Ask Your Commercial Real Estate Questions LIVE | Office Hours
In this episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast, we’re busting the biggest real estate myths that could cost you big time. You've probably heard things like "Real estate always goes up!" or "If you find a deal, the money will come!"—but are they actually true?
I’m breaking down the lies, sharing real-world examples, and giving you the straight facts on what it really takes to succeed in commercial real estate. Don’t fall for the hype—let’s get into it!
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
Tyler hosted a successful CRE Accelerator Mastermind event in Birmingham, Alabama, where they covered topics like developing flex space, underwriting, and case studies from members.
Tyler is planning the next in-person mastermind event in Nashville, which will focus heavily on underwriting practice and property tours.
Tyler is under contract to purchase a 4,000 sq ft building in East Nashville to convert into an event space and YouTube studio for his business.
Owner-occupying commercial real estate was highlighted as a good way for business owners to build their real estate portfolio.
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:
Tyler Cauble 0:00
This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www dot cre central.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast. We are live from the cobble group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee. Back at it for another round of office hours. You guys have questions on commercial real estate? Hopefully I've got some answers. If not, we'll figure it out. We'll figure out whatever's best from there, before we dive in else questions, we'll cover what I've been up to this past week, what I've got coming up, and then we'll start answering whatever you got, whether it's around brokerage, investments, development, doesn't matter. We'll talk about it all. Vicin is saying, Good morning. Tyler, good morning Vicky. How are you good to see you here? Yeah, this past week is pretty great. You guys could probably tell I lost my voice just a little bit because we were down in Birmingham for a cre accelerator mastermind event, which was absolutely phenomenal. It was a the first time that we had a gathering for the inner circle. So the 10 members that have joined that portion that will be working more with me, hands on, came down. We did a bunch of underwriting. We went tour to property and mastermind, which was, which was great. Friday, we talked a lot about developing flex space. We did that for a couple hours with Marcus Kittrell diving into like even as far as the construction costs and civil engineering on his on his flex space that he did there down in Alabaster, Alabama. And then, of course, went and toured the property. We ended up touring about nine different nine different properties that afternoon, did some networking. After in the afternoon as well, going I went and bought everybody cards for Dave and Busters, which, you know, hey, if you haven't done that as an adult with a group of adults, it can be a lot of fun. Saturday, taught a class on how to develop commercial real estate, and then we heard from we heard from a couple of students, including Dustin, who just jumped in the live saying, Great job on the Birmingham meetup. Tyler Dustin gave us a case study on monetizing vacant land. He is an absolute master at that. So Dustin, thank you for sharing all of your wisdom with us. And of course, Chris Thorndike as well, did a case study on one of his assets that he's done in the group, which was really, really cool. Fortunately, we got out of Birmingham before all of the weather hit. I ended up having to drive through quite a bit of it on my way home to Nashville. It was pretty brutal for those of you all that don't know. It's like one of the worst storms, or predicted to be one of the worst storms in Birmingham, like 40 years. So it was it was interesting. So what a great event. We have our next in person mastermind event coming up at the end of June, and we'll be doing that here in Nashville. Got some feedback from a lot of the members. We had 35 people there this weekend. Got some feedback from the members that they want to dive further into underwriting. So we're going to basically spend two and a half days doing nothing but workshopping, practicing underwriting, going through case studies, touring properties, and then underwriting them. It's going to be a really good event. I'm already looking forward to it, and we're, you know, three months out, it'll be cool. This past week, actually went out on site. I'm under contract on a 4000 square foot building here in East Nashville that I plan to convert into an event space for all of our in person events, as well as my new YouTube studio. So I was out there with my architects, walking the site, getting everything prepped as much as we could. I mean, the roof on this building is basically collapsed in so that has been fun working on that project. It's a building that I'm pretty familiar with. We were actually tapped to take it to market and lease probably three or four years ago. Then we ended up working with another developer on possibly tearing that site down and converting it into Office condos, and now I'm under contract to buy it and move my business in there. So it'll be pretty cool. I mean, if you're a business owner, and you know you, probably need commercial space. Owner. Occupying commercial real estate is one of the best ways to build and buy your portfolio. We had a handful of members in the mastermind this weekend that, because I have everybody, kind of, you know, introduce themselves, share what they've been working on. We had a handful of members that said, you know, they got started building. Their portfolio, because they just needed space for their business starting out, which was really, really cool to see. On a more personal note, this is my first full weekend in town in Nashville in a month and a half. That starts to really drag on you, for sure. So I'm excited to get some downtime here in Nashville, and going to be spending a lot of time on the farm prepping for the spring, right? We've got to get all the gardens and all the buildings fixed up and ready, so it'll be good spending a lot of time. And we've got a couple of predators games this week, and they've been they've been on the road, so I'm looking forward to catching up on that. We're also preparing later this week and next week, and honestly, for the next few months, for the hotel takeover. So salt Ranch is nearing completion, and we've got our boutique management company that is, you know, we're starting all the whole process of getting everything ready for us to actually take the hotel live start booking guests. So my hope is that for the mastermind in June, that, you know, the the hotel will be fully open and ready, and everybody can stay there, and we can talk about that project quite a bit, because it'll be fun. So, yeah, that's, that's kind of what I have been up to. I've got a talk that I'm giving next week for EO talks,
which is the Entrepreneurs Organization looking forward to that. It's a bit of a different talk from what I'm typically speaking on you. You guys know, usually I'm all about commercial real estate and talking about how to broker, invest, develop, whatever it is. And next week, instead, I'm going to be talking more about myself from a business perspective. It's kind of like TED talks, which is pretty cool. So you got 10 minutes to get up and share, you know, some sort of point about your business or your life, and, you know, share something that other business owners could take away from it. And so I'm going to be talking about YouTube and how focusing on YouTube marketing, through YouTube, doing all of these videos and these live streams, how that has changed the way that I run my business, because it has, you know, I mean, back before I started the YouTube channel, we were just brokering deals and in syndicating some deals, and now, and I still had to do a bunch of networking, my team was doing a bunch of cold calling now because of the YouTube videos. I mean, we get investors from all over the country for our deals. We get buyers from all over the country. We have some listings, but, you know, it's, it's difficult for us to list like a property in California, so we can always help, and we can consult, but those, those opportunities are tougher for us to work on. So it's, it's been good to kind of see, it's kind of wild. I mean, we're coming up on almost five years on the YouTube channel. We're 600 videos in. It's, it would definitely be a grind if I didn't absolutely love it, right? And that's that's the big thing. Like, if you're ever considering starting a podcast or YouTube channel, it's got to be on a topic that you enjoy talking about. Because here we are 600 videos later, and I'm looking at it and going, we still haven't touched on so many topics in commercial real estate. I mean, that is how dynamic and in depth this market is so looking forward to that. Joe is saying, what books to read, or any other route you suggest to learn more about commercial and industrial investing? Well, Joe, you're doing the right thing. You're already on the channel. Got a ton of videos on that, as far as books around like, specifically around industrial investing, I don't know that there really are any. I know Chad Griffiths is coming out with one here in the next month or two. So stay posted on that. He has basically written the Bible on industrial real estate investing. It's going to be an incredible book. I am writing the foreword for it. Honored to be doing that for him, and really excited. I mean, Chad and I have been friends for years, so really cool to see him getting his first book out there. It's a lot of work to put these kinds of books together, so that'll be cool, man. Honestly, if you go to Google and you type in, you know, top commercial real estate books, cobble or Tyler cobble.com. I do have a list on my website that will pull up. And, you know, those are the top 10 books that I recommend to everybody. So that would be a great thing to go and look at, as far as just learning more. I mean, watch all the videos on the channel, listen to all the podcasts. Go to in person meetups, you know, meet with other industrial and commercial real estate investors. Learn from them. Go to workshops, you know. I mean, anything that you can do, you know, take CCIM classes. Go to join the Urban Land Institute. There are so many ways for you to get the commercial real estate knowledge that you're looking for today, where we didn't used to have that. I mean, when I was first getting started, of course, Uli and CCIM, where. Round, but we didn't really have that many bucks. There were a few, but come on, we didn't really have that many podcasts. There were definitely no YouTube channels. So it's pretty, pretty amazing to see how far the market has really come. Victim is saying, Welcome Dustin, yeah. Dustin, thanks for showing up. Man. Good to see you. Joe Singh, is there any video on underwriting flex space development? Not to my knowledge, I haven't done one. I'm not sure if anybody has done one on flex space development. I mean, underwriting development is relatively tough. And Joe, based on your first question, if you're asking you know how to learn more about commercial and industrial real estate investing development is the last thing that you should be focused on. If you are new to commercial real estate and you are trying to find a path to take commercial real estate development should be the absolute last thing that you do, because it is hands down, the most complicated, it is hands down, the most risky. And, you know, I get, I get asked that question a lot, like, how do I get into commercial real estate development? How do I get started? You get started first by going and buying a $600,000 one or two tenant building, right? And just fixing it up a little bit and turning it around. And then you go and your second building, maybe it's a million dollars, right? And you fix it up, and you turn it around and flip it and then your third building, maybe it's 1,000,004 1,000,005 you slowly grow it, because going through two or three value add investments first, you will learn so much just from that process alone, let alone adding in all of The learning curve of commercial real estate development. So I am adamant that new investors, newbies to commercial real estate, should stay far, far away from commercial real estate development. It is incredibly tough. It really is. And all of the developers that I know are staying away from development right now, or they're just being extremely cautious about the deals that they're doing, because construction costs are too high, interest rates are too high. The market has too much uncertainty, and land cost is high. And so when you add all that together, the risk adjusted return that you would have to get in order to make a commercial real estate development work today isn't worth it, in my opinion. I mean, it just isn't. And, you know, I'm kind of passionate about that, and sorry, Jonah, I'm kind of going further into this question that you probably really meant for me too. But I get asked that question a lot, and I think that it's incredibly tough to get started in development in a good market. And I don't think that we're in a good market right now for commercial real estate development specifically. So my opinion, stay away from it. You know, learn how to underwrite normal deals. First become an expert at underwriting value, add investments, and then slowly move your way into underwriting commercial real estate development, because the development side of things is far more complicated when it comes to the underwriting, right? I mean, you got to think about in a value add investment, you're pretty much just underwriting how much I'm going to have to put into the building in terms of capital improvements, right? How am I going to physically upgrade the look of the building? And then how long is going to take me to lease to the tenants, and what are my rates right? Relatively straightforward. I mean, I know underwriting is a little bit more complex than that, but it's pretty straightforward. Whereas in development, you have to underwrite, what your drawdown schedule is going to be, how much interest you're paying each month based on the amount of, you know, loan you have drawn down, and what that cost ends up being, so that you can actually calculate your trade calculate your true returns, right? Because if you're, if you're, let's say you're spending a million dollars on a development, right? Let's just assume it's a smaller, 10,000 square foot flex space. You're not going to be spending a million dollars on day one, and you're not going to be spending a million dollars in day 365, you might spend $150,000 in month one. You might spend $350,000 spend $350,000 in month two, you might spend $50,000 in month three, right? It fluctuates significantly depending on what kind of work is being done. And so you need to understand how to properly draw down that construction loan and account for that in your underwriting. And so it is. It is definitely more complex. I mean, we have spreadsheets that are specifically built out for development, because it's just more complicated. So that is, as one thing that I would, I would take a look into if you're, if you're interested in commercial real estate development. I said this to the mastermind this weekend. I was like, we're going to talk about how to develop commercial real estate because, you know, I'm the parent, right? And even if I tell you guys, you know, and you're a high school kid like, don't drink, I know you're going to drink, so you might as well do it responsibly. And that's kind of how I feel about development. I know some people in that room are still going to go out and develop commercial real estate, and I would like for them to do it responsibly. You. Even though I don't think it should be done today, vicin is saying, Tyler, you should do an apartment. Vicin, you know, I would love to do an apartment. If somebody brought me a deal that actually made sense in the multi family space, I would 100% buy it. I haven't seen that deal for six years. Cap rates have gotten too, low for apartments and the risk adjusted return, meaning the amount of return that I'm getting for the amount of work and risk that I'm having to take on, way too low, way too low. I mean, a lot of these multifamily syndicators are aiming for a 12% internal rate of return on their deals. That's horrific. It's just not worth it. I don't get out of bed for anything less than an 18% IRR. So my deals are making 50% more than theirs. So to me, it's just not worth doing. Hopefully soon it will
Dustin saying potential video suggestion mez debt deep dive would be cool. Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about meds debt sometime. For those of you all that are not familiar with mez debt, it is basically an additional debt source that you can stack into your capital stack in addition to your traditional debt, right? So you may bring you know, 20% down, but the bank on the senior position really wants 30% you could go and get mez debt for the additional 10% and they are going to charge you a lot more for that mez debt. Typically, it's a different lender, right? I mean, your traditional bank is not going to give you mez debt as well generally, and so it can. It can help you cover gaps in your in your capital stack. William is saying, Do you think we were headed for a recession? That's a tough question to answer. William. I mean, look, I'm no economist by any means. I think we're in a recession. I think it's hard to argue against that. I think, you know, if tariffs continue to go into effect, and you know, we're essentially punishing ourselves by raising prices on ourselves for no reason. Then, yes, I think that we will 100% be in the throes of a horrific recession. But so far right now, you know, everything seems kind of fine. You know, the stock market is always a good indicator of how the market feels, and it's interesting to see what's going on in the stock market right now, right big investors don't like uncertainty, and we have a lot of that right now. No matter which side of the political aisle you're on, there's a lot of uncertainty being created, and that makes it a tough environment to invest in. So do I think we're headed for a recession? I hope not, but it seems like we could be. Joe is saying, Yeah, I understand that development is risky. I just already buy and sell vacant land, so I thought it would be the best route to approach. Maybe I should do iOS first. Yeah, Joe, I mean, the difference between buying and selling land and then moving into development is drastically different, right? It's like, it's like learning how to add, you know, two plus two and then going straight into algebra two, right? Very, very different. Like, yeah, it's both math. Like, you're dealing with land in both respects. You're probably dealing with entitlements and stuff like that, but actually executing on it is very different. Yeah, iOS, you know, industrial, outdoor storage could be a great first start for you there, and it'll at least give you a covered land play, if nothing else, right? You buy this land, you monetize it in the meantime, and maybe a developer comes along and you can JV with them, right? You throw the land, and there's equity into their deal, and you go along for the ride, and you see how they develop it, right? I always recommend, no matter how experienced you are in other aspects of commercial real estate, if you have never developed anything before get together with somebody that has and partner with them in some capacity, right? Whether you're just bringing them in as an advisor, or whether they are the ones that are actually executing the deal and you're just following along for the ride, because it's one of those things that you just kind of have to see it to learn. I've never really seen a commercial real estate development class that completely teaches how the actual process goes. I mean, I've taken some like commercial real estate development classes after I developed commercial real estate and I walked away thinking, man, if this was the thing that I did first, I would have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing. It's just a very extensive topic, for sure, vicin is saying, Tyler, do you invest in gold and silver coins? I don't. I just don't care for it. I barely invest in the stock market. I have stuff there just because I have acorns hooked up to my, you know, credit cards. And it just goes ahead and. Round stuff up and puts it in the stock market. For me, I really am not intentional about doing any of that kind of stuff, because to me, the returns that I get on real estate are far outweigh anything that I could ever achieve in silver, gold, crypto or stocks. And also, I'm a big believer in invest, you know, it's the Warren Buffet method. Invest in what, you know, right? I don't know silver and gold, I don't know crypto, I don't know stocks, and I don't particularly care to I can get some pretty outstanding returns and in commercial real estate and so and I can diversify plenty within that market too. So that's kind of where I like to play. I Our Vasquez is saying, What do you know about commercial real estate in Southern California? What type of commercial real estate would you recommend as a first time investment? I know very little to nothing about commercial real estate, specifically in Southern California, outside of, like the deals that we've looked at for members of the CRA accelerator mastermind, whenever we're going through and underwriting those, you know, I mean to me, commercial real estate is commercial real estate, no matter where you are, right? You've got to understand the fundamentals and the dynamic individual market and the demand drivers, right? What is driving demand for that type of real estate in that area? Right? If you can't tell me why industrial real estate in Southern California will do well, then you probably shouldn't invest there, right So, but, but on the other hand, if you're like, Well, you know, it's, it's, there's a big industrial hub here, because, you know, this company is opening up a massive distribution facility, and actually all the trucking comes, you know, down through here to to hit, you know, all the way through Texas, then, yeah, could make a lot of sense. I think it's really, really important to make sure that you're understanding the market dynamics, right? Because look here, here's the thing. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where you invest, as long as you understand those fundamentals. You know, I've got a lot of people that think, oh, California is overpriced. Deals here just don't make sense. Well, there's a lot of people that invest in California specifically and won't invest anywhere else, that make a lot of money that would beg to disagree. And yes, it may not cash flow. Yes, it's probably going to lose money for the next three to five years, but because the cap rates remain so low, if you just add a little bit of value, you'll be able to flip it for a pretty significant profit. And so that's kind of how that's kind of how they work. Let's see, as far as like, what type of commercial real estate I would recommend for first time investment. It could be retail, industrial. I mean, even office. To me, I don't think it really matters. The Warning curve is equal on pretty much all of them. I think it again, comes down to understanding the market. I think just get something smaller, right? You know? I mean, my first property that I bought, like, raised capital for so not development, because that was a bit of a different case. But the first property that I raised capital for and bought and flipped was $575,000 you know, it was a small, little two tenant, 6000 square foot building on a corner in a suburb of Nashville, and we took out $120,000 in a line of credit to draw down upon as needed, which we ended up not needing at all. Well, a little bit, we drew down probably 20 grand to replace the HVAC. But outside of that, I mean, we flipped it, got a, you know, we sold it for like, $750,000 it was a really good deal. And I learned a ton on that one. And so it was relatively low risk, and I learned a bunch. So that's, that's kind of what I recommend, is just something that's smaller that you can go and learn on, because there's so much that you're going to learn just from doing that first deal. Don't approach it from the perspective of, like you need to retire off this first one. Just get the track record, get the deal under your belt, get the experience. That's really, really what people need. Let's see here. William is saying, I'm a commercial agent. I'm thinking about learning about property management. My end game is to be an investor. Would you recommend learning property management skills? Yeah, William, I mean, here's the thing, you don't necessarily have to go all in on the property management side of things. You could go start taking classes at IRAM, which I think, is the Institute of real estate management. I've taken some classes there great, great program. And, you know, you can learn about that, you know, talk to all the property managers that you interact with on a on a daily, weekly basis as a commercial real estate broker, because I'm sure you do, and just kind of see how they manage these properties, right? Because, you know, at the end of the day, commercial property management isn't super complicated, but you will have to deal with a lot of fires, and it's a lot of managing personalities, is what I've seen, and it largely comes down to understanding the legalese within these leases. You really need to understand the clauses within those leases and what that implies for any situation, right? So that's what I would recommend. Yeah. I mean, look, it never hurts to go all in on figuring out, you know what, how property managers operate, and what that looks like in that world, because it can be super helpful, both on the brokerage side and the investment side.
Nate is saying, Have you done any office to resi conversions, or any class of commercial real estate to resi conversions? Thoughts on that general idea, Nate, we bought an office tower in downtown Chattanooga back in 21 that we had put plans together to convert into micro apartments. The only reason that that worked is because the building floor plate was so small that if we ran a hallway down the middle, we had normal sized apartment units on either side. That is rare. Most office buildings have such deep floor plates that they don't they just don't work for a resi conversion. And it can often be so cost prohibitive to convert an office building into residential units that you might as well just tear the damn building down and build fresh. I'm not even kidding. It's kind of wild. So my thoughts on the general idea. I think yes, it can be done, and yes, it's very interesting, and in some rare cases, you might save money, as opposed to building ground up. But I think it's, I think it's really, really tough to make that, to pull that off, so to speak. L Futch is saying, I have some rather large capital coming in from a land sale. Should I put it into one really great property, or try to spread it out, just getting into commercial real estate. L, what I would say is, it depends on how much capital is a lot or a large sum for you, right? I mean, if a large sum is 250, or 500 grand, then I would say, you know, you could probably only buy one, right? However, if you're saying, you know, large sum is 5 million, then, yeah, I would go spread that out over two or three properties, you know, talk to your Qualified Intermediary to make sure that you're following your 1031 exchange properly. If you are planning on doing a 1031 exchange, you can get, you know, two or three different properties. And that's what I would do, right? I mean, you know, there's, there's something to be said for getting one really large property. But you know, I've got, I mean, we've got members of the mastermind that do both and and I think the guys that do the smaller ones, they really love the small ones. They can get really good you can get better returns and smaller commercial real estate deals on a percentage basis. If you just have to deploy the capital and then go for something bigger, you'll get a lower return on a percentage basis, but a higher, you know, obviously dollar amount, right? So it just depends on kind of what you want to deal with. Other considerations you want to have is the management. Is it easier for you to manage one big property, or, you know, a couple, two or three smaller ones, right? Type of tenants matters too, right? What's the credit of the tenants? What does all that look like? Right? Raphael is saying what LTV, are commercial lenders doing on refinancing right now, if it's base or net income, what cap rate are they going by? I mean, LTV lenders are still, I mean, everybody I'm seeing is still doing a 75 to 80% loan to value. Well, let me take that back. Most commercial real estate lenders do not operate on a loan to value. They will operate on a loan to cost. And so what, what you'll see is, it doesn't matter. Okay? For example, peerless mail. I bought it for 5.6 million. It appraised for $12 million like the day that we closed, it appraised for 12 million. You could argue, well, we've got $6.4 million of equity in this deal. Now that we bought it, we should have to bring any equity to the table, right? Because it's already there. We've got basically a 5050, loan to value in that case. But the way that commercial banks operate is they don't care about that. They still want you to have skin in the game, so they're not going to let you just not bring money to the table. So what they do is they operate on a loan to cost, typically. And so they'll say, you know, they'll give you 80% loan to cost. So they'll give me 80% of that 5.6 million, which is, you know, it can be frustrating, but at the end of the day, it's not the worst thing in the world. I mean, hey, you're still having to be conservative. And it was a pretty good deal. The biggest thing today, though, is not even the loan to cost. A bank may be willing to do an 80% loan to cost, but you're going to get hit by the debt service coverage ratio, right? So your winner may say, yeah, we'll give you 80% loan to cost, but we have a 1.25 Five times debt service coverage ratio, and then, based on the cash flow that asset, they may only give you 72% because they need to stay below the 1.25 times debt service coverage ratio. So it's important to pay attention to that. As far as it being based on net income or what cap rate they're going by, it's based on cops, right? It all comes down to cops in the area. Vicin is saying, Tyler, what's the best financial literacy book you would recommend? Vic and that's a good question. I mean, I have no idea. I'm not a financial literacy guru, so I wouldn't even know where to, where to, kind of start from there. Most of my financial literacy has really just come from studying commercial real estate, studying the market, studying other entrepreneurs and kind of how they operate. You know, I think Ray Dalio has a couple of really good bucks maybe, maybe go check those out. He talks a lot about the markets. Nate is saying, speaking of management, what percentage of rents do you typically charge or see charged, and do they normally charge on cams as well as rents? Yeah, so Nate property management fees are typically charged on gross rents collected, right? Because you want them to be motivated to collect the cam, right if they get, if they're collecting 6% on the base rents and they're getting 0% on cam, what's going to really motivate a property manager to go out and collect the common area maintenance and you can say, well, they'll lose their job, sure, but then you've got to go through finding a new property manager and onboarding them and dealing with all that kind of stuff, and it's really just a pain in the ass. So typically, you're looking anywhere from four to 6% it could be as low as 3% if it's a really big deal, but generally, four to 6% of gross rents collected is what you can expect for commercial property management that's also charged back through cam so So more often than not, and this has been like one of the biggest selling points for my commercial property management company to the landlords that We work with, mostly in the Nashville area, is, hey, we'll come in. We'll take over the property management, because a lot of our clients are formerly Mom and Pop, right? So they're managing it themselves. We'll take over the management for you. We'll make this professional. We'll clean up the books, we'll do all of this stuff. We'll handle all the tenants and keep you at arm's length, and write you a check every month. And you don't even have to pay for our services. The tenants will pay through it through common area maintenance. You got to make sure that the leases are structured correctly to do that. But more often than not, we can do it. Jay Vargas is saying, What do you think is the best way to learn real estate at 19 to get into the development and investment game? Should I get my real estate license and become an agent, or what are some other ways? Yeah, Jay, I mean, what I would say is, get your real estate license, go work for somebody, shadow them for a few years, get paid to learn how commercial real estate works, right? That is, hands down, the best thing you could do. That's what I did. I got my commercial real estate license and went to town. Right? The first thing I learned was how to lease commercial real estate, knocking on doors, begging tenants to take space marketing, showing space, understanding what tenants were going for. And then finally, I started to learn, like, okay, these are the things that work, and this is what doesn't. And then I started working on the investment side of things, helping people understand investments. And you know, it wasn't really until I learned how to underwrite until I could really start knocking those deals out. Because what I started doing was I would go find deals, underwrite them, send them to my investor list, and then, you know, I mean, I basically teed up these deals for my investors, and they would buy them, which was phenomenal. It was like, one of the best things I ever did. So it was pretty great. So that's what I would do, is go get your real estate license and just learn from other people on how to do it. That is it for this week's office hours. Thanks for joining me every Tuesday, 8:30am Central Standard Time. We'll jump in. We'll ask your questions. If you are watching on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts, leave me a review. We'd like to know what you guys like about the show, and other than that, I'll see you guys in the next one. This
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In this episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast, we’re breaking down the non-negotiables—the must-have criteria that every smart investor should consider before closing a deal.
From location and zoning to cash flow and environmental risks, I’m diving into the key factors that could make or break your next commercial investment. I’ll share insights straight from my own deals, plus lessons from other experienced investors, so you don’t waste time—or worse, lose money—on the wrong property.