Advice on how to get off market industrial properties?

[Alex Boersma]

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out my post! I am looking for advice on how to get in front of commercial and industrial building owners that typically fall within these criteria; close to retirement, have deferred building maintenance, multi tenant buildings, are self managing, have at least 40,000SF buildings. Other than reaching out to all of the local agents (which we are already working with), does anyone have advice to get in front of off-market sellers directly? Has anyone tried direct mail for industrial properties? 

Any feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated! 

Cheers, Alex

[Andrew Tripp]

A couple of techniques you might want to try:

- Where an entire building, or even part of a building that size, is just listed for lease and it fits your criteria, you can send the owner an unsolicited interest letter to gauge whether they are interested in selling the building instead.  This shouldn't conflict with the broker's listing agreement in most cases. Sometimes that owner might not have thought about it.

- If you have contacts at local banks, you can try to get in front of their workout people to see if any of their distressed business customers might have industrial buildings they might be willing to sell to get some liquidity.  User distress doesn't seem to be here right now, but that may be coming in the next 12 months or so. 

If you do use a direct mail campaign, I would be curious to know how that goes.  Unlike the residential market, where it literally does not occur to some homeowners that they might be sitting on a lot of value, I feel like industrial brokers are regularly in owners' ears about what their building might be worth.  And in my experience, industrial owners will almost always go to the brokers first to see what kind of off-market interest their might be.