Commercial Retail Investment

[Maureen Wilbeck]

I don't see much about commercial retail property on the forum, but was curious if anyone knew the best approach to market it for sale. My husband and I stumbled into commercial real estate and admittedly don't know much about it. We bought land in 1985 for our office building because we were tired of paying high rent. Now the area has exploded with development around us and we have had some serious interest from potential buyers just because of drive by traffic. Nothing has panned out yet so we were hoping to speed up the process. We really don't want to get a realtor involved. The interest has been from commercial retail developer type people. We are sitting on a very prime property in west Wichita that has been described as a "billboard" property. The traffic count is extremely high. Our neighbors are Abuelo's, Panera Bread, Lowes, Twin Peaks, IHOP, Kohl's, Slumberland, Target and Best Buy, just to name a few. Any recommendations on finding a buyer? Our plan is to do a 1031 exchange. We are interested in purchasing residential real estate when we sell as part of the exchange.

[Dave Foster]

@Douglas Dowell, You're 0 for 2, said the guy from Manhattan :)  @Maureen Wilbeck, start with the planning and zoning dept.  They can not only tell you what current uses allowed are but also what potential "best and highest" could be.  They get marching orders frequently from politicos above them so they will know and probably already have renderings for the path of progress and any significant changes coming down the pike.  Your average drive by and craigslister will either not know the potential  Or they're hoping you don't.

Once you've got an idea of what the City is thinking you can now start to shape your search for the best realtor/partner/developer to use to either broker a sale, buy it directly, or partner with you to produce a nice product.  I'm a big fan of realtors. But you'll serve yourself well by going behind the scenes to get some back story before aligning with anyone at this point.