5 Tips For Buying Your First Piece of Commercial Real Estate
Be careful to follow these 5 tips when you source, qualify, and acquire your first piece of commercial property so that it’s not your last!
1. Research Your Market: Remember, 80% of your commercial property’s performance will be market based. This means that you should have growth in jobs, demand for office and industrial space, household population growth, and increased demand for retail services and housing. If your market is trending the other direction, beware because the other 20% of the equation, your financials, may not equate to profits.
2. Identify Your Return Requirements: Pick your return requirement. Does the deal need to provide you with a cash on cash return (i.e., you invest $1,000,000 and want $100,000 back year after year)?
Or perhaps you want an overall internal rate of return that accounts for how long you hold the property and how much you sell it for? Some people target 12-30% for their yield on investment or their internal rate of return. And remember, just because a commercial investment has a good cap rate, doesn’t make it a good deal.
Note: Your cap rate only tells you the first 12 months of the investment’s potential story!
3. Identify Your Ideal Property Type: Commercial investments come in 4 types: Retail, Office, Industrial, and Multifamily. Which commercial investment type is right for you? Research the differences between them and you’ll see that they all offer distinctive advantages and disadvantages when it comes to management, cash flows, hedging against inflation, maintenance, and growth in the real estate cycle.















