YouSaid · the spoken record

Kathleen McCarthy

lines on the record: 120
first: 2022-12-09
most recent: 2022-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Particularly getting those learnings at a relatively early part of my career, I think, is so important. What really got me thinking about doing something different was just was I continuing to learn? Was there a will to keep investing in real estate having had some of those traumatic experiences as a firm? I felt like I wanted to make sure I was in a place where I personally was not treading water and I had an opportunity to keep learning. And I knew that I wanted to continue to be in real estate. I was not sure exactly in what aspect. And I was actually quite surprised when Blackstone reached out to me about a role to work with institutional clients and do capital raising and investor engagement.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. It came about, I think, a little differently than that. What I would say is I had an amazing experience at Goldman, including, I'd say, the learnings that I had an opportunity to access through the financial crisis.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things that I think really distinguish what we were able to do at Blackstone and what got us to the other side of the financial crisis in a way most real estate investors did not were these things. Good assets, resilient capital structures, access to reserves, access to new capital to go on the offensive and take advantage of moments where there's distressed pricing. So you”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an amazing return. And when you look across that at what I always think about is. There were a lot of different kinds of environments we were investing in, things that felt great, things that felt really terrible, things that felt good when we bought real estate and didn't feel so good a couple years later, perhaps. But what you just touched on is what I think is most important. You can't control the environment you're in, but you can control the decisions you make leading up to that and through it.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you pretty much have it, Barry. I mean, I think about, for example, Blackstone's track record, we've been investing in real estate for over 30 years. And in our opportunistic funds, so these are the funds where we're trying to generate higher returns for customers in a relatively short hold period for the assets we buy for them. We've had 16% net returns on all of the capital we've invested over 30 years.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blackstone, meanwhile, and we'll get to that had, and that's a big part of how Blackstone's been set up for so much success in the decades that followed. Let me interrupt”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, for me, again, with a learning agenda, there's learning and all of that. But environments change quickly. And whether it's the investment you make or you personally, it's your ability to kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other and move through that. 2008 to 2010 was a particularly tough and very formative experience. And I would say there are so many important lessons learned for me. One is an investor, the importance of buying super high quality assets, putting resilient capital structures in place, having access to reserves so that in a moment where you need to invest more capital in your transaction or where you need to, or you have an opportunity, I should say, to buy back debt at a discount, being able to capitalize on those kinds of opportunities is so important. And frankly, we didn't have all those opportunities and we hadn't set ourselves up as well. Really? I'm surprised.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say I feel like in the first decade of my career, I actually had two somewhat similar experiences in that way because remember, I came out of college three months after the dot-com bubble burst. So I was sitting at graduation and classmates were getting emails saying their offers were rescinded. Because their company was going out of business. And I went from again this merger group at Goldman, which was focused only on the biggest possible deals to working on what were relatively small transactions, but for important clients”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was definitely a difficult time. I'm not laughing out of joy, but out of, you know, kind of, it's always still a stunner to think about it.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I mean, again, there are so many things I carry over from one thing to another. And interestingly, I'm happy to come back to this, things I learned in helping companies through mergers, particularly around things like communications and shareholder relations and employee engagement that have now served me really well a couple decades later in my career. But I'd say those are all similar things, whether you're talking about companies that make something or companies that own real estate or real estate assets. And I'd say when I think about Blackstone and how we work on our transactions and what has served us so well over time, it certainly has to do with buying great quality real estate and the price we pay for it. A big part of it also, though, is the capital structure you set up and is it able to withstand”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was noticeable that in the real estate brochures of those companies, there was a huge amount of diversity in the kinds of people that worked at these firms. And it was all sorts of dimensions of diversity, including kind of the nature of people's degrees. You had people who never had a college degree, folks who were architects. Folks who had a more traditional MBA. And what I found was these were all people who were really interested in participating in a people business ultimately, which is where do people live and work and shop and how do great cities come together and things like that. And I really wanted to be attached to those kinds of those people and their passion about what they were doing.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say when it when it came to kind of what part of investing, I think being a merger banker did inform what I wanted to do next because when you're doing that every day you're interacting with different clients and different industries and having to learn a whole new set of vocabulary, a whole new business. And I thought, you know, if I want to start to be a great investor and in particular, I didn't know this term at the time, but Steve Schwarzman refers to it as pattern recognition, great investors are really great at pattern recognition. If you want to start building that, building expertise, I felt I wanted to move into something that was still large and wasn't going to pinhole me or pigeonhole me at a very young age in my career. But where I could be working in and out of a common vocabulary that could apply across all kinds of geographies and asset classes. And real estate offered that. I'd also say, you know, interestingly, when I was going to interviews at different private equity firms or different real estate firms,”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say that probably the vast majority of folks who were in my analyst class at Goleman, particularly in the merger group, when they were looking for their next thing to do, were looking more towards private equity, more traditional private equity, kind of like what my colleagues in our BCP team do, which is investing in companies. Some people maybe were going to hedge funds as well, but I'd say overall, folks were more kind of corporate oriented, you know, investing in companies. And for me, that was interesting. I definitely wanted to gain investing skills. I found one of the things that was a little unsatisfying as a merger banker is you'd work on a transaction, you'd help a company buy something or sell something or merge with another business, but then you really never knew whether your model was at all close to accurate. How did it work out ultimately? All of the things you thought were going to happen, did it ultimately happen? And so I wanted to be part of that kind of follow-through. And that's why moving to the investment side was interesting to me. But I would.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing skills for business context, persuasion skills, you know, the opportunity to be in a boardroom, watching senior professionals, whether it was the chairman of the board or the CEO of the company or the investment banker leading your deal, getting to ideas and outcomes that were influenced based on information. And so I felt that my experience doing M&A at Goldman gave me this whole stable of skills that set me up for really just about anything. And how did you shift into real estate”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I thought about when I thought about college and what I did there and why I selected going to Yale, it was largely, I think, the start of me recognizing that I'm a person who loves to learn and loves to just keep expanding skills. And so I in college did a lot of reading and writing and thinking. It's what you do, I guess, with a liberal arts degree. And then when I was going to Goldman, there were a couple of objectives, I guess. One was wanting to be able to pay for my life in New York. And pay for your tuition. Pay off student loans exactly. And then also build a set of skills that could be used anywhere. And I wasn't at that point sure if I would end up in a corporate role or I would end up in the Peace Corps or something like that. And so what investment banking I thought offered, and I'd say ultimately really delivered, was an experience where you could learn a ton of different analytical skills.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was not kind of at all informed by gender norms that people ask me a lot about now in particular, how a woman, how did you think about ending up in this bank? So how did that color what you focused on at college?”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd back up actually a little bit further and think about how I got there because I don't think it was very obvious actually that I would come out of Yale with an ethics, politics, and economics degree. Perfect for real estate, right? And end up in M&A on Wall Street. But so much, of course, for all of us probably comes back to this formative years with our families. And in my house, I was the oldest of three girls. My mom was a high school science teacher in our public high school. And my dad worked for a cosmetics company, Avon Products, you know, like the Avon ladies. And so for most of my life, I mean, really for all of my life that I remember, his company, and if I would go to visit, they'd have things on the wall that says the company for women he routinely had women who were his managers, his bosses, and there was a female CEO for a really long period of time. And so as people were thinking about, okay, what do you do after college? I was thinking any number of things and mostly that I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explanation about something I had no idea about. And now I feel like I really know I don't even know where to begin other than saying strap yourself in this is a monster podcast. My conversation with Kathleen McCarthy, global head of real estate for Blackstone. Kathleen McCarthy, well. I am so excited to be here, Mary. So I am excited to have you here because, wow, what perfect timing to talk about real estate. Just towards the end of the year, rates are going higher, real estate prices are getting a little wobbly. And I have a million questions about all of that. But before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about you and your background. You started your Doing MA at Goldman Sachs, tell us a little bit about that experience.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just a tour de force education on how to invest in global real estate. Blackstone has been in this space for over 30 years according to their 10K filings, their opportunistic fund is up 16% a year over those 30-year periods. That's really an astonishing return. Kathleen has been with Blackstone since 2010. And I just can't say enough as to how absolutely fascinating and knowledgeable and intriguing this conversation is. You won't hear the gaps between her answers and my questions because we edit that out, but she answers a question. I'm just sitting there dumbfounded by how she's just like, oh my God, that's just an absolutely comprehensive.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yourself in for this one, it's absolutely fascinating. Kathleen McCarthy is the global co-head of real estate for private equity giant Blackstone. She and her team manages over $565 billion in real estate assets. And if you are at all interested in commercial real estate, residential real estate, logistics, warehouse, laboratory and medical facilities, multifamily and apartments, offices on and on in the US, in Western Europe, in Asia, India, Japan.”
2022-12-09 · Masters in Business · Kathleen McCarthy on Real Estate Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source