How to Invest in Industrial Real Estate (Part 1)

11/10/20 • 15 min

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

What is the difference between Warehouse, Distribution, Manufacturing, Flex Industrial, and Specialized Industrial? How do you assess a single tenant risk profile within industrial? What is a sale leaseback as an alternative form of financing? Neil Wahlgren answers a lot of our questions regarding this popular asset class.

You can read the entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/how-to-invest-in-industrial-real-estate/

Can you elaborate on what each type of industrial properties are and what are the differences between them?
1. Warehouse distribution: this tends to be the most common. For example, that would be an Amazon distribution center. Those can range from a large, empty space, four walls, a roof, all the way to these extremely state of the art, modern, brand new Amazon distribution centers that have lasers, artificial intelligence, robot handlers with all the parcels coming and going. Ultimately, you are creating valuation and creating value through what's inside those four walls and a roof. That defines the warehouse distribution side.

2. Manufacturing: that tends to be a range. Everything from four walls, typically metal sided, oftentimes built from scratch for a particular operating company. These operating companies are typically core producers, they can make everything from widgets to industrial dryers, mixers, aerospace parts, and even commercial food, really anything that's made, oftentimes B2B, where you're creating large things with specialized equipment inside of them. Those are categorized as manufacturing space, some will be more agnostic, where you have just a core building, and sometimes five or 10 ton cranes on top. And on the other end of the spectrum, you can have some very specialized built to suit ones, oftentimes irregular shaped buildings. For example, the Boeing manufacturing plant outside of Seattle. You have a massive building that's unlike commercial or industrial real estate in the area.

3. Flex industrial: imagine an entire tenant area, each typically with truck bays, loading and unloading facilities, and those tend to be very flexible in that you have an outer shell of a building. And then the interior walls and the actual square footage of each tenant space is adjustable by the owner of the building to meet the needs of the tenants. Oftentimes, tenants will grow and they want to knock down a wall, take some of the adjacent space, and oftentimes that industrial will be more of an even mix of office and warehouse space.

4. Specialized R&D industrial: that's kind of the catch all for everything else. It can be everything from laboratory space to really high tech, pharma type of real estate, or everything in between.

The thing that I always worry about within industrial is most of them are single tenants, can you elaborate on how you or any investor should approach that when looking at a property?
Absolutely. And you are right about that, the vast majority of industrial spaces tend to be single tenant occupied with the exception of those flex industrial. One really important thing to look at is, with a single tenant, you do have more or less a binary set of risks there. Either your tenant is in place, financially solvent, paying rent, or they’re not. And that gives a lot of investors pause. If that tenant declares bankruptcy or defaults on their lease, you can find yourself in a position where you still owe debt service.

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You can read the entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/how-to-invest-in-industrial-real-estate/

4. Specialized R&D industrial: that's kind of the catch all for everything else. It can be everything from laboratory space to really high tech, pharma type of real estate, or everything in between.

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Previous Episode

Getting Started With Real Estate Syndication

How should you fundraise? What are the best practices? Ben Kogut, partner at HJH Investments will share his extensive experience with fundraising for syndications.

You can read this entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/getting-started-with-real-estate-syndication/

Walk us through your first syndication raise. What did you do? How long did it take for you to raise the funds? What were the results? Lessons learned?
It all starts with the deal, making sure that the deal itself is solid. And for me, a good deal looks like predictable cash flow. Generally speaking, that means that we have a high credit tenant with a long term lease, or multiple long term leases, something to that extent. And so making sure that all the numbers, the debt, that we structure our deals where we have a high net worth individual sign on the debt, and that the assets are in an area that we think are going to appreciate.

On my first deal that started with my relationships. People that I've known throughout my involvement in real estate for the past 15 plus years, plus people that I know throughout my involvement in the community, I basically just started there by talking to people, Hey, here's the deal. Here's what I like about the deal. Here's what I don't like about the deal. And here's what you may expect by potentially investing in a deal like this.

But the best advice I could say if anybody's thinking, Okay, I want to raise money or I'm thinking about one day raising money. Then now is the time to start telling people within your sphere of influence. The people that already know that you're a smart, capable individual, and that you're working on a deal, or you have a deal, Hey, would you be somebody that would be interested in investing with me once I get a deal, and I think a deal will look like this, whatever that is. If you're in triple net properties the way I am, or if you're in multifamily, or all the other different asset classes, which there are many.

Now that you're raising all of your funds in less than a month, what are some of the best practices for fundraising for a syndication?
1. Putting together a clear and concise investment deck, to make sure that people understand what it is that that we're trying to accomplish.
2. This is a new addition to my practice, I've been putting together a short video where I just stand in front of the property, and I talk about it. What are we seeing here. Some people really care about what the property looks like. Some people could care less. They don't care where it is. They want to know what are the leases, who are the tenants, what are the terms? What kind of debt do we have? If I am going to put this much money in, how much am I going to get out and when. I'm trying to provide that type of data to a broad range of people.
3. Communicating with with your investors. Right now we have upwards of 180, or close to 200 existing investors amongst our portfolio, that's always the best place to start.
4. Another piece of advice I could give people, that I struggled with at the beginning, but is really good advice that someone gave to me is to be indifferent. To be indifferent to whether or not somebody invests in that deal or on you. Completely indifferent. I really do not care if you invest in this deal or not. It really set me free, it really takes the pressure off. I don't want anybody feel pressured to come into a deal.
Ben Kogut
www.linkedin.com/in/benkogut
www.hjhinvestments.com

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Next Episode

How to Invest in Industrial Real Estate (Part 2)

What is unit level profitability? What kind of tenant is best to pick for your industrial space? How do you add value to an industrial investment? Neil Wahlgren answers a lot of our questions regarding this popular asset class.

You can read the entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/how-to-invest-in-industrial-real-estate-part-2/

What is unit level profitability?
It refers to whether or not you have insight, as a landlord or as a real estate owner into the profitability of the particular location of the building that you're buying. If your tenant has several locations, you are interested on how profitable is this store in this piece of real estate that I'm buying.

When you say that you are getting properties at 8.5 cap rate, how do you add value to that property? Because you're dealing with the seller, and they're going to lease back the property. And it's going to be a 15, 20 year lease. So how do you guys bring value besides that 8.5 cap?
1. The first is cash flow, and with that cash flow with that net lease structure, you have an expense free set of cash coming in to the ownership pool. With those we typically structure our deals to target 8% going to investors minimum on year one, and that's going to increase year to year as rent bumps kick in. One of the nice things about these leases is typically they will have built in rent bumps. So without doing anything, you have typically one and a half to 2% increases in rent kicking in every year. And because there are no expenses, that rent is usually equal to the NOI of that property. Now imagine you have a static cap rate, I know for a fact my NOI is going to increase 2% a year. So that's the first way that I'm creating value such that if I hold it for five years, I've seen roughly 10% increases in NOI. And now at the same cap rate I can sell and see a significant increase in value.

2. The second piece is paying down principal on the debt. You are able to acquire between 70 and 75% leverage on debt on the real estate. Most of our real estate debt comes from local lenders, or credit unions, they know both the tenant company and the area very well. And that's even more important when you're buying tertiary real estate, where the local lenders really believe in the companies, oftentimes those companies have been in place for 40, 50, 60 years, and you're able to get more aggressive and better terms on the lending. We acquire fixed rate debt, fixed interest rate, usually in the low fours or high threes in today's environment. With that, every month, you're paying down principal on the debt.

3. And then the third is a little bit more subjective. We look to buy real estate in growing metros where we feel like there's a chance for a cap rate compression. For example, today Omaha is trading around 7, 8 cap for a lot of industrial properties. If we think that there's a good chance that this might compress down to a six or seven cap environment in five years, based on the growth that we're seeing in this area as a way to create value. And the other half of that third piece is what they call credit enhancement. Imagine if you buy a piece of real estate with a tenant that has $30 million a year in revenue, and in five years, that company is doing 100 million dollars a year in revenue. Now that's a much stronger tenant, which provides a lot more security on your lease. So now you're able to sell that same piece of real estate at a lower cap rate because you've reduced the amount of risk.

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