First Commercial Property for a residential house flipper!

[Christian Sidaros]

Hi everyone, 

As the title states I've been doing residential flips for the last couple years. I finally have an opportunity to crack into the commercial real estate world but I'm looking for some advice and I have quite a few questions. It's a very low acquisition cost (less than 50k) for an almost 5,000 sqft single story commercial building in the heart of downtown of a small town. The reason why the price is so low is because the building suffered hurricane damage.  It has several offices and only one bathroom (built in 1900) so it basically needs a total gut and a bathroom added (roughly 100k in reno). My question is, if my intention is to buy and hold this property, should I gut the place and repair the structural damage and leave it as kind of an empty shell? My thinking is that if I knock the office walls down and fix the floors and ceilings that suffered water damage then maybe I can begin to market it to a tenant and then potentially give the tenant a blank canvas to work with. And then if that is the case would I be responsible for investing the money to make this "blank canvas" to the liking of a tenant? Or do we find typically tenants want an empty shell to invest their money to their own liking? I guess my main question is, based on experience do commercial real estate investors find that tenants would rather have a blank canvas to customize their space to their liking or would they rather have a building where everything is built and ready and all they need to do is move in? Thanks in advance for the advice!