In 2019, I made my first commercial real estate investment. I bought a 15,000 sq foot light industrial building in Garden City Idaho for $1,300,000. 

When we purchased the building, it was run down, poorly managed and ripe with opportunity to make improvements.

And that is exactly what we started doing.

Over the next two years, we invested $135,000 to make improvements to the building. We also raised rents to market rates (~20% increase in income). All the old tenants got so mad that they all left (they were on basic month to month leases).

With the new tenants, we had them all sign proper triple net (NNN) lease where they would be responsible for their insurance, their share of the property taxes, and maintenance and repairs. 

Once we had stabilized the building, we had $2,000 per month in positive cashflow, and the building had significantly increased in value.

Around that time, we received a solicited all-cash offer for $2,000,000, so we decided to sell the building.

Investing Beats Running a Traditional Business

Over the two years it took us to fix up the building, I was busy running my eCommerce & SaaS businesses (I’ve sold them both now) and it made less money that we made on the building over the same period of time.

Better still, to do all the things we did only took a handful of hours per week.

Suffice to say, I was HOOKED on investing commercial real estate and I wanted to do more of it.

Since selling my companies, I’ve been investing as a limited partner in one multi-family deal, and quite a few mobile home communities.

So why did I switch from being a General Partner (the guy running the deal) to becoming a Limited Partner?

Simple: I wanted to leverage the expertise of investors more experienced than me, while doing less work….and let me tell you, that has worked out extremely well for me. 

Investing Passively vs Actively

The reality is that for most business owners, there simply isn’t time to run your primary business at the same time as you try to run a real estate business.

Every deal/project/property is its own business and needs all the attention that a regular business does; especially until it is stabilized and that usually takes a few years. 

The solution is to find established real estate investors (we call them either General Partners or Lead Sponsors) and then invest with them as a Limited Partner. 

As a limited partner, you have FAR less work to do. Most of your time will be spent finding experienced General Partners and then doing the due diligence needed to determine if you want to invest in their deal(s).

Once you make that decision, all you have to do is write a check….and then cash checks as they are sent to you. 

How I Can Help You Succeed

As a Fund of Funds manager, my job is to find and vet Lead Sponsors so I can determine if they are worthy of investing my money (and yours).

As a part of that, I do a lot of networking, attending conferences, underwriting, and general due diligence.

If what I’m describing here, sounds appealing to you, I invite you to click the blue button below to join my email list so I can notify you of new investments when I find them.