Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

Today we will review a real property example from a real potential buyer who wants to get into commercial real estate investing and prefers a NNN leased property. Are these investments worth it at a 5% Cap rate? Let's find out.Tell us a little bit about you.I'm in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex area in Texas, it's a very rapidly growing area in the suburbs and since there aren't many opportunities within the metroplex, they're rare to come by. I'm a nurse practitioner, I work full time, and am looking to get into commercial real estate investing, specifically NNN leases, since it's a little bit more passive opportunity and I don't have to worry about, as they say, termites, toilets and taxes. So that helps me out in that sense. I've been doing a little bit of research and came across a potentially good opportunity in the Metroplex area, and has a very well regarded corporate tenant.Unfortunately, the cap rate is between 4.5 to 5% and this will be my very first investment. I'm looking to certainly grow my portfolio, and this is a true NNN, where everything is taken care of. I feel like it's great for me to learn from it, and not get too overwhelmed, just starting off. But my hesitancy with this is, since the return is a little bit lower, I'm concerned about what interest rate I would get from the banks, and if I'd be breaking even. I wanted to reach out to and see if you have any guidance, and what you would recommend for someone in my position who is a novice and strictly coming in with a foot in the door.I can totally understand how you are torn because, from what I understand, you're very busy with work and family, so there isn't a ton of time to manage properties and deal with leases and all of that. But at the same time, the cap rate is pretty low. I'm going to ask you a few questions, and if you don't know the answer we'll just go ask the broker at some point and take it from there. What is the downpayment looking like right now?It'll be at least 20%, the price is a little over $900k, and the lease doesn't expire for another 7-8 years. There are three, five year option renewals after that lease is up in about eight years.Are these five year options? Correct. Each option is five years.So you have potentially another 15 years on top of the eight years, correct? Are there yearly rent increases, or is the rent increasing every five years?The lease commencement was in August of 2009, in the years one through five there was no increase, but then after that, they've had a 6% increase. And then after that, it's going to be 8% increase every time there's a renewal.About 1.5% a year, increase, give and take. When does that 8% kick in?It doesn't kick in until after this 7-8 years is up.So you're going to have that 5% cap for the next seven years. And then at that point, they can either leave or renew at an 8% increase. And this is the one that is a true NNN lease, you're not taking care of anything. Correct. It's mailbox money, as they call it.If there is any money left.That's a good point. Exactly.One of the super critical things to take a look at in the lease is, I don't know about Texas, but in California the taxes can be very low if they have owned the property for X number of years. And then once you purchase it at this new price, the taxes will go up significantly. I don't know how it is in Texas, but I would definitely make sure that in the lease, if it's the case for Texas, they are okay with any new tax increase, regardless. A lot of times these major tenants will negotiate a maximum tax increase of X percent. So that's something that is your number one priority to check there.Join our newsletter here: www.montecarlorei.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

After working in the industry for 30 years, and managing 5M square feet of assets worth $1.5B, what are the best pieces of advice out there? Chris Rising, co-founder of Rising Realty Partners, will share his extensive list of lessons learned.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3qs9CY8What are some of the scariest things besides COVID that you have dealt with? And how did you get out of them?I do have a couple of stories but one that sticks out, it still makes me want to throw up. We were buying an asset in Pasadena, it was in office, it was after the GFC, and I got introduced to a tech celebrity who was a wonderful person, I like him a lot. He made a ton of money twice but had never been in real estate. He had hired someone to do his real estate because he wanted to diversify. We found his project that we were buying, it was a bit distressed, we were bringing in at the time a competitor to We Work, so we were going to have some leasing and the whole deal made a lot of sense. I talked to him on the phone and I said, Look, we've been underwriting this, our money goes non refundable on Friday, but if you're not there, we're not going to go non refundable. And he said, Yeah, we're going to, I think, yes. It was mumbling "yes" and I said, okay, good. I remember calling the broker and saying, let's let the money go non refundable. It was a million dollar deposit. Literally about an hour after I called the broker and the escrow, I get a call from one of this guy's representative saying, We're not 100% sold, we're going to want to look at this deal longer. I said, no, no, no, that's not how real estate works, I just relied on a commitment from your boss, and I just put a million dollars at risk. He said, Oh, what are you talking about? You can't do that on that. I had a good 24 hours before the principal called me and said, Chris, I apologize, I didn't realize that, of course I'll honor what I'm going to do.What are the top three biggest lessons learned in your career?1. The smartest person in the world is asking the most questions. And those questions sometimes come across as dumb questions. When I was young, I thought asking questions was annoying, and I shouldn't have a place for that, I should just be there and take my notes. What I realized is that people that aren't asking questions are not engaged, and probably not someone I want to do business with.2. You don't have to be a jerk in business. However, you also have to understand that business isn't personal. That took me a long time. We're a family company, I want everything to be great. But as long as you treat people with respect, and you're ethical, and honest, that can happen in business and it's not personal, deals can blow up. I'm always amazed how people don't realize that a Pro Forma is just a guess. We don't have crystal balls. We try to make it as educated as possible, but recognizing that it's not personal allows you to sleep at night a little bit better3. No matter how important all your business seems, and all that stuff, it's all very fleeting. If you're not enjoying your family, your life, it's a hard road to get to your 50s and realize that you don't have a great family, and you don't have a great thing. My father is 80 years old now, he pretty much moved on from the business. And I think of things that were so important 15 years ago, and they're just not now. The people that were important aren't in the business anymore.Chris RisingThe Real Market With Chris Risingtwitter.com/chrisrising#retwitwww.chrisrising.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

How to manage a huge economic hit on your main asset class? How to buy and add value to properties today? Christopher Rising, co-founder of Rising Realty Partners, shares his expertise with us.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3GMTaaFHow did you deal with 1.5 yrs of lockdown (so far) when your main asset class is office in the Los Angeles area?What did we do from day one was, we did try to work with our tenants. When someone came to us or someone chose not to pay the rent, the first thing we would say was, give us your financials, let’s be a partner here, and let us see. You kind of smoke some people out when you do that, because I can’t tell you how many law firms felt like a lease was a one sided obligation, and they didn’t have to pay if they didn’t want to. But that’s not true. We’d start with the, Hey, show us the books. Then we went to have you applied for a PPP loan, because those were specifically designed to pay salaries and to pay rent. And then if they didn’t do that, we said, have you gone to business insurance, but we knew that they weren’t fronting any of this. But if someone worked and tried to solve a problem, we worked with them. And in fact, I would say that every one of our retail tenants, our office building, I think to a tee, we are working out deals with them now, because most of them haven’t paid rent in two years, so that we can keep them, but they also need to do things like extend their term or something. We’re not trying to be punitive, and say, you owe us late rent. We’re just trying to almost close our eyes and pretend the last two years didn’t happen. We got through it. We paid our mortgages and all that. But in return, you have to give us a little more term on your leases. But it still hasn’t been figured out. I think that on the multifamily side, there are a lot of problems that are hidden right now. Because you can’t evict people, all you can do is served with a notice to pay. And I think when all of this gets lifted, you’re going to see a lot of residential tenants whose credit gets really destroyed.I would love to hear about your last acquisition, how did you analyze it find value add, and why did you end up purchasing it?I’ll talk about the last one, which was in Las Vegas, we’ve taken our industrial strategy and really focused on something called multi-tenant light industrial. I think when people talk about industrial today, they sometimes forget, there’s different forms of industrial real estate, the one that is trading at unbelievably low cap rates are the big box, logistics based industrial buildings. You think of a big Amazon center or distribution center, or just anybody who’s moving product, those are trading at very low cap rates are very hard to buy, because you have to buy them in scale. You’re not really selling one offs, it’s usually portfolios. But people are really buying the cash flow stream and the quality of that credit. So that is not an area we have participated in, even though my father when he was in development, that’s what they did. We’ve taken a different approach and focused on this multi-tenant light industrial product that really isn’t getting built much anymore, especially in major CBDs. It’s not getting built, because it’s hard to get entitled, if you’re going to build something in industrial, you’d prefer to build the big box industrial, it costs less, you get more for your money.The Real Market With Chris Risingtwitter.com/chrisrisingwww.chrisrising.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

How should you raise capital for your first real estate deal? What is the lifetime value of your investors? Should you get investment commitments or a deal first? Dave Dubeau has been investing in real estate since 2003 and shares his insights.You can read this entire episode here: https://bit.ly/3jKirbMLet's say we're ready to do a first raise. I have a list I have relationships, people know what I have been doing. What is the first thing that I should do?The first step is, in my opinion, to create a target group of prospective investors that you're going to really focus in on. If you don't have a track record with raising capital yet, who is going to invest with you? A big mistake I see a lot of people making is they go out to the general public, anybody with a pulse and a checkbook, they think could be a good prospective investor. For somebody to start investing with you, they need to know you, like you, trust you with their money. If you're going out to strangers, they don't know you, don't like you, they certainly do not trust you with their money. That's a very difficult hurdle to overcome off the get go.Should people ask how much they would be interested in investing before or after getting a property under contract?The chicken in the egg question. My personal opinion is, let's get some soft commitments from prospective investors first. Let's get our investor ducks in a row and then let's go looking for properties. Because when you have a deal on the go, yes, that's a good motivator, but the challenge is, you're desperate. You need the cash for this deal, and that desperation, whether you want it or not is going to ooze out of every pore in your body. I far prefer to have these capital conversations first, and get people to even sign off on an expression of interest. That's very powerful. It's not a legally binding document, it just says something like, I am willing and able to invest the sum up to $100,000 with Steff, in one of her upcoming real estate deals anytime within the next six months. Sign off on that, put the date on it, it's still not a guarantee, but that person is much more likely to invest with you when you've a deal than if they just said, Yes, I'm interested.You talk about the lifetime value of an investor, can you elaborate on that? A lot of people don't think about that, and it's very important to know.Let's pretend we're looking at one of your self storage facilities. The purchase price is $1.5M, you need to raise $500,000 and let's say you raise it in five $100,000 chunks. If I come into that deal with $150,000, and that gets me a quarter of the investor pool, then the question would be, how much is that asset going to be worth to Steff over the length of time that you're going to hold? Let's use a 10 year time frame just to have a book end. Over 10 years, what do you think the total gross profit on that property is going to be, the increased value in the property, the cash flow over that time, the mortgage pay down, all of these things? Let's say $2 million and let's say they get half and you get half. That means that deal is worth $1 million to Steff over that 10 year timeframe.You divide that by the number of investors, five, so that's $200,000. That's what that investor is worth to you for that deal. Now, are they only going to invest in one deal with you? Let's say they invest in four deals, if the average profit that they're worth to you is $200,000 and now they invest in four deals. That's $800,000. Now, let's say they're happy with the investments they're doing with you, they will refer other investors to you, and that person would be worth something similar. That's the math that everybody should be thinking about.--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

What should you look for in an industrial property that you are looking at buying? What are some of the strategies to make deals a win win for the buyer as well as the seller? Darren Smith, Principal of Solid Growth Properties LLC will share his industrial investing insights.You can read this entire episode here: https://bit.ly/30jr5HbWhat do you look for in a property that you decide to buy?I'm looking for a property that is in an area that I know that if it goes vacant, I can get it rented without a ton of trouble. And that be like what are my rates on the property? I need to know, how much is the lease on this property? Let's say I'm buying one that already has a tenant in there, and rent is $8/sf plus NNN. If the market rate in that area is $7/sf plus NNN, I'm a little bit nervous, because if that tenant doesn't renew in a couple years, if I paid full price for it, I'm paying above market rates because the market doesn't bear that. But if I'm getting $8/sf plus NNN, but market in that area can bare $10, I'm really comfortable with that.What strategies that you use to make some of these deals a win win?There are so many creative ways of putting deals together, you have to go into the conversation with an open mind with letting the seller know you're there to figure out the best solution for them. I'll tell you a funny thing that happened in the last couple of weeks. My assistant mailed out several months worth of marketing for me on the same day, and I have had more seller conversations in the past couple of weeks than the rest of the year combined. What that has given me is this, it has helped me with my skills of talking with sellers. I've been doing it for years, but you can always improve. Two, I find the things that I keep saying over and over to different sellers. One of the things I keep saying is, Hey, you know what, I may not be the best fit to buy your property, to be honest, I buy a lot of properties, but I definitely don't buy everyone. If you can just let me ask you a couple of questions about the property, to understand that situation and then about your situation, what you're trying to accomplish, what are you hoping to get out of the sale?What has been your best and worst industrial investment so far and why?I'll start with my worst one on a flip that I tried, I'm actually still involved with this, we're at a liquidation stage right now, I'm not sure how much I'm going to lose on this but it's probably going to be a six figure number. I didn't do any homework on this one. It was a flip that I bought sight unseen. It's across the country, I've never been to that town, I was doing as a favor for a friend because he got involved with it. I sent my one of my employees over and he said, Oh yes, we can do this, we can make it happen.As far as my best deal, the seller of this property had been trying to sell this property for a couple of years, he was getting close to the the end of the lease with the Army Corps of Engineers. It was a government tenant that was in the building, it was in an area that's a bit more remote. He'd been trying to sell this property and couldn't do it, it was listed with a broker. I sat down and talked to him. I said, what exactly is it that you need? What are you trying to accomplish? And he said, this is the number I absolutely have to have, and I have to have that because of these things. I said, Okay, great, we can do that. How much of that do you need in cash at closing, he told me the number, it was less than 70% of what the sale price was. We were able to work out a deal where I got a 70% bank loan on that property, it took about 15 different banks, but he held a 30% second on that property.Darren Smithdarren@solidgrowthproperties.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

What is the state of industrial investing today? What are some techniques you can use to buy industrial properties? Darren Smith, Principal of Solid Growth Properties shares his tips.You can read this entire episode here: https://bit.ly/3FrseNdWhy did you decide to focus on industrial? What is the state of that asset class today?Like most investors out there, I started in the single family and dabbled in multifamily and mobile home parks. I actually got hurt really badly in mobile home parks during the last crash. I definitely took some lumps, made some money, so I was able to kind of recover but I’ve tried a lot of different things. The usual transition from people who are doing single family houses, flipping, wholesaling, rentals is to go into multifamily, maybe they get a duplex or a fourplex. And then they scale up from there into larger and larger number of units. I have several good friends who own hundreds and in some cases 1000’s of units in multifamily and are doing it very successfully. What I learned from watching them, though, that it is ultra competitive, my friends are really sharp people that are working really hard. They got really creative and they put these deals together with syndications on cap rates that I would not be comfortable doing. And I didn’t know if I could compete in that market. They’re just better than me.You have a different and maybe unique approach to find industrial properties, please tell us a little bit about that.All I did was I took the things that other people taught me on the single family side, and I just applied them to industrial real estate. I take those things, and I step them up to a higher level of quality. If you’re marketing to houses, maybe you’ll have someone from South America doing your cold calling, maybe you’ll mail them a postcard or more generic type things. Whenever I’m dealing with the commercial side, having that level of sophistication as high as you possibly can when you’re interacting with these people is important, to show your credibility.Are you finding properties only through mailers today?That is the vast majority of properties that I come across and that I’m talking with, direct marketing. That said, I do love working with brokers, two of my favorite properties came from brokers.A lot of times brokers are very protective of speaking to the sellers directly, how do you go about that?I don't go around it, I really want to work with these brokers. Just as if I'm talking with a seller, I always want to try and find out what are they trying to accomplish? What is in the seller's best interest? How do I help them? I have that same conversation with the broker, Hey, Mr. broker, Mrs. broker, I bought a lot of properties, this is kind of how I work, this is what I like to do and what I like to accomplish, what I found has been really successful in the past so that I can get you your full commission as soon as possible is if we could all just sit down and see if there's something that we could work out. I don't know if I've ever had a situation where I talked to a broker and I said, Can you go ask the seller if they're open to terms? That's a DOA conversation. The deal is dead because the first thing people say is no, I want all cash, top dollar. Well, sometimes that property may sit on the market for six months, they may want all cash top dollar, but what if maybe I could come to them and say, What if I paid you top dollar, but you held a 20% second against the property after the bank. So you're going to get 70% from the bank, you're going to get 10% of my cash, and you're going to hold 20% as a second. That gets you the price you're looking for.Darren Smithdarren@solidgrowthproperties.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

What are the tax benefits of investing in real estate? Ted Lanzaro, CPA and real estate investor shares his knowledge around tax planning while investing in real estate.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/2Wg8nyyWhat are some of the benefits of investing in real estate from a tax perspective?The biggest tax benefit of investing in real estate is that you can make net income from your investment, you get your rental income, you pay your insurance, mortgage interest, real estate tax, your other expenses, and you have money leftover. You can then apply what's called depreciation against the property. Depreciation is the rational allocation of the purchase price of the property that you can then deduct on an annual basis. Typically, residential apartment buildings depreciate over 27.5 years. For example, you pay $2,750,000 for an apartment building, you'll get $100,000 of depreciation expensive a year, which means that I could have $100,000 of net cash flow from that building offset the depreciation and have zero taxable income. But I still have $100,000 in my bank account that I get to keep that I don't have to pay taxes on.The other benefit is that you can leverage your investment with debt. If I buy stocks, for example, in the stock market, and I want to buy $20,000 worth of stocks, for $20,000 I buy $20,000 worth of stocks. If I have $20,000 to buy real estate I can buy a $100,000 property, you get a mortgage for the other $80,000. That gives me the ability to get a return on investment that is typically higher than what I could earn in the market, combine that with the fact that I'm not paying any taxes on it, and it's an even higher return on investment.When real estate professionals are able to deduct everything and pay no tax, there are some drawbacks. Can you elaborate on what some of those drawbacks can be?The primary one is recapture when they sell the property. That guy for example, when he goes to sell that property, he has $400,000 of recapture tax. It's a deferral, it's not an avoidance. With cost segregation you make money on the time value of money, because you're going to pay that money back when you sell the property eventually, unless you do a 1031 exchange. In this scenario, I've already warned him that somewhere down the road, when you sell the property, there's going to be a big capital gain, because your cost basis is a lot lower.And that's something that I'm talking with people all the time about, because everybody has been using bonus depreciation and taking huge offsets against their earned income, the ones that qualify as real estate professionals, and I keep telling them, when you sell that property, you will have to pay those taxes. Also, that bonus depreciation is actually set to phase out. Starting in 2023, it goes down from 100% bonus depreciation to 80%, then 60% in 2024, 40% in 2025, 20% in 2026 and in 2027 it's gone. The strategy now if you sell properties is I'll just go buy another, if I can't do a 1031 exchange, I'll go buy another property and just get new cost segregation and wipe out the gain on the property. That strategy has two more years of useful life, and then it's going to become a lot less valuable, and then it's going to be gone.What about the fact that they might not be able to get a personal loan?That's a really good point. I was just telling someone this exact same scenario, which is good tax strategy and good asset protection don't always correspond with good finance. Sometimes you can take so many tax deductions that you can't get a loan. Typically, banks will add back depreciation, it's not a cash flow issue, it's an allocation of the purchase price.Ted Lanzaro(203) 922-1742ted@lanzarocpa.comwww.lanzarocpa.com--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

Are short term rentals a good asset class to invest in? Tim Hubbard will share all the knowledge he has acquired over the last 10 years investing in real estate, and managing thousands of bookings online since then.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3kcZ8bCWhat are some of the benefits of investing in short term rentals?There are quite a lot and there are some that I just realized recently, like eviction moratoriums, for example. That was never a thing with short term rentals because if someone is staying in our properties less than 30 days, normally they don't have any tenant rights. So we had quite a lot of flexibility there. Along these inflation lines, all the money that we printed to help the economy with everything that's been going on, we've had a lot of inflation, and that's one of the reasons that rents are going up. With short term rentals, we can change our rents every day. We don't get locked into a year lease and under-rent our properties, we can use tools, and there are tools to do all this. We can set up a tool that'll change our price everyday.The biggest reason or advantage that I've got into short term rentals is literally the fact that some of my properties making like five, eight times the amount of rent I was making with a traditional long term rental, like a single family home. Back in the day, if I was thinking that I want X amount of dollars a month to become financially free through properties, I could literally divide that number by five times. And that's the amount of short term rentals I need to accomplish the same amount of money. That was the main reason, the biggest advantage, coming down in income.How do you choose a market within this asset class?I choose the market as I have always chosen markets, based on the fundamentals, a place where people are moving to and not moving away from, where the employment is diverse, there's not just one industry, and it's landlord friendly. And that's a big thing, because aside from all the traditional fundamentals we look for, for a good real estate market, we have to take it a little further if we're looking at finding properties to do short term rentals. And the big one is regulations. But before that, I'm looking for places that has good fundamentals, where people are moving to, and there's population growth. The Sunbelt areas in the US have been growing a lot. So I think those are good areas. But then the landlord friendly one is a big one. And I found that there's a pretty good correlation between landlord friendly cities or states and short term rental regulations. If the city's very landlord friendly, then it's probably a little more likely that they're going to be more friendly towards short term rentals as well.What are some of the scariest things about short term rentals?The scariest thing that someone's going to trash my house and have a party. And that's possible, that could happen. But there are lots of ways to prevent that. There are lots of tools now like noise sensors, that can notify you automatically if the noise goes above a certain level.Another thing that might be scary is, when you first start, if you're taking a long term rental, for example, and you're going to turn into a short term one, you wonder, How good is this actually going to do? How do I forecast occupancy and things like that? What if I put all this furniture in there, and it's vacant all year? It can be a big investment to put all the furniture in there.Tim Hubbardwww.restmethods.comShort Term Rental Riches Podcast--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

Sometimes you come across a property that has good potential, that you can add a lot of value, but it’s not a couple of hours away, it’s couple of flights away. I believe that today, with technology, we all can manage and operate properties remotely and I’ll be sharing with you what I have done to make things easier.You can read this entire episode here: https://bit.ly/3n6mOQLInstall Nest cameras on all properties, both outside and inside the building, I can see what is happening at the properties at anytime, I can even talk to people (I’ve never done that before LOL) through the cameras. It notifies me if there’s any movement and you can change the settings to notify you as little or as much as you’d like.Install an alarm that notifies me when each employee arms and disarms any property. I get a notification on my phone and email. This helps my virtual assistant to match employee timesheets if we ever think there’s a discrepancy. I can also arm and disarm all of the properties from my phone.For the car washes I also installed a coin counter, prior to purchasing it we had no idea how much money was coming in, now I can see exactly how many quarters are coming in each day. That way when our employee collects the money, we can check against that week’s report and the bank deposits.Get a Grasshopper account, grasshopper.com is phone over the internet, you can download their app on your phone, your employees can download it on their phones and desktops as well and take the calls. It helps keep all communication in one place, from texts to call forwarding, all while showing only your business number to them.Phone Apps / Final Tips1. Everything that can be on autopay is on autopay, all the electricity, gas, internet. I know that some people don’t like that because some vendors may increase prices without notifying you, but when we do our accounting and bookkeeping we check all of that, so autopay makes it very worth it because it saves us a lot of time.Make sure to have all of these documents on your phone as well, if they’re on Google Drive, download the Google Drive App on your phone, if they’re on Dropbox, make sure to have that app too. It will make your life a lot easier,2. Always keep track of your money, even if you delegate all of that out, I have heard many horror stories from multi millionaires that started delegating that part out and let go of triple checking their numbers, and their people started to take advantage and they had money stolen by actual employees.3. Keep your employees accountable, have them send you a list of things that got done that day, have daily or weekly meetings with them, find out what’s working, what’s not working, where’s the bottleneck, what do they need help with.4. Download your business credit card apps on your phone, that way you will get notified every time something is charged to your business account, not that you’ll be checking every single transaction, but you will be asking your employee “What is this charge about” once in a while so that they know that you are checking.5. Download Venmo and Cash App so you can easily pay vendors and issue refunds if needed, instead of mailing checks.6. My favorite places to find talent are upwork.com, fiverr.com and thumbtack.com. Thumbtack is mostly for vendors like lawn mowers, cleaners, etc, and just like the first two, you can find the highest rated vendors and work with them.How do you manage your properties remotely? Let me know here: www,montecarlorei.com/contact-us--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

What are NNN leases, what are the benefits, and what's the best way to find national tenants? Adam Carswell answers all of those questions, he has been working on NNN leases for over five years and shares his insights.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/2XGgCV5What are Net leases?Net lease or NNN lease to put it simply, there's no toilets, no taxes, and no termites. I find it really interesting how this particular asset class gets overlooked in the commercial real estate investment space. I think it's for a few reasons, one, there really isn't just a lot of information out there on it. And then a lot of these assets are probably a little bit lower on the cap rate side of things, if you're looking for major value add projects, where you come in and make a ton on renovating the asset, then it might not be your cup of tea, but from a cash flow and stability perspective, I don't know if there are many other commercial real estate assets that exist that are as dependable as NNN leases. Some examples are Walgreens, CVS, McDonald's, Starbucks, Advanced Autoparts, Chick-fil-A, and most national brands, typically called national tenants. So you have the amazing credit backing with a lot of these tenants and wondering whether or not someone's going to pay you on a monthly basis normally is not a concern. This is another reason why, especially if you're looking for stability and cash flow, you want to check in the mail every month from Wendy's, that's it.How do people typically approach a national tenant, especially if they're just starting out and they don't have experience with national tenants?The biggest hack in meeting the tenants and the reps that you want to work with is the networking piece. So how do you go about networking? From my observation in working with Michael, who's been in the space for close to 35 years now, the relationships are very key. If there's any sector in the world of business that tends to move slow as far as adopting technology and new ways of thinking, real estate is a slow moving beast. With that being said, you might not like it, but if you want to become sophisticated in this space very quickly, you have to start cultivating relationships with the old guys. You want the people who understand retail and have 30 plus years of experience. And a lot of them didn't have Rich Dad Poor Dad to introduce them to the real estate space, and they know all the people.One place that Michael brought me to was Vegas a few years ago to ICSC, the International Council of Shopping Centers annual conference, if you are thinking about getting into the retail sector, I highly recommend getting into that network, that's where all the cool kids hang out in the retail space. Going to that conference in Vegas really opened my eyes because it aggregated the entire US and international retail space into one massive networking event. You can meet reps from BP, McDonald's, all the fast food places, Walmart, and brokers from everywhere, you always want to have relationships with brokers even though people can say brokers are annoying, you still want to be friends with them.One company that I worked for once upon a time was Sherwin Williams. Those properties are also NNN lease deals and I've relationships with the Sherwin reps now because of that. It comes down to relationships. But if you can zone in on the actual brand reps and become friends with them, I think that could probably benefit you a little bit more than just becoming friends with brokers.Adam Carswellwww.carswell.ioNothing But Net Podcast: https://apple.co/3kaSl17--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support