Fernando De Leon

Right.

Like salesmanship, whatever it takes.

And you're going to find a way to maneuver around the opportunity and find value and extract it.

That is something that anybody can do.

There are no handbooks for it.

There are no manuals for it.

But you've got to develop it for yourself, and then it'll manifest itself as value creation that you are able to, at some point, extract.

And so, for instance, when I first started my career in Dallas building subdivisions, the first ones was a piece of land, and I didn't have the ability to buy that piece of land and build a subdivision.

So I had to go and talk to a landowner and say, hey, I have this idea for building this land into a subdivision.

And I'm going to sell these lots to home builders and I'm going to – these are my – this is my numbers, my expectations.

Would you like to be a partner in this?

and they would contribute it into a partnership.

Or sometimes I would have an option to buy the land and then go get entitlements or zoning changes from the city, and I could go do that through persuasion.

I could convince the city to let me change it from an agricultural use to a residential use.

And then that made the value of the land more valuable.

And therefore, I could get financing and limit the amount of capital that I needed.

But I think that early days, my instincts were about how do I build value?

OK, so this piece of land, I'm going to option it.

And if I change the zoning, it's more valuable.

The option contract was a piece of paper.