Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

What is the current state of the economy and real estate market? What are the opportunities and challenges in the commercial real estate market? Michael Ryan, an investor and loan broker with over 23 years of experience, shares his knowledge.

Read this episode here: https://tinyurl.com/49eua957

Based on all of your readings so far, what is happening right now?

The two fundamentals for generating wealth in the US have not changed, it's either small business or real estate. The economy goes up and down. We are having a recession right now, I purchased more properties at the peak of markets, knowing the markets were going to roll over and go down. It isn't because I wanted to, it's because as an independent contractor in the mortgage business, my income is best at market peaks, and it tanks in the downturns which are the best times to buy. My tax returns don't support it, so I have to figure out how to generate wealth through real estate, and buy at market peaks, knowing that I am doing exactly that.

Real estate is the slowest and the most boring path to wealth, but if you hang on to something for 20 years, the value is going to be up. We see the same thing with the equities market, the stock markets, spin the wheel of fortune, pick a date, and roll 20 years forward. I've property outside of Tampa, and they're talking about Tampa residential real estate stinks now due to over building, people moving to Florida seem to be slowing down, that's the headline. When you're coming off of five years of massive growth, does it make sense to have a little cooling period? Apartment buildings, after massive growth, does it make sense for the market to pull back a little bit? Does that mean that apartments are a bad investment? After Phoenix goes up 25% a year for four years, do you want to buy in Phoenix? Maybe not in year five but does that mean you're going to ignore Phoenix for the next 37 years?

As far as a recession, I've always been in the "easy landing camp", because of other aspects going on. The job market is holding up because until the job market tanks, which is a trailing indicator, we're not hitting it. The bigger challenge we're having is the two, or three years of overcooked inflation, that's what everybody's fighting right now.

Looking into the next two years, what do you think people should be doing right now about commercial real estate investing?

What an incredible time to buy! When I'm talking with people, if you're a Democrat, I'm going to play a Republican and if you're Republican, I'm going to play a Democrat. The purpose is, you don't need Yes folks around you. You need people who are going to work to broaden your thought process, challenge it and you get to sleep on it. Then, come back and tell me what you want to do, and we will execute.

Before the Fed meeting, when they lowered the rates, I put in my residential newsletter that the best time to buy was 90 days ago. When the interest rates were hitting 8% was the absolute best time to buy residential real estate in California. You had no competition, and the sellers were scared to death, so you were able to negotiate lower prices. We're in Prop 13, and lower prices mean lower taxes forever. And when the interest rates drop, we know what to do then. Now that the interest rates have gone back up, the commercial real estate cap rates are up. "Why is that happening?" Because now they're not expecting the Fed to be continuing half-percent cuts because the news is out that maybe the economy isn't as stinky as mainstream media would like to talk about. Go back historically and you start pulling cap rates to get a perspective.

Michael Ryan

mike@michael-ryan.com

What type of industrial building is Chad Griffiths investing in today? What are the downsides of the industrial asset class? Chad Griffiths, Partner and Commercial Real Estate Agent at NAI Commercial Real Estate shares his knowledge.

Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/mre9kmt4

What are you investing in right now?

I like very simple buildings that can be used for multiple purposes, and my favorite is Flex Industrial. It is any industrial building in an industrial park used for other purposes than manufacturing or warehousing. One building that I have on a main industrial road used to look industrial until we did a renovation on it. We have an office tenant in there, a hot tub store, a flower shop, a cabinet store and we just put a bridal dress company in there, all are nonindustrial uses. Most people would never think of a bridal shop being an industrial building, but this building works for so many different types of uses, that if we have a vacancy come up, we might have 20 to 30 different ideas that people present to us in terms of what could work in the building.

I love that in flex industrial the rates tend to be a lot more competitive than retail. If someone wants to be in the suburbs as an office user, you're typically going to be paying a lot less than being in a dedicated office building in the suburbs, and you could still have light industrial in there as well. It's versatile and it's somewhat removed from warehousing. The one that I have is more in the inner city limits. It's very difficult to build something next door to us to compete with us, whereas, if you have a warehouse outside of city limits and there's available land, you could go and build another building next door, and have the versatility of the different types of tenants, that's my preference. If I could buy one thing going forward, that's what I'd focus on.

There are a lot of people who are opposed to data centers. Anytime a new one gets presented, it seems that there's an opposition group that are trying to fight it and get it blocked. I understand that pushback, but we need these data centers. AI is growing at a crazy pace. We need the data centers on top of it. There's a study that said that by 2030 data centers will take up 9% of the total US grid, that's double from what it is today, and that's already coming off of huge growth in the last few years, as these data centers have become more prevalent. They're taking up a lot of power, the forecast is for them to take up even more power, and they also need water, which is, I think, an under appreciated component of data centers.

What are the downsides of the industrial?

I've said to a lot of people, don't invest in industrial real estate. The biggest thing is, if you make a mistake, it's magnified much more than any other asset class. To illustrate, imagine if you were to buy a 15-unit apartment building, and you bought it in a good area, in a city, you're always going to have tenants in there. You just might need to lower the rent a little bit. If it's $1,200 and you say, "I just want to have I want to make sure my bills are paid." and you undercut the market at $800, you'll always have tenants. It's a matter of what price you need to accept. In industrial, if you buy the wrong building, you might never find a tenant. There are horror stories that I could tell of guys that have bought a property and they've sat vacant for years. If you do that with a single-tenant building, perhaps for the equivalent price of a multi-tenant apartment building, and it sits vacant, you lose 100% of your revenue.

Chad Griffiths

www.industrialize.com

www.youtube.com/@industrialize

What are the latest news in industrial real estate? How to predict what kind of industrial will be in demand in the future? What are some characteristics of an industrial building that would allow you to have different types of tenants? Chad Griffiths, Partner and Commercial Real Estate Agent at NAI Commercial Real Estate shares his knowledge.

Read this episode here: https://tinyurl.com/mvnjh5sp

What are some of the latest things happening in the industrial asset class?

What I find so fascinating about industrial real estate is that it's such a wide variety of activities and subcategories of industrial. Ten years ago, most people just grouped industrial as one big asset class, and they'd talk about it at a very high level, and that was it. But now, we should be breaking industrial into more subcategories, because if you look at the warehousing or the logistics side of it, that's gone through a pretty big roller coaster on its own that's independent of other subcategories. And just to give you an example, there are so many warehouses, distribution centers, and logistics facilities that went up so crazy over the last couple of years that in some large markets, they were adding 10- 20 million square feet of warehouse space every year. And now, some of those markets where they overbuilt, there's too much inventory. Their vacancy rate has gone from very low to being problematic in some areas, and it's going to take some time to work through that.

If you look at other subcategories of industrial, manufacturing has still done quite well and it is coming back to North America. Manufacturing and warehousing have been on different paths. There's a new one that has only come up within the last few years, which I think deserves its subcategory, and that is the high-tech industrial which could be EV factories or gigafactories, which is a kind of broad term they use to describe battery factories. Tesla has their gigafactories, that name is kind of extended to other companies as well. You also have semiconductor manufacturing plants, like high-tech labs. Essentially, these aren't manufacturing facilities, if you were to picture Boeing making airplanes, that is traditional manufacturing but these high-tech ones are completely different and there are billions of dollars being invested. TSMC is doing a multi-billion dollar facility in Phoenix, and there's another one going up in Ohio and Columbus, they're popping up everywhere and these are massive facilities. And then the other one that you have is data centers which are growing at a crazy pace.

How do you keep up with that as an industrial investor? How do you look ahead and try to understand what you should be investing in the future?

There are two primary things that I do myself. First, you need to be in a city that has population growth for the foreseeable future. It can't be that there's population growth because there's one major project going on, and then once that project is done, perhaps jobs leave with it. You need to be in a big city where there's optimism that the population growth will continue. Population grows, everybody needs more stuff, they're shopping more, they're doing more online shopping and so warehouses and industrial investment follows population growth.

The second thing is to invest in properties that have multiple uses. If that one tenant that's in there, or multiple tenants that are in there, whether it's at the end of their lease, or they go into bankruptcy, or they get bought out and they just no longer need it, they eventually leave. I want to make sure that when that tenant leaves, that building is suitable and compatible for the next tenant without me having to spend a ton of money retrofitting it.

Chad Griffiths

www.industrialize.com

www.youtube.com/@industrialize

Why should you have a mid-term rental? What are the pros and cons of mid-term rentals? What do corporations look for when looking for corporate housing? Angela Healy, CEO of AvenueWest Managed Corporate Housing shares her knowledge.

Read this episode here: https://tinyurl.com/4uaeke3p

What are midterm rentals? Why should someone have to offer a midterm rental as an investor?

Most people are very familiar with long-term unfurnished rentals, and in the last decade, short-term rentals have been very popular with Airbnb. Those midterm rentals have slid under the radar for quite some time, but we're making more headlines now because so many cities are prohibiting short-term rentals. In New York and Denver, we have a lot of regulations around short-term rentals, whether you need a license, whether you're restricted in which kind of properties you can offer, whether it has to be your primary residence, or whether you can only do it for 90 days. A lot of regulations happening around short-term rentals so what people are finding is, instead of either selling the property, especially in this real estate market, or switching it back to an unfurnished, long-term rental. They have another opportunity to be able to keep the rental furniture there and still be able to make a higher yield than they would be renting it unfurnished.

The nice thing about midterm rentals is if you work with a corporation like ours, you could rent them to corporations in the area, so you have a really solid customer base. No one's going to do anything to their corporate apartment that will make them get disciplined at work, and the average stay is about 99- 100 Days. You do have a couple of turns a year but nowhere like what you were doing with Airbnb in terms of maybe a couple of nights and then a turn. It is a nice medium compared to the unfurnished rental.

We have a couple of offices in California where the rules and laws around renting properties are very much geared toward the tenant or The occupant. By having the corporation rent the property for a specific assignment, you're not going to have somebody end up squatting or staying there beyond their term of what they're allowed, which also allows you to keep the rental rate up with the market. Once someone moves out, you're not subject to rent control, you can set your new market. If the industry or the real estate market is on an upswing, you can certainly get the increased prices related to the upswing and it is a nice way to diversify your overall portfolio.

What are some cons to midterm rentals?

We are subject to corporations and their ebbs and flows. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's only good in an up environment, because when there's a down environment, we do see movement of employees when they consolidate locations. Maybe they're closing this office and they're going to relocate everyone to this office. If your property is located near the office that closed, that could certainly be a con.

And then, there are times where we can be affected by the overall economy, like, if the government shuts down for a week, and everyone takes a deep breath and they're like, "Oh, what's going on? How long will they be closed?" We could see pockets of times when everyone is kind of taking a breath and trying to adjust to the new economy but once they do start making those plans, like either closing places, maybe they're going to expand, or maybe interest rates are rising, and everyone's kind of taking a breath, businesses will start to adapt to that and start to make some sort of change, and that change is good for corporate housing.

Corporations do not relocate people, and they do not start new assignments in December but that doesn't mean that we go vacant in that month, but if your tenant happens to leave in December, the likelihood of us finding somebody new before

How to determine the highest and best use for a piece of land? What is a new product that is in high demand in certain areas? What systems to put in place to manage a growing company? Amy Johnson, managing partner of Y Street Capital, shares her knowledge.

Read this episode here: https://tinyurl.com/4ajk387f

How to find the highest and best use for a piece of land?

It comes down to vision. For us and our process, if it's under 5 acres, I don't want to worry about it because doing something with 3 acres is the same amount of work, and the same amount of headache, as it does with 300 acres. I'm going to look at the overview of the market, what is the need, what is the city's master plan? And just because they have something in their master plan doesn't mean they want to stick with it. What's the city's vision? What's the market's vision? What is the market demanding right now? For example, right now, I am not looking necessarily for really large lots or humongous houses, attainable housing is a lot more in demand, that means multifamily housing and townhome developments. It is not because I love the look of townhomes, but that's what the market is demanding and what is needed in the community. We've the city's vision, the market conditions vision, and then the possibility of what's there. There may also be some products that were very successful in other cities that we put it in this city.

What is a new product that is in high demand in certain areas?

We’re fitting 30 units in 5 acres that the city wanted to just zone commercial. The commercial is great if you have a specific tenant. You've to build it specifically for the commercial people. Jack in the Box wants a specific look, Starbucks, etc. We've built this product in Brigham City, and I've also seen it be successful in other cities, the market was saying "We want some commercial but we also need attainable housing, multifamily housing, or townhomes on top". We've designed this unit that is one single tax ID. It's an individual townhome. The bottom is a commercial use that they can run a business from, they don't need to get a special license and the other two floors are the residential housing. The maker spaces are usually in high demand. They sell for about $100,000 more than the typical townhome unit.

Can you share a couple of tips on how you manage things, and how you keep the company growing from a leader's perspective?

These are important: 1) Delegation and utilizing the actual systems. 2) Being able to say "no" to things that don't serve you, and 3) Set expectations, and that can be expectations for vendors, other contractors that we're working with, and civil engineers having a clear scope of work. 5) I live and breathe by my calendar, if it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist. That means even if my executive assistant and I need to work on a project, and it's just working on something, we will block that time, and we'll put it in the calendar. Or even if it's in person, it has to be on my calendar. On Sundays my husband and I go through our week and plan our week and say, "What does this week look like? Am I missing anything?"

Amy Johnson

amyj@ystreetcapital.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-johnson-358217162/

How to form a successful partnership as real estate operators, what are some of the important tools and processes to make your company run smoothly? Amy Johnson, managing partner of Y Street Capital, shares her knowledge.

Read the interview here: https://tinyurl.com/bddxjmvv

How did you partnership come about?

My husband and I decided to get into the rental game market of residential houses and we turned our own little primary house into a rental and moved into an ugly, disgusting house and kept doing that over and over. It was difficult for us to scale, to keep doing individual residential house: get the loan, qualify, find the right property, all of those things and we knew we wanted to continue to grow. Fast forward, we acquired a great amount of properties, and decided to sell some of our portfolio and roll those into some larger assets. And one of those assets, we were an LP or a limited partner in some self-storage and saw the power of that.

Then we got into land development, I needed some additional support, and that's where I met Victor Menasce, through a different mastermind. I paid him as a consultant on a project. As we were bringing on different projects, I had brought on some others and we just had a really good working relationship with different things, and they had some skills and knowledge and different things that I needed. I realized, that if I wanted to scale this, I couldn't do everything on my own.

How did the conversation start so people can understand where values come from? Why would you both want to do that?

Both companies were very successful before and I think that it is like a relationship, because partnerships are a good relationship. Instead of coming for a spouse or boyfriend having a cup that's half full, and expecting your partner to fill the other half, both of you come with a very full cup and come together, and then you get to create something even bigger. It wasn't that one person came in and tried to save or rescue or take over, that is not a great partnership. Now, that can be a business move. I have looked at other companies where I could see where I could add value. It doesn't mean you can't add value to them, but you're going to come together full and create something bigger, so that each has one cup and, together instead of making two cups, you make three.

What tools have you implemented? What has been the most helpful to your company and how do you manage and oversee everything?

One of the systems that we utilize is our EOS system, our rocks and our wigs. It is aligned and doing our level 10. If you have a good EOS system, it's because you have your priorities straight. When you have a company that is only handling emergencies or firefighting, you're not putting your priorities in straight and that's where you're not growing as well. Another system for us is Asana, but that's more for our project management standpoint. I used to use Google Doc to make my to-do list, and I'd share it with my assistant. Good tracker, but there's more accountability with Asana.

Some individuals say, "The last thing I want to do is taking four meetings a year of two days each, plus every single Friday for two hours to go over our rocks and wigs and our issues lists, and things like that. If you're busy, sometimes that can seem overwhelming and I was grateful for the structure. There were times that I was like, "I'm so busy I don't have time for this." You need to make time so that you can create it.

Amy Johnson

amyj@ystreetcapital.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-johnson-358217162/

What are the lessons learned from the very first development? What factors to look out for when looking for a land to be developed? What is the state of retail sales and leasing today in a specific market and are prices coming down? Raphael Collazo, Associate Broker at Grisanti Group Commercial Real Estate, shares his insights.

Read the interview here: https://tinyurl.com/ymmwthzz

What is happening in your area and market?

Probably similar to a lot of people around the country, transaction volume is down significantly year over year on the buy and sale side. Leasing activity has been pretty active over the last year or so. The sales side had a slowdown, but on the leasing side, there's been definitely an uptick. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that although we see some negative signs in the economy, with the unemployment rate ticking up, inflation's still not quite under control as of yet. For whatever reason, the consumer still is spending a lot, which is probably a bad thing long term, but in the short term, it seems to be keeping a lot of these enterprises afloat. On the retail side, it's been a very active last year or so. But, regarding investment real estate, it's been affected. I work with a lot of people who are looking to do development, especially in land acquisition, and ground-up construction, and that's been very slow over the last year or so.

Are sellers coming down on price at this point?

Some are, and a lot aren't. I think what it comes down to is the staying power. There are a lot of sellers out there that do have bank notes that are coming due. Now, the kicker is that a lot of banks are trying to work it out with the sellers, especially if they see that there's a path towards them ultimately being able to be compliant soon. Banks aren't in the business of owning real estate, so they don't want to have to get foreclosed on the property and then have to go through the whole process of getting it off their books. In most instances, if they see a path toward the seller or the owner being able to perform, they're usually going to be able to work things out with the owner. Now, there are also a lot of sellers out there that own the properties outright, and they're just like, "Hey, we'll wait around and we don't have to sell right now." There's no real urgency and so, do I think that there will be a mountain of distress? No, I don't think so, but very optimistic over the next 12 to 24 months that rates are going to start coming down and transaction volume is going to spike because there's a lot of demand. It's not like people don't want to buy stuff, it's just kind of we're at an impasse. And so, once the gap is bridged, I think we're going to start seeing significant volume.

What do you look for? I'm briefly guessing multifamily projects are being built in the area.

You look at residents. Rooftops for retail are huge because those are the demographics that are ultimately going to be shopping at the places or eating at the places that are going to be nearby. We look a lot for different city initiatives that are kind of pushing for certain things to happen in areas. I follow closely with different rezoning that are taking place, though, these are all publicly available. By the way, you can go to our metro market, we have the Metro council that votes on rezoning that is taking place. If you just look through a list of the ones that are being heard every two weeks, it's a treasure trove of information.

Raphael Collazo

raphael@grisantigroup.com

www.linkedin.com/in/raphaelcollazo

What is the current state of the real estate market and is there a recession coming up? What are some investment strategies for healthy investments? Jeremy Roll, president of Roll Investment Group, shares his knowledge.

Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/ykutphd6

What do you think is the state of the market now? What's on your mind in terms of the economy and your investments?

On the economic side, one of two dominoes has fallen that is going to impact investors in general: 1) interest rates spiked up which caused a lot of other domino effects and a huge adjustment in prices. When there's a 20 or 30% price adjustment in the stock market, everybody calls it a crash. I've not heard anybody call it a crash but that's factually what's happened here on the real estate prices. Some assets have gone down more, and some have gone down a little less, but on average is 15 to 30%. And I think that's domino number one. 2) The domino that I am still waiting for is a recession that I think is a very high probability based on macro data. And then when you get that, you would typically have a stock market crash. Unfortunately, this time around, there's a direct correlation between the length and an inversion of the yield curve, and how long that goes for, which is at a record right now. If you were to chart it out, which I've seen and I've done, it implies a 45 to 50% stock market crash, which even when I say that I can't picture it, but that's what theoretically should be happening, taking history and applying it to today in terms of the length of inversion.

I'm bracing for a very major second domino to fall and not a lot of people are talking about. A lot of people are talking about interest rate cuts, I'm expecting at least one and possibly two before the end of the year. But I think what a lot of people tend to forget is that the reason why they cut rates is because there is a recession or a recession is about to happen and the economy is doing bad. It's not just randomly happening.

We had some interesting data today. They released the CPI data, it was -0.1 month over month and it was at 3.0% over a year, that's the regular CPI. The core CPI was at about 0.1%, I think 3.4 but it's trending down. There's a very high probability that it's going to continue to trend down because 43% of the CPI is comprised of what they call the owners’ equivalent rent, which is a highly likely 18-to-24-month lag indicator of rents. The CPI number has been overinflated for a long time.

How many deals do you have right now under your belt? And how are they doing?

I'm highly diversified because I have been doing it full-time for so many years. I'm currently in over 60 active LLCs, and I've been in over 150 to 200+ over the past 22 years. They're all different because some of them are from the 2000 era and some of them are from last year, or even this year. One thing that I think was very important is I didn't invest in any floating rate bridge loan deals, which was very difficult to not do because in 2020 to 2023, let's say, literally 90%+ of anything I got was that. If you wanted to invest in anything, it almost always had to be that, but it didn't match with my bucket, which I typically look for a 10-year fixed rate loan long term because I'm looking for predictable cash flow. I sidestep that so I'm not dealing with any of that, thankfully, although a lot of people are and I feel horrible about what's going on right now.

Jeremy Roll

jroll@rollinvestments.com

Today we celebrate our 200th episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z podcast, I will share some of my most recent learnings and observations, some are in mindset, some are related to real estate investing.

Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/2vy2tnhz

Real Estate

Every single deal has multiple problems you will have to overcome, a friend of mine that has been building multi family projects in California for several years told me that for each problem you must "block and tackle”, and I have never heard anyone say that there was an “easy” deal, especially in development. In fact, they say “if there was ever an easy deal, they all happened before I started my career, we were only left with the difficult ones”.

Another thing I learned is that buying a portfolio of properties for a discount is a fantastic way to invest. You not only get a discount on them, but you can turn around and sell a couple of them individually for a higher price and keep the other properties. As far as the car washes, I got 3 of them, and a self storage facility, and I got a discount on everything because I bought a portfolio, plus I negotiated a price reduction. And today, 3.5 years later, with the sale of that 1 car wash, I could have paid the entire mortgage for the 3 car washes and would have had money left.

I have also been working on partnerships with people that know their field very well but don’t have cash to invest, for example employees working at commercial real estate firms that are very good at what they do and haven’t thought about doing their own thing, or incredibly driven individuals. Say, you have 5 partners that are very capable, each working on a deal, yes your slice of the pie is smaller, but you now have 5 properties that you’re working on with very capable people. Regarding partnerships, you must do your due diligence on them, for me, it works to get to know them over time, see how they act and react to certain hurdles, see their integrity, and then I will partner up with them after I know them for a while.

Mindset

You may already know this first one and that is “Readers are leaders” indeed, I try observe what common traits highly successful people have, a lot of them did read a lot in their childhood, some of them started reading in their adult years, but what they have in common is that they do read a lot. The reason that this makes sense is because we can read one book and, no matter how amazing it was, we forget most of what we read. However, when we have “reading” as a regular thing in our lives, a lot of the messages of these books are very similar, they’re just written in different ways, and it’s through repetition that this information begins to stay with you for the long run.

Another trait that I have observed from some very successful people is that they experienced different extremes in their lives, wether they experienced poverty, or lived in a country that had a lot of problems, or even if they were born with a silver spoon but their parents made sure that in the summer time, they’d spend half of the time working at a farm doing hard labor, and the other half with the time they’d spend at one of their parent’s friends companies doing an internship. The common trait was that they had seen the good life and the bad life and that made them very driven. They are also very curious people and good listeners.

Earlier this year I realized I was becoming very negative with all that I was learning about what is happening to our country, I was not sure if this is how it has always been and we now just have more access to this information, or was it indeed getting worse. I have my personal opinions on that, but I decided to delete social...