Ethan Penner- Defining Why Greatness is a Choice (#100)

Bio Ethan Penner is a founder of Mosaic Real Estate and its Managing Partner. He is a recognized pioneer in the fields of real estate and finance with a 30-year career marked by filling voids and responding to unseen or poorly understood opportunities. Most consequently, he is credited with being the primary driver in the creation of the Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities market for which he received broad recognition including being named one of the U.S. Real Estate Industry’s 100 icons of the 20th century. In 2011, Real Estate Forum voted him one of the Real Estate Industry’s 65 living legends in their 65th anniversary issue. In 2008, Penner founded and served as President of CBRE Capital Partners, a real estate debt investment platform which successfully raised and managed over $600 million from institutional and high net worth investors. CBRE Capital Partners exited all of its investments in 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Ethan is also committed to improving the lives of others and enhancing awareness and does so in a number of ways including teaching – he is an adjunct professor at Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University; writing – he maintains a weekly blog and has had many articles published in a variety of publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Wharton Real Estate Review and the Institutional Real Estate Investor; public speaking – he is a frequent featured speaker at industry conferences and universities; philanthropy – in 1996 he founded the Walt Frazier Youth Foundation which provided internships to teenagers at major U.S. corporations in New York City, and has been on numerous boards including that of The League, which had a competition-based, in-school community service model, KIND, which is dedicated to bringing education and opportunity to woman, and The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is dedicated to enhancing awareness to combat hate; and fitness – he is the founder and board member of Fitwall, LLC, a company aimed at revolutionizing the exercise industry through its patented Fitwall product. He recently wrote and published Greatness is a Choice, his book about his life and philosophy with several important messages, which will be discussed in this podcast episode. Ethan is married to Marisol Penner, a former professional athlete and native of Venezuela, and they have five children and reside in Los Angeles. Show Notes The Origins of the CMBS Industry (00:09:00) Ethan Penner discusses how he started the CMBS industry in the early 1990s after seeing the devastation of the S&L crisis and the lack of capital in the banking industry. The rating agencies’ skepticism (00:14:18) Ethan talks about how he convinced the rating agencies to overcome their fear of real estate and rate his investments. Persuading the rating agencies (00:15:16) He shares a conversation he had with the head of a rating agency, where he explains the logic of his real estate investments and convinces them to rate office investments. The early years of success (00:19:16) Discusses how his real estate financing business th...