All Forum Posts by: Robert T.

Has anyone leased out parking spaces to self dispensing water & ice machine vendors. This potential tenant requests 2 parking lots and negotiating to tap into main water line for a fee. Undecided of electric source. How much rent should one charge? Any pitfalls? Anyone with experience to start a conversation in this area of leasing? Thanks!

Cost does vary quite a bit. The last roof we ended buying up our own materials from a close out and paid for labor seperately.  Shop around and get a few quotes. 

Most times, you buy a property and has a billboard on it and it becomes part of the deal. There are very rare occasions that billboards are up for sale on its own. You cannot decide where to put a billboard and it is decided by the City and are carefully marked by distance apart. Another reason is that supply is much lower than demand, and the cap rates are going to be very low.  Reason is that you have big companies such as Landmark Dividend hunting for billboards in good locations. 

We acquired a 4300 sf restaurant building that sits on a one acre lot on a major freeway in Houston Because of the size and hence the cost, we had difficulty finding a strong enough single tenant (we marketed at $1.90/sf modified gross). Our proposal is to divide the building into 3 seperate Units (1000 sf, 1500 sf, 1800 sf). We have a new roof, building is in good condition and there is no asbestos. HVAC is sufficient. Currently, there is only one electric & water meter, 2 bathrooms. Besides having to add one more bathroom, we will need to build the walls, redirect the AC ducts, plumbing, electric, new doors and windows etc. I know we have to visit the architect to get a feel of the cost; but has anyone done conversion form STR to MTR before and what are the pitfalls? Any ideas of an approximate cost psf? Is it cheaper to tear down and re-build? Thanks!

Hi: I am from Houston,  a commercial real estate investor with a focus on retail. Have done mainly aquisitions, rehab. and lease ups.  Also have experience in property management. Moving into the challenging & riskier area of development and looking to learn as well as expand network with contractors and other builders. 

Over the years in CRE, we were plagued by this too. We had to cage our AC and change some copper pipes to PVC. It is a real nuisance, and presently we removed roof top ACs from empty buildings and store them. in secure places They even tried to steal live wires in one of our buildings, and gave up after realizing they might get electrocuted and die! LOL Best not to turn off electricity in empty buildings as that could in itself be a deterent.