All Forum Posts by: Gabriel Silverstein

If you want passive investment in real estate you might want to look into Tenant In Common (TIC) investments as well, as a way to allow yourself to invest in several properties at a time (by investing in more than one TIC property). Do your research on the sponsor and make sure they have some history in real estate that goes back before 1995, so they aren't fly-by-night groups that popped up as the TIC area started booming a few years ago but have no idea how to weather market storms. I like groups like Inland, CORE, Genesis and a few others as a start (note, this is not an endorsement of any of those in particular).

SIOR is the most exclusive designation (it's invitation only and heavily performance and experience qualified, whereas CCIM is effectively entirely education based). Both are good, though. SIOR is the Society of Industrial and Office REALTORS so you might guess that while a number of us have retail and/or hotel experience, there is an admitted concentration of (go figure) industrial and office brokers.

Understand that depending on what you are looking for you might have to try several different brokers/agents to find the right fit of a personality you like, someone that's truly qualified, and who is in tune with the specific product you're looking for. I can help you with office buildings from $20MM to $200MM+ but would be worthless for gas stations and many types of land deals, for example.

I would never do a hand off and not stay involved, and I am very leary of the long daisy chains, hence my question. Since this post I have been brought a $43MM REO portfolio in NYC, by a broker I have worked with before and trust, who is one step from the bank, so I can tolerate that, if not ideal. I can't believe that if there are genuine compilers out there that they are hiding so far underground that they don't want to be found - if they aren't how can they be effective?

Thanks a ton on the quote tip!

Some people do charge more than 6% for residential deals. Keep in mind the price of the sale is very relevant - a 7% fee on a $100k home is a smaller commission, for the same amount of work generally, as a 5% fee on a $200k home. The key is not the amount/percentage, it's the value you get for it, so the answer is 2% is too much (for some lazy REALTORS) and 6% is not enough (for the super hard working group that always sells listings higher and faster than the market).

I'm not so savvy as to figure out how to properly quote someone in the nice text box, so to address the comment that "Pocket listings are closer to an urban myth.":

Almost everything I do is off market deals, it is our specialty. Now this is in the large commercial (office, etc.) property market, so if there isn't a parallel between a $140 million office building (like we were touring with a client today) and a $239,000 home, forgive me. In my world there are many deals done that are not formally listed. Without getting into nuances of when specifically something becomes "on market" I think the best way to address the question at hand is to consider "pocket" listings as any open listing (a legal term in most states) that a broker/agent has that is not subject to an exclusive agency or exclusive right to sell agremeent with the owner(s).

Without such an agreement, there is no legal fiduciary obligation towards the owner to get the highest price (note, this can be a little different from state to state in its application). Don't forget, there are some of us out here that are buyers' not sellers' brokers (our focus) and therefore, we require these so-called pocket listings to thrive in the off-market world (nobody needs me to show them a listing that CBRE has). There is no fiduciary responsibilit to the seller at all for what I do - in fact we are mostly paid by buyers and even if paid by sellers, we are representing the buyers, so our fiduciary responsibility, if anything related to price, is to get the LOWEST price, not highest (and to convince the seller that ours is the BEST price even if not the highest).

It's quite subjective, indeed, and unless it's a complete dive, most owners/agents working for them will over rate the property's real "class". The best answer is the least helpful - it is just something you learn over time. Some specific things in different markets are easy points of differentiation, though, like indoor parking or covered parking vs. uncovered outdoor parking, elevator vs. walk-up (if low-rise), construction, amenities (pool, dry cleaner, etc.). Most people, despite the value of differentiating some of these points, just go by looks.

It does vary from market to market, though, as a dry cleaner, fitness center and pool, in unit laundry machines in a high rise downtown Chicago building are a necessity to think about being called an A building, but in Little Rock, Arkansas (wherever that is!) what might be an A building could even have self-serve laundry machines.

What type of real estate are you talking about here - residential or commercial, how big, etc.? I'm always looking for contacts in Austin, and have some good people to pass on, but that's just in the commercial realm...I'm not sure that will help.

Sorry, I didn't have the signature set up before so I wrote it in manually and then it was deleted by the moderator because it was done as such. Lord willing it will show up just fine this time.

To biggerpo's question, I got into the business originally as an analyst at LaSalle Partners, convinced that it was the same thing I was considering Goldman Sachs for but just specific to real estate. My previous background was financial and derivative trading (in London). I had been intrigued by real estate as an asset class when working in Moscow in the early 90s, knowing many ex-pats who were making large fortunes in the arbitrage of being able to buy buildings for thousands of dollars, spend tens of thousands of dollars rehabbing them and then sell them for hundreds of thousands and millions to other ex-pats and the consulting firms they were working for. At the time the amount of foreign aid and other money pouring into that city was astounding and real estate was the wild west.

I ended up in the investment side of the business first, then later moved for several years to national and international tenant rep as an SVP at Equis, where I sourced and managed global accounts and also transacted their deals, more leases than purchases and sales.

A few years ago I left and started Angelic with my life companion, angel, who is our CEO (and he's a non-broker, our only non-broker). We do both investment brokerage and tenant rep but far more of the former than the latter and based on our deal volume in the investment side, for the forseeable future, that's where our focus will remain. Sourcing equity partnership moneys for developments is something of an offshoot of that.

...is BEFORE you do the deal originally. You should have been given the advice before you got into it. I'm not sure if you could have done this or not (depending on how they signed onto the loan and who did it) but if you would have had the deed written to say you were tenants in common, not joint tenants (which I assume you might be) then technically you both/each own fee simple title to the property and there are no restrictions on a 1031 - you go your way they go theirs, and you do not have to be legally parntered in the replacement property to maintain the 1031 exchange benefit.

While the 1031 replacement property TIC (tenant in common) industry can have up to 35 owners for an individual property to still maintain the 1031 treatment qualifications on the way in and out of the investment for all the owners, many lenders are now used to doing TIC structured loans where there are only 2 or 3 owners, but they get in as tenants in common and not joint (or other partnership) tenants/owners, so they get the freedom to go their own way afterwards.