Hey, everyone. Welcome to my course.

The Beginner's Guide to Commercial Real Estate

Investing. How to start buying commercial real estate. If you've been wanting to create a
portfolio of commercial real estate investments, you’re in the right place, and I'm glad you're
here. My goal in designing this course was to give you the knowledge and confidence that you
need to go out there and find, fund, and close your first commercial real estate deal. By the time
you're finished for this course, you’ll have a well above average understanding of the general
commercial real estate market, how to prepare for a commercial deal, how to find properties,
how to operate a deal, and finally, how to properly exit or sell the deal. So where do we start?
First, let me give an introduction to myself, and then I'll give a quick overview of what we're
going to cover in this course. I'm Tyler Cauble. I'm a commercial real estate investor and
developer, and I own three separate commercial real estate companies the Cauble Group, which
is a commercial real estate brokerage, Parasol, which is a commercial property management
company, and Hamilton, which is my commercial real estate development and investment firm.
You may know something about my personal journey, but for those who don't allow me to
briefly tell my story, I think you might find it interesting, maybe hopefully a little inspiring in the
context of commercial real estate investing. As you'll see, if I can do this, you definitely can too. I
got started nine years ago after dropping out of college as the in-house leasing agent for a
commercial real estate developer herein my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It was a smaller
boutique firm, and they actually paid for me to get my real estate license. And because of my
previous sales experience as well as the incredible market conditions, in 2013 gave me a
shopping center and an office building to go out and lease, which was a pretty great way to get
started. I've got buddies that had 50 plus interviews before they ever got a job offer as a broker,
so I was very fortunate there. I spent a couple of years learning just about everything I could
about leasing commercial real estate, and it was nice because I was able to work with office
retail, multifamily hospitality, and industrial spaces. So, I really got a taste of everything before I
had to go out and figure out what I wanted to do. Most of the time, when you start out at a bigger
commercial real estate firm, they'll want you to specialize. They'll say you're the industrial
tenant rep guy or the single tenant net lease sales guy. That's great because you can become the
absolute best at something by specializing, but you may not become a very well rounded or agile
developer or investor. It depends what route you want to take. I knew specializing really wasn't
for meat that point in my career. So, with a little bit of knowledge under my belt. In my third or
fourth year, I was able to put together my first development deal, mainly because for the last few
years at that firm, I'd been able to sit in on all the development project meetings every week. In
2018, another year or two, and multiple deals later, I wrote a book called Open for Business
covering how to lease commercial real-estate that really kick started my career. Literally a week
later, I left that job and started my own firm. So, I kicked off my entrepreneurial journey by
starting the Cauble Group, which is again a commercial real-estate brokerage focused on leasing
and sales for commercial, mostly office, retail and industrial property. About six months later, I
started property management company called Parasol. It was a great marriage, commercial real
estate, leasing, sales and property management, and it really just made sense to do that. I had
clients that were selling portfolios of residential properties and performing a 1031exchange,
which we'll talk about at some point in this course, into shopping centers. They didn't have those
property management connections and indefinitely wanted to get that monthly income, since
leasing and sales can be a little up and down. At my former job, we did everything in house
construction, property management, we had a brokerage and obviously development group, so I
got to experience nearly every angle of the industry firsthand. Then I bought my first office
building in February of 2019. Took me about five years of being in the business before I finally
had the balls to purchase a building myself. It's not easy, and I was intimidated, even though I'd
been through the process multiple times already, but never for myself. So, I completely
understand where you're coming from if you are having that fear too. I always tell everybody to
just pull the trigger on that first deal. Just do it. I don't care if it's a marginal deal or if it’s small,
just go ahead and do your first one because that's the only way to actually open your mind and
really learn how all of this works and frankly, how relatively easy it can be. So that year I went
from zero buildings to four buildings really fast, which was great. And now we've acquired over
$60 million of projects and done nearly $100 million of development, mostly in the East
Nashville area, which is where my firm is based. That brings us to today. At the time of this
recording, I'm nearly nine years into the business and almost five years into my own brokerage
and property management company. And I started my development company about two years
ago. There's no doubt that I went all in from the very beginning. I wanted to live the life of a
commercial real estate developer and investor, growing businesses and vertically integrating as
much as I could. But that may not be your thing, and I get that, and that's why this course will be
perfect for you. Whether you want to just dip your toe into the market with a deal or two, or
scale up to raising capital for multiple deals or even syndication and development. We'll cover
everything in the next few hours together. Before we jump into the real meat of this course, let's
go over the basics of commercial real-estate and why you should get involved with it. So, what is
commercial real estate anyway? For now, let's define commercial real-estate as any real property
that is primarily used for business purposes. The commercial, as you probably guessed it, is
derived from the word commerce. The easiest way to think about it is any structure that you
personally as the investor, wouldn't live in. Now there are some exceptions such as hotels or
apartments, but for now, let's just keep it simple. Commercial real estate may be owner
occupied, meaning you might own the real estate and operate your business at that location. Or
you may lease the space to tenants who wish to live and or work there as well. Or given a
combination of the two of those, we call that commercial house hacking. So then, what are the
major types of commercial real estate? It covers a broad range of properties from smaller
neighborhood cafes to massive regional distribution centers. These are buildings like apartment
complexes, office spaces, hotels, shopping centers, restaurants, hospitals, convenience stores,
you name it. In general, there are a few different broad categories that you can think of.
Multifamily, which can include duplex, triplex or quadplexes garden apartments, midrise
apartments, high rise apartments, student housing and assisted living office, which can include
properties in the central business district, commercially zoned homes, medical offices and
suburban office buildings. Industrial, which includes bulk warehouse space, flex warehouse
space, heavy manufacturing, light assembly, refrigeration and cold storage, showroom and self-
storage, both indoor and outdoor retail which can include community retail centers, out parcel
and single tenant net lease properties, power centers, regional malls or strip centers and
neighborhood shopping centers. And finally, hospitality, which can consist of budget hotels,
extended stay hotels, full-service hotels, limited-service hotels and short-term rentals. And then
if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it, there are far more categories like vacant land.
So yeah, that's quite the list. The good news is though, you don’t need experience or knowledge
in a specific industry to put together a successful deal. There are slight differences in the deals
between these categories, but not enough to go into just yet. By the time you finish this course,
you'll have a strong grasp on the overall principles of commercial real estate investing, which
will help you create any kind of successful deal within the industry. Now some of you might be
wondering what the differences is between commercial real-estate and residential real estate. I
mean, if you've bought and sold a few homes in your lifetime, it can't be that much different,
right? Well, I'm glad you asked. While commercial and residential real estate are two sides of the
same coin, they are vastly different from one another. Some general principles hold true for
both. Location is important, both cashflow and appreciate over time. And both offer many
different tax benefits. But here's the difference. Residential real estate is classified as any
complex with one to four units. Could be a single-family home could be a quadplex, really.
Residential is strictly for living purposes. Commercial and industrial activity at these properties
would typically violate your local zoning ordinances. Though I do know people that try and get
away with that sometimes. I like to describe residential real estate as anywhere you personally
would rest your head at night. This would also include some multifamily and hotels. But both of
those assets are intended primarily for commercial, not residential, uses. There are also many
differences between commercial and residential. As far as your investment outcome goes.
Residential has a higher vacancy risk, a lower profitability potential, and definitely less
scalability. For those reasons, and many, many others which you will learn throughout this
course, I've staked my claim and my future wealth on investments in commercial real estate.
Now let's go over the seven reasons why you should invest in commercial real estate as well.