Should Qualified Opportunity Funds best practices include third-party administration? And what are some Opportunity Zone trends being noticed by the industry’s largest service provider?

Reid Thomas is executive vice president and general manager of NES Financial — a Silicon Valley-based fintech company that provides a purpose-built administration solution for Qualified Opportunity Funds.

Click the play button below to listen to my conversation with Reid.

Episode Highlights

• How experience with Section 1031 exchanges and the EB-5 program uniquely positioned NES Financial to service the Opportunity Zones industry.
• The importance of third-party administration for private equity funds, and especially highly specialized Qualified Opportunity Funds (QOFs).
• The importance of creating an audit trail along the process of an OZ investment, at the GP level, LP level, and project level.
• Why collecting social impact data to measure the effectiveness of the program is so crucial.
• QOF trends that NES Financial has seen, including fund size, geography, and asset class breakdown.
• Why investors should care about a QOF’s commitment to best practices and transparency.

Featured on This Episode

• Reid Thomas on LinkedIn
• NES Financial
• Internal Revenue Code Section 1031
• EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program

Industry Spotlight: NES Financial

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, NES Financial provides software-based solutions to complex investment products. They specialize in 1031 exchanges, EB-5 administration, private equity funds, and Opportunity Zones. As of June 2019, NES Financial is servicing 32 Qualified Opportunity Funds, making them the largest provider of services in the OZ sector.

Learn more about NES Financial

• Visit NESFinancial.com to learn more and schedule a demo
• NES Financial’s Opportunity Zones Webinars

About the Opportunity Zones Podcast

Hosted by OpportunityDb.com founder Jimmy Atkinson, the Opportunity Zones Podcast features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in opportunity zones.

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Show Transcript

Jimmy: Welcome to the “Opportunity Zones Podcast.” I’m your host, Jimmy Atkinson. And today we have Reid Thomas on the show. Reid is executive vice president and general manager at NES Financial, a Silicon Valley-based FinTech company that offers fund administration services to the Opportunity Zones industry. Reid joins us today from his office in San Jose, California. Reid, thank you for coming on the show today, and welcome.

Reid: Thanks, Jimmy. It’s great to be here.

Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. It’s good to be chatting with you. I know we’ve met a couple times at a couple of different Opportunity Zones Expo events at the salt conference out in Las Vegas a couple months back, so it’s good to get you on the podcast finally.

Reid: Kind of on the tour together, aren’t we?

Jimmy: Yeah, we’re kind of on the same circuit, I suppose. So what does NES Financial software do exactly in the Opportunity Zone space? I mentioned that it offers fund administration services in the intro, but what does that mean exactly? And what exactly does the software do?

Reid: Well, what we really try to do is help at the highest level, help folks in the Opportunity Zone space, who are creating funds ultimately, be successful in delivering the good that they’re intending to do. So the software is purpose-built to really focus on the unique characteristics of Opportunity Zones. We think it’s the only purpose-built solution in the marketplace that does this. And it provides benefits to all the stakeholders involved in the transaction, be it the fund manager, the investor, even the economic development corporations that might be involved.

Jimmy: Take us into NES Financial’s background. You guys are new to the Opportunity Zone space as everybody is because it’s a new program, but I know that the firm dates back far before Opportunity Zone. So where did you guys first gain a foothold, and maybe you can talk about what separates NES Financial from other fund administrators?

Reid: Sure. The company was founded in 2005 on this idea that there are from time-to-time, programs that are created that are intended to do good. But for a number of different reasons, they fail in their end game. Sometimes it’s because the investment programs come along with way too much complexity, reporting requirements and overhead that just becomes too burdensome for the folks in the ecosystem to operate successfully. On the other extreme, you have incentive or investment programs get created with a significant lack of those kinds of reporting and compliance controls. And as a result of that, often fraud and abuse might enter the space which again, would lead to the intended good not being able to be achieved.

So we’re headquartered in Silicon Valley, and we saw this as an opportunity to create software that would help provide the necessary security transparency and compliance to these types of transactions. So we developed a software platform that we can quickly configure to the nuances of these investment programs. So they’re purpose-built, as you might say, and therefore, they’re much more able to successfully deal with the complexities of the program and also put the right controls and operating procedures in place to help protect all the stakeholders.

So the first sector we focused on was something called 1031 exchanges, which your audience probably is very familiar with. It’s largely a real estate program where real estate investors can defer capital gains by redeploying any gain into a like-kind exchange and it’s called section 1031 of the IRS code. And at the time we got into the space, there were very little regulations. I mean, a qualified intermediary is kind of a joke as a term because you really don’t have to be qualified to do anything. But qualified intermediaries in the space at the time were taking investors’ funds, aggregating them and investing them in the markets trying to generate yield during the exchange period. And of course, when the financial crisis hit, that led to a lot of trouble, Ponzi schemes and the like.

So we’ve developed software, such that all the right controls on the movement of the money are in place. There’s none of that gambling, if you will, that can go on with our solution. And as a result of that, we became the largest provider of 1031 exchanges in the country. At our peak, we were doing about $75 billion in exchanges a year. And so that’s how we got started. From there, we’ve gone into a number of other specialty funds. We came across an investment program called EB-5 in 2010, which is a foreign investment program that invest in creating jobs in the United States.

Many of those investments flowed into real estate around the country. The investors received an immigration benefit if the investment turned out to be successful. And so it’s a highly complex investment program. The average investment size is $500,000 for an investor, and each investor’s process generates over 3,000 pages of documentation, so extremely complex. And we built a purpose-built solution to manage that. Grew to be the largest provider in that space.

Problem for us in terms of EB-5 is that it’s a limited market. So we have about a 50% or 60% market share. But you know, it’s capped in terms of the number of investors that can be taken. And under this immigration climate in this country, it’s not likely that that program is going to be expanded. So to grow, we took the cool technology that we had developed and applied it to traditional private equity because we had built something that nobody else had ever seen before in the space to be able to handle that complexity and scale like it does.

And we’ve been in the space, the private equity space, we’ve signed up, I think 40 funds. We’ve been at that for about two years, just getting good traction in the market, getting our brand known in the traditional space. And then along comes Opportunity Zones. And that’s the perfect market for us. Because on the one side of our business, we have a business of taxpayers looking to defer gain. On the other side of our business, EB-5, private equity, we have real estate developers trying to develop projects in targeted employment areas in that vocabulary, which is exactly what Opportunity Zones is like.

Jimmy: Complex investment programs require transparency and that’s what you are providing. You’re providing a little bit of a peek under the hood, so to speak, on some of these investment programs, some of these fund products that get spun out under these investment programs. Can we get a little bit of your personal background now, Reid? How did you get to where you are today if you can just briefly tell me your little career story?

Reid: My little career story. I wish it was only little because I’m 57 now, and I’ve been at this for a while. So it’s been a number of years at this point. But I actually have an engineering degree, computer science related. And I grew up in Canada and was always excited about the opportunity as an engineer with a computer science engineering focus, always excited about the prospects of working in Silicon Valley.

Anyway, I worked for a number of years in the telecommunications sector. I’m old enough that I was involved in the cellular build out in the mid-late 80s and through the 90s. And so I’ve worked at a number of technology companies, small companies, been involved with an IPO for a company. And so now I’m back at small companies. I like that best where we can be innovative, creative and get stuff done. I had worked with several board members of NES Financial over time. And so I joined relatively early in the history of the company at a time where what we were really trying to do is create a culture that’s unique where we deal with a lot of financial transactions. And the procedures, controls, processes in that regard are critical.

You know, the customer base that we have moves billions of dollars every year. And so we need to have the right sort of operational methodologies and controls that a bank would have as an example. And so we have a large staff here of folks who come out of that banking sector. We’re very familiar with sort of regulatory controls, compliance, processes and the like. And so what we’ve been trying to do here at NES is to add to that sort of the innovative Silicon Valley culture to be able to create advanced, innovative FinTech solutions that can help change the market. And that really attracted me. That idea of a new space for me, having grown up in telecom and computing coming into a financial services company, but also this idea of working for a company that has a mission of trying to help good ideas, good programs achieve their goal, at the same time as creating a unique culture.

Jimmy: So shifting to Opportunity Zones now, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act gets passed in December of 2017 putting Opportunity Zones policy into law. When did you first hear about Opportunity Zones and how soon did NES Financial go to market with their fund servicing products after that December 2017 date?

Reid: Yeah, well, we heard about it right away, obviously, at the very beginning of the year 2018. And we at that time started to try to figure out, you know, what the requirements ultimately would be here and whether this would be a good opportunity for us, because on the surface, it seemed to make sense. You got taxpayers looking for gain. We know all about that business. In fact, our general counsel, we hired from the IRS and she was involved in writing a lot of the 1031 regulations. And we have a dominant position in the EB-5 sector. So we’re very familiar with programs that are intended to create jobs and stimulate economic development and target employment areas.

So it seemed like on the surface, this is an area that we could add some value in. But it really wasn’t until the census tracts were finalized, that we felt comfortable coming to market with a solution. So that happened in the mid-summer last year in 2018. We created a solution right around that time. It took us probably 90, 120 days to put our technology solution together because remember, we created a platform that’s intended to be configurable for these things.

And we came to market probably late Q3 last year, say, September timeframe. And as the regulations have continued to evolve, we’ve just continued to get more and more success. So today we’ve now entered into 32, I think as of today, 32 contracts to provide fund administration services specifically for OZ funds, which we think makes us the largest provider of services in the sector, and our service is highly differentiated. So we think the sky is the limit in terms of what we can do here.

Jimmy: How many of the Opportunity Zone funds out there are even bothering to use a product like yours, to have a fund administrator? And is it essential to have one and why?

Reid: Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, the idea of is third-party fund administration an important thing. You know, I think historically in the private equity space, the majority of private equity funds do their own administration in-house. The hedge fund world is very different. Post the Bernie Madoff disaster, the hedge fund market went from having 5% of all funds outsourced to third parties to having 95% of all funds outsource to third parties. Because of course, having a third party administrator helps provide more transparency, more certainty, more security, over the, you know, what’s really going on in the fund.

So the private equity world has been adopting that over time. And so I would say in a traditional private equity space, it might be 40% of private equity funds outsourced to a third party. You know, Opportunity Zones, though, we think that number is likely to be much bigger. The thing about Opportunity Zones is that this not a traditional private equity fund. This is a highly specialized fund. And it’s specialized in a number of different ways.

So applying a traditional private equity solution to it or a traditional private equity approach to it is probably not the best strategy. I mean, Opportunity Zone funds are a mash-up, if you will, of traditional private equity investments. You know, you need to do all the financial accounting and reporting and financial statements and so on. But investor motivations also include a significant interest in the tax compliance benefits of this thing. And that’s complicated, right? There’s five-year step up and basis, seven-year step up and basis. There’s a substantial improvement test.

Does the fund have 90% of its assets deployed at the milestone dates? And those rules are still evolving. And then you’ve also got this social impact component of it. I mean, long-term, I think the government is going to care about whether or not this program actually achieve the good they intended it to. I think we’re all very excited about what this program can do for this country, right? This disparity of wealth across the country is a big deal. And this is a program that could really move the needle in helping fix that.

And so in order for…I think we all would like to see this program succeed. And to help make sure that happens, I think tracking that kind of impact data is going to be really important, whether or not it’s ever required by law. So we view this program from a holistic approach, all of those things are intertwined and interconnected. And so a lot of the traditional private equity funds when they look at what we’re doing in this space, they outsource it, even if they insource all of their traditional funds anyway, because this is unique, there’s different investor requirements, the stakes are high. And, you know, honestly, we provide a solution that’s cost-effective, improves their efficiencies, and has just so many benefits. It’s hard to ignore.

Jimmy: Yeah, so a couple things you brought up there, transparency being one of them, and then impact data being another one. I wanna focus on transparency right no. What does your platform look like exactly, what type of transparency are you providing to, I suppose, both the general partners and the limited partners, the individual investors in the fund, what do they see when they open up your platform?

Reid: Right. So, you know, our approach is that everything is web-based. And so we’ve created complete transparency of the whole workflow process. So the way we look at this is that there’s a workflow process with Opportunity Zones, right? Investors have to get their money in at a certain point in time within 180 days into the fund, the fund has to deploy at a certain point in time, and so on. So, we’re creating an audit trail, if you will, along the whole process, from the moment the investor invests all the way through.

So what is seen is at a general partner level, an aggregate of everything that’s going on within the fund, all the investors in the fund, where they are in their process, where the money is in the fund, how much of it has been deployed, and we even go down as far as tracking at a project level, you know, what’s happening down there so that we can calculate and determine what kind of social impact there is, right? Because if we’re doing a project in a certain area, we want to know what kind of impact that has on that area. So they see sort of the financial performance of the fund, they see the compliance status of the fund, they see the status of every individual investor, as well as all of the sort of the OZ relevant reporting right.

So they see the dashboards associated with Tax Compliance status, as well as all the social impact metrics that this project is creating. And it’s all done in real-time. So that’s at the GP level, but we also…each individual investor can see their own information related to their investment as well as the information at the fund level that affects that. Obviously, investors are interested to be sure that the fund is in compliance because if the fund isn’t in compliance, that could have some impact on the taxpayer themselves, the investor themselves and whether or not their investment actually qualifies for the tax deferral.

So the stakes are high for that investor. And then we found, interestingly enough, a significant amount of interest from the investor community in the social impact aspects of this. I mean, these aren’t all impact funds. The intention here is that the investors are motivated to generate a very aggressive or very comparable return to a traditional investment. So that part of it’s very important. But just the same, the investors care, the investors care about doing good with their investments whenever they can. And so that’s an important part of it. So having that capability we’re finding tracking wise is a big differentiator for us. And it opens up the opportunity for funds to be more successful raising capital.

Jimmy: Yeah, I do agree with you that investors do care about what type of social impact they’re making. The tax benefit is great and if they can get a good return on it as well, that’s great. But I think part of that return that they’re seeking…what a lot of these investors are seeking is also a social return as well.

So I wanna ask you about the impact data. There are a few different standards being developed, including by some previous guests on this podcast, the OZ Framework comes to mind. The Opportunity Funds Association comes to mind. There’s a Senate bill that was introduced a couple months back that would give Treasury a reporting mandate. Whether or not that gets passed, time will tell. But there’s clearly an interest in the investor community and on the government side to have some sort of tracking so we can determine the effectiveness of this program.

And I think that’s probably our only chance if we want this program to get extended or renewed at a later date down the road, we need to be able to prove to the government to the American people that this program is working. So with that in mind, how do you guys track social impact? What specifically are you tracking? What data points are you tracking? And at what level are you tracking it? At what geographic level? Is it by census tract or how are you tracking it exactly?

Reid: Yeah, good question. And certainly I agree with the premise about the importance of this and the American people and the government will, you know, ultimately judge how successful this program has been based on that kind of data and metrics. Remember, you know, we have experience in the EB-5 world. The EB-5 world, that’s an immigration program that is dependent on job creation and so calculating how many jobs are created based on a certain investment is essential to that program. And so we built up upon that base to be able to do what we’re doing here in Opportunity Zone. So we have some experience, certainly, in the area.

And so what we do is we’ve built a product today that’s tracking whatever metrics are determined to be important to the project, to the community and we’re trying to align those with the different types of frameworks that are out there. So that sounds kind of vague because intentionally, we’re trying to be sure that we can output the data in whatever format comes to life and catches on.

So we’re really focused right now or initially in our first version of the software, which is out production, what we’ve been really focused on is being able to capture the data and display it in a variety of different formats that can be flexible, because there doesn’t seem to be, at the moment, an industry standard, if you will. But the general categories break into things like employment, employment benefits, wage benefits, and other social impact ends. New businesses or hotel rooms created or whatever it happens to be, depending on the project.

So where we are in our product evolution now is what we’ve built out is the ability to baseline. So our strategy is before a project even gets off the ground, we can baseline the community that it’s getting off the ground in. Now, to your question about how far down we can go. Yeah, we can go down to the census tract level but what I’m learning from the, and I’m not an economist, but the economist experts say, “Well, that’s interesting, but maybe not the most accurate representation because people obviously commute to work, and so on and so forth.” So it may be more relevant to do at a county level, let’s say, but regardless, we can take it down to a census tract level.

So we can baseline what the environment is today, then we can do a projection based on the spending that’s intended to go on in the specific project that comes straight out of our EB-5 experience. Based on what you’re spending money on at the project level, there are models that the government uses all the time to determine economic impact. So we’re not reinventing anything there, we’re just partnering with those kinds of companies that have these models and running that raw data through it so we can create a projection.

So we baselined then we’ve projected what the impact of the project is gonna be, then as money gets spent, and remember, we’re tracking that anyway. We’re tracking that as part of the overall audit trail so as money is getting spent down at the project level, we can be running that through the model again to kind of monitor progress toward the end result. And that’s how we’re doing it.

Jimmy: That’s good. And you’re perfectly positioned to be one of the main firms that collect this data just because you have access to so much of it.

Reid: Exactly right. And so what we’re trying to do is to really be as closely involved with what’s going on in various industry associations and working groups to establish what those frameworks are. Because for us, it’s just an adjustment in the workflow really, to be able to project it in whatever framework ultimately seems to be the best.

Jimmy: Very good. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out and which frameworks end up being adopted. Let’s talk a little bit about Opportunity Zone numbers here for a minute. You mentioned earlier that you’re currently servicing 32 Opportunity Zone funds. What’s the average fund size that you’re servicing?

Average fund size has been growing actually. You know, when folks got in initially, they were relatively small because I think the early adopters really wanted to get some points on the board if you will or wanted to put some pucks in the net to use the hockey analogy. So we saw funds starting out relatively small. But as the market has matured, regulations have gotten clear, we’re seeing larger funds enter the space. The sweet spot, I would say, still for us in terms of the average fund size is in the $25 million to $50 million range. So still relatively small, but we do see that shifting towards larger funds. If you look at the distribution of the size of funds across our client base, the percentage of funds that are $500 million or greater doubled in the last quarter. So we’re starting to see that grow more rapidly.

Jimmy: Do you suppose that’s because of some favorable Treasury interpretation of the statute that allows for multi-asset funds to exit a little bit more cleanly?

Reid: Exactly right. Yeah, I mean, because now it’s much more clear what multi-asset funds can and can’t do, as well as even blind pool funds. So those obviously lend themselves to greater amounts of capital than single asset funds. So I think that will be a trend we’ll continue to see. We’re also seeing some of our larger funds in terms of distribution and sales of their products, they’re partnering with some of the larger wirehouses or broker-dealer channels which facilitates better scale.

Initially, we saw, and we still see a lot of this, don’t get me wrong, but we saw a lot of the single asset funds get created, and folks were selling through high net worth registered investment advisor channels. And that’s still going on. So I think largely it’s really just the clarity in the regulation that’s stimulating the bigger players to be more comfortable to enter.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s interesting. So a shift toward much larger scale funds now that the regulatory guidance is out and things are a little bit more clear, right?

Reid: Yes, right.

Jimmy: Now, can you tell us about some other Opportunity Zone trends that you may be seeing? Where are you seeing the most fund activity geographically in the U.S? What are the asset class breakdowns that you’re seeing and anything else that you’re noticing that’s interesting?

Reid: Yeah, so far we’ve seen, in terms of where funds are operating and where projects are being located, we’ve seen that largely follow the trends of the general real estate sector so far. The program up till now is largely a real estate program. We’ve seen over 80% of all the funds we’ve been involved with focused on real estate development. And so if you think about the timing of real estate, you know, and how long it takes to get a project off the ground and the permitting processes and all the like. Where we’re seeing it is where there was lots of real estate activity to begin with.

So I would say the census tracts that you would think like there’s areas in the San Jose area where I am that are census tracts that meet that requirement. Now San Jose has… There are some clear areas here in downtown San Jose that would if you visited, not shock you that they’re Opportunity Zones as there are in many big cities, but of course, they are adjacent to areas that are doing quite well. So I suspect that we’re seeing Opportunity Zone activity here because these are ideas or projects that were conceived well before the Opportunity Zone rules came into law.

Now going forward, we’re seeing a lot of interest out of the middle part of the country as folks are starting to understand the regulations, put projects together. So I do think we’ll see that shift. We’re also seeing with the last version of the regulations in middle of April, a significant ramp in the amount of operating business interest and activity going on in the space. I think that it makes the upside benefits for an investor in an operating business that happens to do well in an opportunity zone are incredible. And so I suspect that we will see more and more of that activity and that type of investing as we go forward. You know, we have some of our clients that are already jumping on that.

We have one very interesting client, as an example, who started earlier and had combined a real estate development project with an operating business project. They’re actually in the entertainment sector and they operate entertainment venues, I guess, is the word and as part of that they set up, they’ve gone into historic cities retrofitting, rehabbing the real estate at the same time as placing an operating business in it. So I think there’s some very interesting things going on both in terms of the geography, as well as the type of projects that we will see going forward.

Another interesting trend we see is we survey… We’ve been running regular webinars where we review data across what we’re seeing in the marketplace because with 32 funds under contract, and we’re probably in discussions with another 100, 150 or so, we probably have as good a visibility into what’s going on across the market as anybody. So we regularly run webinars where we try to share this kind of data. And one of the things we always ask is what the primary motivation folks are seeing in terms of the social impact, you know, why are they investing in these programs. And the social impact benefits continue to be important. You know, the last survey we did was something like 25% of folks in the industry, investors in the industry, rated their primary motivation as social impact benefits. So we think that’s quite an interesting trend to see.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing that insight. Yeah, like the additional regulatory guidance kind of opened up things for multi-asset funds, it also opened things up for business investing. So that’s interesting to see that shift happening in real time here. What would you estimate is the breakdown right now between real estate funds, just pure real estate funds, versus business funds or business and real estate mixed funds? You know, I think in the first several months or a year plus of the program, almost every fund was real estate only. But what would you say is the percentage breakdown now?

Reid: 75% of all the funds that we see are real estate only. So it’s still the large majority of it. The other 25% have a business component to it. And I would say that split, that 25% is split half. So what’s that? 12 and a half percent are a combination of a business and real estate project like the one that I described and the other 12 and a half percent would look more like a venture investment, a pure operating business investment.

Jimmy: Good. And I would expect or hope at least that that kind of shifts even further toward business over the next several months and years to come here.

Reid: Yeah. The exciting part is I think it will, I think the percentages will shift but the whole pie is growing, right? So I don’t think we’re gonna see operating business investments at the expense of real estate investments. Instead, I just think the whole pie is going to grow and ultimately, the operating business could be the largest part of this program.

Jimmy: I agree. I completely agree. Well, Reid, we’re getting toward the end of our time together here but if you would like to make just one final plea right now, and I’m going to just ask you, why should investors care about third party administration? What’s the whole point of it? Why should they care? And what should individual investors look for in Opportunity Zone fund?

Reid: So investors should care about whether or not… Investors should care about the fund that they’re investing in and what is that fund’s commitment to best practices, that’s what they should care about. You know, the underlying project and the investment metrics, yield, return all of that stuff, are clearly important and the investor needs to spend a significant amount of time focused on that.

But once they’re comfortable with that the next layer to me is if I’m an investor is, how does my fund operate? What kind of controls do they have in place? What kind of monitoring do they have in place? How do they embrace best practices? Because at the end of the day, the investor is the one who’s not only taking the investment risk but there’s a huge tax compliance component of this that is at the end of the day on the shoulders of the investor. The investor is the one claiming this on on his or her return as a deduction.

And so making sure that the fund that they’re investing in has embraced best practices and has hired the right team or bought the right technologies to create levels of security, transparency, and compliance, that are deserving of that investor’s investment, I think is an obvious thing to care about. So I think that…you know, I would ask and encourage investors to ask the funds they’re considering investing in about this, how they do the administration, what kind of transparency they get and the like.

We’ve tried to establish our brand as the thought leader in the space and the industry leader in the space so ideally, you know, the investor would ask about us as a possible provider to the fund for that service. But most importantly, back to the mission, the real important thing here is that this program succeeds. We’ve got some challenges in this country with respect to a disparity in wealth. This is a great program, a great idea. We all need to work together to make sure it’s successful.

Jimmy: Well, that’s great. I agree 100%. Before we go, Reid, first of all, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. I know our listeners appreciate it also. Before we go, could you tell our listeners where they can go to learn more about you, about NES Financial and any upcoming events or webinars that you may have going on?

Reid: Yeah, certainly. So the best place to get information on us and our company is on our website, www.nesfinancial.com. And so I would encourage folks to go there. They can learn all about our company, our solutions and how to get in touch with us whether they’re interested in seeing a demonstration of the product or talking to a business development rep or what have you. So please, I encourage all your listeners to do that.

Also, in terms of events, some of the data that I shared today is the type of data that we share regularly on our webinars. We do a webinar about every two or three months. Our next one is coming up in the middle of August so please check our website for details on that. And at that time, we will share the latest statistics and the overall industry trends that we’re seeing as well as having some other thought leaders and industry experts share their insights in terms of what’s going on,

Jimmy: Excellent, well count me in. I’ll be attending that webinar. I’m looking forward to it. And for our listeners out there today, I’ll have show notes on today’s episode at the Opportunity Zones database website. You can find those show notes at opportunitydb.com/podcast. And you’ll find links to all the resources that Reid and I discussed on today’s show. Reid, again, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate your time and I hope to chat with you again soon.

Reid: Okay, thanks, Jimmy. I appreciate the opportunity.

Jimmy: Absolutely.

Reid: Take care.

Jimmy: You too, thank you.