Leveraging Operational Data to Improve Lender Confidence in Commercial Real Estate

Introduction to Data-Driven Real Estate Financing

Drew: Welcome back, everyone, to the Peak Property Performance Podcast. I am your host, Drew Hall, and today we are going to be talking about how data and digital strategy change the cost and the access to debt in commercial real estate. I'm excited to introduce our guest today. We have with us Dr. Thomas Schneider. Thomas, welcome to the show.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Thank you very much for having me here.

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. Let me give the folks a nice intro as to who you are and why you're with us here today. So Thomas is the founder and the CEO of Finloop, which is a B2B real estate debt marketplace and loan management platform operating across Europe and the United States with a background in both finance and technology. Thomas has spent his career improving how borrowers and lenders connect, benchmark, and underwrite commercial real estate debt. Thomas specializes in leveraging data to reduce financing friction, enhance due diligence, and help owners secure more efficient, better priced debt. He brings a global perspective on how operating data, digital maturity, and cultural attitudes toward transparency shape the future of CRE financing. I love that. Transparency. The transparency and the visibility and how data impacts all that. So Thomas, welcome again.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Pleasure. Thanks, too. And I couldn't have put it better together than you just did. So you keep your work for us.

Drew: Excellent. All right. Very good. That's great. That's great. All right. So let's start off here about how the operational data has an impact on the financing side. As we know, lenders really do care, not just about the property's location, the rent role, the sponsor name, but they care about how a building is run. So let's discuss some of those details behind that how. How a building is run. How is lender confidence impacted by detailed data around the things, the normal things of operating a facility like this? The maintenance history, system performance, downtime, capex planning. How is lender confidence impacted by detailed data around all of those things?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: I think that's a very important point and it's often overseen by most market players because they think once they secured the financing, then the job is done. But the real work actually starts after you get the financing. So now we have to do all the loan reportings that are required. Of course, you have to do the obvious ones. And that's what is the rent roles, proof of insurance, annual reports of the company, all of that. So that is a traditional important part. But what more and more gets important, of course, is how you manage and operate a property because this is important for revaluations, which the banks, depending on where they are, they have to do it twice or every three years to update their data on the valuation. And then, of course, they need to know in what shape or conditions the properties are. And the more information they have on this, the more influence you as a borrower, you have to ensure that it goes the right direction, that you don't end up with a valuation that is unfavorable for you and will might cause you a covenant breach or something like this. So that's an important part that is often overseen. And also how you distribute during the whole loan process, share the data with the lender is an important factor that people often don't see because banks have internal risk report ratings and see how do they evaluate you as a borrower. Do you provide the data on time? Is it accurate? Is it complete? And if you provide that proactively and complete, you will get a better internal risk report rating with the result that if you need to refinance, the chances that you will get refinancing is higher and the terms might be better because that's at the end also a cost factor for a bank because it's a risk factor and the cost factor how much you have to chase you for this. So long story short, it's an extremely important part, which is very, very few people talk about it. So I'm happy to do it today.

Proving Operational Quality in Real Estate

Drew: Yeah. No, that's good. That's a perfect segue into this next question about how do owners and operators prove the operational quality? So here we have this data that we're talking about. What does that look like in terms of gathering the data, packaging it up however is appropriate, presenting that data and working through it? How do owners and operators ultimately prove that out?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, I mean, the easy part are the rent rolls. So this is the stuff you upload and you manage. That's the easy part. The most problematic part where we're like, how do you manage your assets? Of course, if you do a rehab, that's also obvious. You can show an invoice, you can show a rehab, the elevators or we have the facade or the roof, but there's the smaller maintenance parts. They were very tedious. You also have to understand who is the person on the other side. Most of the lenders don't have the time to really dig through all of this data. So I think there's where, for example, today AI is extremely helpful. What we see people doing is that you collect a ton of data and then you can feed it into an AI system to basically summarize it nicely because at the very end, A, the people are technically often not knowledgeable enough for it and they don't have the time for it. But if you basically get it all summarized with a nice AI summary tool, plus you have the hard data as a backing to prove that what you're saying is true, I would say that's the golden standard these days. And that's where I see a lot of development happening in the markets that you can do this off of all these providers who measure how buildings are managed and how they're run and all these intervals. Because I think that is the important part. Also, like how often does an elevator break down? It's a good indicator actually for a lender to see like, oh, is there a maintenance gap or not? And if you use the data in your favor, you have a competitive advantage. It's new. It's not that common yet, but I think today it's a big advantage for you to negotiate your terms and then the future will be mandatory.

Drew: Yeah, that's good. I'm glad you mentioned that, that that's what you're seeing from your perspective, too, that it is relatively new. It's definitely not penetrated a long way into the market. But I mean, are you seeing this operating data improving underwriting conversations already?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, the banks don't require it yet. So that's where we at least don't see that. I mean, of course, ESG, all this environmental stuff, that is important. That is required even today. But I'm a little bit critical about it because in Europe, for example, we don't have real standards yet. There's thousand five different standards for it. I think we don't have a gold standard yet where everybody agrees on. But on the other data, it is not there yet. And the banks take it if they get it, but they will not force you to get it because they don't know what you can give them. And again, I think it's also what you can give them. If you just collect data, and that is, again, the problem of a lot of these providers, they just collect data, but they don't create it and turn it into a nice report. That data is overwhelming. It is difficult to read. And at the end, nobody will look at it. So I think you really have to spoon feed it to the lender these days and to really make it that he can also explain why he uses corporates in his assessment of valuation of any other part of assessing the risk of that loan portfolio that they have.

Drew: Yeah, that's a fantastic point. You're right. I mean, it's definitely possible to collect some data just for collection's sake. It doesn't actually have real impact on what you're trying to accomplish.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, it might have impact for you, but maybe you can read it and understand it. But again, you always have to look at your audience. Your audience needs to get it.

Challenges of Siloed Data in Commercial Real Estate

Drew: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Well, so let's think about this. Like oftentimes, one of the journeys that we see commercial real estate operators and owners go through is from starting with like this siloed approach where they focus on one particular either system or maybe one particular vendor is telling them, hey, I've got these two systems in your building and hey, I can bring this into one spot where we will hold your data. So you will absolutely have data for this one system or maybe these couple of systems. So hold on that for just a moment. As we think about like we know that lenders evaluate risk holistically, but most CRE owners can still only present fragmented vendor owned or vendor specific data like I was just talking about. We write in the book, in Peak Property Performance in the book itself, we talk about this data like philosophy, kind of what you alluded to, Thomas, where you push past this siloed data about any one or couple of building access systems, building monitoring systems on this quest for like a holistic multi-system campus wide correlation opportunity, really. In terms of that property visibility and transparency that we started with at the top of the show here, in terms of that visibility and transparency, how far can one of these single vendor dashboards take us? Like you mentioned elevator maintenance. That's one thing that's really important. I guess maybe that's what I'm talking about in terms of, that's a good comparison, I should say, in terms of a single vendor dashboard. It might just be about an elevator like you mentioned, but all of the surrounding components in the building, the physical spaces that can impact, one can impact on the other. What would you say about, are you seeing that it's mostly single vendor dashboards like that, where people have to kind of independently pluck details from independent systems?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, I mean, it's a pretty new trend that we're seeing that we're starting to monitor buildings besides from the rec fold perspective, which we always did, because it was obvious and it's the easiest one to monitor. I mentioned the elevator because it was one of the first systems that I came across with. Of course, we see the heating as well. Heating is a big part of it and well, and then you can branch out and all the granularities you can imagine and the prop tech world is developing fast. So you can see a lot of island solutions, which focus on one problem. But exactly, I think, I mean, all of this helps better than nothing, but combining it all together and to being able to draw like a complete holistic picture on how your problem is performing, of course, would be the end goal.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: And then you can also use it and adopt the language for technicians. Technicians need a different language to worry about than the lender. And again, then now we get back to the audience. Or if you want to sell your property, I mean, that is another report. And so I think getting the reports on is easy because once the data is there, you, with AI, I'm a big fan of it because it really summarizes most of the reports. And if the hallucination will go down the level of that, which I think it's the speed of how it developed, I used AI systems a year and a half ago. And for the first time I felt like, Oh, it's not worth my time. It's not, you know, it doesn't help me. The quality isn't good enough. And these days I almost, I'm almost becoming too lazy to read a long letter. I just say, summarize it for me. And I trust it because the quality of this is good enough. And I think with the ability of process, a lot of data, because you, these collection systems produce a lot of data, a ton of data. And that's actually, that is where I think that alone would have been extremely tedious without AI to be, to, to monetize it and make it easily accessible for certain groups, because writing this together and collecting this data and analyzing it is tedious. So, but I think with this in combination, well, that's the long story short. Yeah. I think that's, that's where we'll go and we will have it. I think the benefits also of this is that the problems that I've seen with a lot of property owners in the past was their machines were analog. So they were not connected to anything. So, well, then it's, then I was always also questioning, well, how do they want to track this? What device do they put on something that just doesn't want to talk to anyone because it was never made for anything like this. But these days today, even your washing machine has an app and is sending data. I mean, since even the most trivial machines are able to communicate, any new heating, any new filter, any new pump has this embedded because it's a necessity these days if you want to sell much. So I think we were motivated to do this in the past, but it was difficult to really implement because a heating that is 20 years old, well, it's really tough to really measure a lot there. But it will get easier and easier. And I think we will have, and it will be completely mainstream. Actually, people will laugh about our conversation or wonder about our conversation in 10 years, I think. And people will say, oh, yes, I mean, it's like.

Drew: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, having, you know, a lack of visibility into some things is already kind of comical in some ways. I mean, like you mentioned a washer and dryer in a home. You're right. You're exactly right. For the first time ever, I have an app on my phone for that as well, you know, and my timing, using a timer on my Apple watch seems like old school now. Thank you. So that's, that's exactly right. Well, and, you know, here, as we're talking about, you know, the siloed versus cross silo holistic view, it really becomes powerful when, you know, you move to start with, you move from analog to digital, each, each and hopefully every system that you possibly can, you get them connected to this common digital infrastructure, as we talk about and get that data flowing as much as possible. And then, like you're saying, plugging it, plugging it into an interpretation engine, like using AI, yes, indeed. And making those correlations that you would not otherwise be able to make is incredibly powerful. You know, HVAC, we mentioned it. All other forms of energy in the building, occupancy, maintenance. I mean, you can preemptively plan or preemptively predict so many things based on all these other inputs that you're able to analyze when you, it just starts with getting that data from all of these different varying systems throughout the property. You know, and, and again, not just for data's sake, but for efficiencies, for quantifying that operational risk as it applies to debt, like what we're talking about today, those are really big needle movers.

Addressing Financing Friction in CRE

Bill: So I think it's a good tee up kind of in this next topic about financing friction. Financing friction itself is often not just due to a capital shortage, but it can be part of this visibility problem that we're talking about here. From your perspective, what would you say about why debt is more expensive and slower in some markets and how this good, clean data that we're talking about can help change that?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, that's the reason why we found a FinLoop in that regard, because we have seen the debt markets all around the world in Europe as in the U.S. is pretty intransparent. The U.S. isn't generally always more transparent than Europe. So in all fairness, we have to give the U.S. market that, or I would say the Europe is always five years behind of the U.S. So, but on the other side, even if you look at today in the U.S., I mean, you had a lot of changes in the U.S. You had the S&L crisis in the eighties, then you had the rise of CNBS in the nineties, and now you're moving back to originate and distribute. So it's a little bit like, so the banks are slowly coming back into the U.S. So in the past, you had, it was just broke, but it is still broker dominated the U.S. markets, but the banks are slowly coming back, but they still have a little different attitude than the European lenders. European lenders are balance sheet lenders only, American banks tend more like to originate and then to distribute, to sell this out. But what we have seen with FinLoop in the U.S. where we can provide a dramatic value to this, a lot of, in Europe, you only use advisors and brokers if you have a very complicated deal where, okay, so you need a mezzanine piece or you need a whole loan structure where traditional lenders are not interested. And then of course you also go into more expensive sources of capital. But the simpler deals, that's called like you want to acquire, stabilize in Minneapolis, more in Detroit. I mean, Detroit is a little bit, or actually it's developing better now these days, but you know, or in New York. And these are plain deals where, especially for example, the New Yorker someplace, where you have the whole lending market in actually Europe and the U.S. at your fingertips for that. We provide a lot of U.S. borrowers with European capital, for example, in the main cities in the U.S. because there's a lot of British, German, French lenders providing capital for that, and that in transparency that we have in the market, that people can go directly to them and negotiate with them directly, saves them between 50 to 150 bips, and that is tremendous. That is a tremendous potential. And we were doing this in Europe, we started in Europe seven years ago, and it was a tremendous success because it is, the market is really in transparency. And again, the brokers are expensive. You can sort of avoid this. And now we, since two and a half years, we're doing this in the U.S. helping borrowers in the U.S. to speak directly to a lender. I mean, there's nothing wrong with using Advisor in my view. If you need help on presenting the deal, structuring the T's and all of that, then it's, yeah, well, you have to pay for it. You got to service for it. If you're a professional developer and you know your property very well, I mean, in reality, nobody can better explain your project to you in theory than the Advisor. So you, by being able to directly talk to the lender, you save that 80 to 150 bips. And that is a tremendous saving. So, and that's how we started with Finloop. In the U.S. we're still fairly small. We still only do around like five to 600 millions per quarter. But we have over two and a half thousand U.S. lenders onboarded in our system. And we have around 1,200 European-based lenders. And that is also a competitive advantage, I would say, because we can give them both access to both markets. Although, in all fairness, we have to say the European market only really triggers in if your project's 30 million plus. If you need a 5 million acquisition loan, not that many European lenders would be of that size interested in it. But for that, we also have the local American lenders.

Drew: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So the European market led the way in terms of what you're describing, removing that Advisor requirement, so to speak, in those transactions you're describing. Hmm. Yeah. I could definitely see that would be. I mean, in addition to the financial impact, positive financial impact, I would think that that would have a really positive scheduling impact as well, right?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, what do you mean by scheduling, that I get this point?

Drew: Well, just, I mean, introducing whether or not the Advisor is going to be involved in the transaction, you know, like when you're introducing, like you're saying, in the European markets, having led the way to connecting borrower and lender directly without Advisor in the picture, I would just think that there would be a, when I say scheduling, like calendaring, like do you remove some pretty big logistical hurdles, I should say?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, it depends. I mean, again, I'm not here to bash Advisors and brokers. Actually, there are big users of YouTube as well. An Advisor who really helps you on structuring the deal will probably help you to get the deal even close faster. So every web Advisor, I think that what we are kind of disrupting is obviously the lazy Advisor who just connects to parties and that's it, doesn't provide the value adds, and then I do review scheduling would be a topic, but what where we definitely save both sides time and that's why also so many Advisors are using Findoo is we cut with technology, we cut down the time between two to three months for identifying who is the right lender for your project because let's face reality, an Advisor has 20, 30 good contacts, happy days. If that works out of the contact, there's good speed and everybody's happy. But also the US market financing is more difficult, especially if you want to have mezzanine pieces, you have more complex sector or refinancing in certain areas for products that are not that hot anymore, if you have a baby stranded asset, maybe with some environmental issues or energy rating issues, and now you need to identify who else would be the market and that's where I think technology again can really help you now by having a fully updated database of a few thousand lenders that it's not like an eBay style based on everybody can see what you're doing, but internally we can run it for the algorithm, see who are the matches, we anonymize it, we send it to these.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Fifty, two hundred matches, they have to confirm that they are interested in general, they don't know who you are exactly and all the details, but they confirm that this is something that would fit the lending criteria and then we directly connect you. Some people call us the Tinder of real estate debt. It's not completely true, but it's not completely from me either, because now, yeah.

Drew: Do you swipe left and right in your app?

The Role of AI in Data Management

Dr. Thomas Schneider: We don't have the swiping, but it gets to a similar point where, but we save you the time to identify where, well, but there's no match and that would be a very tedious process to identify once you run through your lender list, when to really do this and what I have seen is we have over two hundred lenders now using our system as a white label, completely like as a background tool basically. So the client doesn't even know that they use Finloop as a system and I have not seen one single advisor, even the advisors who work cross-country and that had more than two hundred solid contacts. So maintaining that relationship, that's again where technology came in, that was my idea when I founded Finloop was managing eight thousand contacts is a full-time job. People are switching jobs, lending criterias are changing, but also within the financial institution itself, it was often, we were often criticized when we started that we pre, like that we approached several people within the same lending institute. People got to me and said, hey, Thomas, don't you understand that we gave you our lending criteria? And I said, well, that's true. But the good news about real estate debt is one thing, it's still a people's business and that is something that will not be changed directly in the next five to ten years. So you need to not just find the right lender, but you need to find within the institute the right manager, like within the bank, does he get your project? Does he like it? Is he busy? Is he not busy? Does he need to fill his quota? Does he go for divorce? I mean, it goes from professional to private reasons why a deal goes further or not. And we close on average per quarter a few hundred millions of loans that were rejected by a bond lender, from lender A, the person A, and then accepted by lender B. And I got the guy in the same bank who accepted it and got it to the board because he liked the deal and he wanted to push for it. So that's good and bad news for real estate. You can't digitize everything on the debt side, but you can, technology can help you to identify the people who are willing to listen to you and get your project.

Bill: Yeah. Wow. That's really compelling.

Future of Underwriting with Performance Data

Drew: Wow. Yeah. That seems very transformational. So let's talk about the future then. How will the underwriting process evolve as operating energy performance data becomes the expected norm?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, I think that the whole loan management process and like the whole holding an asset because when you do a commercial and real estate investment, so you have asset topics and you have finance topics. There's almost no investment of financing in real estate because of the positive leverage effect. So it's very advisable to have that on real estate. And I think that where the market is trending to is that people are collaborating and working together and combining the prop tech with the fintech part because managing basically that you have a software that managed the assets and collects the data and shares it with the asset managers. So that's again going on the property level, but then uses the same data because all of that data you need as well for the financing parts and even for the exit parts. If you want to sell the property, you will need that information.

Drew: Yeah, that's great. So that's fair. I think where it goes to digitize it as much and just streamline it because it's super important and it helps in every aspect.

Steps to Be Financing Ready in Commercial Real Estate

Bill: Okay. So what are a couple, maybe two or three concrete steps that owners should take now to be financing ready?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, I think it starts really from the moment when they acquire the property, basically setting up a data room with all the data that they had in the past, which is of course not digitized, but they need to have it. And actually some of the data can also be very nicely read in and be then integrated into the whole system to digitize them basically. Then of course looking at going to the property level, collecting as much data they can, given how new or how old the property is, there might be limitations on, again, as we spoke before about if it's a 20-year-old heating system, it might be difficult to collect a lot of data there, but collecting what they can and connecting it also with that data basically have a central collecting point and then determining how you want to distribute this and optimize the distribution of it. Because again, some data, the very technical data is important for like our elevator example. He just needs to know, okay, why was there a hiccup or like why was there a glitch somewhere? And that's all that he cares about. But then you can also use this to the finance part where you see if you bring this to the next maintenance round, if necessary. And that data can be used then in your overall cash flow analysis to see what is your surplus on the property. And that would be super interesting to be shared with the lenders, for example, to get that look. There are many strings then because the lenders will want to see is, A, have you done your maintenance? Are you thinking about it? And if there's something coming, is it budgeted in? And if they see that you have all of this under control, again, they will say to your less risky client because you have everything above average under control, then they can give you better refinancing options or even like offer anyhow another refinancing. If they're uncomfortable with you, they might just want to get out of it and they will refinance. And I think that is the future. And the earlier you start, the sooner these softwares are available that can provide this service. I think they're happening right now because now we have, again, with AI, the ability to fairly affordably work through that amount of data. I think that was a problem in the past. I think five years ago, three years ago, when I heard about all the data collection, I felt like, well, that's nice. So you collect a thousand data points on my heating system or my elevator. But how on earth am I going to get this digestible for the specific audience? And that part, I think, is being solved now in the industry. It's still early.

Bill: Agreed. Yes.

Drew: Yeah. Yes, definitely. It's changing fast.

Personal Insights and Career Advice from Dr. Schneider

Bill: That's right. Okay. Thomas, before we wrap up, we always like to take our guests up to what we call the extra floor. That's just a quick set of five questions here just to get to know the human side. It's not so much conversational, just like first thing that comes to your mind, gut level response. It's five questions. So here we go. Number one. What is a book or a podcast that has shaped how you think?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: That's a good question. I mean, TED Talk at the early stages, I think it got a little bit too commercialized, but the early stages of TED Talk, they were very influential and very interesting and pushing.

Drew: Yeah. Lots of creativity in that venue for sure. Okay. Is there a great piece of career or life advice that you've received that you can think of?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, that's a tough question. I think what is the most important in your career is that you love what you're doing because A, you spend probably more time in your work life and with your family if you look at the hours. And if you don't enjoy what you're doing, I think you're wasting your time. And what I tell my interns or younger employees, I always tell them, I have a good and a bad news for you. The good news is you will become very likely a hundred years old. The bad news is you're not prepared for it. Neither your parents nor society basically told you what that means for you. It means that you have to think about relationship differently. So now we have to survive a marriage for 60 or 70 years instead of 30. The vow before the death that divorces you was invented in 1815 and life expectancy there was like 34 years. Well, it's easier to survive a marriage under these conditions where you only have 15 years to survive or thrive together. And then if you have to do it for 60, so that is one. But also career-wise, I think you have to think, what is your career after your career? Because I think how we grew up, oh, you retire at 63 in Europe or in the US, maybe 65 or something. Well, these days you might legally be able to retire, but you're too young to really retire and your brain is too fresh and you probably shouldn't want to retire. So think about what is your career after your career that you can really live to the fullest. I mean, of course, there are some industries that if you work heavy construction work, maybe you need to retire. But even then, you will still become older and think what do you want to do afterwards? Because just being a private gardener for 20 years might be a bit boring. So that would be one thing I would raise.

Bill: Yeah, definitely. And all that is such a mindset thing. I mean, I remember talking with my dad when he was coming up on retirement and he's like, oh, what will I do in retirement? And I remember saying, you know, what won't you do? Like you have all of these interests and natural abilities that you can just explore. It's almost like unending. And that is how it ended up playing out. So it's interesting. I mean, I think so much of that is a mindset, which is true about a lot of things in life too. That's good. Okay. What's a habit or a practice that consistently makes you more effective?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, I think I learned that on my first job when I got my PhD, I was 26 and I thought that all of the world belongs to me. And I got my first job at Ernst & Young, working in the data room. And the work was really stupid at that time because it was really like we had to check if the data was complete by basically going page by page by page and seeing if this thing is complete. I was utterly frustrated after three weeks doing this because I felt like why did I study for so many years and that's what I'm doing now? Even though pay was good, but you know, the cat only has one life, so you want to make something out of it. And then I realized, well, maybe I should start reading the documents as well. And actually that by reading these documents, maybe not the best interest of my employee at the time, but I really made sure that they're complete. I learned a lot. And what I'm trying to get to is whatever you do in life, don't find excuses.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: And the second thing I do with people, and that is actually quite tough, but it's extremely rewarding. Whenever I have a negative notion about someone and we normally would say, Oh the guy is boring or he's this, or that. I ask myself, why do I think like this? Because that is the easiest way out. If I can say someone's an idiot or he's boring, this and that, well, that's the easy way out to justify why I'm mentally not willing to engage with it. So I force myself to be interested and to listen, to share the So I force myself to be interested in every person, even if I don't like a person. And by doing this, I learned tremendously from a lot of people, which I would have disregarded otherwise quickly.

Drew: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay. Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: It's interesting. I, I just, I moved now to Mexico and, but I work a lot in European times. So I'm always, I'm like at one o'clock at night, it's eight o'clock in Germany today, for example, and that's a big market for me. So I now get up every night at one o'clock. So to be ready, like I need 30 minutes to get ready. Then 1.30, so 8.30, 9.30, I'm ready to work. A lot of people actually ask me like, wow, that must be painful. And it's horrible. I have a story for you. Actually, it turned out to be the best life change I made because what I do now is I, if I work from one, I work until 12, then I'm basically done. I've, and I can actually go for breakfast to see my kids. I can, then I go for lunch. Then after lunch, I think it's important to sleep an hour. So I have a nap with my daughter and then I have basically another until seven o'clock because you need to go to bed at seven, 7.30 to maintain. But until 7.30, I have basically time to go to the gym, to see my kids, to whatever I feel like. And I, now I feel like I have one and a half days in one day. And then I also asked myself, what did I really do from 7.30 to 11 PM? And then in reality, the only thing I did is I watched Netflix, HBO, and I did things that actually not, you know, didn't, were not that important in my life. So, I haven't watched Netflix or anything like this for a long time now, but I can really say, if you can handle the sleep just six hours a day, and I think it's possible, then you, of course, during the weekend, if you sleep a little bit longer, maybe, I think it's the most efficient thing I've done. So to answer a long story short, yes, I think an early bird, extremely early bird, you only go nightclubbing during the week, or if you're not, if you're single, you do social events, it might not be feasible, fair enough. I get it. But if you're a married guy like me, well, it's not bad. It's actually a very...

Drew: Yeah. I mean, that's powerful right there that you feel like sometimes you have a day and a half out of each day. That is, that is very enviable. That's great. That means you're doing it right. It works well.

Bill: Okay. Last one, Thomas, when you're not working, what do you love to do that recharges you?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: For me, it's really going to the gym. That is my way of, like, meditation. It's when I run, I usually go every day for 30 or an hour to run on the treadmill and then a little bit of weightlifting. And it really is, that's the, that's the, because I'm sitting a lot. So being, moving my body, that's in the, the Latins knew this, they said, insana corporea, like only a, like a healthy mind, a body gets a healthy mind. And I believe in that. And it's, so that's what I do, of course. And then spending time with my kids because my kids are very young now. So I, I'm still the hero. Their Facebook quickly change and then I become very boring. So I'm just wanting to soak in every minute of this because these are the things, so it's like spending time with your parents, family, it's, you know, you only regret it once it's gone, but there's nothing you can do about it. So that's, those are the two things, friends, family, and keeping myself healthy.

Conclusion and Contact Information

Bill: Excellent. Yeah. Okay. Well, how can people find you or contact you? What's the best way to locate you online?

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Well, the best is to go on www.fingloop.com. So there is a people's page. You can find me there. You can find my LinkedIn profile. You can just connect with me. If you're looking for financing, if you want to chat about real estate, I really love our industry. I choose it for a purpose. It's, I think it's an industry that allows us to be very creative and in go different areas. You can go into almost architectural style. Then you build a house, you can be a financial architect. Like I was the last years, like how to structure a deal. That's an art in itself. And so I've worked quite a bit in the US now, and of course in Europe as well. So whoever wants to talk with me about real estate, wants to use Fingloop or wants to do a podcast, always be welcome to contact me. I think creative community exchanges.

Drew: Fantastic. All right. Well, Thomas, thank you again very much. It's been a great conversation today. We really appreciate you joining us here on Peak Property Performance. And to all our listeners out there, we thank you for tuning in as well. And if you haven't already, please do follow and like and subscribe. And we will see you on the next episode of Peak Property Performance.

Dr. Thomas Schneider: Thank you very much for having me.

Bill: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much, Thomas.