Claire Cormier Thielke – The Future of Cities and Real Estate

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Invest Like the Best is sponsored by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. I'd heard of Canalyst over the past few years and became more interested after meeting the founder and CEO last year to pick his brain about SaaS businesses. Founded by a former buy-side analyst who encountered friction in sourcing, building and updating models, Canalyst is now used by over 300 institutions, including the largest money managers in North America and by a number of guests on the show. With detailed company specific models on virtually every investable public equity, Canalyst clients are able to react more quickly. If you've been scrambling to keep up with the deluge of IPOs these days, Canalyst has models on DoorDash, Palantir, Airbnb and everything in between. Their pre-IPO models are built as soon as the S1 hits and include all segments, KPIs and non-GAAP figures. If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalist.com forward slash Patrick, that's canalyst.com/patrick.
Stay tuned at the end of the episode where I talk to Canalyst customer Fenimore Asset Management about how Canalyst helps their firm better find and manage their investments.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:59)
My guest today is Claire Cormier Thielke, Managing Director of Asia Pacific for Hines, the largest private real estate investment, development and management firm in the world with over $144 billion in assets under management. Claire is responsible for acquisitions, development and new business generation for Hines in Asia and was recently appointed to the board of Zillow.
I was first introduced to Claire two years ago and I've wanted to have her on the podcast ever since. Her personal story is also fascinating. Claire finished Stanford undergrad in two and a half years and now teaches there on the intersection of technology and real assets. She was a professional track and field athlete competing for USA Track and Field and she's run a marathon on Everest, which we discuss. Aside from her personal story and some of her amazing achievements, in this episode we dive into the world of real estate investing, including how to use pattern recognition to unlock real alpha in real estate, the ingredients that make a city special and the surprising ROI of public art. Please enjoy my conversation with Claire Cormier Thielke.
Claire, this has been one of the conversations that I've been most excited to have by far for a lot of reasons, mostly because of you and second, because we're gonna cover stuff that we just haven't talked about in the show before. I think a great way to orient the audience would be with what I always call a thumbnail sketch of your career to this point. The major steps along the way that got you to where you are today, culminating with you describing sort of what you spend your days doing now, and then we're gonna dive into cities and all sorts of interesting investing topics, like I said, that are unique to the show.

**Claire Cormier Thielke** (3:30)
Okay, I'm excited. Well, I guess like a lot of people in the real estate industry, I started out with an interest in residential, 10 or 11 years old, and the MLS and the online version of the MLS had started to roll out.
I loved to get on the MLS, understand the different houses in my neighborhood. The thing is, I'm from Houston, so a city that is famous for its lack of zoning. The city was changing all the time. So I could look and see what had been an old used car lot in just a matter of a year transformed into this really interesting mixed use place with restaurants and apartment buildings and a whole center of gravity. And I just loved it. So I knew that that's what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn't know what it was called, but that's what I was, where I'd focus and went to university and studied urban planning and heavy construction. One day my advisor said that Gerry Hines was going to be on campus interviewing. And Gerry Hines was a titan of this industry. He built the entire skyline of my hometown. He shaped the skyline of most of the major cities on globe.