cheaper commercial rent or buy the commercial property? and how?

[Robert Otteson]

I have really been wanting to get into residential real estate, started listening to the podcast and i am hooked. right now in my area residential properties seem way over priced. my wife has her own business and our lease agreement for her business has ended so we started looking for a new location we've been paying over $2,000 a month for the rent of our business and we started looking for new places to rent because they were going to raise the rent and we really needed a either a smaller location or a cheaper location and we started looking into some and we found one that we like and the agent mentioned that it was "possibly for sale" also. We've paid over $85,000 in the last three years for our rent for our business and this new location comes with three little stores in a strip mall and it's for sale for approximately $500,000 I haven't done any research yet in commercial real estate but I need to act kind of soon and I'm just trying to get a little bit of guidance in a little bit of feedback I know that loan types are different but I'm not quite sure how we could go about getting a loan for half a million dollars. the 3 locations in the strip mall, one has a nail salon (not sure what her rent is there yet) and the other 2 are empty. We plan on moving our business into one of them and renting out the last one. if it was a residential 30 year mortgage, then what we were paying in rent would almost cover the whole monthly mortgage payment. But I don't think buying commercial could be so easy. what do you guys think? Rob...