#1 Question I Get Asked As A Commercial Real Estate Pro

This week's Listener of the Week is Claude22. Claude, thank you for your five-star review. For those of you listening, if you wanna be next week's Listener of the Week, leave us a five-star review below. And you might be next week's Listener of the Week. Week, week. So, there is a question that I'm getting asked every single day, and I wanted to talk to you about it. And the question I'm getting asked is...

How is leasing activity right now? Right? There's economic uncertainty, interest rates are crushing sales. Not crushing sales, but they're certainly not helping them. So as a result, what does leasing look like? And I'm excited to get into this with you. So we have a property in Commerce City that has two units. Sick building.

High ceilings, great features, tall legs, just kidding. But between the years of 2008 and 2009, both units in this building were completely vacant. Showing after showing after showing, no hits. And so now it's 2023. And when I say I signed two five-year leases, one a renewal,

and one new lease on this building within the last six months, I wouldn't be making that up. So, the internet as we know it will forever change the way that we consume real estate as a society. And so people, you know, it's human nature to look at how folks have been successful in the past and then try to copy that to create your own success. However,

This does not apply to commercial real estate, right? It's human nature to see that somebody would do XYZ, so then you would create XYZ and get your own result. But in commercial real estate, following the crowd is your surefire, right? Like you don't want to approach an investment when everybody else has already played the game, right? You want to discover the new investment before everybody else. So.

Aviva Sonenreich (02:25.334)

with technology changing everything we do, specifically how we consume real estate, it's really, really important to not focus on what worked yesterday and think about what will work tomorrow, right? So that building in Commerce City in 2008, this was like pre-e-commerce. This was before warehousing was a desirable product type. So we...

bought it really well, and as a result, e-commerce put so many new tenants into the marketplace that now, only 15 years later, we can lease this building truly in no time. So I want you to think about your day-to-day actions and maybe what you did 15 years ago and how you do it today. And I'll just...

bring up one that I like to talk about all the time, and that's banking, right? So we used to go to the bank, we'd take our checks, and you know, cash or whatever. Now we don't even need to go to the bank anymore, right? We just do our mobile deposits on our phone, right? That was a big change in the last five years. Same thing with takeout, right? When we were young, it was just pizza. Now you can literally get anything delivered to your door.

at any point and this has a massive effect on real estate. So I wanna go back to going with the trends, right? If you go with what everybody else is doing, there's no way that you can get ahead, right? Because if demand goes up, right? All of a sudden, e-commerce becomes a thing and everybody starts buying warehouses.

then your returns inversely go down, right? The more saturation in a market, the less you can really make out of it. So what can you do to position yourself in 2023, 2024, and beyond to not go with the crowd, but still make good conservative buys?

Aviva Sonenreich (04:47.458)

Get creative. And I know that's really easy for somebody to say, but I think it's really important for people to understand that commercial real estate is a creative sport. Like if you don't have a creative bone in your body, good luck getting a deal done, because no deal is the same. And it takes elements of creativity to do deals and then discover pockets that maybe the average person wouldn't have discovered. So.

A really good way that I like to do that is to just monitor my own consumption, right? I sit back and I think, okay, what do I do? How are my actions changing? Or what are people like me? What do our behavior look like? It's like I said with banking, right? I used to go to the bank. Now I don't go to the bank anymore. But now I go to visit...

my grandparent in a senior living facility, right? We're gonna see more and more and more senior living facilities pop up because as baby boomers get older and live longer, societally, we need them more. So, don't ask, you know, I'm not saying go buy a senior living facility because we all know that's a lot to bite off, but what I am imploring you to do is to get creative, to look introspectively at

your actions and understand that that's probably a pretty good indicator of the rest of your city or country and then navigate accordingly. So another example I like to use is automotive, right? We all use our cars a ton. Well, what happens when our car breaks? Got to get it fixed. You want to be the first person to the party, not the last person to the party, right?

The folks who got into warehousing before e-commerce are crushing it right now, and you can crush it too. So what questions do you have for me? DM me at Aviva Real Estate on Instagram and literally every other social media platform. And if you wanna get started in commercial real estate, head to my show notes for my free guide as to how to get started in commercial real estate. We'll see you next week.