Can anyone recommend a CRE Mentorship Program?

[Palani (Pono) Wright]

It seems like in every asset class there a few mentorships/programs to choose from but in commercial it's kind of scarce. Can anyone recommend one that they have personally used and had good results?

[Ash Patel]

I have been a full time non-residential CRE investor for over 10 years and have purchased everything from retail (vacant --> fully leased NNN), warehouse, office, flex, land, industrial, mixed use, restaurants, medical and have done ground up development. Most of what I do is heavy value add vs. parking money. I wish I had a mentor but its hard to find others that do exactly what I do. I have learned from making every mistake you can imagine. I have mentored people individually for many years and recently started doing that in a group setting. Please don't take this as a solicitaion and I am no longer accepting new members. I will tell you that we met every Tuesday for six months and each session was 4 hours long. The six months ended in May and we now meet every other Tuesday and still learn a lot from new deals that people are evaluating. Everytime you read a lease, you can learn something new. There are so many different clauses in leases that affect how you underwrite deals. There are countless factors that go into evaluating buildings, guaging the health of the area, calculating how long it will take to fill a vacancy, stress testing deals, projecting on the upsides as well as downside, dynamics of having an anchor tenant lease renewal on the horizon, guaging competition and surrounding vacancy, looking at future development of the area, understanding how local politics are affecting growth, traffic patterns etc. Imagine a shopping center where certain tenants pay taxes, insurance, maintenance while others pay a flat rate or a capped amount for maintenance. With MF, you have comps, single year leases and a lot of precedent for your playbook. We also have tenant improvement allowances where we give them money upfront and that has to be factored into the proforma. A mom and pop tenant will trade at an 8-9 cap where as a high quality nationan tenant can trade at 5 caps. There are very few books written on CRE relative to MF and other residential becuase there is no simple formula. There are tons of masterminds on MF, flipping, wholesaling etc. Very few on CRE. My advice, find someone that specializes in the area that you want to dive into and add value to them in return for education and mentorship.