they have tenants fully filled out, all the spaces within the shopping centers are filled with tenants.

Then we look at that tenant mix and we try to determine are these tenants viable? If there's three restaurants out of six tenants, or is it a safe purchase? Knowing that there's a lot of restaurant turnover, I think everybody would agree, restaurants turn over and fail at a high rate. That's something you have to be cognizant of. The flip side of that is if you have a restaurant tenant and they do fail, it's a lot easier to backfill that for the most part because you have a kitchen in place, you have all the restaurant equipment, you can usually get a second generation restaurant tenant in there, and honestly you end up being able to charge a higher rent because all of that equipment is already there and it's already built out.

Then the nuts and bolts of the actual economics is you look at the rent roll. The rent roll is all the tenants, how much they're paying per month or per year. And then you look at the expenses of the shopping center. You're looking at common area maintenance, like let's say parking lot, sweeping roof repairs, all of that kind of stuff, all of your expenses. You look at the gross income from your rents, subtract the expenses, and that's your net income. I think that's a basic business tool that anybody listening to this would know. Then what you look at from there is the cap rate. The cap rate is, it's a real estate term. It's basically a percentage. It goes anywhere from what I've seen in my life is 4% to 15% if you're getting the best deal of your life.

What that means is you take your net income, net operating income or NOI, and you multiply it by the cap rate. What we like is anything eight cap rate and above is what we really ideally like to purchase. Let's say you have a hundred thousand dollars NOI, net operating income and a eight cap, that's 8% cap rate. You multiply that, and so you're paying $800,000 for the property. And that's a very basic look at a cap rate analysis. And so again, we're always looking for location value with the cap rate, meaning 8% or better. So it's not overpriced, the property isn't overpriced.

Then we're also looking at strong tenants that we think can sustain and withstand downturns or whatever may come because you just never know what's going to happen once you buy a property. A lot of it at the end of the day is a gut feeling, is this a good property that is going to be viable holders of real estate we rarely sell. Over 30 years, which is the hope of how long we own the property, will this property withstand various issues and can we make it successful? That's a long winded look at how we analyze properties.

Currie:

A few things there. You said basically, will it be profitable over 30 years or so? Is it similar to residential real estate and where you buy the property and it's financed for 30 years?

Pavan Reddy:

It's somewhat similar. Your home mortgage, you're right, it's typically a 30 year term fixed rate for that entire period. A lot of times your rates are very low. I would say commercial loans are a little bit different in the sense that you're never going to get a fixed rate for 30 years. Your best case scenario is a fixed rate for 10 years typically, but the amortization will be over a 20 year or 25 year period. In that sense, it's kind of more similar to the mortgage, but the length of the rate is fixed for a shorter term than a traditional home mortgage.

Currie:

You buy properties on 10 year terms, and obviously you're going to be spending more money in interest than say a shorter term like five or seven years, which I believe some business loans typically are. Do you have a capital asset plan or philosophy or is 10 years what has worked so that's what you go with?

Pavan Reddy:

I think it depends on the rate environment you're currently in. So for example, over the last decade, we've had a great rate environment. It's been historically low. If you're looking at let's say a 3.5% interest rate, you want to lock in that rate for as long as possible because odds are it's not going to go any lower and it's probably going to go up. If we're in a very low interest rate environment, we want to lock in that 10 year term, whereas the last six months to a year where rates have really been increasing and now rates are 6%, 7%, that's where you start to look at more of a five year term or a interest only rate where you have maybe that rate is floating or can change, but you have the opportunity to refinance once rates go back down.

At the end of the day, the amortization, like I said, is 20 or 25 years. So you're not paying it off either way, whether it's five years, seven years, 10 years. So you'd rather have the flexibility of a shorter term with lower payments and then have that opportunity to refinance to a better rate and a longer fixed rate.

Sarah:

How have higher interest rates, higher inflation and supply chain issues affected your business?

Pavan Reddy:

Various ways. So of course the rates going up, as we just discussed, have been really more of a hindrance in purchasing new properties because a lot of times the way that these deals pencil or work out with the math is based on lower rates. You're able to lock in that low interest rate for a long period of time, and that allows you to have a little bit more flexibility in the shopping center you might buy or the property you might buy. Fortunately for us, a lot of our loans were coming due in the past three years or we saw the opportunity to, Hey, these are really low rates. Let's refinance some of these deals. I would say over the last 18 months, we refinanced just about every property we have, I think. And so we were able to lock in very low rates for mostly 10 year terms.

Some of that is luck. We just were like, "Hey, these loans are coming to you and we need to refinance. This is a great time to do it." Some of that is a little bit of strategy, but I don't think anybody could have told you 24 months ago that rates would be double. Right? If you could, you'd be a lot better off than just doing real estate. Again, I'm not trying to say that it was some brilliant strategy we have, but we were able to refinance all of our deals and lock in low rates for a significant period of time. That really helps us because the rising interest rates don't impact those properties. We have that comfort that we can rely on on the current rates we've already locked in. Now, again, it does probably keep us from doing more deals right now as we see how this shakes out.

We're not going to be purchasing any properties at soon because of the higher rates. Once you do lock in those three, 3.5% rates and you see the returns on those deals, it's hard to then find another deal that can pencil at a 7% mortgage, right? I would say the deal flow is what's most impacted. The flip side of that is when you have that low rate environment, the prices of property is really skyrocketed. For example, I get emails every day from various brokers with their listings, and you see Dollar Generals, standalone Dollar Generals or Dunking Donuts or Auto Zones, all these different various real estate types selling at very, very historically high prices. Again, back to that cap rate, the lower the cap rate, the higher the price. We were seeing those properties sell at 4% cap rates, 4%, 5% cap rates.

On a basic level, you can look at a cap rate as a rate of return on your investment. you're getting a 4% return annually, basically is how you can look at that. If you buy a four cap property, again, we like eight cap or higher, and that's something we haven't seen in five or six years, which is why we got more into the development side of real estate just because it was easier to build properties and do that to get a better rate of return. Now, if you're able to go buy a CD at a bank for 5% or put it in some sort of savings account for 5% with basically no risk, then why would you buy a real estate property at a 4% return, right? I would say that is the 30,000 foot view of how rates impact the property values. The higher the interest rates, the lower the properties are selling for, if that makes sense.

Then again, the flip side of that is the lower the rates, the higher the purchase prices are for properties. That's kind of the interest rate angle on real estate that I've seen. As far as inflation, I would say that more impacts the development side of our business. The last two or three years we've done more development from the ground up, and that's something that's been really interesting because it's a completely different ballgame from just buying a shopping center that's already fully built with tenants there. Development is such a guessing game. It really is a five year term outlook because you're having to buy a piece of land, get that to where it's ready to be built on, find tenants to go in there, build actual property, and you're really not making money on anything for three to five years by the time the tenants get in there, build out their spaces and start paying rent.

It's a long process, but again, sometimes that made more sense to us than purchasing a property at a skyrocketed price. For inflation on the development side, we saw, for example, during Covid and shortly after lumber went up 300%. Obviously if you're building a building, your costs are skyrocketing, and finding subcontractors to work for you was really hard. They were so busy with so many different home improvement projects and all this construction that was going on that those prices were going up a lot. We developed Midtown Auburn in our retail pads there. I would say that it was a 70% higher than it was when we got it priced in 2019 based on the inflation. That's really where it hurt us there more than anything.

Currie:

And so whenever that happens, whenever you find yourself in those scenarios, is that buck passed down to the tenants or do you just have to readjust your breakeven point? Where does that money come from? Essentially, whose pocket does it come out of?

Pavan Reddy:

Yeah, that's actually a great talking point because one of the downsides of real estate, I would say is when you have tenants locked into long-term leases, their rents aren't really changing. Sometimes you'll have graduating rents or it'll increase every year, but a lot of times you'll really have basically, they're paying the same rent every year for a 10 year term, for example. If you have inflation impacting your cost basis, whether it's expenses or actual development, a lot of times that can really hurt the landlord solely because it's not passed on to the tenants. It's just coming out of your pocket.

I would say, yeah, that is a big factor and something that a lot of real estate companies and landlords have been doing is building in inflation clauses into the leases. That's something we've started to do more so where you'll have an annual increase of your rent based on inflation. If it's 2%, your rent will go up 2%. If it's 6% it has been, then your rent goes up 6%. And so we're starting to build those clauses into the leases more to kind of protect us from inflationary factors, just because again, otherwise you're locked in for 10 years and if your inflation is at 6% every year from a landlord side, that makes that a big haircut every year over a course of a 10 year term.

Sarah:

Right now, what would you say is the greatest risk that your company is exposed to and how do you mitigate that?

Pavan Reddy:

Greatest risk? I don't know. I feel like there's so many, I would say probably an economic downturn that starts to really impact our mom and pop small business tenants. That's something that you could never really tell how it's going to happen or when it's going to happen. Let's say we have a recession that starts having less money in people's pockets and their ability to spend money on in discretionary income and restaurants or boutiques or a lot of our tenants are fitness tenants where you're spending $100 or $200 a month on your fitness classes. If your income starts tightening because of economic issues, that's one of the first things you're going to cut out is your a hundred dollars gym bill. I think our biggest risk, because really at the end of the day, we're relying on our tenants being successful and paying us rent.

Otherwise, none of this works. I would say that's kind of what keeps you up at night a little bit, is you're taking on a large mortgage, a good bit of debt with the idea that over time the tenants that you bring in will pay that debt down for you. If you're running a big vacancy factor, let's say you have 10 units in a shopping center and then all of a sudden you lose three tenants and that's going to start to hurt and get you closer to either breaking even or you're having to go into your cash reserves to pay your mortgage. Fortunately, as of now, knock on wood, we're very strong with very limited vacancies. We've had a great run for the last 10 years or so with the economy just kind of going up or staying steady. My hope is, again, I'm no economic expert. I don't know I that anybody is at this point. I feel like even the CEOs of banks don't know what's going on.

I'd love to say, "Hey, we have this great way to mitigate that downside risk." But there's just no way to tell. Again, we try to keep in touch with our tenants. We try to get sales figures from them, make sure that we can do everything we can to make sure that they're successful and strong. Some of the ways we do that is basic aesthetics, good signage, good visibility for their business, make sure everything is well lit at night so their customers feel safe and that, again, visibility is big for any business as you're driving by. We really try to help our tenants that way because again, we want them to be successful more than anything.

That's the only way our business works. As far as the overall forces of the economy, there's not a lot we can do for that. We just have to hope that it continues to be strong. I would say one way we try to mitigate that is by choosing tenants that are more necessities. Again, service tenants, restaurants, fitness, that kind of stuff that you can't replace with a cheaper substitute on the internet. We try to have internet resistant tenant mix. Hopefully that will help us weather any recessionary issues.

Currie:

You touched on the mom and pop business a little bit back up to that, how can mom and pop businesses compete with national chains, especially as we move into these economic uncertain times and you're looking for somebody who's going to be there and be able to pay those 10 year leases. How can these little guys keep up with that?

Pavan Reddy:

That's something that is always controversial because I have friends that own historic properties in downtown Auburn, and a lot of people will get angry, the public will get angry that, "Hey, they're leasing this to a franchise. It's not like a cool bar or a cool local restaurant, something like that." I'm like, "Yeah, I get that. I would love to have every business in Auburn very localized, culturally significant tenant." A lot of times the economics of that just don't work. I would challenge people to look at it as if they own that property, okay, this is your livelihood, this is your property that is supporting your family. What decision would you make if you have a national restaurant like a Starbucks or someone like that coming in and offering you a rent that's probably higher than what a mom and pop can pay, but also they're backing it with a publicly traded company and the strength of that, or if that's your building and your, that's how you support your family, what decision would you make?

That's what I would tell people to look at. There is a flip side to that because we see all the time that national companies start to downsize their franchises. They or they start to downsize their locations. It's not a perfect system. I would say honestly, during Covid, for example, most of our national tenants were much harder to deal with than our mom and pop tenants. They would lawyer up and start saying, "We want rent abatements and all this." The mom and pops were like, "Hey, we're just trying to do our best to get through this." That's our outlook. Again, we're a family business. We are a mom and pop business. I literally work with my mom and dad almost every day. So we are very much the same mindset. And so if you look at it that way, sometimes the bigger the tenant, the harder it is to deal with.

For example, in our Oxford Shopping center, we have three or four or five national tenants like Dollar Tree and stuff like that who are sending us legal notices like, "Hey, Covid is happening. We can't pay rent. We're not open." Whereas I'll have a mom and pop restaurant who's just gives me a phone call and say, "Hey, we're shut down. What can we do about this?" I'll just describe that experience because that was a big fear for us and for everybody. I think the entire country was dealing with it in one way or another, obviously the entire world. From our perspective, we're looking at our monthly expenses, our monthly mortgage, and then our monthly rents when tenants are shut down, how can they pay their rents? How can we pay our mortgage? We're working with our lenders to figure out, "Hey, can we pause our mortgage payments until we figure out how long this is going to last? Can we do an abatement? Can we do a deferral, whatever it may be."

Then for our tenants, we're doing the same thing. I'm like, I understand you guys are closed. You might not be able to pay rent. A lot of businesses are month to month, they don't have big cash reserves. I would say most of them are like that. My big thing was communication with tenants. I wanted to talk to them as much as possible, give them as assistance and guidance as we could from a landlord perspective, one of the big thing was the PPP loans that the government was offering. The number one thing about that again, is the communication factor, because a lot of those tenants didn't know about those loans. A lot of the tenants didn't understand exactly how to utilize that, all these tools that the government was offering.

I was sending emails every day like, "Hey, here's how you do this. Get in touch with your accountant. Get in touch with your banker. Get this loan because it can not only cover your rent, but cover your employee's salaries, cover your monthly expenses until we figure out how to get out of this Covid situation." Long story short, from the national tenants, they weren't as receptive to those ideas as the mom and pops who are, again, just trying to work with us and get through it as best as we could.

For us, we try to look at it from both angles. And part of that is a lot of these mom and pops have you look at their previous business history. Do they have experience in running a business? Do I think that they'll be successful long term? Sometimes I will choose that over a national company who's franchising to someone who's never owned a business before or opening a location that might fail in six months or a year. Again, a lot of that is gut feeling. A lot of that is using your best judgment you have based on the information you have and going from there.

Sarah:

What advice would you give to those who are interested in commercial real estate or business law?

Pavan Reddy:

Commercial real estate, I would say a lot of it is contacts, connections. From a brokerage point, I work with a lot of brokers and everything I hear from them is, you're going to put in 18 months, 36 months where you're making basically no money, learning the ropes, working under other senior brokers, making relationships. And honestly, I would say 90% of your work is going to be cold calling various landlords, various real estate owners trying to get in touch with them for whether you're trying to facilitate a sale or purchase of a property or fill it from the tenant leasing side. That's one aspect is brokerage. Again, it's just like any industry, you're going to have to learn, work through it, build relationships. To own and operate commercial real estate is honestly not really feasible for most people, unfortunately. That's just the nature of it.

It's gotten to a point where the entry is such is so expensive that I don't know how really anybody could do it without getting lucky and having that family help or background. I would say the best ways to do that is go work for a real estate investment trust or a large commercial real estate company who owns properties all over. You can kind of build your network through doing that. And then once you start making money from a larger company, then you have the capital to, "Hey, let's partner with a few other people." As you get through college and you get older, everybody starts making a little bit more money. Maybe you have a friend who's a dentist or a doctor and one that's a lawyer or an accountant and the two or three of you partner together, and that way your capital is a little bit more feasible towards commercial real estate.

Then you purchase a small property. Maybe it's a property that your friend who's a dentist needs an office, and so you guys purchase that property together. He's a tenant, and then you lease the other spaces and that pays your mortgage. That's kind of a small way to start building it, and then it can snowball from there as you get more and more, because again, and this is something that I think people don't really understand or value about commercial real estate from a public perspective, I would say the biggest benefit to it is on the tax side. Essentially, when you buy a property, you can use what is called depreciation to avoid paying taxes. If you look at not, and not to get political, if you look at Donald Trump, one of the reasons he hasn't paid a lot of taxes is because he uses depreciation expense as a real estate owner.

You can utilize that tool if you own property, you can use depreciation, accelerate depreciation, and you can basically not pay taxes for multiple years. Again, that's a valuable tool that I think a lot of people don't understand about real estate. It's kind of a twofold track where you're making money off the real estate you purchased, but you also are using that real estate and the depreciation that a company as a tax shelter that can impact your, let's say you have a salary in your day-to-day job, you can shelter some of that income through the real estate depreciation.

Currie:

It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today, and your story is the American Dream. How can our listeners keep up with you and your journey?

Pavan Reddy:

Yeah, well, I appreciate you saying that. One thing I want to emphasize is that any success that we have is all due to my parents and their willingness to take the risks to come to this country, to leave their families behind in search of a better life. I wouldn't be here for sure. My life would be completely different if they hadn't taken those risks. I give every bit of thanks I can to them. Without them, I wouldn't be anywhere. I appreciate you saying that. It really is. I look at them and I'm kind of astonished, especially if we ever go back to India and go around, I'm like, man, this is such a different life from what could have been. I'm so thankful for them, thankful for this country, and just thrilled to be an American. As far as keeping up with us, our company name is Auburn Ventures, probably should have said that earlier, but again for real estate, it's not like a publicity thing.

You're kind of behind the scenes. Like I said, you're nobody really understands who owns what properties. Maybe that's probably for the best. Our company's called Auburn Ventures. We have various subsidiaries that own the properties that we have, and so you might see different names like Glendean Shopping Center, LLC or something. That's all under Auburn Ventures. We've got our website, auburn ventures.com, and we're on Facebook. You can keep up with us that way, or all my contact info. You might see my name on various signs that our developments around town, so you'll have my contact info there. It's also on our website, and I'm happy to talk to any college students or college of business students who are interested in real estate or the law and do what I can to help facilitate that career path.

Sarah:

Awesome. Pavan, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time and War Eagle.

Pavan Reddy:

War Eagle. Thank you guys for having me.

Narrator:

Harbert, inspiring business.