OZ Pitch Day - Nov 14th
Opportunity Zone Success After Four Years, With Stephanie Copeland
Four years into the launch of the first Qualified Opportunity Funds, how have expectations of the tax policy changed? And what types of success have some early adopters had so far?
Stephanie Copeland, managing partner at Four Points Funding, joins the show to provide an update on her team’s efforts to develop in Opportunity Zone communities in Colorado over the past four years.
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Episode Highlights
- The three things that Four Points Funding has done over the past four years to make $80 million in Opportunity Zone equity investments across the state of Colorado — 1) fundraising; 2) identifying high quality investments; and 3) a lot of education.
- How perceptions of the Opportunity Zones tax policy have changed over time, and the most important lessons learned in the first four years.
- The pent-up demand for affordable housing for median-income families, and the challenge of continuing to develop this product type with debt costs rising.
- Two major impacts of the current macroeconomic climate on Opportunity Zone investing — 1) indecisiveness and loss of capital gains created by a downturn in the stock market; and 2) rising cost of capital blowing up underwriting models.
- How the Fed’s policy of increasing interest rates to combat inflation may have the perverse effect of constricting the supply of new real estate developments, thereby increasing housing costs.
- The Colorado secondary markets that Four Points Funding is bullish on, including Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs, Estes Park, and Durango.
- How the Opportunity Zone policy has catalyzed investment in designated communities that would not have otherwise happened.
- Stephanie’s process for designating Colorado’s Opportunity Zones during her time as executive director of the Office of Economic Development under Governor John Hickenlooper.
- Whether or not OZs are becoming more institutionalized over time, and why big pockets of knowledge gaps still exist.
- Stephanie’s thoughts on the pending OZ reform legislation, and when she hopes it might be enacted.
Featured On This Episode
- Episode #82: Creating Catalytic Impact in Rural Opportunity Zones, with Chris Montgomery (OpportunityDb)
- Episode #103: Finding Uncommon Value in Untapped OZ Markets – Webinar Replay (OpportunityDb)
- Four Points Funding Launches Fifth OZ Fund (OpportunityDb)
- Erie, OPAL, SoLa, Four Points Win Forbes OZ 20 Grand Prizes (OpportunityDb)
- Fed Approves Fourth 0.75-Point Rate Rise, Hints at Smaller Hikes (WSJ)
- Opportunity Zones in Colorado (OpportunityDb)
- Opportunity Zones in Grand Junction, CO (OpportunityDb)
- Opportunity Zones in Glenwood Springs, CO (OpportunityDb)
- Opportunity Zones in Estes Park, CO (OpportunityDb)
- Opportunity Zones in Durango, CO (OpportunityDb)
- New Novogradac Data From 2022 Q3 (OpportunityDb)
- New Legislation Would Extend and Improve Opportunity Zones (OpportunityDb)
Today’s Guests: Stephanie Copeland, Four Points Funding
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 Jimmy Atkinson. And joining the show today is Stephanie Copeland, managing partner at Four Points Funding. She joins us today from Denver, Colorado. Stephanie, it’s great to get you back on the show. Thanks for coming on. How you doing?
Stephanie: Good. Thanks, Jimmy. Thanks for having us again. It’s been a couple years and lots have happened between, and I’m looking forward to talking about that.
Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. Lots transpired over the last couple of years since you and your partner, Chris Montgomery did an OpportunityDb webinar. One of the first ones we ever did actually, a couple of years back, early in 2020. And you were also on the podcast back then. So, it’s great to have you back on the OpportunityDb platform and the “Opportunity Zones Podcast.” I’ll be sure to link to previous Four Points Funding appearances in the show notes for today’s episode, you can find those at opportunitydb.com/podcast. But Stephanie, for now, let’s dive in. So, we’re four years now into the Opportunity Zones tax policy, what has Four Points Funding accomplished in those first four years? I know, you have been up to a lot of work over there in Colorado.
Stephanie: Yeah, you know, the last four years, we’ve spent kind of a mixed bag of time doing the things that you have to do with an Opportunity Zone Fund. One is fundraising. The second is identifying really high quality and particularly high quality for this particular equity-type investments. And third is a lot of education. So, we’ve actually invested about $80 million of equity across the more nascent part, the more outlier and rural parts of Colorado, thematically in multifamily housing. So we’ve got about a million square feet under development. We actually, as of this quarter, we have 385 units that are operational, so we’ve retired some of that square feet under development and moved them into operations.
And we’ve also invested in about seven campsites, which sound like kind of non-adjacent investment opportunities, but we found is that if we’re already in a market, being in the market with another kind of real estate backed operating business makes a lot of good sense for the team with regard to synergy. So we’ve got about seven campsites all are up and running, operational, we’ve done a lot of development there, and they’re doing quite well. And I think… you say it’s been four years, I think the pandemic has both made it kind of 30 seconds. But also, you know, when on one hand, it feels like it’s been 30 seconds, or less than a year ago, on the one hand, it feels like it’s been decades. So, we’re pretty proud of putting this all to work, but we’ve got a lot of hard work in front of us.
Jimmy: Sure, no, it’s great that you’ve got, you know, those few hundred units already operational and online. That’s been a really neat part about covering this industry since, yeah, I guess, about middle of 2018 is when OpportunityDb came into existence. Nothing had been built by then, everybody was just starting to pencil in the projections, and, you know, having different fundraising efforts for, you know, projects far out into the future. And now we’re actually kind of seeing a lot of these units, a lot of these properties and projects all across the country actually get stabilized and leased up, which is great to see. So another great success story for Opportunity Zones from Four Points Funding.
As far as Opportunity Zones as a whole go, just the entire tax policy, the incentive, whatever you wanna call it, what lessons have you learned? I know, you probably had some perceptions going into what you were doing at Four Points Funding. Have any of those perceptions been confirmed, or what has been debunked in the intervening four years since the tax policy was first rolled out?
Stephanie: Sure. You know, we didn’t really know yet how investors were gonna think about the Opportunity Zone rules for them as investors vis-à-vis, the different timing of investments that would come into play, meaning we initially thought we were gonna roll out a series of funds every six months. And we did that because we thought, you know, our investors would want to be only six months apart from any other investor in the fund, you know, because of the timing, the whole period for Opportunity Zone investments really starts the last day, the last dollar goes into the investment/into the fund. And so that was our first kind of thought.
We ended up ditching that thought pretty quickly because it’s just too laborious and it distracts too much from the actual development that you need to do, you know, putting the money to work. And so we moved to kind of vintage year funds. So that was I think, the first thing I would say we were wrong, we pivoted quickly and now we’re in the middle of raising our fifth fund, which will be for the cohort of 2023. And that really was a guess based on investor reaction. We now have a lot of data on how investors are really thinking about this, and how, really what their tolerance level is for hold periods.
The second thing I’d say that has really been confirmed is thematically, we just knew that we could go find nascent areas of demand, and use the Opportunity Zone investment to both create outsized returns, but also impact positively a problem and what some of the smaller communities were having, which is, of course, and it’s been in the headlines for a number of years now, the lack of housing, and I’ll use the small “a” affordable housing, meaning not affordable as defined by the government, but affordable to the income levels that are in that community.
And so we build to about the median income, that’s the product type that we build. We don’t try to lead the market in pricing, we don’t try to compete with subsidized housing, we’re kind of in that middle area. And we thought there was a real pent up demand for that, and that’s certainly been borne out. And we think that that’s gonna continue to be an opportunity, although navigating that in the backdrop that we’re sitting in today is a little more tricky than it was when debt was essentially free. You know, your cost of capital outside of equity was very, very low.
Jimmy: Right, right. Well, I wanna shift gears and talk about the economic backdrop that we’re facing right now in this country, and really worldwide. But, you know, we’re in a bear market, the broader equities markets are down, you know, between call it 20% and 30%, since the beginning of the year, very high inflation and also rapidly rising interest rates. What impact does all of this have on Opportunity Zones?
Stephanie: You know, when Opportunity Zones were enacted, we knew it would take some time for the market to really understand them, and to create kind of a systematic approach to Opportunity Zones where people said, “Okay, you have to improve the investment by 1x, you have to do certain things that really lends Opportunity Zone investments to greenfield development, kind of de novo high growth development, because you can’t just invest and allow…you can’t park capital, capital has to be capitalizing.” And in a backdrop, where it’s taken, you know, four or five years, frankly, a couple of years to even get the rules out, and then a few years, you know, to really form the market, people were just getting used to thinking about returns and how much the incentive added to the return, and what the real benefit was.
So, two things the economic backdrop is doing that are kind of most top of mind for me. One is when people are losing money in the stock market, they’re less likely to think about where they’re gonna put their capital gains because there just aren’t as many in period, you know, in the time, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of liquidity sitting on the sidelines, it’s just a sentiment issue. And it certainly becomes a different conversation. And that’s a whole new conversation that’s starting up.
The second thing is when you’re underwriting deals, and you’ve gotten used to a certain cost of capital, and in fact, your deals that you underwrote a few years ago, expected a particular refinance rate once it was stabilized, that’s been blown up. And so you’re looking at yield on costs relative to treasuries, you’re looking at all kinds of debt service coverage ratios that you never thought you’d have to contemplate because your cost of capital has gone up in such a short period of time so dramatically.
And I think there are so many people that believe are the conversations that men are always debating when is it gonna come back down? I think you have to get to the point where you’re saying, “I don’t know that it will,” and we might necessarily be in this kind of spike we’re in right now. But I think we’re gonna have to get used to a normalized rate that’s higher than what we’ve been used to in the past, come decade, decade and a half.
Jimmy: The industry really got spoiled, right?
Stephanie: Really spoiled.
Jimmy: With a very low interest rate environment for, you know, a decade or more, I mean, it was actually not very natural for interest rates to be that low for that long.
Stephanie: That’s right, and again, you have an environment that’s kind of normalizing, not necessarily going out of normal, but it’s just done it very, very quickly. And so when you have business cases and underwriting that are set off on a certain expectation and that rug is pulled out from under you in the middle of your underwriting, it just means you have to look at things again from a different dimension. Now, there are two things that are at play, particularly when you’re building in real estate. One is, what’s your cost to capital and then there’s what’s your cost to construction, all those relative to the rents.
So, we’ve got these competing interests where, obviously, the higher the cost to capital, theoretically, the slower construction will be, that will take some time for that to get into the market and be reflected in lower pricing. And so right now we’re still in the market with high rates and high pricing, so we don’t have really fun either side. The only pressure point that you can pin then is rents. And rents have gone up so dramatically in the past several years that I’m not sure how much more room they have to go. In fact, they’re coming down in many markets, without starting to be super predatory and/or really limiting demand.
So right now, you know, you’re thinking about, you can’t really take rents up more, you know, you’re not gonna see 20%, 30% rent increases in a year, most probably in the next couple of years, you’ve got a high cost to capital, and you don’t have construction pricing that has yet abated, or at least slowing down in its increase. And so we’re just seeing a lot of deals just fall out. And we’re seeing a lot of deals, just people just slow way, way down. The unfortunate part of that is that limits supply. And when you have limited supply in these markets, you either have higher prices, or people start leaving the market. And that is gonna be a concern perverse outcomes that exist. But I think from the Fed’s perspective it is worth it and some of the pain that we’re gonna go through in order to slow down inflation.
And so I could wax poetic about that for a long time, but I think, really what you have to do is make sure that whatever you’re investing in, you have to look really deeply at a sub market level. Can you stress test the investment and make sure that it still holds up? Would you be happy with it in a multitude of scenarios, including an unlevered, completely unlevered scenario?
Jimmy: Right. Well, I found it really interesting, one of the last things you said there, the Fed is raising interest rates to combat inflation, but at least in the real estate development world that might end up, you know, constraining supply even further, which would drive housing costs up even more. So at least, that part of the inflation calculation might be under some upward pressure for some time to come. I know it’s kind of hard to contain all these issues that the Fed is trying to combat right now, and their primary cause or their primary purpose is to lower the general CPI. But it will be interesting to see how it affects the housing supply and the housing market going forward over the next several years. It’s certainly rather unprecedented what they’re doing in terms of these huge 75 basis point interest rate bumps over the last several months here.
Stephanie: And tightening money supply at the same time. I mean, you’re theoretically doing that on both parts. But you’ve got in it… Again, I think all of us are just saying, “Gosh, we’ve got, you know, historically low unemployment rates. And there’s all these things that will lag and can create…” So unemployment, the impacts of this will lag, you know, that will happen later. Construction pricing will come down, but that will happen later. And there’s always a little bit of disconnection and dislocation in the market when you’re going through this kind of pivot, where you have things that shouldn’t exist at the same time, but they do, because you’re going through this dislocation.
And, you know, the other thing I would say is, you know, when you think about renting versus owning, you know, clearly ownership is just getting more expensive until housing prices come down. And that will be again, a sort of a long-term more lagging indicator. I think for the next couple of years, we’re gonna have a lot of unwinding to do there. And then not to say what’s the Fed gonna do to get across a global backdrop, you know, across, that’s facing in some ways, different issues that we’re facing.
One of the things that I think has been super interesting is that, you know, we’re growing through inflation and we have to acknowledge that so much of the inflation that we’re experiencing has been on the supply side and not necessarily demand side. Now, we put a lot of stimulus in the economy, and that created the demand side, but I truly believe that many of the drivers were on the supply side itself, at least for a core inflation to reach the endpoint.
Jimmy: Yeah, I think the COVID pandemic and our response to it certainly didn’t help matters there.
Stephanie: Correct.
Jimmy: You know, just to pick up one other thing you mentioned earlier, that just kind of how this starting and stopping of the Opportunity Zone industry going forward, you know, it took a couple of years for the industry to get rules, regulations around the legislation. And then right when we had the regulations, we were interrupted by COVID, and then we started humming along again, and then this…the economy kind of turned south. So it’s kind of been several fits of starting and stopping since OZs got going. But Stephanie, I’m curious to hear what is Four Points Funding developing going forward, it sounds like most of what you’re doing is median level income housing. I don’t know if you might refer to that as workforce housing or lower-case “a” affordable housing. Are you doing more of that going forward, or do you have anything else planned?
Stephanie: No, that’s what we… We really like that backstop because we believe it sits core in the middle of where household formation is coming into play. And this kind of, you know, you’ll have a constant in and outward amount of demand, just because people are either moving into or up from affordable housing or moving into a for-sale or ownership. And so we are continuing to get on the path of “little a” affordable housing, workforce housing, middle income housing in these markets that we’re going to. And the things that we look for in the markets are not necessarily we wanna be in non-NFL markets, we wanna be in markets that are adjacent and have very, very clear infrastructure elements that will continue to attract population.
So, I wanna make sure there is a good university nearby, there is a…like in the case of Colorado, we have a lot of resort adjacent communities that have a tremendous amount of need for workforce in the resorts but not an availability of affordable housing in those markets. And then I also wanna see things like markets where you’re fairly near a good airport, you’re really close to good health care, etc. So, we try to make sure we’re not going, you know, super remote, but we wanna be kind of in the under radar emerging markets, particularly around Colorado as our population disperses outside of the core metro areas of Denver.
Jimmy: Right. So, in Colorado, what are some of those markets that you like?
Stephanie: So, a couple of markets…Our first two markets I really love, we built in Grand Junction which is on the furthermost western part of the state, largest hospital between here in Salt Lake City, between Denver and Salt Lake, growing population 11,000, student university there that is affiliated with the University of Colorado, Colorado Mesa University. Big hospital system, big airport as well and expanding airport with many direct flights in and out on a very major thoroughfare I-70 across the U.S. So it has all of those kinds of infrastructure backdrops.
It also sits on some of the world class mountain biking trails in the country/world, which draws a lot of people in both from a visitation and eventually from wanting to live there. That economy is actually diversified quite a bit, away from oil and gas into engineering, software and other businesses that has also diversified the labor supply, which we really like.
The second market is a different kind of market, but equally strong for the same reason. We think there’s sustainable demand for the market, it’s a market kind of down valley from Aspen called Glenwood Springs also off of I-70, very, very close and creates a lot of workforce. It’s a labor supply market into Aspen, and we built there right on top of the transit hub, so that workforce can easily get up and down the valley to their work. And that market also has very little supply coming online, and so it’s very difficult to build in the market, which we also like.
The other markets are less known nationally, but we’re building near Estes Park, which is at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park, 4 million visitors a year. We’re building in Durango, which is this kind of oasis of very, very strong population migration coming in. Again, great college there, very strong entrepreneurial ecosystem, and also very close to skiing to tell you right into a lot of the mountain resorts in the southwest. And then we’re building in some other parts of the state that are less well known but have similar type of tailwinds.
Jimmy: That’s great. So, I want you to imagine now, Stephanie, that you’re talking directly to a policymaker who needs to make a decision on whether or not he or she supports the OZ legislation or OZ extension going forward. How would you sell the OZ program to that individual? And if I could lead you a little bit, what positive impacts primarily have your projects had on community so far, and would those projects have been as impactful but for Opportunity Zone funding?
Stephanie: Well, I think there’s two things I would say. One, we wouldn’t have existed as a fund unless I’d had a captive audience looking for my types of investment. And the incentive really gave the opportunity for new intermediaries like me to come into the market and say, “I’m gonna build my market around taking advantage of this incentive and impacting the communities in a beneficial way.”
So we think that absent the OZ investment, many investors like us wouldn’t have come into the market at all if we hadn’t first and full stop. And as I’ve said, I mentioned, there were so many fits and stops across the market, but it still had unbelievable success from an investment into the census tracts, these 8700 census tracts that were designated across the U.S. And there was a Novogradac conference last week I was listening to, it was in the tens of billions of dollars, and I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s been an unbelievably successful investment. Now, are all of those investments positive for the communities? I can’t say. But you have to know that absent this incentive, the vast majority, super majority of those investments would not have happened.
For us, the housing that we’re building has one, gone so much faster than it otherwise would have, it exists when it otherwise wouldn’t have. We kicked off a big…In Grand Junction, we were the first in to really start investing in Opportunity Zones there. And now there’s a lot of people behind us doing the same thing, which we think is great. And we think that there needs to be more over time coming in and incented in this way that where investors will let you underwrite to return, they otherwise wouldn’t let you underwrite towards, and particularly holding it for a long period of time.
So, I would say one, it’s a really brilliant policy. It has its flaws like all policy does. And I think many of those are being addressed in some of the potential upcoming legislation that we’re hoping is passed. And we’re hoping it’s passed because we think the market needs more time to percolate, particularly against all the fits and stops that we’ve had in the background.
Jimmy: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I’ll ask you more about the legislation toward the end of today’s episode, but I wanted to turn my attention now to your time prior to joining Four Points Funding. You were in former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper’s office, and you were responsible for nominating the Opportunity Zones in Colorado. Was there anything unique about your state’s approach to doing that?
Stephanie: Well, I think we were all…By the way, we had 90 days, maximum 120 days to make a nomination.
Jimmy: It’s a very quick turnaround time, right?
Stephanie: It was a very quick turnaround, so I don’t fault any of the states and what they did, but we kind of looked at this taking a step back, and Governor Hickenlooper was actually really catalytic in this, he said, “Listen, let’s start with the end in mind, let’s say this incentive is meant to catalyze things that otherwise wouldn’t occur on the positive way. So let’s take a look at all of our…” We had 500 eligible census tracts. “Take a look at all of them and just start indexing them based upon investability, adjacent infrastructure. And then on the flip end of that distress, and really look at, where are we gonna be able to have a Goldilocks impact on a particular census tract?”
So for example, there are many eligible census tracts where the train had already left the station. They were already on a high path to growth, already a lot of investments coming in. And this actually would have just fueled a fire that was already burning really, really hot. We eliminated those. We essentially said, “Hey, we’ve seen in the last five years this kind of growth rate, even though in 2010 these census tracts were distressed, we’ve seen them move out of that. So let’s eliminate those.” On the flip side of that, there were a lot of census tracts that had zero ability to attract any capital, I mean, nothing that we could actually think of, or even make up in our minds. And so we essentially weighted those using this index pretty low. And then we looked at the rest of the census tracts and we just stack ranked them based on the way the algorithm, it’s not quite an algorithm, the index application was applied.
From there, we then did a lot of qualitative interviews across the state with county commissioners, municipal leaders, enterprise zone managers, where there was a lot of overlap, and essentially said, “What would you do with this? How would you use it? How would you figure it out?” And that moved things around a little bit. And mostly because the state had a strategy of really trying to continue to accept population growth without overcrowding, dispersion across the state, a population was a very strong kind of thing on everyone’s mind. We thought about how do we move people into the more remote markets, and I’ll call them rural markets, but these aren’t tiny remote markets as the way you think about it, move them more across the state, so as to be able to continue to accept the population growth without the overcrowding that can exist in high dense urban areas. And so we moved, we shifted some of the zones into the rural parts of the state that had high investability index scores. And that’s how we did it, yeah.
Jimmy: That’s great. I know your state certainly gave a lot of thought to the nomination process, probably more than a lot of others did. I know that EIG held you guys up as a star child, so to speak, a star pupil under the OZ program. So, great work there that you and your team in the governor’s office did way back in, I guess it was when, the beginning of 2018?
Stephanie: 2018, right after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed. And by the way, EIG, I can’t say enough about the work they’ve done in helping to catalyze this incentive and continuing to do that. So they were also really thoughtful with us because again, we had a very short period of time. So, you know, it wasn’t just, you know, our own thoughts going into this, we had really great people helping us do that as well.
Jimmy: Absolutely. No, EIG is fantastic. I think my viewers and listeners probably agree if they’re familiar with their work. Oh, let’s move along to Opportunity Zones, who’s investing in them? I guess question for you, are Opportunity Zones becoming more and more institutionalized as the marketplace matures? Do investors really understand how to utilize OZs yet or does a huge gap still exist, a huge knowledge gap? What are all your thoughts there?
Stephanie: Yeah. No, I think there are still big pockets of knowledge gap. I was on the phone with an investor on Thursday of last week who I was introducing Opportunity Zones for the first time, and they had a fairly large game they were working with. Most of our investors are high-net-worth individuals that, you know, where tax management is part of their investment thesis, you know, what they do, and this is a really good way to blend, you know, kind of tax efficiency with real estate investing in a way that goes beyond what a 1031 exchange would do, or other kinds of real estate development would do.
And so I think that, it feels to me like the whole market knows about Opportunity Zones. But I’m surprised every day when I talk to investors who are just getting to understand it, even accountants, even, you know, very, very highly qualified. So it just takes… I mean, this is not something that has been a big brand campaign rolled out in the U.S., you know, where people are seeing this over and over again. So it absolutely is, in the pockets of investors we’re working with, yes, it’s becoming more well known, but there’s still a large swathe of the population that doesn’t understand it that could benefit from it. So I think there’s a lot more room to grow, to go.
And the kinds of investors we’re seeing, as I mentioned, mostly high-net-worth individuals or other funds that have kind of mission-aligned or thematically asset-class-aligned targets that come in alongside as we do that as well.
Jimmy: Right. We saw a lot of… I don’t know, something you just said made me think we saw a lot of commercials for crypto during last year’s Super Bowl, maybe we need one or two Opportunity Zone commercials for the Super Bowl coming up this February.
Stephanie: Yeah, maybe that’s a… you know, I don’t think that we’re gonna… you know, again, crypto can probably at some point, will hit, you know, every point on the tail of the, you know, consumerism. I’m not sure Opportunity Zones will. So maybe there’s not a real benefit to do that, but I would like to see it become more commonplace, you know, a common understanding of how people use it. And mostly because when anything’s new, and it’s getting headline news around, it’s just about, you know, making the rich richer or doing things, a lot of the benefits are lost in the noise and people don’t wanna share. It sounds interesting to share the positive benefits, it’s lots more interesting to talk about the nefarious work that goes on in all those evil people. And I think the longer time we have, the more obvious is gonna become the positive impact this has had. So I think that we just got to keep on doing the work we’re doing. And, again, we’ll talk a little bit about this in a minute, but I’m really, really hoping that the legislation that has been proposed is enacted.
Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m trying to use this podcast platform as one small voice in the noise…
Stephanie: Good.
Jimmy: …to try to push some positive stories forward. Well, let’s turn our attention now to legislation for the last few minutes of our time together here today, Stephanie, what are some… We talked about it a few minutes ago, but what are your overall thoughts on the legislation? And I know you’re hopeful that it will pass, when do you think it might… And by the way, for the record, we are recording this toward the… let’s see, where are we? We’re in late October.
Stephanie: Late October.
Jimmy: We’re a couple of weeks away from Election Day, so I’m not exactly sure when this episode might air but that’s when we’re talking right now.
Stephanie: Well, I’m hopeful, although… I could not handicap this. So I am hopeful that it passes before the end of the year, potentially even in the lame-duck session, but I don’t know enough about what’s going on day-to-day on the Hill to say whether that’s possible or not or probable. I’ve also been monitoring quite a bit with the help of some of our partners, it seems like the modification itself has bipartisan support. I like that it has reporting requirements, which are on the funds. It’s not a standard that you have to operate against, it’s just you have to tell people what you’re doing with the fund, we think it’s very positive. It does eliminate some of the Opportunity Zones that maybe don’t really need the catalysts anymore. And it gives the states the opportunity to replace those. And most importantly, it just gives us a little bit more time. So it just delays the exploration of the of the investment period, the starting investment period, and it gives the time for the market to form a little bit more.
I think that that kind of iteration on any policy is both natural and very, very good. Like I said, I hope that we could see it before the end of the year. Whether that’s probable I couldn’t say, you know. If not then, then probably towards the beginning of next year.
Jimmy: Right. Well, yeah, hopefully it does get passed sooner rather than later, fingers crossed. Stephanie, it’s been great speaking with you today. Thanks for all of your insights. Before we go, if we have any listeners or viewers out there who want to learn more about you, or what you’re doing at Four Points Funding, where can they go to learn more about you?
Stephanie: Sure, if you go to fourpointsfunding.com, that’s our website that has all of our funds, our current fund we’re raising for, as well as all of our projects and what we’ve invested in. A little bit about us as partners, we now have close to 20 people on the team. And we’d love to have you come visit the site and hear from you anytime. And really appreciate the time, Jimmy. It was great to talk to you.
Jimmy: Fantastic. And for our listeners and viewers out there, as always, I will have show notes available for today’s episode at opportunitydb.com/podcast. And there I’ll have links to all of the resources that Stephanie and I discussed on today’s show. And also please be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube, or your favorite podcast listening platform to always get the latest episodes, just search for “Opportunity Zones Podcast.” Stephanie, again, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Stephanie: Thanks Jimmy.