Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z How to Invest in Retail & Grow Through Syndications
How to grow your retail portfolio and syndications? We will review the career of Aaron Zucker, founder and principal of Zucker Investment Group, they purchased 22 deals in the last 40 months through syndications. What does he look for when purchasing a retail property? What are some of the lessons learned so far?
You can read this entire interview here: bit.ly/3w5RwO2
How did you scale so fast? Let's go over your journey in the retail space and break it down to about every two months since you decided to start your company.
In the beginning I moved into my parents basement with a six month old. That was interesting to say the least, with no portfolio and not much of a plan. There was a plan, it was just notes on an iPad. We bought our first property as a covered land play in Irving, Texas, we still own that property today. It's on the border, on a great location, and we are planning to monetize that property in some way shape or form over time. Until then we're enjoying the cash flow. I'm about to break out in hives thinking about that experience, I had $50,000 of my saved money non-refundable without all the equity figured out. I was raising $1.8 million, which I definitely didn't have, from anybody and everybody who told me they would be interested in buying real estate. It was a good litmus test to see who was actually going to be a real LP in that company and who was just talking, or maybe wasn't interested in that type of deal. It worked itself out, we got the equity resolved and bought a deal.
Then some time went by and people were still feeling out whether or not Zig was real. I'm sure that's still certainly the case, we're still trying to build a reasonable reputation. But we were able to source a couple more opportunities pretty much exclusively through the brokerage community, off market. That's a testament to the quality of relationships that I had and still have and I'm always building upon which we couldn't be any more bullish on leveraging the brokerage community, and getting them excited about the fact that we not only allow but encourage them to invest in deals with us, and they appreciate the fact that we move extremely quickly. We're young and nimble and are certainly aggressively growing. The mantra about our organization is that we're super aggressive, and we are, but when we look in the microcosm of a specific acquisition, it's usually pretty conservative.
I'm a one man band at this point, I continue doing my thing, posting on social media saying we're looking for deals, hitting the phones hard, following up with the brokerage community, calling sellers, whatever it takes to procure something. Then one day, we acquired a sexy site, which was a Lululemon, single tenant. It was a Lululemon condo, and a joint venture with a group called Konover South based out of South Florida.
Months thereafter, we were able to unlock an off market Chipotle deal, at an aggressive cap rate in a great market in Orlando, we executed on a blend and extend with the tenant and then flipped out of it. We sold that property in March of 2020 before the pandemic was hitting, and there were a few other acquisitions that were a little bit more boring. Between the time that we bought and sold that Chipotle, and the disposition of that, was what put Zig 1.0 on the map and gave us some some credibility that our group was looking for, and then more most importantly, executing on value add retail deals with great tenants, Chipotle, Lululemon in very good markets like Cincinnati and Orlando.
Aaron Zucker
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