Which College Degree for Development, Competing as a Boutique Broker, and More (Office Hours)

Each week, I'm going live at 8:30am CST for my "office hours" to answer your questions about commercial real estate on the show. Let's hear what you'd like to know when it comes to brokerage, investment, and development!

Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com

Key Takeaways:

• Goal Setting: Tyler emphasizes the importance of setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals for the upcoming year and breaking them down into daily/weekly activities.

• Impact of Election: Tyler discusses the potential impact of the new president on commercial real estate, highlighting concerns around deregulation, tariffs, and immigration.

• Niche Focus: Tyler advises finding a niche and differentiating your commercial real estate brokerage, as he did by focusing on East Nashville and small businesses.

• Evaluating Deals Quickly: Tyler shares a "back-of-napkin" calculation method to quickly determine if a deal is worth further underwriting, based on price per square foot and desired cap rate.

• Providing Value-Added Services: Tyler suggests offering Property Performance Assessments to property owners as a way to get a foot in the door and build relationships.

• Leveraging Relationships and Networking: Tyler emphasizes the importance of regularly communicating with other brokers to stay informed about market trends and conditions.

• Efficient Use of Technology: Tyler discusses reducing reliance on expensive platforms like CoStar and instead leveraging free or low-cost data sources and personal market knowledge.

• Importance of Mentorship and Involvement in Organizations: Tyler highlights the benefits of being part of the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) and the value of mentorship.

About Your Host:

Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.

Episode Transcript:

Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go? Siri central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level. Cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast live as always, from the Cauble group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee, excited to be back for another round of office hours. This is where I go live every tuesday, 8:30am central standard time to talk to you guys about commercial real estate. Answer your questions, whatever you've got around commercial real estate, whether that's investment, that's brokerage, whatever it is I'm here. Let's dive into it. Question of the day before I dive into everything, how are you planning on ending the year? What are you doing in the last I mean, it's November 12, so 45 days, give or take. What are you doing over the next 45 days to make sure that you are closing out the year, right? And preparing yourself for 2025 I've been working with my commercial real estate brokers on getting them ready for their goals, goal setting for next year, and setting them up as smart goals, right? So Specific, Measurable, Actionable or Achievable, Relevant and time bound, Your Goals should have, should hit all five of those qualities in order for it to even be a goal, and then break it down, right? Maybe you've got a goal to make $100,000 net next year as a as a first year commercial real estate broker. What are the daily activities, the weekly activities that you have to do that are going to get you there? Because just saying you want to make $100,000 isn't going to get you there. It's all the tiny little actions, action items that you take throughout the process that make all of the difference. So to catch you up on everything that's been going on this past week, I mean, it's been a week, right? It's November 12. We have a new president elect that has been interesting. If you have not seen the investors roundtable that Matt Logan and I did for the talking about Trump and how his incoming or upcoming presidency could fare for commercial real estate. Highly recommend that you go check it out. It is a political because this is obviously not a political talk show. We're not getting into any of that. We're just talking about what Trump has said and what that could mean for commercial real estate, the three biggest things really were deregulation, which could be positive or negative, tariffs, which will definitely be negative, and immigration, which will definitely be negative. But we had a good conversation around it. Ended up going for like an hour and 15 it was pretty great. So you know, outside of the election, which was a lot of what we were dealing with last week, trying to figure out, you know, what our strategy is going to be going into 2025 we did a construction update last week with Jacob, my project manager, good friend of mine on salt ranch. Highly recommend going and checking that one out. We're going to be doing a construction update every month here on out now that we've got a lot going on out there, wanted to, you know, one keep a diary of just what's going on with the project, but to share the inside story with you guys as to what we've got in the works every 30 days, how things are going. Where are budgets coming in at what, what the problems are that we're facing, what I wish I could have done differently. They are fun, fun conversations. So we'll be doing that each month moving forward. So pay attention for another one, I guess, the first week of December, give or take. This past week, we had the mentor match at the Entrepreneurs Organization. If you own your own business. Highly recommend getting involved with the Entrepreneurs Organization. It has been a life saving, business saving thing for me. It's a phenomenal organization that really helps you just kind of, I mean, yes, I'm a commercial real estate professional, but I'm also a business owner, and so I've got to learn how to grow and scale and manage my business as well, and that was really cool. So I got matched with a mentee that I have actually known for a number of years, because he used to have a podcast, and he had me on his show back in the day, it might have been 2019, 2020, give or take when he had me on there, but he's doing some development. And. He's joining the Entrepreneurs Organization, so we're gonna be working on some stuff together. Just gonna be really cool. Let's see. Oh, last Friday, Dustin, one of my Siri accelerator students, came into town. He wanted to meet up about some he came in from St Louis, wanted to meet up about some projects that he's working on, and then a project that he and I are working on together. So we took a couple hours on Friday, dove into that really cool to see what he's doing. He's monetizing land, vacant land, with paintball fields, which is pretty interesting. He got in there. He acquired this land at a relatively low basis, he built it out for the paintball fields at a relatively low basis, and now it's grown significantly in value, and so we're working through what he's going to do, if he's going to sell to this group that he's currently talking to, or if he might take it to market and and get some more money there. But he's also working on some really interesting things with regards to youth sports and how to monetize commercial real estate through that, and we're planning on doing some of that out at peerless mill in Chattanooga. So I was diving into that with him. We've got a lot of exciting things in the works with regards to sports and sports tourism at the mill that I can't announce just yet, but I do want to tease and share that a lot is going on behind the scenes with that, and it's really exciting. And I think, I think Chattanooga has a really unique opportunity to become a major destination for youth sports, and we're exploring what that might look like to have that hosted at the mill today. It's Tuesday as always, these office hours are on Tuesdays, and we are launching a new video series on the channel, so it'll go live this afternoon. I kind of modeled it after Peter McKinnon's like Two Minute Tuesdays. It's kind of a Two Minute Tuesday thing. This first video, I think ended up being closer to three minutes, give or take, but I'm gonna be coming in and giving you guys more bite sized chunks of information on commercial real estate. So today, the downsides of triple net leases, because everybody talks about triple net investments, triple net leases as if they are all rainbows and butterflies, and they are certainly not. So go check that out. I think it'll be a fun series. These are gonna be two to three minute videos, quick bites to give you quick information, just as high quality as all the other videos that we are doing for you all. Last night, we had our CRE accelerator mastermind call, and I wanted to share with you all what we talked about on that, because I think it would help you as well as you were going into your commercial real estate investments, one of my students, Kate, asked, how like because one of the things you have to do as a new commercial real estate investor is analyze a lot of deals, right? So how do you quickly determine whether a deal is worth spending 30 to 60 minutes underwriting on or if you should just move on. And so I showed everybody kind of my back of napkin calculation to very quickly determine whether a deal is worth pursuing any further or not. It takes you 30 to 60 seconds to do so. What you do is you'll determine the price per square foot all in of the acquisition and any renovation costs. So that's your all in price divided by the total square footage of the property, right? And that'll give you a price per square foot. And then I just take that price per square foot and I multiply it by the cap rate that I want, right? So maybe it's 8% maybe it's 10% maybe it's 12% I percent. I typically do 12% so high. Yes, I am reading the comments. I typically update everybody on my week first, and then I jump into those so I will get to you here in a second. Appreciate your patience. So once you have the the price per square foot, and you multiply it by the cap rate, that gives you the triple net rental rate that you will have to achieve in order for that to be a good deal, right? So then you would just say, Okay, well, what is everything else renting for in this area? So let's say you find the price per square foot for an acquisition to be $100 a square foot, right? And you want to get a 10% cap rate. That is point one times 100 which gives you $10 per square foot, triple net. So if I look at all of the commercial properties in the area, and they're renting for $10 a foot, triple net or higher, that's a good deal. Let's

dig into this a little bit more. If it is less than $10 a foot, triple net, probably not a deal time to pass and move on. So I know if you're listening on the podcast, it's probably a little bit difficult. I tried my best to fully explain that, but that is how I've. Very quickly determine whether or not a deal is even worth underwriting, right or or looking into whatsoever. Now you will become more familiar with your market. You'll become more familiar with what things are renting for in your area, and so as you become more and more familiar, you'll be able to do that in 15 seconds, right and move on from from these deals or not. So highly recommend taking that formula, going out there and applying it to some commercial properties. Go, go look at five deals today. We'll get five deals this morning after you you watch this live and and use that and start familiarizing yourself with these properties, that way you can better understand how to how to do all of this. All right, cool. That's all I've got. Let's dive into y'all questions, because that's what we're here for. And I know so high is very anxious about this. Envy stars are saying, morning from Houston, good to see you. Justin, appreciate you jumping in. Ma'am. So high saying, hello. What degree should I take to work in real estate development? So high, tough question to answer, because I don't really think degrees matter. I'm a college dropout myself. I have done just fine not having a degree. And there's so many different ways for you to get into the commercial real estate industry that there's no one path, in my opinion, that is necessarily better than all the rest. You could get into commercial real estate development as a property manager, you could get into it as a commercial real estate broker. You could get into it as a construction project manager. You could get into it as a CPA, not to mention architecture engineering. There's, there's so many different ways for you to get into development, I think, figure out whatever you like best and pursue that. If you're into numbers, go into finance. If you prefer the marketing and sales side of things, do marketing. I think there's a lot of different things you could get out of that. Ryan is saying, let's go. Pump to be here. Pump to have you here. Ryan, appreciate you jumping in. Let's see. Jay is saying, I have a question. We are in the process of syndicating. My main question is, how do you get basis to take advantage of bonus depreciation without putting in any money into it? Jay, that's a good question. It's probably a better question for your CPA. The short answer is, you can't really, because your basis is determined by the amount of money that you're putting into the deal, right? So, I mean, I've had deals like that as well where I didn't, I mean, didn't put any cash into it. Now, that's typically why I put at least the minimum investment into every single one of my deals. Also, if you're if you're syndicating and you're not putting any cash into it, that raises a lot of red flags with investors. So just one thing to keep in mind, I always put at least the minimum into all of my deals so that, you know, one, I can take advantage of depreciation, but two, so that my investors see that I have skin in the game, right? Because it's not fair to them. I mean, yes, I'm signing on the debt. Yes, I'm doing all the work. But, you know, I mean, my mentor, Bruce Peterson. I mean, he was the biggest investor in his first deal. He wanted to show his investors that he really had skin in the game. Was going to do everything to pull it off. So I think that'll help. But, yeah, I would, I would talk to your CPA and figure out what, what you might be able to do there. I there. So high is saying, is this podcast going to be saved on the channel? Yes, every live stream we do is saved on the channel under the live streams. So if you go to youtube.com/tyler, Cauble, it'll have, you know, videos, shorts, lives, just click on live, and every single one of these that we do ends up going up there. Their title is just office hours when I do it, and then I go and retitle them based on whatever we end up talking about. So that's it'll definitely be saved, and it'll also go out on Apple podcasts as well. Judy is saying, Where can I join the entrepreneur organization? That is a good question. I'm pretty sure it's just eo.org It is not, do not go to that that goes somewhere like New Zealand. Let me see. So I know I Nashville's is just EO nashville.com I wonder if it's just eo.com it is not eo.com Okay, so just search for the Entrepreneurs Organization, wherever you are. I know here in Nashville, it's EO, nashville.com so sorry, that wasn't very, helpful at all, but I would just look up Entrepreneurs Organization. Judy is saying I just went out on my own and started my commercial real estate brokerage in Massachusetts. Any tips? Congratulations, Judy. First off, that's really exciting. I started my brokerage back in 2018 and hands down, one of the better. Decisions I ever made largely because I didn't have the creative freedom to do the marketing that I wanted to do at the brokerage that I was at before. I didn't get any support, not to mention the splits were very unfavorable. So I went out and started my own and it was, it was a great move, and now I've got a team of phenomenal commercial real estate brokers that are just absolutely crushing it. So it's really fun to work with them. Biggest thing on, you know, starting your own commercial real estate brokerage, find your niche, right? What makes your commercial real estate brokerage better than anybody else? For us, it was going out and focusing on East Nashville, and you know, which was a smaller neighborhood? Well, actually, it's like the largest neighborhood in Nashville, but it was on the wrong side of the river, and most of your traditional commercial real estate companies didn't want to touch it. And so for me, it was a blue ocean, right? Go read the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, by the way, phenomenal book. And so that made it very easy for me to differentiate myself. I got to know the neighborhood extremely well. And then from there, I was just better at marketing than anybody else. We were early on Instagram. We were early on podcasting, early on YouTube. That all helped my brokerage business grow quite significantly. And then from there, it was bringing in the right Junior brokers or affiliate associate brokers, and empowering them and giving them leads. You know, later today, you're actually going to hear we're doing a live stream back on the channel with Emily Benedict, who's one of my she's my newest commercial real estate broker. She's been here for like, six weeks, and she's already got a two plus million dollar deal under contract. So we'll be diving into how, uh, her first six weeks has looked. And you know, what other commercial real estate brokers could do to have a faster start, like, what she's got going on? So that's, that's the biggest thing to me is, is just treating it like a business, like you're no longer just a commercial real estate broker. So when it comes to a business, you've got to have marketing, you've got to have sales, you've got to have admin, right? I mean, think of all the little things like, that's the tough thing about going out, starting your own business, is there's a lot of little things, right? We set everything up on G Suite, right? So our email, our drive, everything is through G Suite. We, you know, focused on getting a lot of Google reviews like that really, really helped us stand out. I wrote a lot of blog posts. I did a lot of YouTube videos that helped with SEO so that we stand out. There's a lot of things that you could do. So excited to see where you go. Keep us posted. Judy, I appreciate that. Let's see. Kip is jumping in morning from DC. Good morning. Kip just started working at a boutique commercial real estate firm as a leasing agent. I was appraising commercial properties for two years before this. What are some good tips for a young broker, Kip? You should definitely tune in this afternoon as well to talk with Emily and myself. Best thing that you could do. You know, I was actually talking Logan. Was talking about this Logan Freeman in the brokers mastermind last week, or a couple weeks ago. He no longer does a broker's opinion of value. He does a Property Performance Assessment, I think that's really interesting, right? So if you've got a background in appraising commercial properties, you basically already know how to do a Bov, but a Property Performance Assessment, I have a feeling more property owners would want to see that, right? If you're going to come in and look at their their property and tell them how they could be performing better, it's almost better than a broker's opinion of value, in my opinion, because it's not necessarily just for a sale, right? So that could be really interesting for you to start doing, and start offering to people, really, at no cost, right? Just so you can get a foot in the door and start meeting all of these people. And I would aim to try and do one a day if you could, if you do one a day for 30 days, you know that ends up being what 20 business days, give or take. So that's 20 new people that you've had conversations with, and you never know where that's going to lead, because a lot of these, a lot of these property owners, no other property owners, and they'll start talking about, well, yeah, this broker came in and did a Property Performance Assessment, showed me how I could raise my rents by 10%

that stuff matters, right? And, of course, if you show them, you know, hey, here's how you could increase your property's value, or here's how you could, you know, better, manage it, or here's where you could cut costs, they may bring you in to handle all of that for you, for them. So that's that's what I would do if I had the background and skill set that you had, which is unique, right for commercial real estate brokerage. Dwayne is saying, what software are you using for property management? That's a good question, Dwayne. So right now, we are using red. Men, which I fully regret. It was just what my partners were familiar with, and that's what they wanted to, wanted to use. I'm in the process of buying them out, and so with that, we're exploring what it would look like to move over to Yardi. My property manager is very familiar with Yardi. She's been using it for years. And so, you know, resin is fine, like it does 98% of what we need it to do, but it's that 2% that just gets really, really annoying. And so Yardi is probably about the same cost, and people are just more familiar with it. So we'll probably be moving over to yardy. I've used buildium, and there's one other one that I've used in the past, and at the end of the day, they're all kind of the same, really. WW is saying, Love the office hours. Well, we love you. WW, appreciate that. These are fun. This is actually one of my favorite live streams that we do, just because I get to go live and I don't have to prepare anything. I just get to show up and answer your questions, which I love doing. What questions should brokers be asking property owners and prospects since the election? You might have touched on this earlier, so sorry if you have to repeat No, we have. I didn't touch on it too much. We actually didn't even dive into that in the in the live stream that we did on on the election, what I would say? I don't know. I mean, that's, that's a good question. What should brokers be asking property owners and prospects since the election? I think that there are a lot of property owners out there that are, you know, either left leaning or right leaning, that have entirely different opinions of where the economy is going to go over the next six to 12 months, give or take. So maybe just try, you know, I mean, I wouldn't ask them who they voted for, obviously, but just try and feel out like, what, how do they feel about the the coming market, and figure out what your, you know, kind of foothold is from there, right? If it's all doom and gloom, then, hey, let's go ahead and offload this asset and, you know, get it sold for you, so that you can, you know, put that money into savings, or you could, you know, 1031, into something more secure, whatever that is. If the alloc is all positive, it's okay. Great. Well, you know, would you like to buy another one? Or, you know, can we, you know, sell this and 1031, exchange it to something bigger? You know, there's, there's a lot of different things that you could do. But as far as, like, specific questions that you should be worried about, I don't really think that there is. I mean, at the end of the day, existing, I don't believe that existing properties are going to be impacted as much. I do believe that new construction will be in trouble because tariffs, in combination with mass deportations, you're increasing your construction costs and you're removing the labor force. I mean, immigrants make up 30% of the construction labor force, so that and labor on the construction side is already lacking. We already don't have enough people on the labor side there. So I think new construction is going to be in trouble. I think existing assets probably going to be fine, but we'll see it depends on on where we go with inflation. Alpine ism is saying, Hello all. Hello. Welcome to the chat. Appreciate you so high is saying, I'm actually working in real estate marketing in France and planning to move either to Dubai or USA. Which one do you think is more rewarding? I'm studying Business Management, graduating this year. That's a good question. You know, you know who I would actually reach out to is Hamza Ali. I mean, Hamza does real estate in Dubai, and he does it in the States, but he lives in the States. So, I mean, maybe that's your answer, right? There is the guy who's investing in both actually prefers to live in the USA. But it's, that's, man, that's a really tough question to answer, right? Because that's it's so personal and so specific. Alpine ism is saying, stay in France, get opportunities following France? Yeah. I mean, you know, France is an interesting market. I have no idea what European real estate really looks like. I know it's different, but I know Dubai is is crushing it right now in terms of real estate, real estate development, all that stuff Dwayne is saying, Thanks for the inside man currently using building. Absolutely Dwayne. I mean, here's here's the thing, like, building is fine. I was fine with building him. There were some capabilities that it didn't have, that my team wanted to have, which is why we ended up moving away. But like that, we we managed a pretty big portfolio of assets on buildium, alpineism. Is saying Dubai is currently still very speculative due to the population growth curve, artificial curve based on massive labor migration. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that Dubai could very easily. Be a bubble. It's, it's the population is significantly made up of immigrants, right? It's, you know, American contractors, and you know Europeans, and you know Middle Easterners from all over the Middle East come to Dubai. It's a very interesting market. So, you know, I think that it's interesting to see where it's gone in the last 1015, 20 years. But I also do think that it could be a house of cards. I have no idea. I haven't looked into that market too much, just based on what I know about markets and how long it takes for them to build up properly. Could be interesting. Alpine ism is saying the USA has global consumption and production at 50% something like Japan in the 90s. And Cv of having 30% and Cv plus at percent, the palace Park in Japan, it is worth as much as California. Yeah. I mean, you know, USA being as big as it is, I mean, I think California is like the fifth largest economy in the in the world. So it's, it's tough to argue with the machine that the USA has running. The other thing is too I mean, if you look globally, I mean, the USA is one of the safest countries in the world, simply because it is so far away from everything else. So if we do start to move towards more isolationist policies, then there could be some instability in other parts of the globe. But, I mean, it's all conjecture. Who knows? Avery is saying, can you tell us how you got started, and if you were starting over, what route you would take? Avery Lucky for you, I actually did a YouTube video on this where, I think it was literally titled, like, if I had to start all over, let me see if I can pull it up for you. So let's see here. I've done a whole bunch on my background of how I got started, but I dropped out of college, started off as a commercial leasing broker. Let's see. So I'll just share my screen here. I mean, you can see, here's one. It's titled, if I started real estate in 2024, I would do this. There's another one, how to get into commercial real estate investing. If I had to start all over, did that one three years ago. We just released another one yesterday. It was how to buy commercial real estate, even if you're a beginner. So go check that one out. It's pretty that's a pretty great video, actually. So there you go. Hopefully that will give you, I mean, those are longer videos, so that we give you a much more in depth answer than I could right here. Rusty is saying, What's your market share in Nashville? Do you compete with the big firms? Oh, dude, my market share in Nashville's, like, maybe 1% it's, I mean, it's tiny, but here's the, here's the great thing about that, I mean, and to put that in perspective, CBRE is probably 50% of the market share in Nashville, right? There's massive they just do massive, massive deals. Since we don't have corporate splits, and we don't have massive corporate overhead, and I'm not paying costar $100,000 a month, we don't have to close that many deals for us to make high six figures, low seven figures a year as commercial real estate brokers. So, I mean, if you think about it, like, let's, let's do, you know, I don't know, our average deal size, like, $2 million right? You do a $2 million deal, and let's just say there's another broker on the other side, so you get 3% that's a $60,000 commission, right? So not bad, right? And typically, my brokers have, you know, splits anywhere from 5050 if it's house given lead, right, like if I give them a lead from the house, it's a 5050, split. If they go and source their own deals, it's 7030 graduated up to 8515 in a single year based on volume. So let's just say this is a deal that a broker sourced themselves and they hadn't capped out. So they're 70% they take home $42,000

whereas if you did a $2 million deal at CBRE at the same 3% right? So still, $60,000 right off the bat, you're giving 50% to the house. You may be able, if you're if you're like top dog, you might be able to negotiate for 40% to go to the house, but it's not a big difference here. So that's $30,000 right off the bat. And then typically, you're gonna have at least one person on your team, right? And that's, you know? So we'll divide it by two. That's $15,000 you get for working the same deal. So one of my agents could get literally three times the amount of money for doing one deal, and that's assuming that it wasn't a referral from another CBRE office, which means you're paying out another 20% to somebody else in another office. So you have to do these bigger deals if you're going to go corporate. So that's that's why we don't have to do as many deals. We can do smaller deals. And do just fine. So Dwayne is saying, since moving from costar, what are you using to pull analytics? Dwayne, honestly, I've got my ear to the ground. I know the market so well I don't have to. There's also plenty of demographics groups out there that have the exact same information that costar does, because costar just pulls it from them. So, you know, platforms like ESRI, honestly, if you really just need to understand demographics, I would just go to Google and type in demographics and 370, 206, zip code or whatever it ends up being, right? It's really not necessary to pay so much money for a lot of these platforms. I really don't believe that it is. And I mean, you know, this is going off on a tangent, but, you know, when I first got started, I thought that I needed software like that, and what I realized over time was a lot of the information is correct. I'm paying a lot of money, and I'm giving a lot to these groups, and I'm not getting a lot in return. And we cut it off back in 2020 and since then, our brokerage has grown significantly. And the reason being is we just decided to focus more in on certain things. If you're going to be a generalist, then you have to have a service like that, because you just cannot get enough data right. Like, if I'm going to sell an office building in downtown Nashville, and then I'm also going to go sell an industrial building two counties away, there's no way that I'm going to be able to know what office vacancy, market rents, you know, ti etc, on a downtown office building, are, and simultaneously have my finger on the pole so well that I know exactly what industrial vacancy, industrial rents, industrial ti whatever is out two counties away, right? So when you start to hone in, like I did, and focus just on East Nashville, well I've see every single transaction that happens on this side of town, so I know here's what everything is renting for. Here's what everything is selling for. I don't need a platform to go aggregate that data for me. It makes my life a lot easier. And also, dude, I drive like all of my properties are within a 10 minute radius in my office, I call myself incredibly lazy. I am a lazy investor, and it is the best way I could have possibly set up my business. So I really, really love it. So, yeah, I mean, you really don't need those things. And the other thing is, too, and this is, you know, it's, it's a little bit more difficult starting out as a broker, but make the phone calls you need to be talking to all these people anyway. I mean, when I was, when I was full time brokering deals, I was on the phone like 99% of my workday, I was calling other agents. Hey, what have you got going on? What are you seeing? How much are market rents in this area? I just saw you did a retail deal. What did that look like? What were the tis on that? Cool. Here's a deal that I'm working on. Here's all the information so that you have that too, and we would just trade information, right? And so that's what makes, that was what makes a great commercial real estate broker, somebody that just has their finger on the pole. On the pulse really understands what they've got going on. So that's what I would recommend, is just staying on top of your market, talking to brokers every day, like make it a point to make two to three to five phone calls a day to other commercial real estate brokers, just see what they're doing. Judy is saying, Do you have a niche immediately, or did it take time for you to figure it out? No, I did start off as a generalist. Back in 2013 when I got started as a broker, I was working on office, retail and industrial, and I was willing to do it pretty much anywhere. I mean, my I officed in the office building that I was leasing. So those were the easiest deals for me to work on. I could go downstairs and show space. Then I had a shopping center that was like 30 minutes north of town, and then I had an industrial facility that was like 30 minutes east of town. So I was just kind of going all over. And then when, you know, as as a new commercial real estate broker will, I would take a listing that was 45 minutes south of town, and I would take a listing that was 15 minutes southwest. And so, you know, I just had deals all over the place. I was constantly in the car, and it was miserable. And so when I decided to focus on a neighborhood, focus on East Nashville, that's when my life got better. I mean, just as a broker like, I didn't have to drive as much. I mean, Now, granted, I still put, I mean, I bought a Tesla brand new back in 2019 and it's got 140,000 miles on it. Now, some of you run the math on that, like I still drive an insane amount each year, but I mean, it's not as much as it used to be, that's for sure. So in terms of, like, figuring out your niche, I didn't niche down into East Nashville and small business until about four and a half years into the business. So that was when I really started to learn like, Okay, this is what I want to focus on. This is what I feel good about. But you could do it a lot sooner than that. That was just basically when I left the company that I worked for and I could kind of go do whatever I wanted. Jay. Is saying, Would you think to do syndicating that cost or is needed? Jay, I'm sorry, I don't really understand, I don't really understand that question. If you could just clarify it for me please. In the chat, Alpine ism is saying, I like your flex space videos, very interesting and practical. Thank you for the effort you put into each video. Absolutely. Thank you. Alpine ism I really appreciate that I love flex space. It's obviously a very hot topic today. I think there's so much that can still be done and in the flex realm. And you know, here recently, I did a case study on a luxury flex development that one of my students did, one of my Siri accelerator members did down in Birmingham, Alabama. And y'all might have seen the video. I mean, it's up on YouTube. We did a, we did a story of the deal on that one with Marcus Kittrell, and it is, oh, gosh, what was it? I think it's just like, you know, building flex space from the ground up, or something like that. Oh, inside this unbelievable ground up flex development story of the deal. So I actually did another presentation here recently where I did a deep dive case study on that project. So we really dove into it. It's like 30 or 45 minutes long, so I'll probably be releasing that as well. That may not go on the YouTube channel, that may be behind, like a, I don't know, a paywall, or an email paywall, or something like that. Give me your email, and I'll give you the video, something like that, because it's a really interesting video, and it's a talk that I gave it at an event down in Houston. So awesome. Well, guys, we're six minutes past the hour. So we're that means we're six minutes past time. Appreciate you guys for jumping in and asking your questions in the office hours. I couldn't do this without you all. Obviously, you got to come in and ask questions. So if that's what we're here for every Tuesday, 8:30am Central Standard Time, jump in whatever questions you have. We'll dive into it. Ideally, it's about commercial real estate, but I'm willing to explore other topics. I don't really matter. Topics. I don't really I don't really mind. Doesn't matter. We'll do whatever. If you're liking these videos, don't forget to hit that like button. Hit the subscribe button. If you're listening on Apple podcast, do me a favor. Leave me a review. It helps me understand what you want to hear more of what you're not liking. If there's something that you don't like, hopefully there's not but I want to know about it so I can fix it. We'll see you guys in the next one. Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go? Siri central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advance strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level. Cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www.crecentral.com to learn more you.