Following a Sept. 16 panel on loan restructuring, RELA brought in Adam Metz, CEO of General Growth Properties, who gave a candid assessment of the outlook for retail. "That was a big draw for us, because a lot of the people in that room had been lenders to GGP," says Bisbano. "You can have certain people come and speak when the markets are good. Given the current environment, what better than to have the CEO of a major company going through a creditor workout?"

Although RELA's leadership doesn't direct speakers toward their topics, the speakers often ask for input on what members want to know about. "All bankers are dealing with troubled assets in some form," Sanford says. "So a lot of the concepts we were familiar with, pre-downturn, we're now becoming experts on. But as an industry, we're still managing good assets as well as bad, good relationships as well as troubled and sometimes very adversarial relationships. The industry is still wearing many hats and there's still learning and great interest in gathering information on the outcomes of other deals and other situations."

It's the kind of information they can't get from a daily newspaper, Samford says. "From a lender's standpoint, there's just not enough there," he says. "If you're a general schmo, you read it and think there's a lot of information, but if you're a lender you want to dive much deeper." For example, the restructuring panel this past September, which featured experts that ranged from ratings agencies to CMBS underwriters, "really got into the details. That's the kind of topic people want to hear about."

In the current environment, "you can only talk about the acquisition environment for so long, because there really isn't one," Sanford says. "It's less about who's buying what than about people managing their way out of the current situation, and all the particulars behind it."

With that said, the content going into this year is more forward-looking than it was last fall, when both the Boston and Washington, DC chapters also offered restructuring panels. Bisbano comments, "People have had their fill of 911-crisis topics and maybe want to know where the economy is headed or what the new strategies are for developers and owners, as opposed to looking back over the disaster and destruction we've had for the past 18 or 24 months."

Launching a podcast series, of which Fascitelli's will be the first, is one of several ways RELA hopes to provide more content and thereby value to members. One web-based technique they'll be rolling out is conducting "snap polls" among members, featuring multiple-choice questions about the issues of the day. For the larger real estate community, "We hope to be able to answer questions about the marketplace directly from our members' responses" to the polls, Bisbano says. "We want to make more use of that, so that RELA is not only an educational and networking platform, but perhaps also a voice for the real estate lending community."