David Adelman is a San Antonio real estate developer.
The last 12 months have been the slowest of my career. And by slow, I mean it felt as though time moved slower than ever.
I suppose that pre-COVID, as a 50-year-old real estate professional, I was busier than I had ever been. The economy was roaring in Texas and all the relationships I had built over 25 years in San Antonio were yielding more than my fair share of opportunities.
And all of a sudden, the coronavirus slammed on the brakes.
In the early days of the pandemic, I reacted like a lot of people; when faced with uncertainty, I went into defense mode.
I took as much control of my day-to-day business operations as I could. For example, I changed bill payment procedures from automatic to old-fashioned check writing. I wanted my hand on the controls just in case our tenants stopped making payments. And as you might guess, some did stop.
This was the point at which it became clear as day: Relationships matter. With open dialogue, we said to our tenants that nobody should make sudden or rash decisions. Instead, we should wait to see how things would play out. I had the same conversation with our lenders.
It was particularly comforting at that point when all of our lenders were completely open to payment holidays. Fortunately for our business, enough of our tenants did continue with their payments — many with support from the various programs provided by the federal government and others from their ongoing operations or, in some cases, their rainy-day savings.
For our part, we were able to make 100 percent of our payments to both our lenders and vendors.
As the summer of 2020 ground on, it became clear to me that there would be bright spots as well as challenges. Similar to past business cycles, we would simply have to figure out the challenges.
Unlike the financial crisis of 2008 — which wore on through 2011 — I’m confident that this will be a far more rapid recovery. I feel very good about making new investments in projects that will house people and businesses in the San Antonio area.
The population growth trajectory before the pandemic is clearly back on track. It might even be accelerating. Here’s my reasoning: We don’t live on top of one another here like in New York City; we don’t have natural disasters very often (except Snowmageddon); and we have plenty of infrastructure to support population growth.
So as time speeds up again, the big lesson for me from this crisis is that relationships really do matter. Sometimes when everything is going well, people forget that. But, in a flash, things can turn and you can be sure that your relationships will carry you through.
