Mr. Walter: The company was formed in 1993 when the Marriott Corporation split into Marriott International and Host Marriott Corp. We are actually the successor company to Marriott Corporation, so we are the ones with an 82-year history. At the time of the split, most of the real estate went with our company and only a few of the employees; and most of the employees and very little of the real estate stayed with Marriott International. Originally the idea behind the company was to grow and be a real estate owner, and generally the concept at the time of the split was for us to buy primarily Marriott-branded hotels. That changed in 1998 when we did a 1.5 billion transaction with Blackstone and bought a number of hotels that carried other companies' brands. That's the year we also converted into a real estate investment trust and really started to head down that path of lodging ownership. At the point in time that we split from Marriott, the TEV of the company was probably close to 3 billion. Today we're looking at north of 11 billion, and that's despite the fact that we have a stock price that's certainly depressed from where it was two years ago. As you think through what's happened since we converted to a REIT, we bought a number of assets and sold some. Probably the largest transaction that we did in the last several years was a 4 billion acquisition of roughly 38 hotels from Starwood. Starwood was pursuing something similar to what Marriott had done, which is to lighten their load in real estate ownership, and really rebalance their company more towards being an operator and a manager as opposed to a real estate owner.
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