Can an Opportunity Zone marketplace connect communities, OZ project sponsors, and investors to advance capital deployment and community impact?

Peter Truog is founder of The Opportunity Exchange — a marketplace that connects impactful Opportunity Zone projects to capital sources. Also joining today’s podcast episode from The Opportunity Exchange are Leo Peña and Ayat Amin.

Click the play button below to listen to my conversation with Peter, Leo, and Ayat.

Episode Highlights

• Why communities should leverage their Opportunity Zones by showcasing their pipeline of assets.
• How The Opportunity Exchange can benefit three distinct types of Opportunity Zone participants — 1) community actors; 2) project sponsors; and 3) investors.
• How The Opportunity Exchange platform aligns with the mission of the Opportunity Zone initiative, by helping to drive higher impact community investments.
• The challenge that smaller communities face in showcasing their pipeline and securing Opportunity Zone capital.
• The value of reaching out to your local economic development agency if you are sponsoring an Opportunity Zone project.
• The data being collected by The Opportunity Exchange for the purposes of impact tracking and reporting.

Featured on This Episode

• The Opportunity Exchange
• Peter Truog on LinkedIn
• Leo Pena on LinkedIn
• Ayat Amin on LinkedIn
• The Fund for Our Economic Future
• Opportunity CLE
• Opportunity Alabama
• Invest Atlanta
• Venture for America
• Beeck Center
• Opportunity Zones Reporting Framework

Industry Spotlight: The Opportunity Exchange

The Opportunity Exchange is a marketplace to connect impactful Opportunity Zone projects to the right sources of capital by making connections among the three key actors in the Opportunity Zone space: project sponsors, investors, and community/economic developers.

For project sponsors such as real estate developers, The Opportunity Exchange is a great tool to market Opportunity Zone projects to a national audience of investors as well as connect to community partners who can offer localized guidance. The platform also helps users implement a data and impact tracking process by leveraging the US Impact Investing Alliance’s OZ Framework, among other resources.

The Opportunity Exchange currently has over 400 projects in 20 states while working with community partners such as Opportunity CLE, Opportunity Alabama, and Invest Atlanta.

Learn more about The Opportunity Exchange:

• Visit TheOpportunityExchange.com
• Email [email protected]
• Follow @OpptyExchange on Twitter

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. How can communities take advantage of opportunity zones to support and help the people who live there? One key is to showcase the community’s opportunity zone assets and helping to facilitate that endeavor is The Opportunity Exchange. Today, I’m pleased to be joined by three members of The Opportunity Exchange team, founder, Peter Truog, as well as Leo Peña, and Ayat Amin. The three of them joined us from their office in Cleveland, Ohio. Peter, Leo and Ayat, thanks for joining us and welcome to the show.

Ayat: Thanks for having us.

Peter: Hey, Jimmy. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Leo: Thank you. Thank you.

Jimmy: Absolutely. Glad to have you guys here today. So, Peter, I’ll turn to you first to get us going here. Can you tell us about The Opportunity Exchange? What would you like our listeners to know about your service? What is it exactly and what’s your mission and who are your users?

Peter: Yeah. Happy to kick things off. And, you know, thanks for inviting us on the show. We’ve been listeners of some of your past podcasts and are really excited to be part of what you’re building here. So, I’m happy to get things kicked off and describe a little bit about The Opportunity Exchange. As you mentioned in your intro, we’re based in Cleveland, Ohio. And our mission as a company is to help connect communities, real estate developers, business owners, investors, all of whom are interested in advancing impactful opportunity zones projects that really align with the needs of the various opportunity zone communities across the country. We do that by working directly with cities, counties and states to help them proactively identify a pipeline of local opportunity zone projects, support those developers and business owners through the development process and market some of those exciting things going on in their community.

We also work with real estate developers and business owners who have opportunity zone projects and are looking to get them seen and getting connected with investors across the country. And we work with investors and funds who either are curious and exploring more and learning more about whether opportunity zone investments might be the right fit for them, or who have actively raised capital and are looking for pipeline and looking to evaluate different projects across the country. So, our role as a platform is helping to connect those different parties and looking to connect them in a way that leads to higher impact, really community-aligned investments across the board.

Jimmy: Good. So, a lot of different types of opportunity zones participants can use your marketplace it sounds like. Leo, I’ll turn to you now if you can give us some of the numbers on your marketplace. I’m interested in knowing how many projects do you have listed currently? What is that total investment capacity and what types of projects are you seeing?

Leo: Yeah. Absolutely. So, on the project side, we have, you know, 439 total on the platform, out of which we had about 194 listed. So, about 45% of our projects are public. And of those public ones we span across 20 different states. And the total investment size is just under a billion. So, 949 million of total investment size there. And then the breakdown, it’s pretty interesting. So, of all the projects on the platform, 33% are lean available for sale, is one of the categories there for easy developments, 40% are focused on real estate development and then 27% is active business, you know, seeking to raise capital.

Jimmy: Okay. Good. That was going to be my next question. If it was just for real estate or if it was also for business as well. Are you seeing an uptick in business listings or is it too early to kind of identify that trend yet?

Leo: I would say it’s a little early. I think we, depending on the community partners we work with, we’ll see an uptick of one type of project or the other, and I think that’s very exemplary of the connections they have within their community. So, sometimes one community partner will come on and we’ll have, you know, five or six businesses come on as part of their projects listed and represent a higher percentage than they usually do.

Jimmy: Got you. Good. Okay. Before we proceed with discussing The Opportunity Exchange a little more, I’m going to back up for a minute and get background on all of you. And Peter, maybe you can start, you being the founder, if you could tell us a bit about how you got to where you are today and when you first became interested in opportunities zones and how did the three of you come together at The Opportunity Exchange?

Peter: Yeah. So, my journey into this kind of resulted from a dual interest that I had both in pursuing kind of a data and analytical experiences in my professional background and also, some of my previous work in community and economic development. So, immediately before founding The Opportunity Exchange, I was working at a community economic development non-profit in Northeast Ohio, called The Fund for our Economic Future. And that was how I originally got connected to the opportunity zone incentive. I was working with cities and counties in the Northeast Ohio region to help select their zones and then begin to, you know, ponder and address some of the questions that we’re talking about on the podcast today. You know, how do we go about finding projects in our community? What should our strategy be for marketing our community and what’s happening within it? What do we do about connecting with investors and how do we do all that activity in a way that really prioritizes community impact?

Yeah. There was a ton of questions that places here in Northeast Ohio were asking and a lot of other parts of the country we’re asking as well. But what was really exciting about it was that coupled with the enormous number of questions that were kind of immediately at play when the incentive was passed, was there was a kind of an equal amount of energy about the potential for the program. Both as a way to attract new investment into communities, but also more generally as a way to bring together stakeholders across the community and economic development ecosystem to really start to build new types of muscles when it comes to attracting private capital into different opportunities out in communities. And so, it was that combination of a lot of open questions, a lot of similarity across places and the enormous amount of energy that was behind the incentive that really inspired me to jump in with two feet.

So, late last year, I quit my old job to launch the company. And, you know, it’s been kind of a whirlwind since. We announced our first partnerships earlier this year in March working with groups like Opportunities CLE, a partnership here in Cleveland, groups like Opportunity Alabama in Alabama, and have been growing since. And so, that was kind of the early trajectory of the company. And then as we started to grow, we brought Leo onto the team as we were starting to add some more partners and really starting to grow the network.

Jimmy: Yeah. Leo and Ayat, if you can speak about how you got involved. That will be good.

Leo: Absolutely. So, I’ve known Peter for a few years prior to this just right out of Cleveland connections. My previous work was in government, civic tech. So I had been working in the election space for a few years, particularly around providing uniform members in the military, running abroad, ability to vote, cast their ballot as well as online voter registration, voter registration software in general. So, I’ve always been focused on creating tech that enables cities and communities to work a lot better. So, after leaving my old job, I was like, “Where to next?” And talked to Peter quite a few times before jumping on board. But I think some of the, you know, energy that Peter was describing was felt across Cleveland and Northeast Ohio as a whole. And something that I had my finger on the pulse on it and wanting to be a part of it and knew that my previous experience and passionate align very well with what we’re doing here. That’s how I came onboard.

Ayat: My background’s a little different from theirs. I was working as a AI programmer in California before this, and I didn’t really like the impact that job was having and a little soul searching of my job eventually led me to the Venture for America program, which is how I find it’s a program Leo’s also a part of. I didn’t have any connections in Cleveland, but that’s how I found out about this company here. And the more I learned about it, the more I learned about opportunity zones and this whole realm of economic development happening across the country. And I shared the same passion that Peter and Leo have, and I’m the newest member of the team. So, very happy to be a part of it.

Jimmy: Good. We’re happy to have you on the podcast today. So, you mentioned earlier the types of opportunities or participants who are using your platform. Is it free for anyone to use your platform or do you charge a licensing fee for anyone in particular? Maybe one of you can speak to that.

Peter: Yeah. Sure. So, right now we have kind of main types of users who use the platform. You have cities, counties, and states who use the platform too. A build their pipeline of OZ projects across their community, showcase that pipeline to the national network on the platform and measure a lot of their activity. For those entities, we charge just annual licensing fee. Like think of software licensing fee for use of the platform.

The other two groups of folks who use The Opportunity Exchange, you have either real estate developers or business owners, think kind of OZ project sponsors. You know, they use a platform either to always list their projects and use it as kind of one of their marketing channels and kind of investor outreach channels for some of the work that they do. And in many cases, they do that in partnership with the communities that we work with, right? So, for example, if you’re a developer in Cleveland and you have a project, you know, submitting your projects on The Opportunity Exchange to be part of the Cleveland portfolio that we have is a way to kind of grow your reach, expand your audience and align some of your activity with the broader economic and community development activity that’s going on across your community. That’s the second group, project sponsors, real estate developers, and business owners.

The third group is investors in funds, right? So, thinking about kind of bringing all these parties together on a common platform is one of the core challenges around opportunity zone activities. More generally is how do you connect the dots across all these different groups. And so, the third key to the puzzle is this third group, investors and funds. And thinking about, you know, for them using it as a way to access pipeline and kind of aggregate listings and view listings of projects from across our network. Part of the benefit is, you know, given our partnerships with communities, the ability for, you know, investors, for example, we were on the phone with somebody from Maine the other week who is curious about opportunities across the Southeastern United States and kind of the value of being able to understand, you know, in Atlanta, for example, through the partnership that we have with invest Atlanta, you know, accessing and kind of viewing some of this real-time information about what’s happening in the city from a project perspective. And being able to approach that with a little bit more confidence, recognizing some of the partnerships that we have in place as part of the exciting stuff that we’re seeing from the investors and funds side of the platform.

Jimmy: Good. Yeah. It is a challenge to connect all those dots as you said, but I think you guys are off to a great start so far. The Opportunity Exchange provides a mechanism, essentially that can help cities and states to more proactively promote their opportunity zone assets as you’ve alluded to. Ayat, I want to bring you back in now. How important is that to the ultimate success of opportunity zones at these cities and states become more proactive in how they promote their opportunity zones?

Ayat: Yeah. I’m happy to answer. So, at its core, the goal of the opportunity zone initiative is to help communities grow by bringing investment money in. But the big question surrounding this initiative is what will that growth look like and who will benefit from it. And I think almost everyone wants the communities to benefit. Therefore, we’re already seeing the ability for communities to market themselves and promote impactful projects in their OZs as critically important to the ultimate success of how these…how the initiative will play out overall. So, helping communities market their projects nationally that align with their needs and bring attention to their communities really aligns with the core mission of the opportunities in program. And this is a big thing that The Opportunity Exchange can really is meant to do.

But there’s also more that you can do on the platform. It’s more than just promotion. And our vision as a company is to provide a tool that addresses some of the deep talents that have limited capital flows to opportunity zone communities in the past. One example is the challenge that smaller communities have with limited capacity to manage the activities happening in their community. And we think a lot about how we as a company can provide scalable tools to help these communities overcome the legal and financial barriers to securing opportunity zone capital. Or how we can think differently about engaging communities, ensuring their input is adequately represented in the project development process. So, the opportunity zone is really a place for people to connect but also for them to more easily manage and do the whole process.

Jimmy: Okay. That’s great. So, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Can you walk me through a case of a community partner using your website to help promote locations, opportunity zones assets? If I’m a partner in Cleveland, let’s say, how do I use your site? What am I looking for exactly and what am I doing with the information that I find there?

Peter: Yeah. Absolutely. I can describe that flow for you. I think first off, defining a little bit better what a community partner is for us I think it’s important for those listening, and it really varies as all cities and counties and states are very different ways of structuring themselves. Here in Cleveland, for example, it’s a public-private partnership. There’s a few entities involved from the city, the county, the land bank, non-profits in the area. So, you know, GCP, the EDA here in Cleveland, so it’s very large initiative and one bringing a lot of parties to the table. And some of our other community partners, it might be a nonprofit leading, you know, the state-level efforts. Or in some of other partners, it might be the city’s Economic Development Agency taking lead owning the process entirely.

So, when we refer to community partners, it’s the gamut of organizations that are taking charge for opportunity zones in that community. But yeah, how do you describe the flow here in Cleveland? I think it’s a very good example of how our platform helps them organize and present their projects. So, initially, their process is describing, “Hey, this is what opportunity Cleveland is.” So, describe their initiative. They establish their presence locally and subsequent to a national level. So, describing the zones here in the city and the county, describing what parties are involved in the initiative, and describing, you know, how they’re approaching gathering projects, how they’re approaching selecting and publishing projects. So, they come to our platform, they put all that information, describe themselves, link to all the reference materials, their prospectus, and then are able to call for projects.

So, most of our community partners do, we call it call for projects where they’ll share it across their media channels and say, “Hey, you know, you have an idea, you have a real estate development, you have a local business that might qualify for opportunities zone capital. Are you interested in learning more?” So, they put the reach fairly broad. And I think that’s really important and how we’ve seen the most success so far to have an intake on those projects. We provide our community partners the tools to gather that information. So, in Cleveland, to link to a project intake form here that we have on our site, allows them to understand, okay, this is, where is it located? Who’s sponsoring the project? You know, what type of project it is? So, as I earlier we mentioned, is it land that’s for sale? Is it, you know, development project, so local business? And that helps orient the questions that are asked afterwards.

So, yeah. In that project intake process we’ll ask, you know, more information on the site details or more information on the capital stack or proposed capital stack for the project. So, then on the opportunity Cleveland side, they’ll receive this information. It allows them to scale their efforts because to gather project information, it’s as easy as sending a very walkable survey. And I would say it’s a little bit more complex than that, but it allows them to easily gather that information and then they get together as a group. So, they have a few different committees here. They’ll walk through different aspects of the initiative, one specifically for projects. So, we’ll get together, review the information gathered on The Opportunity Exchange and decide, “Okay, let’s get more information from this project sponsor or based on our criteria that we share.”

Be able to publish a project, we’ll publish it. Once a project gets published, it is viewable to all investors on The Opportunity Exchange, other community partners, other project sponsors. Then it goes on that community’s portal. So, from that process, you know, they’ll go through intake projects, review and publish, and it makes the management on easier. So, we have tons of parties collaborating on the platform and understand what the projects in my community look like and how can I expand that reach or what does that reach look like so far. So…

Jimmy: Good. Okay. I think I have a better understanding now. And so, if you’re a developer and you want to publish your project to the site, it doesn’t just automatically publish, it has to go through some sort of a vetting process. Am I understanding that correctly?

Peter: Yeah. That’s right. So, here our partners in Cleveland, we have to review your project, get in contact with you and feel comfortable with that information before publishing that project. If we have a community partner in your, you know, geography, right? So, in the County of Cuyahoga here, our community partners review your project prior to publishing on the portal. So, in that sentence there’s a review process of the project details prior to being associated with one of our community partners.

Jimmy: Well, that’s good. So, your marketplace essentially is like, is very community-driven. I think that’s great to get the local community involved from the get-go and make sure that they vet the projects and that they’re aware of the projects, too. I think that’s part of what your platform brings is awareness of certain projects to community developers that may or may not have had the opportunity to know about it otherwise.

To shift gears now a little bit. I want to talk to the real estate developers listening from their perspective. If I’m a real estate developer, let’s say, and I’m looking for opportunity zone capital or I’m looking for that support from my community partners in the local Economic Development Office, let’s say, what are your tips for me to promote my project so that I can get attention of investors and those community partners?

Peter: Yeah. I think if you’re looking at it from that lens, a big part of it is transparency I think and sharing with your local community partners. I don’t know, that’s always the first initiative, first inclination to say, “Hey, I have this project, reach out to the city, reach out to your local Economic Development Agency.” But as we’re seeing with quite a bit of our community partners, a lot of investors and funds are reaching out directly to cities or counties or states to get that information.

Reason being not everyone’s familiar, you know, with Cleveland, for example, and what the landscape looks like. And oftentimes, information is being passed via your local EDA, your local, you know, public-private partnership taking lead. And I think sharing that information and understanding how you can best align that community adds another person championing, you know, hopefully what’s a very good effort of development in your community. So, I think that’s a big tip from us. I think if you haven’t aligned or had a conversation with the community partners or, you know, local city, I would suggest it. I think it’s also important to, you know, clearly describe how they aligned it with the interest of the community? So, I think there’s a lot of ways to find information on how that neighborhood or how that community is looking at their development going forward.

And I think with this initiative particularly, that draws a lot of attention from the capital out there. I think that draws a lot of attention if we’re looking at exclusively from a capital perspective. I think that’s one of the things that gets more eyes on your project. We’ve definitely seen it within our platform and outside our platform. I mean, to add a little plug here, it’s pretty easy to list a project on our platform. And I think going through those questions is a great exercise. The reason why I make that plug is a great exercise to understand how to showcase your project. A lot of the things that we ask have been worked with investors and funds and other community partners to understand what are the questions that give the best glimpse and best understanding of whether this project will be successful and attractive to capital. So, that’s something to check out as well.

Jimmy: Good. No. I think that those are all good tips and that’s a good point you make. I think just going through your project submission application intake form, so to speak, you guys have already figured out the questions that community partners and investors want to know. I think that’s great. So, if you’re a real estate developer and you know the answers to the questions that The Opportunity Exchange is asking you, then you’ve got a leg up a little bit and you’re kind of on the right track already. So, make sure you can answer those questions. I think that’s a good point there.

So, we’ve talked about from a community partner perspective, and we’ve talked about using your site from a real estate developer’s perspective or a business owner’s perspective. What about from an investor’s perspective? I’m sure you have opportunity funds and maybe individual investors looking through your site, kind of perusing the different projects the deals in the pipeline there. How are they using your site? Can you go into that? Let’s explain that a little bit more.

Leo: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s very interesting dynamic as a marketplace, right, to see the interest of all of these different actors. And I think to Peter’s point, originally how we started, this was the focus, right? And I think as we’ve done a lot more research on, you know, who are the investors looking at it. We realized there’s a lot of people who are funds, sure. But there’s also a lot of individual investors that I think opportunity zones, in general, have awakened and I think it’s a lot of local individual investors that do care a ton about their community. There might be local high net worth individuals or, you know, people with a decent amount of capital gains from selling a home or something related and they realize, okay, it’s a great opportunity for me to reinvest in my community.

It was just a general profile of what we’ve learned here. I think in terms of interactions, it’s a lot of browsing projects and we keep track, just barely so of a lot of this information. And it’s interesting to see the trends of, I come in to look at a project in Atlanta because I live here, but then I look at projects in Cleveland and reach out because I’m also looking at, you know, historic tax credits on top of opportunity zones. So, it’s interesting to see those, you know, connections being made on a platform that wouldn’t otherwise. So, I think having that beats geography a little bit. I think what we’ve seen is a lot of individual investor interest. And the reason I highlight this is it’s hard to invest as an investor without a fund, you need that vehicle to put in the capital.

So, from our side that some of the conversations we’ve also had with funds is understanding, okay, we have a lot of individual interest. How do we align that with funds? And it’s something that we’ve been thinking about pretty deeply over the past few months and having conversations with funds on how to best match that. And that’s a pilot we’ll be running soon is how to best connect. There’s individual investors with local interest or be a more national specific interest with funds. So I think that’s something pretty exciting from our part is being a facilitator of connections just on the capital side now.

Jimmy: No. Good. That sounds interesting. Let me know when you get that up and running there, when you get that launched. So, you mentioned the ability to see whether or not a product is HTC-eligible. So, are you collecting that information on the different types of tax benefits that a project may be eligible for whether, it’s HTC or Lytic or a new markets tax credit? Is that a question you ask or is that just information that’s certain projects or are volunteering?

Leo: It’s both. So, we ask…a lot of projects will volunteer in their project description, if they’re trying to, you know, present themselves with every single program they qualified for. Well, it’s also one of our questions on the intake form. And additionally, it’s a question we ask our investors, right? So, on top of asking, you know, where you interested in a few assets or what kind of you’re looking for, we also ask about what credits or other programs they’re targeting to better align that matching the projects or selection of projects.

Jimmy: Good. Yeah. I think that’s smart to do. Having the ability to stack multiple benefits is always a plus for the real estate developers that are able to do so. And you also mentioned that you’re collecting a lot of data on your platform. So, that kind of moves me to my next question here. Currently, treasury and the IRS have no reporting requirements for qualified opportunity funds. But as I mentioned, you guys are collecting data on these projects. So, I can imagine that you may be able to do some reporting on your own voluntarily. Can you discuss how you intend to track the impact in opportunity zones?

Peter: Yeah. Absolutely. Happy to answer that. And Jimmy, I think this is one of the kind of founding principles of the opportunities change was a recognition of exactly what you were just describing. But there’s so much that can be learned from the collection of data, whether that be project-level information about what types of other, you know, tax incentives a project might qualify for. You know, whether that be data about a project’s potential to deliver impact in the community or data about which types of projects attract attention from which types of investors. There’s just a massive amount of opportunity for places who are able to harness a lot of that information. But, you know, given what you outlined at the top, there’s a kind of a lack of infrastructure to collect that information at least at a federal level at the moment with how the incentive is set up. And so from the very beginning, this had been something that we’ve been really focused on and it started with a kind of a commitment, particularly around measuring the community impact and community benefit of the projects that are city, county and state partners identify in their pipelines on the platform.

So, what that looks like for us is, you know, we were partners to some of the great work that the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, the Beeck Center did around developing their OZ framework and continue to stay involved to a lot of that work. Similarly, there’s some really exciting work going on at the Urban Institute with some of our partners in Cleveland around thinking about how to measure impact at a project level for some of their projects in Cleveland. I think the summation of all that leads to, you know, this ability for the organizations and the community partners that are using Opportunity Exchange, the ability to not only, you know, quantify from a project level. Great, you know, we have 35, 40, 100 projects on the opportunity to change platform.

The breakdown of project types follows these dimensions. The total size of what that represents is, you know, X, Y, Z. There is kind of a whole, a number of basic projects, level information that our partners can track through the use of the platform. But it really then also expands into the ability to track some of those impact metrics as well. Things as simple as, you know, job creation potential, the ability to create affordable housing units, things like that. But also, yeah, kind of more robust measures of impact around the alignment with broader community and economic development strategy in a neighborhood or the kind of ways in which a project might connect with accessible modes of transportation so that people who live there can have access to regional job centers. There’s a lot of things about a project’s impact that through the use of The Opportunity Exchange platform, we hope to kind of empower the communities that we work with to track and then act against.

So, that was a lot about how we think about impact, both at a project level as well as some of the community benefit dimensions of the work. I think the final piece around just kind of this, we’ve been talking a lot about The Opportunity Exchange as this connector across these different parties. And I think the third piece of data and kind of reporting that we’re building into the platform is just understanding which projects are attracting attention. What do those projects look like? What are some common characteristics? How do we think about leveraging what we learn about what investor interests might be? To think about how that can inform future strategy for some of our community partners. Or if we know that investors are interested in projects that share certain characteristics, is there a way that we can integrate that into longer-term strategies that our communities adopt in terms of how they think about their projects that are coming down the pipeline now, how they frame those on the platform, how they market those, how they help them kind of go through development process.

So, I think this third bucket around kind of what attracts interest, which projects are particularly kind of flashy for investors on the platform and how do we then make that data available to the communities we work with so it can kind of inform their ongoing strategy would be maybe a third bucket that it’s particularly interesting for us.

Jimmy: Well, good. I’m glad to hear that you guys are doing that. I think it’s crucial that we get some sort of reporting, whether it be from the federal government at some point or the local communities or are private third parties such as yourself. Some sort of impact reporting data I think is crucial to the success. But we can see what this tax incentive is doing for the country and for these local communities as well.

Peter: Yeah. You know, I think on that point, I think just to…we’re really open to working with other groups on these questions. I shared that it was kind of a founding principle of the company was to create a mechanism that can help fill this gap from a reporting perspective. And, you know, we’re talking with a bunch of universities or, you know, research institutions at the moment about, you know, how the information that we collect in the platform might be helpful to answer kind of these higher-order questions about the way that the opportunities on incentive is impacting communities. What types of activity are we seeing? And I guess we’re just really open collaborators when it comes to thinking about how what we’re learning can help answer some of these questions that we know numerous people listening to this podcast and kind of everybody else involved in the opportunities on space more generally questions that they’re asking. So, we’re are happy to be partners and kind of collaborators and helping them think through some of those efforts.

Jimmy: Excellent. Excellent. Well, Peter and Leo, and Ayat, thank you for taking the time today to join me on the program. I appreciate it. Before we go, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and The Opportunity Exchange?

Ayat: Yeah. There’s several places. If you’re a real estate developer and you have a project, we welcome you to come list it on our website. You can do that at theopportunityexchange.com. And if you’re a community partner and you’re interested in working with us, we’d love to hear about what’s happening in your community. So, or anyone for that matter. If you working opportunities in space and just want to connect with us, you can contact us at [email protected]. And the last thing you can do is follow us on Twitter. We post things there all the time and we’d love to have more followers. Our handle is @opptyexchange or @opptyexchange. Yeah. Thank you for having us. We are happy to speak with you.

Peter: Thanks a ton.

Leo: Thank you, Jimmy.

Jimmy: Okay. Absolutely, guys. And for my listeners out there, I’ll have show notes on the Opportunity Zones Database website. You can find links to all the resources that Peter, Leo, Ayat and I discussed on today’s show, and you can find those show notes at opportunitydb.com/podcast. Thanks again, guys. Great talking with you.

Peter: Thank you.