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Tag Archives: commercial buildings

Commercial Opportunity

Old two-story brick building

This is one of the “extra” buildings that the banker didn’t include in the cost calculation. It is included in the property. It would make a nice eight-unit apartment on its own.

Have you ever thought about assisted living?

Sue Ann and I have known several “older folks” (We’ll just ignore our own ages for the time being!) who have chosen to spend their “twilight years” (nothing to do with the movies) in some very nice assisted living facilities. There are also facilities for people of more modest means.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking that Milam County would be a great home for a middle-class facility for some time. You can soak up that small-town vibe. It’s quiet. Other support businesses are already in place. It’s not far from first-class hospitals in three or four directions, one of the reasons why rural hospitals are an endangered species. Continue reading →

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That Was Interesting

Paul Esajian knows a lot about money and financing buildings. He is good to share!

I realized I hadn’t talked about the workshop on multi-family real estate that Lee, Carol, and I went to in Austin last weekend. It surprised us that FortuneBuilders would send one of their founders over for such a small, specialized event, but I think they are trying to get people to move away from renovating houses in difficult markets like Austin, and move toward commercial deals, where there’s more opportunity right now.

So, we got a lot of information in a short amount of time about how to figure out if a commercial or multi-family deal is a good one, and lots of information on funding these deals.

My favorite part of the presentation was some great stories the presenters shared, including our friend Linda, who was one of our original trainers. Each speaker told us how opportunities presented themselves in unexpected ways, with the moral being: always be ready to jump on a good opportunity, because they will NOT last.

How Do You Be Ready?

It helps to have sources of funding all lined up and ready to go. Many of us have a network of private money lenders we can reach out to. Others have self-directed IRAs. And still others know non-traditional lenders. The most important thing for any of us to do is to figure out what our resources are that we can get to quickly. If all your money is tied up in renovations, you may not be able to be so flexible, so think about keeping options open. And I can tell you, our private money lenders LOVE to make investments that pay good interest, so don’t be shy about reaching out to your contacts when you get an opportunity!

We do plan to attend more of the FortuneBuilder opportunities to learn about commercial real estate. If you’ve been considering joining, now is the time, because the classes they offer are expanding. The first one Lee went to was great, so he’s all excited!

We know the organization’s not perfect, but we do feel like the advantages significantly outweigh the disadvantages. See for yourself.

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What Would You Do with a Former Church?

It’s a yellow church in need of cleaning and painting. Etc.

Why am I asking that? Well, the Hermits’ Rest Enterprises team are buying a church building! Not exactly what you’d expect from us, is it?  This raises a lot of questions whenever we mention it (after the people stop laughing), so I’ll pretend like I’m a newspaper writer and answer the classic questions:

Who?

Lee, Mandi, and I wanted to find a commercial building to house our Cameron office, so we can rent out the lovely house on Travis Avenue where we’ve been working for the past year and a half. There is a LOT we can do with all the property we own on the main road, once Mandi moves out and we vacate the gray house (which is SUCH a sweet house).

From the side you can see where windows used to be. They probably leaked. Vacant lot is behind our cars.

What?

It’s a small church building that has a nice upstairs sanctuary and a basement with offices, a large kitchen, and a big area where meals could be served, or many other things. It comes with some cool furnishings, and I hope two pianos and an organ!

Bonus: there is a vacant lot next to the church, zoned Residential. I bet we could do something with that, too!

The congregation has become too small to warrant such a big church, so they have made other plans. They just needed to sell the building.

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What Do You See?

Closed Sonic Drive-In

What do you think of when you see something like this? If your first thought is, “I wonder how I can use this location to make money,” you may be an entrepreneur.

What do you see when you spot an abandoned building or a closed business?

The trick of being a successful entrepreneur, especially a commercial real estate investor, is to see opportunity where others see failure.

This fact was brought home to me by the recent closing of the Sonic Drive-In in the small town where I spend most of my time these days. This being a Small Town, the closure was a big deal and sent the small town grapevine into overtime. All kinds of reasons for the failure were floated until another business closed for failure to pay sales taxes to the state. (We know this because the state is auctioning off all their assets.)

But the one thing that nobody talked about in either case was: “What’s going to happen to the building?” Okay. Nobody talked about the loss of a handful of sub-minimum-wage jobs, either, and they certainly should have. Finding new jobs in a rural small town is no easy matter.

In kind of a combination of those two thoughts, my initial reaction on seeing the sign at the Sonic (I learned about the other closure much later) was, “I wonder what kind of business could go in that location.” You see, a drive-in is a very special-purpose building. There aren’t a lot of other options for using it. In fact, there are so few options and it is so costly to build that Sonic has a program to repurpose other commercial buildings as drive-ins.

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