What should I do about this deal?
Hello everyone-
I'm posting under an anonymous account to retain a little anonymity, but I regularly post on this forum and appreciate all the good discussion it generates. I am known as the "real estate guy" in my family, so a couple of my brothers/inlaws have come to me with a proposal recently. 5 of them live in the same town and run their own successful businesses. 2 are lawyers, one is a dentist that owns his own franchised practice, and the other owns his own CPA firm. They are all financially stable, and looking to invest some of their cash in real estate.
They came to me recently asking if it would be a good idea to build their own small office building and consolidate their location, hoping to save/make a little cash flow by owning their own building. They would want me to source the deal and run it as the GP, with them being the LP contributors. One significant thing to add is that the dentist is a franchisee, therefore has half his overhead paid by his corporate partner. Theoretically he could sign a high market rate lease, and have half of it paid for, with the other half going right back to him through ownership.
I have my own ideas as to how to go about this, but I'm just wondering if you guys have had any experience with something like this and what I should look out for if I go through with it. Obviously I haven't run the numbers yet, but I'm just looking for general advice/tips. Assuming we can get a decent piece of land for a good price, here are the details:
4,000 SF pre-leased office
3,000 SF pre-leased medical office
2,000 SF spec office ? (depends on proforma numbers, etc)
7-9,000 SF total
Tertiary Market
$5 million available equity
Hoping for 65% LTC with pre-lease
Am I crazy to get into this, or am I crazy not to? I would basically be required to invest very little of my own funds, but I am super motivated not to screw over my family.
All market conditions aside, I've seen family deals explode and relationships lost . I've also seen families have enormous success.
The wealthiest and healthiest family I know requires agreement from all parties in order to make a decision. If one person chooses No vs Yes, the deal, transaction, refi, sale, etc is off.
Construction is such a pain in the ass. No value add play at this time? Rates moving up, prices moving down?
It seems like you would have minimal lease-up risk, and should be able to secure favorable debt terms with significant credit tenant pre-leasing. However, hard to give advice without knowing what market rates and construction costs are. Given you are not in an immediate time crunch, why not engage an architect to do some massing studies and provide a conceptual design that you can price? That way, you can at least get a sense of what the yield on cost would be. That should give you a bare bones barometer for whether it even makes sense to assume the risk as family developer.
Also, a huge part of this decision likely involves tax benefits. Talk to your accountant/financial advisor if you have one. You may be able to structure a deal with significant write-offs/tax deferment based on the structure. Few people here are qualified to give that advice and it will fall outside the realm of any basic pre-tax proforma.
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