From Apartments to Sports Development: How Mark H. Built Multiple Real Estate Companies

Mark Hall (00:00) I realized about 10 years ago that I was becoming a

log jam. We had just gotten to a size where you have, you know, several

hundred properties, you’re operating in 20, 25 states.

There’s only so much one guy can do.

Meghan Escobar (01:46) Hello everyone. Welcome back to Real Estate Pros

Podcast. I’m your host, Meghan Escobar, and today I am joined by someone

I’ve been looking forward to chatting with. We have Mark Hall in the

building on the show, who’s been in the industry on so many different

levels right now.

He’s got his hands in a lot of pots. Let’s just say that. He’s wearing a

lot of hats. He’s in the development side of things. He’s in the

investment side of things. And, you know, I’m really happy to have him

on the show. So I think our listeners are really going to be able to

take something away from who you are as a person and how you’ve been

able to diversify and delegate. And so

Tell us diving in, you know, first and foremost, for those of you who

might not be familiar with your world in a short version, what is the

main focus for you these days and what markets are you operating in?

Mark Hall (02:42) Sure. Firstly, thank you for having me, Meghan. I

appreciate the invite. yeah, just for your listeners, a quick little

thumbnail sketch. I’ve been at this for little over 45 years now as an

entrepreneur in the real estate space. I generally have four areas of

focus that you could describe sort of from a big picture standpoint.

Three of those are heavily real estate oriented and one’s just sort of

affiliated with some of our real estate activities. my legacy business

that I’ve had for the longest time frame is a company that I call Hall

Equities Group. And it’s our commercial real estate investment and

development platform. And we are privately held. We have no

institutional capital associated with our project, no w with our with

our shareholders, no institutional investors. It’s a handful of families

that have been with me since I started in the mid-1980s here in Northern

California and we’ve just sort of grown together over the decades. I act

as the managing shareholder for everything that we do.

And it’s a very small, closely held group. In Hall Equities Group over

the years, we have had experience in just about every asset class of

income property that you could think of from a development, ownership,

and operational standpoint. I think over the course of the years, we’ve

probably had three to four thousand apartments, millions of square feet

of industrial office.

for a good 15-18 years, I spent probably 30 to 40 percent of my time

developing shopping center projects. We’ve got self-storage, life

science laboratories. we’ve done subdivision projects, master plan

communities, just a variety of a lot of product type. Our second

platform is a company that we call ZMC Hotels. I developed my first

hotel in 2005.

I had an opportunity in 2014 to acquire a family owned hotel company out

of Duluth, Minnesota. At the time that I bought this family owned

business, we had five hotels in our portfolio totaling, I don’t know,

somewhere around 1300, 1400 keys. And when we bought the Duluth – Based ZMC hotels.

They were a family business that was in the third

generation, and they had 29 hotels in 11 different states and a

management platform. And we acquired the whole shooting match. And today

we have just over 50 hotels across the United States, mostly affiliated

with Marriott and Hilton as a franchise or.

And a variety of other brands, including Wyndham, Choice, and Hyatt. Our

third area of activity is around youth sports. we as I was developing

shopping centers a number of years back, I started to get concerned

about the online distribution model, taking the brick and mortar

traditional retailers to the woodshed from a competitive standpoint and

we were aware that we were gonna see a lot of second gen, dark, large

format retail space in this country. And we started to focus on how we

can backfill some of these large regional centers. What came out of that

effort was a concept that we call a sports mall, which is a a shopping

center of youth sports training businesses. I emphasize training as

opposed to gameplay.

There’s a lot of sports plexes across the country, sports facilities,

and they primarily focus on gameplay. Well, gameplay takes a lot of real

estate, and you have not a whole lot of people running around on courts

and fields for the amount of real estate that it takes. Whereas

training, you know, you can you can put 10 times as many kids into an

8,000 square foot baseball training facility.

than you can on a on a one and a half acre baseball diamond. So and that

just translates into better economics. So that’s a business that we are

building right now. We’re scaling sports malls across the United

States in different markets. And that’s a business that we’re excited

about that has a lot of promise to it. Our fourth platform is a little

business that I call COPA Innovation Laboratories. And it was tied

Together with our pioneering effort in sports malls, in that we felt

that if we owned and operated a key sports tenant, we could sort of seed

every sports mall with the type of a tenant that would set the example

for our other tenants and sort of lift the operating profile, lift the

energy in our sports malls by putting a lot of emphasis into a really

groundbreaking

sports training business. And we selected the sport of soccer to do

that. And we took a lot of inspiration from the Michael Lewis book

Moneyball that that was a true story that characterized the Oakland A’s

and their general manager Billy Bean and a big Hollywood movie

starring Brad Pitt in that movie came out and we took the same

concept of data analytics

And applied it to the sport of soccer and focused on creating a training

center around soccer. Now that has morphed into investments in numerous

other sports right now and developing our own sports technology

business, our own hardware, our own software, and we’re embedding that

in our sports malls. We’re also using our hospitality experience, our

our hotels and landing them in our sports malls.

as well as our experience in retail shopping centers, particularly

grocery anchored centers, and in really sort of creating whole new

little economic ecosystems around human performance. And so we’re

spending a lot of time there. So that in in a nutshell is our four areas

of activity.

Meghan Escobar (11:01) I love it. And you know, what caught my attention

about you, Mark, was how you’ve been able to insert fun into your world,

you know, managing multiple markets, managing multiple projects, keeping

the margins strong. Definitely not something easy to do. so what do you

think for you has been the key to keeping

your machine running smoothly, being pulled in all these different

directions, all these different projects. And I say fun because when

I first asked you, you know, what are you what do you do? The first

sentence you said was, I try to have fun in everything that I do.

Mark Hall (11:45) That’s correct. That’s accurate. Well, you

know, sort of from a big picture standpoint, I think in life you can

kind of characterize business, maybe this is maybe a little overly

simplistic, but as sort of two polar opposites at one end you can

become very specialized at something and scale the heck out of it and

just become an incredible expert, think McDonald’s or Starbuck, or you know,

something where you’re really focused, you scale, you take over the

world. And then the other end of that spectrum at the extreme is that

well, you’re not an expert at anything, you’re sort of a jack of

all trades and you’re involved in a lot of different things.

And I would say that this is just very much a reflection of my own

personality, that from a very young age in life I was always interested

in learning. And that’s where I have fun. I never took a job or really

you know, had money as the primary driver between b you know around my

decision making.

It was really, am I learning? Am I on a steep growth curve? And because

that’s where I have fun. I like to solve puzzles, I like to grow, I

like to learn, and that’s been my story for the last 45 years of my

professional career. So as a result of that, today we have a very

diverse portfolio.

A lot of different product type that we’re involved in, a lot of

different experiences. And I would say that you know, the way the

brain works, you = get your creativity and your wisdom from what’s in

your long-term memory banks that you remember. And you can salt

your memory banks with a lot of experiences in life.

And those that we most remember are the bumps in the road, the failure.

So we remember those a lot more than we remember our wins. And you

get a lot more bumps in the road when you’re on a constant learning

curve than you do when you’re in a very focused you know groove. So I

would say that a big part

Of having fun is exercising our level of creativity that comes from

connecting the dots on all the various different product types that

we’ve had experience in, which gives us a leg up sometimes in the

marketplace with mixed use developments or looking at larger scale

projects from you know a half a dozen different ways where perhaps most

of our competitors maybe only see it one way or

Two weeks.

Meghan Escobar (15:45) Yeah. Yeah, great perspective. And every operator

I know, entrepreneur I’ve had the opportunity to chat with, you know,

has a moment where things got real. Maybe a time they had to pivot

really fast. Would you mind Mark sharing one of those one of those

moments for you?

anybody who’s ever started a business, been in business, entrepreneur,

operator, owner, right, they all have a moment where things just got

real for them. You know, maybe it’s a deal that went sideways or a time

where you had to pivot really fast. just a challenge or an experience

that you had to overcome. You don’t know if anything comes to top of

mind that you could give our listeners a moment.

Mark Hall (16:33) Okay, well that’s pretty personal. For me at least. I

sure I’ll unveil a little vulnerability. You know, for me as an

entrepreneur in my life, I wasn’t thinking about this early on, but

I had what I would call a very codependent relationship with most of my

team members. By that I mean my job was

Capital allocation, risk management, decisions on what we were buying,

what we were building, and why. And everybody that worked for me was

essentially an extension of that machine. And I would provide people

with a little checklist every week. Here’s what you need to get

done, focus on this. And we would get together regularly and

review that. And over time you realize that.

That influences the type of people that you attract. And those people

tend to be more risk-averse. And they tend to measure their success by

whether or not the boss is happy, as opposed to whether or not the

project is successful or the investment is successful. So in a way it

creates a lack of resilience in your in your organization.

and it’s kind of a it’s a weakness. And when you get to a certain size

and scale, you’ve got all of those critical decisions going through a

single guy, me in this case, which I became.

I realized about 10 years ago that I was becoming a log jam. We had just

gotten to a size where you have, you know, several hundred properties,

you’re operating in 20, 25 states.

There’s only so much one guy can do.

And you end up realizing that the pace of the organization is being

slowed down by your own ability to process and move and hustle. And so

this was happening. at first I didn’t understand what was going on, but

I noticed that, well, in a couple of deals, the wheels were starting to

fall off. And we were having some struggles, cost overruns.

on development projects, delays on entitlements, screw ups from a

political standpoint. And all of this for me kind of came to a head in

the twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen timeframe. And then the pandemic

hit. And suddenly we found we had to close fifteen of our hotels and I

had to furlough

nearly a thousand employees all at once. And our sports malls were

shuttered. Our shopping centers were shuttered. and I I suddenly found

myself, you know, hanging on by my fingernails. Right. And I ended up

finding a guy to help, a personal coach, frankly. Yeah. And I in the

middle of the pandemic took five months off and rented a little cabin.

in the rainforest on an island up in Puget Fa Sound. And my personal

coach, and I’m not gonna name a name, but he’s Yeah, he’s capable.

And he helped me realize that this was something about codependency

and I needed to start focusing on co collaboration and make a shift. And

and I did that. And that doesn’t happen overnight.

That transition is still happening, but shifting into more of a co

collaboration approach to your team is was important for me to take the

next step forward and continue to then move into a new growth cycle,

which is where we’re at now.

Meghan Escobar (20:40) Right. And thank you, Mark, for, getting a little

vulnerable and sharing that. I know this is typically not an easy thing

for people to share, you know, going through their challenges. But it’s

also the stuff that people don’t talk about enough. And honestly, what

separates the folks who are just dabbling in investments and development

versus those who are in in it who are actually in the game long term,

you know. So I think it’s important to share those experiences.