This is Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America, and it's my pleasure to introduce Doug Ostrover. Doug is Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Owl, and prior to founding Owl Rock in 2016, Doug also co-founded GSO in 2005, which he eventually sold to Blackstone. Before GSO, Doug ran Credit Suisse's leveraged finance group and held senior roles in DLJ before CS acquired it. In my view, Doug probably has one of the strongest backgrounds in credit across multiple platforms, and this gives us confidence in their credit portfolio. Doug, thank you for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. It's an interesting day, right? Pull up. I thought we were gonna have an up day. Stocks are getting killed. I think it actually is a good segue at some point into. I saw Michael Arougheti here. They're in private credit, but just a little discussion about where rates are going because it's certainly a cause for concern, numbers that are coming up.
Great. Just quick little intro here. Blue Owl is an alternative asset manager of $140 billion of AUM and focuses on private credit, general partner solutions, and real estate. It also is one of the largest individual investor efforts in the industry. Doug, let's just start with growth. How do you contrast your growth opportunities between the individual investor business and the institutional business?
First of all, thanks for having me and thanks everybody for coming out. We'll hopefully try to make this interesting and fun. Just as I think about growth, let me just talk about growth more broadly for a moment. You know, we just came out with our numbers. We had pretty good numbers, 40% growth in revenues, FRE, DE. I think it's important as we think about growth and we get into institutional and the high net worth channel to remember, you know, our asset base is different than our peers. 94% of our revenue last year came from permanent capital. Unlike our peers, where funds fade away over time, and then they have to replace it, hopefully with a bigger fund, our capital stays in perpetuity.
I see Alan in the audience, and he's phrased it as a layer cake. We have a layer, we add another layer, another layer, the assets don't leave. We had great growth. It's highly predictable, really stable. For 2023, we've taken our numbers, our growth rate down a little from mid-40s to mid-30s. Still, I think, pretty impressive for an alternative manager. Certainly, I think I heard Mike mention this in hit when he was just speaking. We've got a large amount of capital, 10%-12% of growth next year, which has come from deploying the capital we've already raised. That'll lead into your question. You know, the high net worth space gets a lot of press, I'm sure we'll talk in greater detail about it.
Let me start with the institutional side. If you were to take our business and you were gonna look at our credit LPs, our real estate LPs, our GP solution LPs, it is a world-class blue chip roster of clients. Unlike many of our peers, and I can't remember who it was, I listened to one of the earnings call, they talked about their top 50 or 100 LPs being in two and oftentimes three of their products. We have just 4% overlap. As I think about our business and these businesses coming together, 96% of these very large LPs are in just one product. The cross-sell opportunity for us, excuse me, is very significant. We're building out the teams, we're building out Asia, the Middle East, Europe. I think we're pretty well built out in the United States.
I think over the next few years, we're gonna have a lot of success there. On the high net worth space, we decided early on when we launched that this was the wave of the future. We built our business from day one to be a major player in that market. This is not like we saw Blackstone and they were successful, let's go build it. We were ahead of Blackstone. We haven't raised quite as much money, but as a percentage of our assets, it's a big percentage and growing. Look, I am really excited still about the wealth channel. I don't think anything's changed. We never thought it was gonna be a straight line up to the right.
Of course, when markets are choppy and volatile, both on the institutional side and on the high net worth side, people pull back their allocations. I don't know exactly where it's gonna go, but I do feel like I have my finger on the pulse of this market because the one thing I like to do is get out and meet with great advisors, some of who are in the room today, and have lunches, dinner. In fact, last night I hosted a dinner for 50 advisors at a competing firm. I like to get a sense of where they see their clients allocating capital. I can tell you, everyone I talk to believes today their clients have a very small allocation and it's gonna grow a lot.
If you apply that to the broader market, that wealth channel, it's tens of trillions of dollars that will migrate from wealth into the alternative space. I look at that, I think we're well-positioned. We continue to add resources. I can tell you one positive thing about the pullback in the market over the last year. It's given us a chance to come in and talk to the leaders of all the distributors and try to get a sense what's working, what's not, what can we be doing better. I feel really confident over the next 12-18 months, you'll see two things happen. One, you will see us bring more products. What we're focused on now is differentiating products. We wanna have products in the channel where we have very little competition or where we have no competition.
The second thing I think you'll see this year is that for our existing products, you'll see our syndicates grow quite a bit. I'm still, you know, very excited about it. Can't tell you know, exactly what that line up to the right looks like. It'll be up and down, but net-net, it's gonna move sharply up to the right.
Doug, what product are you most excited about in terms of growth right now?
You mean of our suite of products? That's a, that's an unfair question. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when my kids were little, and I was sitting around the dinner table. They would always say, Dad, who do you love the most? And of course, I would always say, I love you all the same. Let me just so I don't create any enemies in the firm, but I will tell you which one I like the most in a sec. We have three distinct strategies. We are the market leader in GP solutions. We just finished a fundraise there, $13 billion. We are the category killer in that space.
For those of you who don't know that market, that is where we go, and we take a minority stake in the largest alternative managers in the world. The team has done an excellent job. If you need $500, $800, $1 billion plus, you can come to us or you can go to a sovereign wealth fund. We've won over 90% of the deals that approach $1 billion. We are the market leader. Most importantly, we made a bet that the big firms were gonna continue to get a disproportionate amount of the assets, and that is what's happened. The returns, depending on the vintage, are 20%-40%.
The current income, 'cause think about it, you're sitting at the table with people like the founders of Vista and Silver Lake and Starwood, and you're sharing in the fee and carry, and the current income there has been well over 20%, and that goes on in perpetuity. Unique product, not in the market with it today, but something, you know, I'm excited and very proud of. The credit business, which is our biggest business, has done remarkably well. $70 odd billion of loans, under five basis points of loss per annum. I'm sure, you know, maybe we'll get a question or we can talk about credit quality, but the portfolio is doing really well. Why am I so excited about that business today? I didn't listen to what Mike Arougheti said, but I'm sure he echoed these sentiments.
I've been doing this 30 years. This is the single best environment to be a lender I have ever seen. The reason for that is there is a mismatch between the demand of capital from private equity firms and the supply of capital. Everyone is capital constrained. As I mentioned, it's been hard to raise money in the high net worth channel, institutional channel. For us as a lender, what normally would happen, we have a let's call it $75 billion-$80 billion loan book. When there was a lot of M&A and rates were coming down, we could have a quarter of our loan book get refinanced every year. We would have $20 billion plus the money we raise that we'd have to go redeploy. Now rates are up. There's virtually no M&A, there is no churn in the portfolio.
We're only deploying new capital. The other thing that's happened, as everybody in this room knows well, is the banks have pulled back. You know, if you went back 30 years when I was running Credit Suisse's leveraged finance business, the world hasn't changed that much, believe it or not, in 25, 30 years. As a bank, I had $5 billion of capital. I'd make loans, but my goal was to turn around, make a loan, and lay it off to Fidelity, PIMCO, BlackRock as quickly as possible. If I made two points on my $5 billion, that was $100 million. Not bad. I'd wanna do it 10x , 20x , make $1 billion or $2 billion. The problem is when you have this much volatility in the markets, like we're experiencing even just today, how do you price that risk?
How do you make a commitment for 30 days or 6 months? It makes sense that the banks are out of it. They will come back, but I don't think it's gonna happen for a while. The best example I can give you of how difficult the environment is just look at the Twitter deal. That turned out to be a very long dated commitment. He bid, the banks committed, then he said, "I don't wanna do it." He was forced to come back. By the time that happened, it was like 90-120 days, $13 billion of risk. I don't know where everyone's marking it, but I'm hearing around $0.50. That was a $6.5 billion loss for the banks.
When you ask yourself how quickly are they gonna come back, they're not gonna come back very quickly. Great opportunity, and I should add. A year ago, 18 months ago, on the loan side, we make a good loan, safe, pretty good covenants, but we'd be earning a 6.5%. Today, that same loan has lower loan-to-value, so it's higher up in the cap stack, better covenants, and we're earning a 12%. That's before we use any leverage. Today, with some leverage, we can get a mid-teens return. I would tell you, as, you know, as I know this is being broadcast, but I'll say it anyways, just as an aside, when we're sitting there and we're going through deals often, we say, Who's getting the better side of the trade?
Where would you rather be, in the PE or in the credit? When we were only making 6.5, that was kind of a low rate. It was good risk return because rates were at zero. We just thought PE was probably had the better side of the trade. Today, if I'm making a mid-teens and my loan-to-value is about 1/3 or 40%, I have 60%, 70% equity underneath. Clearly, the better side of the trade is being a creditor. I'm very excited about that. If you're gonna force me, you know the answer to this, so I see the smirk because you know the answer.
We'll save me a question later, I think, on this one.
All right. My favorite place in the market right now is net lease trust, triple net lease. For those who don't follow it, and I'll save it for a later question, is where we go, we buy a mission-critical asset from usually an investment-grade counterparty. Not only do we buy the real estate, but that investment-grade counterparty is leasing it back from us for 20 years. We can talk in more detail on that, but we're able to earn a very high current return, kind of twice what you're seeing in the broader market today, because this is a very specialized niche, and we've been able to generate meaningful capital gains. That's what I'm most excited about right now.
We'll get back to Oak Street in a little bit.
Sure.
Last year was an interesting year. Bear market and public equities, higher inflation, didn't really derail your fundraising effort. You know, why was that?
Well, I think, you know, one, we talked about we were in private wealth, institutional channel, but I think we had the right products for this type of market. If you look across all those products I described, the characteristics are high current income, for the most part, inflation protected. We'll talk about that with Oak Street, but in the credit market, we're all floating rate. Let me just. I'm glad you brought that up because I wanna mention this. If you look right now in the, in the markets, institutions are increasing their allocations to private credit. Yes, last year, we raised $25 billion. We're happy with that number. If the markets had been a little less choppy, a little less volatile, I think we could have raised materially more. We're out that we're gonna raise $25 billion this year.
We feel pretty good about that. I think we'll have a lot of success in private credit. The thing to keep in mind with private credit, what I describe, better covenants, lower loan-to-value, and 12%-15% returns, is that it's floating rate. If you were to ask me right now, what is the biggest risk in the market? It's The Fed. If you looked at sentiment before today, everybody's view was maybe a couple more rate increases.
Well north of 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. I don't know the number. Very high number. you know, if you continue that growth rate with even no multiple expansion, you're talking very high total return for the stock. How do you think about the growth trajectory going forward? Can you maintain that high growth rate?
Yeah. Let me, I'm gonna circle back and maybe just talk for a minute about the value of the stock. I mean, the market will value it where they think appropriate, but maybe I can spend a minute and talk about how we think about it at the firm. One, we've got this permanent capital stream. It's highly predictable, highly stable. 100% of our revenue from that revenue stream comes from management fee. Carry stays down with the employees, shareholders share in the management fee. Long dated stream of income that's very stable. Predictability and stability. I know when I look at the numbers from last year, what we generated in management fee, I'm gonna generate those numbers for the next 20 years. To your point, it's an annuity basically with growth.
Growth is the big variable, we can all talk about what that growth rate will look like, we've shown an ability to hit or exceed our numbers for the bulk of our careers. We're out this year with $1 billion of DE, what I'm focused on is we've told the market we're gonna earn $1 a share in 2025. Let's just assume that we can get to $1 of dividend per share in 2025, roughly 2.5 years. Is the stock gonna trade at 13 with long-dated pools of very stable capital? Are we gonna trade an 8% or 9% dividend? I don't think so.
I think if we still have those characteristics and growth in front of us, we'll trade at probably a 3% or 4%. I think the stock, we are setting ourselves up to pay a really nice dividend. If we hit that $1 or we exceed it or we're somewhere close to it, I think the stock could trade in the mid-20s. That's what we're playing for over the next 2.5 years. I look at that, I can't do it in my head, but that's roughly a +30% IRR per annum.
A double.
Yeah. I view that as really attractive because unlike a lot of firms that have a lot of carry and where assets are leaving and they have to go replace the next fund, we have a built-in floor. You know our earnings can't drop off too much because we've got assets that go on for 20 years and all our revenue and all our profit comes from management. I view it as a very stable, safe place to invest, and in your words, the ability to get a double over the next 2.5 years. I think it's one of the more compelling financials in the market.
I wanted to hone back in on the individual investor opportunity. You know, you guys have continued to grow throughout the year, a little bit of slowing in the fourth quarter. There was a little bit of pause in some of the liquid products out there. I wanted your perspective on the, you know, you said some numbers earlier, but on the long-term trajectory of individuals going into privates and offs, and what do you think of this sort of pause we've seen? Is it just a symptom of a bear market?
Yeah, I think it's just a symptom of not just a bear market, but a volatile market. Clearly there, you know, there have been some funds that have grown and had redemptions. By the way, I think we're gonna come out of this stronger. Blackstone, Starwood, I think are doing a great job meeting those redemptions and doing exactly what they said they would do. I think those are great portfolios. I feel good we're gonna come out of this better. Going forward, can we modify the structures a little bit? We're certainly working with your teams to think about what can we do to enhance it. I am really bullish on the opportunity.
As you think about this market, it's gonna grow to be $200 trillion in the wealth channel they're forecasting by 2025. If you go from 5% penetration to 25% penetration. By the way, I heard Marc Rowan speak. I think he was saying it was gonna go to 50. I don't have a strong view where it's gonna go. If you can go from 5- 25, that's $40 trillion of growth. Let's just cut it in half. Let's say it's 20, let's say it's 10. These are massive amounts of dollars. While competition has heated up, there's really not that many players who are well-positioned.
I think when you look at our, you know, our denominator and the assets we have, we're one of the firms that's well-positioned to really, if it does take off the way we're all hoping and expecting, we're one of the firms that can really benefit. What are we gonna do? We're gonna continue to work with the leadership here at Bank of America and Merrill, trying to think about what is it that will resonate, what is it that's not out there. You know, there's a lot of, you know, powerful FAs here. I'm looking at one, Forty Under 40. You wanna come to your clients with things where you know they're not gonna lose their money. That is how you lose the client. You want things that are differentiated, and that's what we're trying to do.
Our software fund is a great example. We're the only one in the market with a software lending fund. It's put up great results. Happy to spend some time talking about it, but can we continue to find things like that? Our new REIT is another great example. There are REITs out there, but there is no one out there who is focused on stability and predictability of a triple net lease product. What else can we bring into the channel? Maybe we have one competitor, we hope we have none. I'm pretty confident, as I said earlier, you're gonna see us bring over the next 18 months, probably three new strategies that we think will hopefully resonate with everybody in this room and, you know, around the world, because we have built out distribution around the world.
It's not just a U.S. phenomenon. It's in Europe, it's in Asia. You know, we're in the process of building out the Middle East. We're seeing excitement from that wealth channel globally. Again, we feel cautiously optimistic we can get a minimum of our fair share and hopefully meaningfully more than our fair share.
All right, Doug, it's time for Oak Stree. Let's, you know.
This has been quite the build-up for Oak Street, so.
you know, I like the credit quality component of it versus its competitors. There's a tax efficiency component of it. Is there any scalability issues, like how big could this fund potentially get?
Why not explain what it is to the audience just for a second.
Let me just take a step back. I started explaining earlier. Triple net lease, we're the leader, one of the leaders in triple net lease. It's where we go to usually an investment grade or a very credit-worthy counterparty. We buy what we believe is a mission-critical asset. And that investment grade counterparty leases it back usually for up to 20 years. I view it as a little bit like a belt and suspenders. We're buying the real estate, and we hope to make money on that, and we've got this 20-year lease stream, to your point. There's a credit element to it tied to real estate. Cap rates have moved out. Today, we're earning on lots of new deals, close to 8%. As you mentioned, that 8% is tax advantaged. About 90% of it you pay no tax on.
Think about earning a seven and change net on something where you own real estate, and you have an investment grade counterparty paying you interest. We've never had a default. We've never had anything go into arrears over 15 years. The reason I get so excited about the product is what we have done is we have become a solutions provider, and this will get into your TAM and the size of the market. We go to these large companies, and today the credit markets are a mess. They're looking for alternative sources of funding. More and more companies are saying, You know, I can get a higher return on my capital than owning real estate. We've done deals for Amazon and Starbucks and Walgreens and CVS, Cracker Barrel. They've all been IG, great companies. They've always had one thing in common.
They hit a certain amount of real estate, and they say, This is a bad use of capital. I can deploy it in other things and get a higher rate of return. What we're able to do, and as far as I can tell, we are the only firm that does this, is we can go in and buy wholesale, and we get a premium for that. If you think about in credit, in real estate, what's the best thing you can own? You want something that has a very high contractual rate of return. As I mentioned, today, it's moving towards an 8%, not quite there. That is tax advantaged. We also have what I call unconstrained right-tailed risk, meaning we can make a lot of money, big capital gains on this.
These funds, and I know many of you are gonna find this hard to believe, have generated in excess of 20% returns for 15 years. How do we do it? How did we generate a 20% return last year, almost all from realized assets? We know rates were moving in the wrong direction. How does that happen? Well, I'm not gonna say which company, but we bought a bunch of stores 18 months ago from an investment grade counterparty. We bought them at a seven cap rate. If we were to go do that same trade today, we'd probably buy them at a 7.50. We bought them at a seven. We turned around, and we sold those assets into the 1031 market at slightly above five.
We made almost 2x our money and close to a 40% IRR in 18 months. You know, if you have a client who sells an asset, they have a certain number of days to redeploy that capital into another real estate asset and not pay tax. Now we control Walgreens, CVSes, Cracker Barrel, Starbucks, Amazon warehouses. People call us and say, I live in Maryland, and I'd like to, y ou know, I've got $35 million I need to deploy or $135 million. What can you offer? If we're buying them at 7 or 7.50, that market is around a five still. It's a gigantic market, and we have been able to generate these really big cap gains.
This is how I view the product. You come in, and you make a base case of an eight. You have the optionality that we continue to sell markets, sell assets into that 1031 market, and you also have the optionality, the opposite of floating rate debt. These are 20-year leases. A year or two, three years from now, rates start to come down. You know, you have incredible convexity. You make a fortune if those cap rates do compress. We are. This is a great opportunity. To answer your question, we have live in-house today well in excess of $10 billion of executable trades. Our issue is we don't have enough capital. You know, if you were to talk to Marc Zahr, who runs that business for us, he thinks if he went out, he could get close to $20 billion.
That's how much demand there is from a marketplace. Remember, the credit markets are dislocated. A lot of people are saying, I've got these assets. Why not just monetize it and, you know, have a little bit more lease expense? Big opportunity, uniquely positioned, high current income, tax advantaged with the ability for big cap gains. That to me is unique, differentiated, and as you think about our growth, that will be one of the areas I think we're gonna really scale.
Doug, let's shift into credit quality. You know, we watched a lot of asset managers get bigger in the private credit space. Have you seen competition intensify, and how can you maintain high credit quality in your portfolios if there's more firms fighting over the same loans?
Yeah, listen, it's a great question. It's obviously something I get often. First of all, I described earlier that this is one of the best environments to be a lender, that we're actually capital constrained despite the growth that you've seen in the marketplace. Where was it really hard for us to maintain credit quality? It was the prior six years. That's when money was flowing, rates were low, the competition was crazy, people were waiving covenants, rates were low. It was really hard to maintain your discipline. I think we did about 4% of the deals that came in, and you can imagine our deal teams, they were frustrated because we were saying no most of the time, and the deals were getting done away. I'm not saying they were bad deals, but they didn't fit what we were looking for.
Now fast-forward to credit quality, we haven't really added any names to the watch list. We're not seeing our credits get worse despite what you read in the press. In fact, year-over-year. Now, this is gonna distort things a little to the upside, but I just wanna give you a sense. I think revenue across our portfolio on average was up 13%. EBITDA was up about 10%. Now, that's not apples to apples 'cause some companies made acquisitions along the way, but the trend has remained positive. In fact, I saw Pepsi results. Not that I follow Pepsi, but I thought it was interesting. Their volumes were down, but their revenue was up. Why? They increased prices 15%. Unilever, Ben & Jerry's, Dove Body part, Soap, and things like that, volumes down, raised prices 11%, sales were up.
We're still seeing the consumer willing to absorb those higher costs. By the way, as I talk about that risk of rates staying higher longer or maybe The Fed having to raise it longer, these are the trends I see. As I look across the portfolio, I am not seeing problems, but there is one problem that people aren't talking about, and that is interest coverage. I mentioned rates have moved from 6- 12 effectively, even if you had an outstanding loan, LIBOR's moved from zero to four, and so interest expense has gone up exponentially for a lot of companies. If I were to show you our stats, we started above three turns of interest expense. We're now to slightly above two.
If rates went up another 250 basis points from here, we could quickly be trending towards one. We could see an increase in defaults. If rates go up another 250 or 300, I think we would all agree, stocks would get really hurt. What I care the most about, we've been very disciplined about our loans-to-value. If it turns out I have a good company, let's say I lent to it and it was doing $100 million of EBITDA, it's still doing $100 million, but it has a bad balance sheet, meaning interest is too high, I'm gonna get all my money back plus some. What I worry about is what you asked in the beginning, seeing cash flow start to decline. We went into a recession. We're not experiencing that.
Right now, I feel really good about the portfolio, like how we're positioned. Just I wanna make this clear, everybody in the marketplace is capital constrained. It is so much easier to make a loan today than it was 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago.
I think this is an important point that, you know, there will be some restructurings over the next year.
You know, a default or a restructuring necessarily isn't a bad thing because you could walk away with more value coming out of that.
Yeah. We took over a company during the crisis, that, you know, cash flow went to zero. Key firm didn't wanna put in more money. We took it over. When we made the loan, this was an early loan. Our deals are bigger today, $30 million of EBITDA. It went down to almost zero. Now it's doing $40 million. We're gonna turn around and sell it, and we're gonna get well in excess of par. To your point, when you hear default, don't think automatically like it's necessarily bad for the creditor. If the firm, and I would put Ares in this category, does a good job, disciplined, oftentimes it can be a small to a large positive for us.
At this moment, I just wanna check and see if there's any questions from the audience since we only have a few minutes left.
You spoke about triple net lease with 20-year odd timeframe. I mean, as an investor, I have another option available to me, which is a public REIT called Realty Income. They are in a similar market for some time. It's interesting that when you mention that you're getting about 8% on those sale and leaseback deals for an IG counterparty, I haven't heard them talking about that 8% figure. Probably, they are somewhere around 6 percentage points. How is your triple net lease different than this?
Yeah, I may have missed the beginning. You can help direct me along the way. Most of the ones we've made have been, you know, that 7% to 7.5%. Recently I've seen it migrating up to the high 7s. We're not quite to eight, but we're getting there. We're able to get that because we really are coming in and being a solutions provider. Great company, whether it's Walgreens, CVS, whoever it might be, they wanna sell $500 million in real estate, they can get much tighter cap rates if they hire a bunch of brokers to go out, sell it, one here, two here, three there, take a long time.
This is, like, such a small amount of money to them in the scheme of a $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion business that I don't wanna mislead you, it's a negotiation. We come in, we say we can do size, and they know that the next time they wanna go sell a distribution plant, a factory, whatever it might be, or more stores, we will be there. We've done it over and over and over, and some of these we've gone from starting 10, 12, 15 years ago to owning one store of one of these big chains. Today, we're their largest landlord by far. There's a trust built up, and we get paid a premium for solving that problem.
At the end of the day, what matters most is, one, credit quality, making sure they can pay that lease expense. Two, the underlying assets. We've had great experience of either selling into that 1031 market or monetizing the assets or renegotiating the leases. Look, I can just show you over time, 15-year period, high current income, and as I said, greater than 20% total return. Let me just address the public market. You know, the public markets, I'm not that close to that space. My partner, Marc Zahr, obviously knows all the assets. I did spend a lot of time during COVID, especially in the office REITs, going and talking to people about was there a lending opportunity. We ended up not doing anything. That is a total different analysis.
A lot of the public REITs are very long office space. I don't have a view. I happen to be in a building, by the way, that's fully leased. We need more space, can't get it. Around the country, I would say that is not the case. You have to have a view of where that's going. Are rents really gonna go up? Can they fill those spaces? You know, not every REIT is created equally. They touch so many different asset classes. We decided when we launched our business to focus on a very narrow niche. I know we're out of time, so I'll leave you with this. One of the things we try to do at Blue Owl is we are a solutions provider to the private markets, primarily to think about PE, venture firms. We wanna be an indispensable partner to those firms.
Think about what we've created. One, we're one of the largest lenders to their portfolio companies. We can write the largest checks up at the GP level to those firms, meaning at the partnership level. They need capital to do something, we are a great source of funding, and by far the biggest. Then part of what we wanna do in real estate is there is no one working on that with them, on their companies that are really asset rich in real estate. There are two very small funds, no one who can come and really solve a problem for a very large company, meaning wanting to liquidate assets. Now we have this third leg of the stool, where we've amped up our discussions with the founders and CEOs of these companies, Hey, this is what's happening in the investment grade space.
You should take a look at it for your portfolios as well. That was part of the rationale for getting involved as well.
Well, with that we have to stop. Doug, thank you so much.
Thank you.
On behalf of all of us here at, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Thank you.