Spencer Levy
I'm Spencer Levy and this is The Weekly Take. Happy New Year. On this episode, we're unpacking one of the most basic forms of real estate there is. We're unlocking the world of self-storage.
Liz Schlesinger
It used to be a land use play and it quickly became clear that it was very valuable income.
Spencer Levy
That's Liz Schlesinger, the founder and CEO of Merit Hill Capital, an owner operator of self-storage facilities with a portfolio of more than 130 properties in 30 states and nearly eight million square feet of space across America. Liz joins us from her home base in Brooklyn.
Nick Walker
When people ask about self-storage, I always tell them it's the most fundamental real estate play you can get.
Spencer Levy
And that's Nick Walker, who grew up in a family of self-storage operators and has covered self-storage on the brokerage side for 13 years now with CBRE executive vice president of capital markets in this sector. Nick joins us from Los Angeles. We'll talk about the physical units themselves and how the sector has evolved in the U.S. and around the world. We'll discuss leasing and different perspectives on investing in this space. We'll talk about tenants, uses, the role of self-storage in the lifestyle of America, and we'll even talk about Legos. You'll be glad you cleared out some listening space for a fascinating conversation about self-storage. That's right now, on The Weekly Take.
Welcome to The Weekly Take, and I'm delighted this week to talk about self-storage with two of the leading experts in the business, Liz Schlesinger, the CEO of Merit Hill Capital. Liz, welcome.
Liz Schlesinger
Thank you.
Spencer Levy
And I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Nick Walker, the leader of self-storage capital markets for CBRE. Nick, thanks for joining us.
Nick Walker
Thanks, Spencer. Glad to be here.
Spencer Levy
Well, we're delighted to have you both here and self-storage. A lot of people know about industrial. A lot of people know self-storage is more personal. But for the benefit of our listeners, perhaps, Liz, you can paint a picture for us. What exactly is self-storage? How is it different than regular industrial buildings.
Liz Schlesinger
Well, it's evolved over time, so it used to be a land use play and it quickly became clear that it was very valuable income, particularly given how much Americans like stuff and store. So it went from basically a bunch of garages stuck together in single use, one floor units to now it can look like any old building in a city. Obviously from a city zoning perspective, they try to make them nicer looking and it could be a three or four story building. Often we as storage owners want there to be glass so that you can see the traditional garage looking doors. So you know that it's storage. Now it's fancier than it used to be. We tend to like to buy the not fancy stuff because we think that works very well. Most customers prefer drive up to elevator access to their stuff.
Spencer Levy
Well, let's dig a little bit further into that. How do you describe self-storage to somebody you meet on the street?
Nick Walker
I always tell them it's the most fundamental real estate play you can get because it is that box. It doesn't have a toilet. You don't have any turnover costs. It's a broom and you know, somebody that, you know, doesn't have a huge high wages. You sweep out the unit and you got something that's rent ready. Again, it's kind of transition to exactly what Liz was saying. You know, we're in our fifth generation of storage. It's multistory, it's clean as well, lit some of the floors you can eat off of. They look fantastic, Spencer. And so we've really seen our industry completely change and evolve. And now we've gotten a little bit more of a retail component. The fact that it's better locations, more on high traffic streets, things of that nature.
Spencer Levy
So, Liz and Nick, the pandemic obviously changed all forms of commercial real estate from a demand standpoint, from a capital market standpoint. How have these facilities performed during the pandemic from all those different perspectives? And you might also want to touch on property management challenges you may or may not have, Liz.
Liz Schlesinger
So in the initial March timeframe, we had a very tough time getting renters in sort of the northeast area and just a very slow, slow what would have been our normal renting season start to the season. But Arizona performed sort of just like business as usual. March through middle of April our industry went into a bit of a tailspin, to be honest. I think people were really nervous. Their customers weren't initially coming other than the college students who are going home. And so a lot of rents were dropped. And it looks exactly like the V that economists are desperate to see. The rents went down more than they needed to. We all acknowledged that. I think it was a knee jerk concern and reaction. And then we went right up and have kept on going since the middle of April and rents our rents are actually up 18 percent. Street rents and our achieved rents are up eight percent year to date. And despite having significant supply built over the last five years, the supply has not only been absorbed, but we're at our record high occupancies. People have actually been creating these offices and also doing a lot of home projects. And so we've had a lot of demand from home projects. People are buying and selling homes and moving, and the mobility has been also another user base. So lots of new uses and the same old ones basically.
Nick Walker
Yeah. I mean, to Liz's point, it's the first time, I think since 2018 where on a year over year basis we've actually seen the street rents increase and this is post pandemic. So when you look at other asset classes and things of that nature, you kind of scratch your head because you shouldn't be like this. But with storage, you, you absolutely have been that way.
Liz Schlesinger
When the pandemic started, I thought I was going to be really hard initially for developers to releasing a product because our traditional rental season is in the months that the pandemic hit, but instead we absorbed most of that supply and as a result, I think a lot of people were hoping there may be some distress in that development. And that's not probably going to happen. I mean, there's going to be some disappointment, but not distress because of the absorption.
Nick Walker
Yeah, I remember all the recalls for the second quarter and they were talking about how they were going to buy these lease up deals by the end of the year, thinking there was going to be distress. And I don't think so.
Spencer Levy
Nick, I want to go back to a conversation you and I had a couple of years ago when we were talking about what is the optimal location for these facilities. And I was talking about markets, the high growth markets like Dallas, Nashville, Charlotte. But you had a very different answer. You said it is hyper local. Tell me what you meant by that.
Nick Walker
When you look at map, our tenant base around our facilities, I would say that you get 70 to 80 percent of your tenants in a three mile radius. And it used to be a lot tighter than that. It would say like under two miles, obviously, with our, you know, inventions of our iPhone and smartphones and everything else that goes with it. You know, you find a little blue dot, you hit the directions and you just drive there. You might have passed the closest facility to you. But because of that evolving, we've seen it expand a little bit. But generally speaking, the bulk of your tenant base comes within under three miles of your storage facility.
Spencer Levy
Well, let me dig into that in two ways. First, for industrial uses, many of them are not permitted near residential locations. Is self-storage considered industrial or is it an exception to that? And it is able to be closer to a residential center than would be a commercial industrial facility?
Nick Walker
I generally see it in light industrial zoning. But that still being said, you can get a special use permit or something in that form or fashion in some kind of, you know, neighborhood commercial kind of a district. And so that generally puts you closer to the residential. But there are markets, you know, like L.A., right? Because I'm in L.A., there's a big market where there is 15 or 16 self-storage facilities, all in one street. Right. Because that's the closest you can get to it. And there's no cell storage facilities, you know, as the crow flies for eight or nine miles. So that kind of skews kind of how we look at a market and say, well, is that submarket, you know, oversaturated or undersupplied? But it's because in that particular city, that zoning only allows for storage to be in that one district. And so but a lot of other districts allow self-storage either under a couple years or special use permit to be in other, you know, areas that are closer to the population.
Spencer Levy
Liz, let me turn that question to you. How do you look at good locations for investment of self-storage?
Liz Schlesinger
I agree with Nick that it's a hyper local business because people want to be close to their stuff, even if they're not visiting it that often. It's an emotional attachment. And I think that's particularly why Clutter and other businesses that have tried to kind of create a moving business out of storage and have a business model there, pick your stuff up, put it in industrial buildings, you know, 10 miles out of the city with a cheaper the idea is that their business model would be more efficient and cost less money. But ultimately, the cost to get the stuff there is quite high. And also consumers aren't interested in paying that much for that service. And lastly, really want their stuff here. So personally, I think it's hard to really understand where storage should be without having ever needed a storage unit. Vis-à-vis to the investment part of this. For me, it's a pricing based decision. So the more population within a three mile radius and the more income, the better. But when you start layering price in that, those are often much more expensive markets to buy in. And so it really depends on your risk return profile for us. We just we really do want at least twenty five thousand people within three miles and ideally forty five to fifty thousand dollars of median income. We've invested and did quite well, investing very early in 2006 in secondary and tertiary markets. And over time, those have become, you know, people have sort of been stretching for yield and trying to find yield. More and more people have been moving to the secondary and tertiary markets. So we actually are sort of circling back inward a bit to some of this, some of the more primary markets, because we find that the spread between the secondary in the primary isn't that high there and it's not as high as it should be right now.
Spencer Levy
Nick, you can pick up on some of the threads that Liz had on the who is the typical profile of tenant. I had thought prior to this episode that it might be an empty nester, but. It sounds different. What do you see as a typical profile, Nick?
Nick Walker
We really live off of any kind of, you know, death, divorce, disruption, displacement, you know, so it could be any one of those. When Liz was talking about needs based, you've got college students that had to come home early. Right. And you saw a big wave of those move in right now. I mean, I've got four kids at home. So if I was trying to convert any kind of space to home office, you know, I'd have to clear out some things, whether it's the garage or something like that, where we're going to need storage. And so it's really a needs based business. We're seeing businesses that are shutting down or having to get rid of their tables and chairs that have come in indoor spaces. But more or less, you know, you have the people cleaning out that a spare bedroom, if they had one garages, you know, just all that things that have come into it. And I think those are kind of the immediate people that have pushed in. And I don't know if office is going to change a whole lot in the next year to two years from what we're seeing. So we'll probably have that additional kind of clientele that we didn't always have. And then you have your people that are moving to Texas or moving out of the urban markets into suburban markets right now. And so as they're trying to find out what kind of house they're getting is a bigger house or smaller, the average home today has, I think, 300,000 items in it. Three hundred thousand items. It's a big number. And so and people love their stuff. And so when you look at that and you're trying to downsize or move and things of that nature, you just can't necessarily put it in the back of your station wagon or your suburban and go to the next place. You're going to need someplace to put it somewhere for the time being.
Liz Schlesinger
And the other concern I had when starting Merit Hill was are millennials going to use the product. And I spoke to one of the people I think is one of the most brilliant people in the space, Spencer Kirk, who is the former CEO of Extra Space and someone I really look up to. And I asked him: do you think this trend is played out because I'm a risk averse person and totally wrong, wrongly so I thought 2016 was the top of the market for our business. And I was concerned about this millennial trend as well. And he said, Liz, when millennials start to have income and start to make money and start to have kids, they're going to basically act just like every generation before them. And what's interesting is millennials are now our highest percent of our customers. Now it's a larger generation. So that's part of it. But millennials have been using it as a lifestyle demand through that and particularly in more urban areas. And then also, as they've gotten older, they're having kids. And like all mothers, when your child writes your Mother's Day card, you're never throwing that out. So that's the bottom line, is that it's a sentimental connection that then ultimately means our customers often use our product way longer than they ever would have expected to. And they keep it sort of rolling on their credit cards for years because they're not going to throw out their kid's drawings.
Spencer Levy
Well, Liz as I will say that I need to put some of my stuff in storage, that's for sure.
Liz Schlesinger
I was wondering when you said, by the way, Nick, that three hundred thousand items, if I counted Legos, do I count that as one set or is that per? Because we're at three hundred thousand with just Lego pieces in our house.
Nick Walker
I know. I know in our house we've got per bin, so I’ll say per bin is one is what I’d call it. I think I have six or seven bins at my house so.
Spencer Levy
But to defend your Lego point, this is a true story. My kids outgrew their Legos probably five years ago, OK? And we brought in a guy who sells Legos to say, hey, you want this collection? And I'm handing him the collection. And I started shaking. I said, no, I cannot give this to you. And I literally kept it.
Liz Schlesinger
Did you put it in storage is the question?
Spencer Levy
Exactly.
Liz Schlesinger
Good.
Spencer Levy
It's funny how we all have the same story. So, Liz, speaking of the same story, I'm going to give you one research thing and then I’m going to come to your back story. So all from a research perspective, what you are suggesting about millennials. CBRE wrote a report three years ago called Millennial Myths Live, Work, Play, which says precisely what you just said, which is that millennials, it is life stage, not age that matters. And the punch line, somewhat comedic, which we concluded is that millennials are primarily just young human beings. And when they're older, they do just like everybody else did before them, kind of like the three of us with Legos.
Liz Schlesinger
That's why I can figure out storage, because it's kind of common sense. We're all human, we all get married well most people get married. Most people, unfortunately lose a loved one. Most people have kids. So we go through this human experience and millennials are just, as you said, younger in their journey through life.
Spencer Levy
Well, speaking of the journey, Liz and I see this with tremendous admiration. You have a wonderful personal and professional journey to talk about. I’d love to hear about the professional side. How'd you get into self-storage and then five or six years ago to starting your own company? Tell us a little bit about that.
Liz Schlesinger
Sure. So I joined W.P. Carey out of business school in 2005, which was in hindsight, top of the beginning at the top of the real estate cycle. And I have joined into the net lease investment department and we had a net lease with U-Haul and we basically sort of started to dig into storage. And honestly, I have never met a business that I love more than storage. It has a lot of cash flow and it's a life cycle, life need product and very little TI, very little CapEx too. So the cash flow is just very, very recurring and stable through different cycles. We started investing in the space in 2006. It was not the cool thing to do. I happened to be a pastor's kid, a second child, and I don't really necessarily do what other people do. So that's why I was living in Brooklyn in 99 when it was called another country and investing in self-storage out of business school. My friends thought I'd basically trashed my MBA. This was in 2006 by randomly investing in a niche product. Had a lot of conviction around the product though. And from 2006-2016 built with my team the eighth largest self-storage portfolio, we grew from inception to about 19 percent cash on cash return on the portfolio that I had bought and was the head of that business when I left. I left in late 2016 and I raised a large three hundred million dollar investment along with GP investment so that I could start a company with my team ultimately, they were young, so they technically weren't in the non-solicit non-compete part of my agreement. So in March, the entire team there quit and came to Merit Hill Capital, which is honestly the thing I'm the most proud of. That was really, really special that they came. So it's been the six of us that Merit Hill, we've grown the company very significantly from that point. So it's been a fun ride. We have beaten our revenue and NOI projections from every single deal to date. We are now up through a pandemic we’re up over our NOI by one percent. It was higher obviously prior to the pandemic, but that's every single property of one hundred and seventy eight that we've bought. And to me that's really, you know, a measurable statistic. Anyone can buy a lot of stuff and lose money, but we're still we're making money on that stuff too, which is good.
Spencer Levy
Well, congratulations on your success, not only for your savvy buys, but also the guts. And I use that words to form your own company and really kill it with that.
Liz Schlesinger
My business is called Merit Hill because it's meritocracy and it's a hill. You got to keep going when life knocks you down so you don't build success without grit and determination. And as Nick knows, as a broker, you got to call a thousand people before you get your first deal. I've had to with my team look at three thousand two hundred sixty properties to find the one hundred and seventy eight that we bought. And we've been turned down a lot. So that's the only way to kind of make it. Nothing is kind of easy that's worth doing usually.
Spencer Levy
Now, Nick, I want to pick up on a thread that Liz talked about regarding the value of these assets. How are values going in self-storage and what are they headed to?
Nick Walker
You know, I mean, we've seen cap rates, you know, stay flat or compressed just to come in a little bit since the pandemic or pre COVID, I guess, and I think our markets, you know, class A markets, you know, our urban markets, the suburban you know, there's not a big gap between those two right now. There's more of a gap in some outskirts of these tertiary marketplaces and whatnot. But we have seen that because of how well the storage has been, they've almost given very little discount for our, you know, Class B versus Class A facilities whereas you look at some other product types, there's a big gap. You know, there's a much bigger gap there. But for storage, I would say that that we haven't had as big of a difference between the two. I would say that our Class A facilities are selling, you know, I would say mid four to five cap facilities and really core marketplaces. But our, you know, Class B facilities are trending at very low fives in today's world.
Liz Schlesinger
I would say there's a bigger trend, though, behind this, which is a lot of capital, but there's a lot of money in the world and there's an aging population. And that's a lot of the reason why interest rates are low. And, you know, along with an economy we're trying to stimulate and basically there's not that many asset classes that these enormous real estate funds that have been raised to go into right now, because even though investors like to say they don’t go with the herd, investors kind of often do sort of invest together in spaces. And so, you know, retail is a tough thing to underwrite right now. The hotels are tough, industrials obviously hot, but there's not a lot of sectors that have performed as well as storage through the pandemic. And I think it's basically a supply demand game. There's a lot of money and there's not a lot of places to invest it. And additionally, they're very small asset sizes, right? Our average deal size is only five million. So we've done a hundred and seventy eight deals and it's a ton of work, but we haven't invested the same equity that, you know, friends of mine could buy a building and invest it more than we've invested in four years and sleepless nights. It's not that easy to get capital in the sector and there's a lot of capital that wants to be in it. Therefore, cap rates have been on the owning side, terrific. On the buying side, difficult because they've just been driven down by that demand for the product and the capital.
Nick Walker
And to add that. I mean, look, it's like you were touching on. You can't just come in and say, I want to spend a billion dollars in self storage and do that, you know, overnight.
Liz Schlesinger
Unless you want to buy our portfolio for one cap. Yeah. Nick will sell it to you.
Nick Walker
Yeah. But you just won't be able to do that. It's eighty percent. Well I think it's down to about seventy three, seventy five percent of our industry is they own less than three of these. And so it's not like there's an exorbitant amount of portfolios on the marketplace you can just come into.
Liz Schlesinger
That was 90 percent by the way, in 2006 when I started investing in the business. So it's gone. It has consolidated, but it's still not as consolidated and sophisticated as other industries.
Nick Walker
Yeah. And then as you buy these things like large institutions that want to get into this or the institutional world that wants to get in this in a meaningful way, I, I don't think that they're ready for the brain damage. Right. I mean, you buy a mom and pop, they built this thing. There was no phase one. There was no survey. You know, there's encroachments all over these things. The title reports are just extremely screwed up. And to do that for three to five million dollar deal, who wants to go through that? Right. They want to try to go in and say, I want to put twenty to twenty five million is a minimum deal size if we're going to go through that kind of brain damage.
Liz Schlesinger
Nick, I think it'd be funny to tell people some of our deal stories together. So you can imagine Nick and I have done I don't even know how many deals at this point together, probably fifty. It's an emotional sale for many of the sellers because it's their entire nest egg. And, you know, it's not an institutional seller. It's not a company to company trade. And that creates a different dynamic to our deals and then to the zoning point. We’re light industrial. We like to buy properties that are in the retail districts. And what happens there is most of them are not zoned to be there anymore. So that means where they built legally, did they have permits? Do they have a CO? The number of properties we bought that didn't have a CO, but it wasn't a violation of the code because it was so old then the real nitty gritty of this is I love it, but it's mind numbing for people who kind of want to throw a bunch of money to work in a quick, easy way. But that's the only way you get returns like we get you can't get that by just, you know, buying a billion dollar portfolio.
Nick Walker
It almost feels like, Liz, is that everybody that builds a self storage facility, I'd say, in the, you know, mid 80s or older had a handshake deal when they put these things together and things like that. You know, nothing's documented. Everything is. Oh, yeah, that was that was George Smith. And he let me, you know, take that 10 foot fence and it's not a big deal. And yeah, I maintain it, but it's my fence. And you're going, well, you know, the title report tells you in the survey. And so you look at all those things and that's why...
Liz Schlesinger
We had a sewage pipe under one that was connected to a mansion built behind it. It was a relatively rundown mansion. It almost was going to be cheaper to buy the three hundred thousand dollar house. It was enormous, but it was in Pittsburgh then it was going to be to figure out the value of basically a reduction in the value of the property, because this this sewage easement was running underneath very valuable buildings that we were paying quite a bit on per square foot basis. And we also couldn't get a loan or even, you know, zoning or cleared title with a huge sanitation pipe underneath the property. The one the one time and I do think it's worth making about the current owners of storage and investors getting into the space. I personally think that people make a massive mistake in assuming that a mom and pop seller is an idiot and they are going to make a fortune buying from them. Because the truth is, if they've been in storage longer than you, they're smarter than you. And so they've been in storage for 30, 40 years. They're not fools. They're an incredible business. And they don't always run them, you know, horribly. And I think a lot of people, Nick, I'm sure you feel this way on the brokerage side. I think it's this, like, quick oh, you just throw it together. You can pay whatever. You know, there's no way this group is managing it well. And it's just not that simple. There are some properties that we've bought from mom and pop sellers. I mean, we bought property from Nick, where the guy he lived on the parcel in a house. There was a chicken coop in front of it. There were pins on the he would manage the site and the units by pin. OK, these are the sites that stupidly me has said these are the people you want to buy from. Guess what? We didn't do very well on that site. We did exceptionally well when we sold it because of cap rate compression. But the actual revenue didn't quite meet our projections because, you know, the guy was actually doing a pretty good job managing it with little pushpins. So it's not always as simple as it seems. And that's true for anything.
Spencer Levy
Let's go to the capital markets for just a moment here. Nick is there are a lot of new money coming to the space, specifically international money, or is it still primarily smaller owner operators?
Nick Walker
I think primarily it's smaller, you know, operators, but that's still being said, Spencer. There's there is a lot of institutional capital that has been trying to enter our space. You know, I think Storage Mart, I think they got a sovereign wealth fund that came in and came into their portfolio as well. You know, we've been dealing with a few different large institutions. But, you know, they want they want to at least get in at least the first tranche or attempt to in in some kind of meaningful way. And so some of these groups you have to educate and we've seen them start out and say, well, you know, I need to start in with a two hundred million dollar tranche and then I'll look at growing the portfolio over there. And as you talk to him and you tell them and educate them, it's they'll maybe come in in that 30 to 50 million dollar range and then and then try to do a couple of those deals. And so, you know, as long as they're kind of doing their research, they're starting to understand that, yeah, they're not going to get in in the exact way that they would ideally like to if they were going to start a multifamily vertical or some other kind of vertical and be able to, you know, place some capital, meaningful capital in a very good short order. Yeah, we're seeing more groups that might have been in the space 15, 20 years ago, have started and sold out, have come back that wanted to actually try to get into it. We've also seen some new groups, plenty of new groups that have that are calling regularly and trying to get into this space. And we'll see. Time will tell on those, but they're definitely circling.
Spencer Levy
Is there an international market for self-storage or is primarily an American phenomenon?
Nick Walker
OK, so there's 60,000 plus self-storage facilities located throughout the world in. 50,000 of them are located in the U.S. So I would tell you that it is growing in other markets in Europe and Australia, New Zealand and Asia and, you know, Canada and a little bit in South America, but for the most part, Spencer, it's the U.S., you know, phenomenon.
Liz Schlesinger
I think it's the consumer. It's a consumer based business. So we're consumers, as we all know.
Spencer Levy
Indeed. So this has been a fantastic podcast, but I'd like to give you both the opportunity for final thoughts on the future of self-storage. A year from now, when we look back, is it going to be better, the same worse in the self-storage business? And what advice would you give to anybody who wants to get into the business, starting with you, Nick?
Nick Walker
I would say the future of self-storage in the next year, I think is going to be good. I think that we've seen developments have started to curtail a little bit. We went through a big development cycle, having peaked in 18, and it's been slowly coming down from its all-time peak. So I think we're going to normalize in the next year or so. And I would say that we're going to be a benefactor of that from a rental rate that are hopefully keep increasing. I think that there's plenty of capital to chase in the sector. So I think from a cap rate standpoint, they're going to stay low. I think we've kind of all said that we believe debt is going to stay lower for longer from all of those things. I think storage is going to be in a, you know, as good of a place or better place in a year from now. And I think long term, wise, I think self-storage is geared up to do extremely well. You know, you've got I think it's 10,000 baby boomers retiring daily now for the next 10 years. And so I think as those start to adjust and their lifestyles, I think we're going to be a benefit benefactor of that moving forward.
Spencer Levy
Liz, your final thoughts?
Liz Schlesinger
I would agree with Nick that the future of self-storage, particularly over the long term, is going to be positive. I think we are going to face as a country headwinds for at least the next six months. And we have faced headwinds this year with counties that won't allow rates to be increased or evictions to occur. So there will be work to do to until the pandemic is over. But it starts that the fundamentals of the business and that they're very strong, the business works throughout cycles. And I agree with Nick that we should continue to grow as an industry and continue the actual fundamentals of our business. Right now we are at an all-time occupancy high, the only thing that could potentially be a problem is new developers building more product because we just absorbed the last cycle supply.
Spencer Levy
Well, on behalf of The Weekly Take, what a great conversation about self-storage. First, I want to thank Liz Schlesinger, the CEO of Merit Hill Capital, for joining us. Liz, thank you very much.
Liz Schlesinger
Thank you, Spencer. It was fun.
Spencer Levy
And I want to thank my friend and colleague Nick Walker. Nick, thank you very much.
Nick Walker
Thank you, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
For more information on our show, check out CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. We'd also love your feedback. So if you found us on Apple podcast, Spotify or another platform, please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. Until next time I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart, be safe, be well.
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