Ziel Feldman - HFZ Capital Group Part 5

Lisa Knee: Now you're out on your own, you're at PMG and you and Maloney are together and you're looking for your first deal and your first property. Do you still find and look back at that property as your first love your first, is there some emotional attachment to that first property? Or any regrets and saying “Oh, what a disaster.”

Ziel Feldman: Well the H in HFZ are not going to want to hear that it's my first love. However, as far as business is concerned, there absolutely is. We were buying two buildings on 64th Street right off Central Park which was owned at the time by the OTS, which is our version of the federal government. It was an occupied building and it was a whole lot of work Kevin and myself had very little money at that time and we had to scrape together as much as we could to buy our first deal and we were actually very fortunate we got a line of credit of sorts from Bank of Austria of all banks way back then, and that really helped us. The property ran 64th, right off Central Park was basically my first foray into being an owner post being a lawyer. This was the first cycle since the crisis had peaked in ‘88 was in a market that stopped coming down. So they, like us, believed that this was an opportunity for us.