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.