Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

Steffany Boldrini
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Dec 21, 2023 • 12min

How Much Have Real Estate Prices Declined?

How much have commercial real estate prices declined? Are the properties we are buying today discounted? Neal Bawa, CEO of MultifamilyU, shares his knowledge.Read the entire interview here: http://tinyurl.com/832h7ak6How were you investing in 2020, 2021, 2022?For that property, I must be honest and say there is no horror story to tell. The property did what it was supposed to do, we bumped rents by $175 from the very beginning to the end. On the last day, we had rents $176 dollars higher. So, the property did what it was supposed to, it also stayed highly occupied. You might say, it doesn't sound like a typical property, where are the horror stories? The answer is this, by stepping outside of the metro, we were able to buy the best property in this small market. We didn't have to be stingy; we didn't have to buy a really bad property in a bad area, we just bought a very nice property in a very nice area, it just wasn't in Atlanta. As a result, our process of actually running the property for years was fairly straightforward.What about today? Things have changed dramatically since COVID. In December 2019, probably three months before COVID, cap rates were low, but they weren't crazy low so we probably bought the property at around 4.7 cap or 4.6 cap but if you fast forward to six months, nine months after COVID, cap rates were completely insane. Many people don't know the answer to this question which is, when do you think cap rates in the United States for multifamily were the lowest, which means the highest prices? The answer is March 2022.How much have prices declined?Another question that I think everyone should be asking that I don't see enough is, how much have prices declined? When you ask that question, you have to go back to the first question, which is when was the peak because whenever you measure a decline, you have to always measure it from the peak. First, you have to know where the peak is so that you can say how much of a decline there is. In March or April 2022, the peak is well known because CBRE has published that and a bunch of other people have published articles around that peak. We looked at our underwriting from those days, and we were losing a lot of offers, we were still making offers because you have full-time employees, and their job is to make offers even if they're losing them. We looked at the going-in cap rate in that month for the offers that we made. None of them were offers we won and one can say that we were conservative because we didn't win any offers and we didn't even get into best and final so it's nice to look at that benchmark. And then we looked at the offers that we made in November of 2023 so now the gap between the two is about 20 months and the difference is the offers we are making today are 37% lower than the offers we were making in March. Does that mean that the market is discounted by 37%? No.What is the right price?In the absence of crazy interest rates, what is the right price for our properties? The right price is about 15% higher than it is today and at some point, we will return to that price, we are never going to go back to 37% higher, probably not for the next five to 10 years. The only thing banks know how to do when bad things happen is to cut interest rates to zero, so it will happen at some point, but until that next Black Swan event occurs, prices are about 15% above where they are today. What causes them to go to that level is simply interest rates dropping by about 150 basis points from where they are.Neal Bawawww.multifamilyu.com
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Dec 14, 2023 • 17min

How to Find the Next Hot Market & How to Convince Investors

How to find the next market? How to convince investors to invest in something that is new to them? Neal Bawa, CEO of MultifamilyU, shares his knowledge.Read the entire interview here: http://tinyurl.com/4vj3wyhrYou sold a deal today and you returned a huge amount to the investors. Let's go over the entire process from why were you analyzing that deal and what made you want to buy it.The name of the deal is Equinox at Night, which is a name that we gave it, it was called Weatherly Walk when we bought it. The property was sold today, which ended December 2023, and was purchased right about this time four years ago. We wanted to buy it in time and close in time for the depreciation benefits in 2019. The journey was one day short of four years.I wasn't looking for a property in this particular marketplace but back in 2019, I had started feeling that properties were getting too expensive inside city limits and I felt like it was a terrific market to be putting a lot of money into. As I was talking about Atlanta, I started seeing good things and then as the years went on 2017-2018, I found that I was seeing more negative things about Atlanta than positive things because inside of the city, I was starting to see pricing that was just unreasonable for the income levels. What was happening was that the incomes of the people living in Atlanta, were going up 4% a year, and the property prices were going up 20% a year when property prices go up that much, the new owner needs to raise rents, so they're forcing rents higher because everyone's buying at these new prices. And for a while that works but then what happens is that either you start seeing occupancy fall, or even worse, you start seeing delinquency increase, as you start forcing people into 40% of their income, 45% of their income going to rent and almost 50% go into rent, then you're going to see a lot of delinquency, the first time their car breaks down, they can't pay rent.How do you convince the investors that may have been used to keep investing in MSA itself?In many of our projects, you just send out an email, and all the shares are taken. We knew that we were buying a better property and were going to make a lot of money on it but first, we had to convince investors (you're not going to make any money if you can't close the property). We did a two-step approach: first, before we put the property in the contract, we were making offers and we had identified three cities not two, that were around. We started holding webinars about the true opportunity in Atlanta, and then another webinar about the true opportunity in Phoenix. "First, I'll tell you about the true opportunity webinars and then I'll tell you about how that transition into getting the property funded", this is something that every syndicator should do instead of telling everybody, "Fayetteville is the greatest city in the Atlanta metro" which never works, what we do is we started to rank some of these outside cities. We started comparing these cities and started talking about these different cities and why we felt that they were better than Atlanta itself, both for single-family and multifamily. We always tell our database, that if you want to buy single-family homes, go do it. You'll be back talking to us in one or two years once you realize you've turned into a landlord, you just wanted to be an investor. We always tell people that the single-family experience is worth it, you learn a lot, and you don't want to do it again.  Neal Bawawww.multifamilyu.com
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Dec 7, 2023 • 18min

How to Invest Wisely: Navigating LP Due Diligence & Fund Decisions

How to approach due diligence on a new operator as a limited partner? How should investors decide if they should invest in a fund or not? How should you fundraise for deals that have not been determined what they are yet? When to say no to a potential investor? Dr. Joseph Ryan Smolarz, founder of STOR, shares his insights.Read the entire interview here: http://tinyurl.com/yph2892pWhat are some of the main topics that you want to pass to passive investors and how should they do due diligence?The basis of the whole interaction is trust, you're trying to build rapport with your investors from a sponsor's point of view. From an investor's point of view, you want to make sure that you're a good fit. You have ways of thinking about things and your risk tolerance needs to fit into the asset class and the investment strategy that you're trying to do because if you're in a very aggressive fund, and you have a low-risk tolerance, regardless of what happens, you're not going to be happy. Those are the questions that I would start with.When you're starting the due diligence as a sponsor, the number one goal is to make sure you're not in a Ponzi scheme or some sort of fraudulent group. There's a lot of good questions to ask to sort of drill down on that and if you're not comfortable at the beginning, you're probably not going to be comfortable at the middle or the end, as well.During an up market, how would you recommend doctors doing their best to find out if a sponsor is not legitimate?Having made several pretty bad mistakes as a limited partner, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. When I approach a deal as a limited partner, what I'm trying to do is understand that sponsor in such a way that we can build a 30, 40-year relationship. It's not about the first deal in its entirety, because I'm willing to put in the time, effort, and cost to get to a comfortable place knowing that when these guys or girls have a deal, and they send it to me, that I'm never going to have to go through this first step of due diligence again. I'm comfortable that they're not trying to push one past me, or whatever the case may be. And that's a gigantic step. I would personally say, and I know this is going to be shocking to your audience, but a lot of times, what I'll do is, I will hire a PI to go through and make sure that some of their previous deals have not been fraudulent.If I had a fund, and I knew that the economy was about to take a turn, for example, in 2024, we all know that it'll be even better for finding deals. However, there is a lot of fear that normal human beings think that that specific time will never end and it'll be doom and gloom for a very long time so they end up not putting the money. From a fund perspective, I would personally prefer to have that cash available right now in case people get cold feet, how would one go about that, in your experience?There are lots of sponsors out there that will do that, they'll get the capital, and hold on to it. It does add liability to to the fund. If you're going to do that, you would probably want to know how much E&O insurance they have, errors and omissions, and all the things to safeguard. Is there the ability for one person to be able to extract all of the cash and run, or is there a safety mechanism where it takes two people to sign off on it? There are lots of checks and balances, and systems out there that can be put in place for a reasonable cost if the sponsor hasn't thought about that, and what happens in those scenarios, and they very well should. But it's just personal preference.Dr. Joseph Ryan Smolarzwww.storpartners.comThe Medicine & Money Show
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Nov 30, 2023 • 30min

Top Lessons Learned From 6 Decades of Investing

What are the top lessons learned over a very successful six decades of real estate investing? Tom Wilson, principal at Wilson Investment Properties, a seasoned investor in several asset classes including retail, office, multi-family, industrial and others, shares his wealth of knowledge.Read the entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/38phajz2Major Lessons LearnedMy first tip of the day is to go to Fannie Mae's website and look for Doug Duncan's predictions around what's going on in the marketplace, and he has accurately called every single rate change in the last 20 years.Secondly, operations is indeed a critical element, Ken McElroy prides himself in having come into the real estate world from the operations standpoint, and he often emphasizes how important that is. The best underwriting, the best market, and product are only as good as you can execute it. You really need all the legs of the stool to be able to have something come off successful.We always want high cap rates, low risk, and high appreciation but it's very hard to find all three, so you have to decide what is the most important to you. California has been able to generate great appreciations in recent years, but not so good on cap rates, and Texas, Florida, and other places have other things that are strong so you need to realize it's very hard to get everything you want, you have to choose which is important.One of the most important things I've learned is how different sub-markets are and how different products are. It's incredible how different they are. You look at the curves of these markets and products. The general information will give you a general concept but you can always find products, you can always find portions of the market where it can be quite contrarian to what the general information is.Don't fall in love with a deal and try to make it happen. Saying no can be more valuable than saying yes. Almost every property I've bought, I've gone to see it myself, I don't do the level of detail I used to but when you scale, you have to delegate to others. Go look at the other stores around the area, retail, grocery, etc. Who is it that actually comes in there? Market studies from the listing agents show you the one-mile, three-mile, and five-mile, what the demographics are, that's not necessarily who's in your property. As you can tell by going at nighttime, park the car, and see what comes in and out. When you make a mistake, it's tough to grieve, and lick your wounds for a while but don't run from it forever. Go back with your team and analyze what is it that went wrong or what is it we can do better next time. Sometimes we learn more from the things that don't work, than the things that do.Change your model periodically. Switch from market to market to asset class to another, whatever it goes with the time so the market. One of the things I've done that has contributed to my success is to change the model. One of the things I haven't done so well is probably not change it as fast as I could have. It's hard to leave something that was working.What's the most valuable asset that you have?I think it's the 2,000 names that I have on my phone, because with those relationships you can start over if you have to rebuild. Relationships are critical, and character is more important than competence. It's nice to have both but character is number one.And, above all, enjoy the journey. It's so easy to get caught up on every day operations and finding more success. But along the way, give back and smell the roses.Tom Wilsonwww.wilsoninvest.com
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Nov 9, 2023 • 13min

Ken McElroy: Step by Step Guide if Your Property is in Trouble

What to do if your property is in trouble? If your interest rates are doubling? What will save your deals? This is a step by step guide on what to do if your property is in trouble, from managing your bank all the way to getting multiple bids from all of your vendors. Ken McElroy, CEO and founder of MC Companies, shares this golden guide with us.Read this entire episode here: https://tinyurl.com/mry4cbnvWhat are some of the things we should be doing if our properties are in trouble?The first I always look at is what's within your control. One of the things I've started to do is really dial in on my operations. Now, I have a massive advantage because I started in property management right out of college. For the first 10 years of my life, I managed 20-30,000 units. When I step on a project, I have a checklist in my mind that I've been through 100 times. The first thing I've done is scrubbing each one of my assets. I want to make sure that my expenses are completely in order, everything's been bid out multiple times, and that my market rents are exactly where they should be. I make sure that I have the right teams in place, that I'm maximizing my revenue, my other income, and my expenses. That requires a fairs amount of work. That's super important because no matter what, that is going to determine your next loan, your next investor, they're going to look at the operations.The second thing is you have to dig into your partnership agreement with your LP equity and your prefs, and all of that, and you need to take a look at your stress points. And then you can start to bring in other sources to top it up, whether that's asset management, it could be family office, institutional, or a number of things, you can give up GP equity, you can bring more LP equity, you can come up with a loan, all of that should be fully transparent to your existing deal. You can't just change things and tell them later. You have to paper up and make sure it's all correct. That's the area that people are going to be in trouble on, thinking that this will be short term, I only need this for six months, three months, one year, whatever. If they're right, they're probably going to be okay but if they're not, people are going to wonder how they got squeezed out.You need to go out and get other opinions from brokers, opinions of values, people are doing that all over the place. Brokers aren't listing deals right now, they're actually giving everybody BOV's. That's really important because that substantiates what the thing is worth. Then, you have to look at your debt, and see how much equity you have, and if you have equity, even if it's half, or 2/3 or 1/3, of what it was, that's still okay, you're in the money. Now, it doesn't really matter today because you're not selling, If you're selling today, that's exactly what would happen. You're playing the long game here so you need to have all that information and then you can go out and make good decisions on the asset, preserving the equity. I've been in a situation where we bought things and equities went down, probably everyone has, a car, a house, things depreciate, things go down in value, but over the long haul, especially with this inflation, you're on the right side of it, even though you might be feeling a little bit of pain. I want to be in hard assets during high inflationary times, because we all know, you can't build a home or apartments affordably right now, so if you own them, you're actually in that category. That's good, even though it might not feel good, if you can hold on to it, I truly believe that real estate is going to really skyrocket based on all these crazy things that are going on globally.Ken McElroywww.kenmcelroy.comwww.mccompanies.com
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Nov 2, 2023 • 16min

Ken McElroy: Is Now a Good Time to Buy? Are Rates Going Up Again?

What is happening with commercial real estate? Is now a good time to buy or will it get even better? How are the Fed rates going to play out? Ken McElroy, CEO and founder of MC Companies, shares his experience.Read this entire episode here: https://tinyurl.com/mryp72kvA lot of investors have bridge debt or value-add deals, we're seeing capital calls, you've been through 25 years of this, how are you looking at what's happening right now?What happens in a normal balanced market is: there needs to be a little push-pull between buyer and seller and what happened is that the buyers in the last couple of years were at a massive disadvantage, they had to stretch for pricing and for terms, they were shortening their due diligence periods, etc. It was all coming and what this is doing is, it's an adjustment for the sellers and that gets lost in cash calls and all of that. But we needed the sellers and the brokers to adjust their expectations. What was happening was that people were stretching for deals and many of those deals are the ones that are in trouble, so the market was not in balance.I have talked to one investor that has five capital calls going on, there's a lot of challenge, but it's really counterintuitive. A lot of times, it's the idea of being fearful when others are greedy and being greedy when others are fearful, as Warren Buffett would say. Do you think, with the cap rate expansion, are we seeing some better deals now or are we not quite there yet?We're not quite there. There's a lag effect with interest rates, with cap rates, with sellers and brokers and all of that. Playing defense and offense is a good analogy and I believe that you should be at all times. You should always be playing a little bit of offense, sometimes you're playing more offense, a lot of people right now are playing maybe a little more defense, but the worst thing that you can do is bury your head in the sand. If you're in this business for the long haul, I think that there needs to be a good balance there.What has gotten our investors to trust us over a long period of time is full transparency. We all know news can be a little slanted but it does stand to reason. If somebody's in that kind of trouble, how are they managing that? Have they been talking with their lenders? Have they talked to their investors? What are they doing on the management side because, for the last 22 years, the market has not gone up. I've seen it go up and go down multiple times. There are strategies for all of those things. There has been a tremendous amount of focus on influencers raising money online, I don't have a problem with that, however, if that's their only skill, then they have a problem and if the investors invested in those people, then that's an LP problem. When things like this happen, and it will happen again, you start to look at experience and wisdom, and how deep your bench is, your capital reserves, and all those things.What do you think about the Fed with rates?From everything I read and see it doesn't appear that the Fed would do that, and if they do, what are they going to go down to? Five? They punch all the way past 3, 4, 5, 6 and now they're approaching 7, so think how far they have to go. Even if they say, yes, we're going to reduce rates, they're going to do it at about a quarter point, half a point over time. Maybe if you're lucky, that could be a point in a year. You have to put things in perspective, they're not going to go from 6- 7% rates or even 8 for single family, in some cases, and hard money is way over that.Ken McElroywww.kenmcelroy.comwww.mccompanies.com
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Oct 26, 2023 • 14min

How Should You Do a Capital Call to Your Investors?

How to approach doing a capital call to your investors? And on the other hand, how should investors decide to give more money for a deal that is in trouble? Mauricio Rauld, securities attorney of Premier Law Group and host of Real Estate Syndicator Live, shares his knowledge.Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/3mz7t22hA lot of people are in trouble, interest rates have doubled, insurance has doubled in many states, and some people have to do capital calls, how would you approach doing a capital call? And from an investor's perspective, how would you choose to participate in it or not?The first thing we typically advise clients is from my buddy, Ken McElroy, when things aren't going well and things are starting to not go according to plan because lack of cash flows don't happen from one day to the next because those things are going to slowly start happening, the key is to make sure that you double down on your communication with your investors. A lot of syndicators, especially new ones, tend to sort of stick their heads in the sand a little bit when things aren't going well, the investor is going to be upset at us, and we should not tell them, if you're communicating once a quarter and things aren't going well, start communicating once a month or once a week or every day, depending on how severe things are. That way, when it's time to do the cash call, it's not a complete shocker, you've slowly been showing what's going on, it's been a tough environment, we need to refinance, and we can't because the interest rates have gone up and the whatever the situation is. Letting them know earlier will be appreciated by the investors and you’re going to be in a much better situation.Try to avoid a cash call at the beginning. Usually, if there's the inclining of issues that happen, let's say, rents or revenues down because of whatever reason, then, the first line will be the syndicator. They'll make a loan to the company, they'll make a capital contribution to the project: 1) to show faith that they're confident in the project, 2) the cash call is the last thing you want to do. For both syndicators and for investors, as you want to look at the operating agreement. If you need $500k, you probably want to ask for $750k. There are a lot of funds out there that are really targeting they might come in and say, look, I know you need 500, I'm going to give you the 500 or I'll give you a million, but then they insert themselves way ahead of everybody else. Obviously, the bank is going to be number one always, but then they're going to be second and they're going to have their money out before any of the LP money comes out.Mauricio Rauldwww.premierlawgroup.netwww.youtube.com/@MauricioRauldEsq 
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Oct 17, 2023 • 23min

How to Keep Yourself Out of Jail: Legal Compliance in Syndications

What are some of the biggest items that syndicators need to keep in mind? How to raise a fund yourself under your company name? Mauricio Rauld , real estate syndication attorney of Premier Law Group and host of real estate syndicator live, shares his knowledge. Read this episode here: https://tinyurl.com/yvk4k4e3What are some of the biggest items that syndicators need to keep in mind that are easily forgotten?Understand that you are in the business of selling securities, because a lot of times, especially new real estate syndicators, they don't quite understand that. I'm just buying real estate, why do I have to worry about the Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC? I'm just getting a couple of my friends and we're going to go buy a single family home, or buy this building, why do we have to worry about all this stuff? People think of SEC as the stock market, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc but it is much broadly than that. TIC agreements, joint ventures, profit sharing agreements and promissory notes are potentially securities, I always joke that high fives and handshakes are securities but the structure itself doesn't matter. People try and get creative such as I'm going to structure it this way or that way, or it's just a loan, it's just my dad, but the reality is the SEC doesn't care about any of that, all they care about is whether you are raising money, where the returns are generated by your efforts. If you're raising money, and you're doing all the work, or you and your co-sponsors are doing all the work, and you have passive investors who are writing you a check, it doesn't matter how you structure it, and how creative you get structuring it, it's going to be a security and that's something that newbies forget.What would be a way to go around that, would it be to raise a fund yourself under your company name, and then invest in that deal if you don't want to participate fully on the operations side or other things?In order for somebody to come into the syndication group as a legitimate co-sponsor and bringing in some capital, there are three things they need to fit into because there's an exemption. The general rule is you need a broker dealer license, but we can find an exemption to registration and that would be what we call the issuer exemption which requires three things and most of these deals don't follow. Number one is no transaction-based compensation. This happens a lot, you have to be willing to say, I'm going to give you 10% of the GP even if you don't bring a single dime. I know you promised that you thought you were going bring a half a million dollars from your investors and it turns out, you aren't able to bring any, you still have to get that 5% or 10% because you're giving that person that percentage, not for raising money, but for other things they should be doing like any other syndicator: due diligence, underwriting, asset management and all these little ton of things otherwise it's transaction-based compensation. Your primary role needs to be those substantial duties, it can't be raising capital and you have to show that you're doing more than that. If you're a real syndicator, you have two or three partners, you're part of the team, and you're all working hard to make this deal work, then you're going to fit into that exemption.Do funds pay an interest until they allocate all of the funds, is that optional?That's the beauty of syndications in general and certainly with funds, you can be as creative as you want to be. I would usually recommend not making it super complicated, because then you start losing investors. Some people decide to give a flat fee, almost like a coupon rate.Mauricio Rauldwww.premierlawgroup.netwww.youtube.com/@MauricioRauldEsq
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Sep 28, 2023 • 24min

Family Offices: What Do They Look For in an Investment?

What do family offices look for in a deal? How do they manage their investments, are they risk takers or not? How are they evaluating deals in today's market? Irwin Boris is responsible for Acquisitions & Asset Management at Peykar Capital, he has 25+ years of hands-on FP&A, due diligence, and operations experience.Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/4ycychyeHow were you evaluating deals when the market was hot and extremely competitive? How has that changed today?We stopped doing multifamily early, about four or five years ago, and we sold a bunch, we only hold one multifamily project that I'm involved with right now. People call to buy it every day of the week. I say, I got six years left on my mortgage, we only have renovated half the units, I really don't care, if make me a stupid offer, and we'll consider selling it because I have no place to put the money. We don't really care about it. I've been doing industrial for many years, it's a cap rate play. What's the spread between your going in, your current cash flow, and your cost to finance? If I could buy on a 9.5 cap, I could finance on a 7.5% and then get 65% leverage with some interest only, I could probably get 8.5 or 9% current out of the deal, after closing costs. That's really what I look at, if you can't do it on a cocktail napkin, don't do the deal.What are some of your hardest deals and lessons learned?There are always deals that die in due diligence. Hopefully, they die earlier than later because you have out-of-pocket costs. We have one deal that we really liked that was upstate New York, in the vicinity of Ithaca College, it sat on a lot of excess land that was zoned for industrial or multifamily, whatever I wanted to build there. Basically, the land was free, it was a covered land play with a lot of excess land where the current ownership had already gone through the PUD approval with the municipality. I just needed a site plan.In the middle of due diligence, the seller told me that their major tenant called them and said that they don't need all the space, they want to renegotiate the lease and give back 20% of the space. I said I don't want to deal with this now. And then the lender's appraiser found that was a sublet listing on Costar for the space. Unfortunately for the sellers, who were all in their late 70s and early 80s, they've owned this for quite some time, they asked me, what do we do? I said, you really don't have a choice but to renegotiate their lease now and ask them for another five or seven years before their options because three years from now, when they are up for renewals, they got you, and they'll tell you what they're going to pay. Here, you still have a little bit of strength. They ended up taking my advice, and they took back the idea, they brought down the rent a little bit, and they have seven years left before five-year options. But unfortunately, based on the revised income, I couldn't stand behind the price anymore.There's always going to be deals in due diligence that die in due diligence. And there's no way to flush those out in advance. One thing I do with commercial buildings is I like to get the 10 largest tenants on the telephone and interview them. How's business? How many people? What are you doing? Are you back in the office? Are you still remote? How's the square footage working out for you? You flush a lot of these things out when you have those interviews. Don't just rely on an engineering report, an appraisal, and the financials because the tenants are going to tell what you the future of the building will be after the close.Irwin Borisirwinboris@gmail.comJoin our investing club here: https://montecarlorei.com/investors
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Sep 14, 2023 • 21min

Top Things to Look For When Investing in Medical Offices & How to Find Tenants

How to invest in medical office? How to find your tenants? What's the average TI (tenant improvement) for a small to medium size office? William Pozo, a podcast listener that has been investing in medical offices for several years, shares his knowledge.Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/mjbhu6fmHow do you find your tenants?First, it's the size of the space. Larger spaces tend to be more sophisticated tenants that want to have leasing agents. Tenant reps inflate all my costs so they're dangerous from a landlord's perspective. The size of the space warrants it, or the sophistication of the tenant, because their build-outs can be complicated and the doctors don't really know what they want. Their spouses tend to be the ones making some of these decisions, it's very difficult when you have a very expensive lease combined with a sophisticated build-out and there's an education process. I've done the leasing with reps, and I've done it with brokers. If the broker is a good broker, you won't have an issue, and I'll be happy to pay their fee.Anything less than two or 3,000 square feet, I'm advertising it in front of the building. I'm putting the word out with existing doctors. There's a small group of community folks, these doctors tend to have a point person at their front desk, and they have a few important business people. If you put out the word out to a few of the larger ones, all these doctors, if they like your building, they bring those doctors with them because if you're an orthopod, or a pediatrician, or one of these sophisticated cancer doctors, they're looking for those physicians to be very close so they'll spread the word. But the larger ones that require hundreds of dollars per foot in additional capital tend to go to the reps or the brokers that can deal with that level of sophistication. I've done a few of those.What's an average TI for a small office and the largest office that you have given?If the doctor is willing to sign a long lease, and it's a reputable doctor, there is virtually no limit that I would not put them in, I will draw the tenant. In other words, I'll start at 10, I'll start to drive down at $20 to $30m but I'll go all the way up to 150, within reason. But if it's a reputable doctor that I know will draw his own clients and other doctors, it's worth it. The leases should not be less than three years, and that would be with no build-out or with near zero build-out. In the 5-10 years leases, I'm starting to spend money on the build-out. You'll have odd requests, special MRIs, or special PET scan scanners and those cost the building a lot of money, not the machine, I'm only talking about the build-out around the machine (the copper or the or the radiation field) that cost is very expensive. But once they've installed that equipment, it’s like a carwash, you can't take the carwash, it's the same thing for a doctor. Once a practice installs a machine, they will stay for 10 to 20 years, they're not willing to give up on their equipment.What should we keep in mind with regards to medical office leases?A lot of smaller guys are afraid of the lease, they're afraid of negotiating or structuring the lease. Don't be afraid of that, especially if you have direct contact with a doctor. You just come up with a form, go to the area's market and see if anyone has the forms. Don't let that be a challenge. That's the number one reason people don't invest in medical offices, they see it as something scary that they have to have these contracts, it's not an issue. Let's face it, these doctors are unsophisticated and straightforward. William Pozowilliampozo@gmail.comJoin The Advanced Real Estate Investing Summit: www.aresummit.com use code SUMMIT20 for 20% off!

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