Andrew Dick: Hello and welcome to the Healthcare Real Estate Advisor podcast. I’m Andrew Dick, an attorney at Hall Render, the largest healthcare focus law firm in the country. Today, we will be speaking with traded Edge III, the president and chief executive officer of Flagship Healthcare Properties, LLC. Flagship is a privately held real estate company that owns, manages and develops healthcare facilities. We’re going to talk about Brannen’s background, the evolution of the company and trends in the industry. Brannen, thanks for joining me today.

Brannen Edge: Andrew, thanks for inviting me and pleasure to be with you.

Andrew Dick: Terrific. Well Brannen, before we talk about your role as the chief executive officer at Flagship, let’s talk about your background, tell us where you’re from, where you went to college and what you wanted to be.

Brannen Edge: Sure. So, before moving to North Carolina, I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. Lived there, my whole childhood went to James Madison University for undergrad, up in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and after graduation initially started out in banking. So, I describe myself as a recovering banker. I had gone to Charlotte for a conference, middle of my time at JMU, the first time I visited Charlotte, and was so impressed with the city. It was a clean city, a growing city, a business-friendly city. So, as I approached graduation, really all of my efforts were focused on how do I find a job in Charlotte? Which is a little unusual, Richmond has a way of bringing its natives back to Richmond, but I wanted to do something a little different and frankly, I really didn’t care what industry it was.

Brannen Edge: I wanted to find some training program that would teach me how to do some something. I found that in BB&T and joined their training program right out of school. It was actually located in Winston Salem, which is about 80 miles from Charlotte. I thought, “All right, that’s close enough. I can do a pit stop in Winston Salem and then find my way to Charlotte,” which is what I did. It was a great pit stop because I met my now wife in Winston and had a great experience with the bank.

Brannen Edge: But after about six years of working with the bank, where I learned a bunch about credit, and operating companies, and service companies, and manufacturing companies and real estate companies, I realized that I didn’t want t