Ziel Feldman - HFZ Capital Group Part 7

Lisa Knee: It takes a lot of drive and determination to be a real estate developer, certainly here in Manhattan. And to execute seamlessly and flawlessly some of these buildings and the plans that you're doing between the round ups that we talked about downtown to the rejuvenation/revitalization of something that is an iconic Upper West Side property, what is the drive that you have that is so unique that allows you to do this?

Ziel Feldman: Well every developer to be successful has to have a lot of drive and vision but you know I tend to be a contrarian. So in my professional career I was buying my first time I bought real estate aside from my foray into with bad timing as a lawyer in 1987, I was buying real estate in ’91-’92 with the markets open when almost nobody else was. And I was buying real estate in 2009 with the current company when almost nobody else was. You've got to have a conviction in what you're doing. I try to make the best guest, educated decision again driven by where I see demographics going, where I see interest rates going, where I see globalization going. To me, the financial crisis literally everybody was sitting on their hands and I just started looking at old and everything is always different and last time they said that, “It'll never happen again,” and maybe the next time they’ll say, “It’ll never happen again,” but you really need to give yourself as many tools as you can to try to make the best decision. And I think the biggest lesson that I can report, especially to the younger people in this business, it's no different as a stock picker. We never tried to time the top of the market and time the bottom of the market. If you're somewhere in the middle, you’ll always do extraordinary well. So when you're at the top and you sell, you know a lot of that has to do with luck and when you when you're buying at the bottom the market just needs to know with conviction there’s enough room for it to go up, but never wait to the very end. And I think that's really true like both whether you're in Wall Street or in a lot of businesses that all things are not always under your control.