When Michael Levy tired of managing non-real estate assets and wanted to get back into commercial property, the self-described lifelong New Yorker and now CEO of Crow Holdings got on a plane to Texas. His mission for that 2014 visit: meet with one of the sons of the late famed real estate developer Trammell Crow to discuss the future.

That conversation with Harlan Crow proved fruitful, with Levy deciding to "uproot" his life, and move to Dallas to take the job in 2016 as CEO of the private family investment firm founded by Trammell Crow nearly 75 years ago.

Levy spoke about his winding real estate career last week at an invite-only gathering of real estate executives. From "talking himself into a job in investment banking," earlier in his career and being "thrown in the real estate group," at Morgan Stanley, Levy built on an affinity for real estate he initially didn't realize he had, he said during the annual Weitzman survey and forecast event at the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The former New Yorker said he's happy he made the move to the nation's fourth-largest region.

"Dallas has been so good to me, but people across the board — and not just in business, but people" even at the Department of Motor Vehicles "were hospitable and it was a very welcoming town," said Levy, who left Morgan Stanley after 18 years to join Crow Holdings. "It's an easy place to live and it's clear as day why people are moving here in droves."

Levy began his career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, one of the world's largest real estate investors in the early 2000s. His work found him competing with the likes of Blackstone before Levy moved to another part of Morgan Stanley's business.

Then the global financial crisis that started in late 2007 hit Morgan Stanley, which "hit a wall." Levy said. That forced him and other firm executives to attempt to rebuild the franchise.

It meant a job change for Levy at the firm, repositioning him to manage asset classes outside of real estate such as private equity, venture capital and infrastructure.

The pivot away from commercial property made Levy realize he wanted to "get back to his roots in real estate." He grew tired of playing the role of "bureaucrat" or "talking head" of a management team overseeing other asset classes without the ability to dive into the details like he did earlier while helping build a real estate portfolio at Morgan Stanley.

"It was an area where I had a different kind of familiarity and comfort and I wanted to get back into this industry, so I joined Crow," he said. Crow Holdings "is a real estate developer and a real estate investment firm. Most firms aren't built that way, they are either a real estate developer or real estate investors."

That development piece of the pie at Crow Holdings was new to Levy, who has a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. He spent the first year or so at the helm understanding that end of the business. Today, Crow Holdings is involved in a variety of projects.

"Today, we are one of the largest apartment developers in the United States, with 20 offices from Seattle to Boston and in between," he added. "We are one of the largest industrial developers in the United States. We have an active office development business, but only in Dallas at this point of time. We partner with institutional investors, with something in the neighborhood of $12 billion to $14 billion of construction activity underway as we speak."

Crow Holdings also manages wealth for similar types of investors from pension funds to endowments to sovereign wealth funds to insurance companies, with the ability to invest on various third-party projects throughout the world.

The firm has a wide range of would-be investments to consider, Levy said. Beyond industrial and apartments, accounting for about 70% of Crow Holdings' investments, he added the firm has also invested in niche real estate including manufactured housing, gas stations and small retail properties.

Here are some other topics Levy covered at the Weitzman event.

"Office space is pretty scary right now. Even though Disney's Bob Iger said employees are coming back four days a week, it's not five days a week. You go to these dense urban environments, like my poor hometown New York City, people say they aren't commuting an hour-and-a-half each way to work anymore. The office sector broadly is really hurt. That's the new whipping boy. If retail was the whipping child for the last decade, office will be the new whipping child for the next decade."

"At the real top end, employers are looking at office space as an HR solution, they want really modern, innovative, open, green space and so we are developing that in Dallas. We have a mass timber building up in Frisco, Texas, which is incredibly environmentally friendly, and a lot of corporate users have told their stakeholders they will be carbon neutral by some date and so we will develop into that theme. In retail there are two areas that have done well: Grocery anchored retail and neighborhood shopping centers."

"The real estate business is an intersection between underlying real estate assets and the capital markets and that's what makes it work. Why was 2022 difficult? It wasn't difficult because of the real estate; it was difficult because of the capital markets. This time around, the real estate industry had nothing to do with it. We weren't on the leading edge of the capital markets downturn, we were innocent bystanders."