Aaron Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, we are really excited to be joined by Jonathan Zamir who’s the founder and managing partner of Keystone Equities, which is the leading real estate investment firm and operates both as a private equity and private credit platform. It focuses on acquiring, redeveloping, and repositioning commercial and residential properties in key markets across the US while also originating and managing debt investments.

Under Jon’s leadership, the firm has grown a diverse portfolio emphasizing value creation through strategic investment, hands-on management, and disciplined financing. With over 20 years of experience, Jon has really seen it all, done it all, and prior to founding Keystone, he also worked at Infinity Real Estate, a prominent real estate private equity firm, and graduated magna cum laude from NYU Stern and also received a graduate certificate in real estate from NYU School of Continuing Professional Studies.

In this conversation with Jon, we’re really going to learn about the critical aspects of relationship building in commercial real estate, how to attract and manage institutional capital, how to ride through the ebbs and flows of real estate cycles, and you’ll learn a little bit about The School Of Hard Knocks that he’s gone through and also how to show up as your true self and how that authenticity that you bring to your relationships really builds a lot of trust and rapport and actually creates a ton of value. So here we go with the interview. I hope you enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you.

Jon, really excited you're here. Obviously, I have known you for quite a while, although we don't talk as regularly as I would love to, but you're making the time today, which I'm very appreciative of. I think our listeners will also really appreciate hearing your story, which is remarkable.

If you wouldn't mind, we can maybe go in the Wayback machine a little bit and talk about where you were raised, where you grew up, and maybe some of the lessons learned from those early years, and then we can get into your college and beyond.

Jonathan Zamir: First of all, thanks for having me. Excited to be here, and I blame you for not being in touch as often, just because I had to. Would love to see each other more often, and I'm glad to see that you've continued to be busy as well.

I was born and raised in New York City. I'm fortunate to know I live in Great Neck, Long Island. I'm blessed with three children and a wonderful wife. That for me is everything. Business comes after that. The cool thing about having grown up in Manhattan is that I made it a point when I was younger to live in probably every single part of Manhattan, except for the Upper West Side.

Aaron Strauss: Good for you.

Jonathan Zamir: It was great. You really saw how 20 blocks make a huge difference in terms of your surroundings. That was awesome. I went to NYU Stern for school. Prior to that, I went to [inaudible] and then I got my graduate certificate at NYU as well in real estate. I stuck in New York through and through. I did live in Miami during COVID which was unexpected and great and then I came back and subsequently moved to Long Island with the kids.

Aaron Strauss: Fantastic and maybe we'll talk about some of the earlier starts. I mean you were at Moinian, you were at Infinity. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of those experiences, and how you got your start in the industry after college.

Jonathan Zamir: My first job, I would say, particularly in real estate, was when I think I was 16 or 17 years old. I worked for a brokerage firm, and back then before you had the internet—and now you start to age yourself—but before the internet was quite big, they had a big blue book. I don't know if you remember that, but the giant blue book. My first job was when someone came to my desk and threw this giant book and just opened the random page and pointed and said, "Start calling." I'd sit there, literally just day in, day out, calling every single phone number asking someone if they wanted to sell their property.

It was hell. I did not enjoy going to the office every day, but in hindsight, it was an awesome learning experience because it toughened me up. I'm a sensitive guy in general and it was really difficult. You're calling all these numbers and then, unfortunately, you'll call someone and ask if they want to sell their property and you have an elderly woman who's like, “My husband passed away two years ago, screw you and never call me again.”

You feel horrible. The truth is you just don't feel like a good person. That wasn't your intent, but you do a thousand of these calls and then there's that one phone call where they're like, "Actually, you know what, I might want to sell." I still remember I'm like, "Wait, what?" I was so excited.

I was about to kill it myself, "Wait, what are you saying?" I ran over to the broker and I was like, "Oh my God, I have someone who’s interested." There was a lot to be learned. It was tough, man. I remember, this is back when people were converting office buildings to multifamily all the way downtown. One of these days, they sent me down there.

I was wearing a suit and wearing a light blue button-down shirt. At this point, the landlord that was converting it turned off any AC. It was the heat of the summer. I'm walking up flights of stairs, knocking on every single door of office tenants with a pamphlet asking if they want to look and find new office space.

You knock on a door and a guy slams a door on your face. Listen, it was tough, but there's a real benefit in having the gall to really ask someone to go that one step further. You realize it's the people that have the confidence and I would say that the lack of fear, to put it nicely, to do the extra step.

It's probably the best experience in my life because of that one extra step. I actually attribute a lot of it to the lessons I learned in that first job. Which it somewhat desensitized me, but it also taught me that the first snow is just the beginning. You gotta keep pushing through it until that yes comes through.

That's what's guided me. That was just a summer, by the way. That was a whole story. After that, I was fortunate, a family friend, Joe Moinian, an amazing developer, back then he had about 40 buildings in New York City and did not have a lot of infrastructure, hired myself and three of my cousins. We got paid like $ 8.50 an hour. But the truth was we got paid for an education. It was such an incredible experience because you're 17 or 18 years old, and I know this because when I went to NYU Stern, I would cram my classes two days a week, and I worked for Joe three days a week.

You literally sit at the head of the table, young guy, don't know much, but you have a property manager, an asset manager, an expediter, a broker that are all reporting to you because you now run this portfolio of properties, and they're teaching you, you're like a sponge just learning everything, and you're writing checks, you're managing properties.

I like to think that Joe was kind enough to teach me a lot of street smarts and subsequent to that, I led acquisitions at a firm called Infinity Real Estate, where I felt like I got a lot of the book smarts. I went to NYU and I did very well in school, but to be honest with you, it was very difficult for me to take anything I've learned from school and apply it in the real world.

It wasn't until I was working at Infinity, alongside peers who are incredibly intelligent, they really taught me how to price risk, how to underwrite a deal, how to bring investors together, and how to execute. It was taking the street smarts and the book smarts and then going from there.

Aaron Strauss: Amazing. In Infinity, I've met the principles behind that firm. Fantastic. Also, very dynamic young guys like yourself.

Jonathan Zamir: Awesome experience.

Aaron Strauss: Exactly. The experience as a young guy to run with all-star teammates influences you. That experience, just dialing and hustling on the streets of the city, that's pretty intense. Then from there, I guess at that point, is when you decided to become independent. That's when Keystone was formed, or was there another blip there I'm not remembering? But at some point, you were jumping to the principal side directly.

Jonathan Zamir: At Infinity, I learned a ton. It came to a point where I felt like I had plateaued a little bit. I really wanted to see if I could cut it on my own. Had I known what I know now, would have I done what I did? I don't think so. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. But it was definitely scary.

I went out on my own and the idea was, “Oh, I'm going to go buy real estate.” It's like, “All right, that sounds like a great idea.” Especially when you're a young guy and you have all these people in your community who became over-successful. But I now have younger guys come up to grab a cup of coffee and talk.

They want to get into the business and go out on their own. While I encourage them, the one thing I always tell them to do is take a step back and first really try to understand the numbers because it's really easy to just fall in love with an image or just not think through the finer details like, “I'm going to buy real estate.”

I'll be like, “Great. You're going to buy real estate. Talk me through it.” They will start talking. I'm like, “Okay. Do you buy buildings?” “Yeah, absolutely.” “Five million dollar deal?” They say, “Yeah, that's fine.” “Okay, fine.” “Is that easy to do?” “No. No, it's not easy.” Okay, fine.”

Let's say you buy two deals for $10 million, awesome. You make a 1% or 2% acquisition fee and talk to me about the numbers. As I start going through this exercise with them, and they start realizing what those numbers look like, and then I'm like, “Okay, you bought the asset, your investors want you to put money in the asset, where's that money coming from? Now where are you going to have money to live off of? You're going to make asset management fees on $10 million, what's that going to get you?”

If you're now hoping to bank on that, the reality is if you're now managing those assets, you're not going to have time to find the next deal. Any asset manager fees or those fees are going to go to hire somebody if you want to grow and scale your business.

Your hope is you're going to make money on the back end and to promote. I can tell you right now having been through a number of cycles before, you could do everything right and the market could just crap out on you. It's hard. It's tough out there. Unless you have a viable business plan where you can really point to, "This is how I'm going to make it work and sustain myself," it's challenging.

I got lucky, I hustled my way day in, and day out. I printed a whole list of names and numbers and I just started pounding the phones, day in and day out trying to find deals. I have a couple of really funny stories and cool stories, but incremental steps that really shifted my business in a substantial way.

Aaron Strauss: One thing that's unique about you, and I've met a lot of successful real estate entrepreneurs, it's a very small segment, and we've talked about this not for a long time, but you seem to have a great feel for attracting institutional capital in a way that a lot of other of your peers do not. I remember, as a, I mean you’re a relatively young guy now, but even going back a decade, institutions would be comfortable with you. They're very risk-averse.

You have this polish, this gravitas, this ability to attract capital, and I think numbers are what they are, but you also need to be of the personality and have the force of will and the dynamic nature that people trust you at that level. Maybe you could talk about that. Some people may be listening to this podcast they're coming up with.

Maybe they're buying smaller buildings. They're trying to gravitate toward institutional capital and institutional investors. Maybe you could talk about that transition as well. That I think could be very valuable for people to hear about.

Jonathan Zamir: The industry's really shifted. If you go to someone like a Jon Mechanic and ask him, “Where was the industry 25 years ago? How much of it was institutional? How much of it was private syndicates?” I've actually done this exercise, it's like 80% was private syndicates.

The institutions just really weren't around as much. Nowadays, 80-plus percent of deals are being done by institutions in terms of dollar volume. The market has evolved, and the market has changed. It's really hard to compete when you're not one of the bigger guys playing with one of the bigger guys, but they are a lot more sophisticated and you're right, they are risk-averse.

What I was fortunate enough to do was find opportunities that I managed to de-risk early. The first institutional size deal was a deal that everyone was just looking at differently than I was. It was a building on the corner of Bowery and Canal Street, 77 Bowery. At the time, it was the East West Bank building. East West Bank was in the building on the ground floor.

They had a retail branch there, and they were moving their offices from that building up to Madison Avenue. They wanted $20 million. That was their number. People wanted to give them $15 million, $17 million. It was a high basis per square foot of the office. What was unique was I looked at the deal differently.

I'm like, “You know what, I can pay them $20 million if in return they're going to give me a brand release for $650,000 triple net on the ground floor.” Because in my head, I said, “You know what, what the market isn't realizing is at the time that was worth the five cap,” let's say. That's $13 million. I could make $20 million for the building, but if I bifurcate, then sell the retail for $13 million, or even $12 million, or even $11 million, my basis on the office is a fraction of the way anybody's looking at the deal.

They're looking at the whole, and I'm saying that some of the pieces are greater than the whole. By the time I tied that deal up, I had at least now executed, mitigated a lot of the risk. When I went out and reached out to some of the institutional groups, they felt a lot more comfortable in terms of the risk profile of the deal.

That's not to say there was still a lot of work that had to be done to make sure that we executed properly and to make sure that that we did the right work and eventually when I did a deal with Apollo Global Management, another deal subsequent to that, it was funny because I was on my own at the time and we were buying a building for $41 million to 202 Canal Street.

This is actually a good lesson that I learned. I did write to the bank when we bought that deal. There were opportunities to re-trade. I didn't want to do it. I said, "Look, I'm going to honor my word and do what I committed to doing with you." What ended up happening was essentially the person that ran the bank, we went to a closing lunch a couple of months afterward.

I'm like, “You know, there's this building at 202 Canal Street that Bank of East Asia's selling, and I wish I knew someone at the bank because they're there, but they're not there. There's no lease,” and she's like, "Oh, I know them extremely well. I'm happy to make an intro."

This was a Thursday. It was a Thursday. I remember this and she sends an email and shows me that I get a response back saying, "Guess we're very interested in meeting you." Like, "Okay, I'll be in your office tomorrow." I show up at their office. I scheduled the meeting for like 30 minutes.

I ended up staying with them for an hour and a half. In an hour and a half, I negotiated a $1.8 million triple net lease on the ground floor of that office building. I negotiated an office lease with a termination option. I negotiated financing on the acquisition and they agreed to make me, essentially, their stocking horse to know that they could stay in the building.

Without them, I was at $32 million bucks. With them, I was at $41 million on this office building. Everybody and their mother looked at me and said, “You're out of your mind. You're paying $1,000 a foot for a 93% vacant office building.” That was scary by the way. I was a young guy and really smart people were telling me I was an idiot.

But what was super exciting was that they didn't know that I had this lease for $1.8 million triple net signed by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to name this their US flagship. Subsequent to closing that deal, we ended up flipping out the retail for $36 million.

But we were in for the upper floors for $5 million. But the point here is more, we mitigated the risk. Apollo was my partner, they came to me, and now I'm coming full circle to your question.

Aaron Strauss: Sure.

Jonathan Zamir: Apollo was like, “Listen, we're not doing this deal with you if you can't do this all by yourself.” I was working from like, no joke, 5:00 AM to 11:00 PM consistently because I was negotiating a retail lease and office lease, that financing, equity financing. It was just like it was too much.

I looked at them and I said, “Well, you guys are the best at hiring in the world. I'm only going to hire if you help me find the right person.” We went through this process where they helped me find this incredible individual who became a peer and colleague of mine. That was instrumental in our success.

Again, these are stepping stones, but look, money finds deals. If there's a deal to be had, it's all about the risk profile. If they think the risk is warranted and at the time, and still today, I'm a risk. It's all a function of how high of a risk am I for that institution.

If they feel that I'm capable, then I mitigate that risk. But if they feel like the deal itself is really creative and really attractive and that the risk of some of them might be a little younger or less experienced, is made up for from the return profile, those two do a deal with you. That shouldn't hold anybody back from reaching out and trying to do a deal.

I will say that I was really, really lucky because I worked with Ackman-Ziff at the time which helped create a market for me on the equity. We were negotiating and we had term sheets from a number of different equity groups before we went with Apollo.

Having and being able to lean on someone like that, who had a lot of experience and could guide us and watch our back was really instrumental. It wasn't as much as I said, I was working from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, I was surrounded by amazing attorneys and amazing colleagues on that end.

Aaron Strauss: I want to get to the present day, but before that, and we hit on it a little bit, and you've had some home runs and you've worked really hard, you've done well for yourself, maybe we could talk a little bit about some hardships too, not to belabor difficult times, but you've gone through cycles and you could be the best operator and depending what's happening with rates and markets, et cetera, there's always setbacks, anything you feel comfortable sharing that maybe you worked like crazy on a deal that fell through the last minute or something didn't map out?

Jonathan Zamir: I'll start off by saying that the industry is really tough. Anybody that tells you there’s no problems is full of it. Every single person I know who was active in real estate over the last five years is hurting in one way or the other. It's funny, you live in an Instagram age where everything looks rosy and peachy and it's a bunch of BS. Nothing is easy. I grew up thinking it was going to be a lot easier to be successful. I mean, honestly.

Aaron Strauss: No, I appreciate that. That's all I can ask for.

Jonathan Zamir: You see these success stories and you think, “Oh, I'm going to do that,” and then you realize it's really competitive and there are a lot of smart people out there. It's also a global landscape. 25 years ago when people were investing, it was just the local players. There was no internet. There was no access to information.

We're like Chinese capital or European capital or whatever it is, they really couldn't access the market itself. That's changed really dramatically. My point to you is I've definitely had hardships. I had one deal specifically that was the only deal in my life that I called my investors and said, “Take back your money. Don’t do this deal.” Money was in the bank.

Aaron Strauss: Wow.

Jonathan Zamir: Two of my investors called me up and said, "Why?" I said, “Because this isn't the deal that I committed to with you. It's changed. The market's changed. I just don't like the profile of this." Two of them were still adamant about doing the deal. I gave back capital to everybody else.

We did the deal and we lost money. It felt horrible because I'm not in the business of losing money. Then of course, they're like, “Why'd we lose money?” I'm like, “I told you, take it back, you're right.”

Aaron Strauss: I told you, yeah.

Jonathan Zamir: But it still feels horrible. It's tough, man. It's not like when you go through cycles, I have friends who just did everything right in terms of execution. You bought a multifamily asset and you were working the stabilized tendency and marking the market kept expenses low.

Then the laws changed. Nobody wants to buy your property anymore. The value of that property has gone down exponentially. Their equity has gotten blown out. Their investors have lost their money and they've lost their money and all the work that they've been doing for four or five years, I'll tell you about guys who work in large funds if they're crossed in those funds, all those years of building up that embedded equity to get wiped when a market crash happens, which has unfortunately been happening a little bit more often recently, it's tougher and tougher.

Yeah, the hardships are there. I tell my guys that a deal has to die at least once if not three or four times. I'm not even kidding, in order to get done these days. It's not until the money's literally in the bank account. Like, literally. I had a deal that was a large transaction, a million dollars of diligence plus into the deal.

Literally settlement statements were executed. Everything is done, done, done. Then there was an email from an attorney being like, “Are we ready to release escrow? Then there was this dreaded phone call that was like, “The deal’s collapsing.” I'm like, “How?” This is like months of work.

Aaron Strauss: Oh, my gosh.

Jonathan Zamir: By the way, the deal collapsed but we didn't give up, we worked our butts off the next few days tirelessly and it ended up getting done in a different form, not quite the way initially had been hoped but it got done.

My point there is nothing’s easy and you’ll see all these posts on Traded or whatever, talking about sold, did this deal, did that deal. I’m like, “That’s great but there’s a lot behind the scenes that people don’t see.” That’s the tough part. You gotta be tough. I can tell you another story. I don't want to get into too much detail because I want to respect the group I dealt with but the other thing to realize is institutions, you're working with people that tend to have different incentives than you as an individual so when someone leads an institution, if they mess up, their job’s on the line.

It's not their money, but if I mess up, it's my money on the line. There's a big delta there. I've seen some pretty bad stuff from certain institutional partners where you'd hope that they would have acted a little differently and they didn't more because they're concerned about, and I get it. I'm a big boy, I get it. But money does weird things. People act differently.

I went over to a partner's office once to tell them that I was not going to go forward with them on a deal because I had offers from someone else and my partner and I wanted to go forward with that other deal. The response I got, and by the way, I went there out of respect to do it in person and to say I’m not doing deals together. The response I got was, "You're an ant. I'm going to crush you. I'm going to sue you. If you think this is how you do business, it's not."

I'm like, "What are you talking about? I came here to actually do the right thing." The response was, "Get the heck out of my office," to put it nicely. I literally, I'm not joking, I got thrown out of an office. I was confused. The guy just looked at me and said, “Go screw yourself and find your way out of my office.” I'm sitting in this empty office where I'm like, “What just happened? Am I supposed to actually leave this office?”

There was this younger guy that worked for the guy that just stared at me blankly like, “What just happened?” I'm like, “What just happened?” I walked out, but it was so short-sighted because I'll never do another deal with that person. By the way, they might be fine with that and that's okay. But Dad always told me like, “You could do 99 things right and one thing wrong and you will always be remembered for that one thing.”

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent.

Jonathan Zamir: My reputation is everything to me. I really have worked hard to try to make sure we do right by people. Honestly, it's paid back tenfold. The people you do right by will always want to do business with you. Everybody says things like this, but I've found it in practice for it to be true. I'm fortunate and humbled to be able to work with some great people and to build on the success that we've had.

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent, really well said, Jon. Of course, institutions will be kept nameless for everyone's protection. Maybe we could fast forward to today. I know you just took out this very large portfolio at Cross River. Everyone's talking about buying loan portfolios. Not many people are actually consummating these transactions.

I mean, I'm sure there are more deals that are written up about, but to extend you feel comfortable sharing or you can share, maybe you can share a little bit about that as a strategy, as an opportunity. Plans, do you want to do more of the debt purchases or do you think it's more prime for equity potentially at this point?

Jonathan Zamir: So I have to be mindful of what I can and cannot say, what I will tell you is I would love to do more of those kinds of deals. Cross River has been a great partner. I think it's really challenging. People try to buy equity deals and they're like, “There's 50 bidders on equity.” You try to do any, like NPL deal right now, like Nonperforming Loan, like short sale or anything, there's 50 bidders on it. That's where the market is because everything's upside down.

Anybody saying, "Oh, I'm buying defaulted notes," it's not an easy thing, it's still really competitive. I think that transaction specifically was a bit unique in the sense that I think we structured, and this is something that I've always tried to commit myself to, is structuring deals in a win-win scenario where the bank benefits and we benefit at the same time. But the regulatory landscape is shifting where banks are playing right now.

Banks are almost getting penalized for lending in real estate, they're required to just hold so much more on their balance sheet if it's a commercial real estate loan versus it being a C&I loan or credit facility. What that does is it's essentially empowered groups like us to become lenders and then work with banks. That's not easy to do.

We're fortunate to have now built a nice pool of whether it's high-net-worth investors or institutional groups that invest with us. The bank had to be really mindful to do things quietly because the reputation is everything in an industry. But we were able to effectuate that. I mean, that deal was really exciting. We just had to do it really quietly out of respect for all the players and the deal itself.

I almost look at that almost more as a financial instrument than I do a real estate transaction. The underlying collateral is real estate, yes. But we feel those are good loans. We hope they continue to perform. We're trying to build our book of business. What we hadn't done, when I say we, Keystone Equity, our business historically has always been equity. It wasn't until about a year ago, we started getting fairly active on the lending side, both originating and acquiring debt.

In the last 11 months, we've deployed over $400 million. I will say it's still something I'm learning every day. I try to surround myself with people much smarter than myself to make sure that we're protecting and filling the voids. There's a lot of knowledge gaps in every industry and everywhere, I always try to surround myself with really smart people.

But the market's in this weird place right now where there's a dearth of capital playing in the market. There's a lot of capital on the sides right now. It's not like there's a lack of capital out there. But what we found is that you could make what were historically equity like returns, like a mid-team, mid-to-high-team type of return, putting out credit, with credit like risk, not having to take equity risk.

For us, we're like, that's a good trade. That's arb in my view. But what it's also done is created this situation where anytime I'm presented with an equity deal, I have to stop and ask myself, “Is it worth the risk?” It's inherently pushed the bar for equity deals higher, where the only equity deals will have to be really, really opportunistic.

But what's super exciting about what we're doing now is we're backed by pretty significant capital and I mean that humbly. I now have the ability to pursue transactions in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and being able to say I could do it fairly quickly. I can execute a very large transaction very quickly if warranted.

Those deals are very few and far between but what it does is it gives sellers and lenders and banks and whomever, it gives them a lot more confidence in transacting with us.

Aaron Strauss: Well said.

Jonathan Zamir: Between that and reputation, which is everything, because it's one degree of separation. Someone's just going to call someone that knows me, “Is Jon a good guy?” If that reference comes back negative, deal’s dead. The first thing I'll do when I meet somebody is they go ask about us.

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent. It's just that theme, maybe it's a good place to wrap here. It goes all the way back from the beginning. You take your lumps, work hard, get your butt kicked a little bit along the way, but don't sacrifice your broader reputation for short-term gains because it all comes back later on.

Jonathan Zamir: It does.

Aaron Strauss: The way stocks compounded the market, relationships compounded the market, if you do things the right way for a long enough time, you'll have those big opportunities like you've had and you will continue to have. I guess we'll wrap it here, Jon, I mean, this has been a great conversation. I'm super thankful for your sharing the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Jonathan Zamir: Of course.

Aaron Strauss: I'm really looking forward to watching you continue to take down some nice deals too.

Jonathan Zamir: Can I say one more thing?

Aaron Strauss: Please, of course.

Jonathan Zamir: Because it's something that I learned from a business coach of mine. I grew up feeling like I had to show up to meetings like the man, like this image that people had, like everything is peachy and rosy and what I've come to realize is people connect with vulnerability, being able to show your true side and showing a lot of the hardships that you're going through, that's the stuff that people really connect with and that's what they're going to really know. They're going to feel good knowing that they're not the only ones because they're not, everybody has problems.

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent.

Jonathan Zamir: I'm still trying to be really mindful because listen, there's an insecurity that everybody has. When I meet with people, I inherently feel like I have to put that bravado on. Then I remind myself, “It's all BS.” If I really want people to understand who I am, be who I am, and if they connect with me, great.

If they don't, that's fine also. But at least I know that I was true to myself. It sounds like a cliche, but I'm just saying genuinely, I have found when I open up about some of the difficult things I've gone through and how everything isn’t rosy, the bonds I've built and the relationships I've built are exponentially stronger.

Aaron Strauss: Oh, yeah. That is deep. That's a deep truth. One thing about it, I've known you for a long time, you have extreme authenticity. I'll put it that way.

Jonathan Zamir: I appreciate it.

Aaron Strauss: People, they know who you are. They see who you are. You show up the way you are, you're not trying to be somebody else you're not, and I think that's resonated for you as your calling card frankly in the years you've built your business.

Jonathan Zamir: I appreciate that. It means a lot.

Aaron Strauss: You'll continue to leverage that reputation which you've worked really really hard to build over the years. I've seen you. I know you've worked really, really, really hard so hopefully you'll continue to show up every day for your investors, for your family, for yourself, the market needs guys like you to move it around. So I guess we'll conclude here, Jon. But again, I want to thank you for really sharing, for being the person you are, it's been a lot of fun. I'm really glad we can have this conversation and share it with our listeners too.

Jonathan Zamir: I appreciate it. You appreciate the time and thank you for all the great stuff you've been doing as well.

Aaron Strauss: Thank you for joining The Dealmakers' Edge. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Please, give us a five-star rating so more people can follow the conversation.