All Forum Posts by: Danny Simard

I've managed a few parking facilities before, and the majority of the properties I've managed have parking. In general, parking is one of those things that is not exactly fun to deal with, but it makes a ton of money. In my opinion, it's at the far end of the un-sexy-but-profitable scale. You do need to partner with a good operator, and there's plenty of mediocre ones out there. 

Since you mentioned leasing, you can monetize garages primarily two ways: 1) management agreement. This is where you hire a parking operator to do the main parking operations, they send you revenue less their management fee each month. 2) lease. This is what it sounds like, you lease the garage to a parking operator. They pay you rent, and they operate a parking business.

Here to also say do what Chris Mason said. However, with an arrangement like that, you should talk to an attorney. 

Hey Sam, 

I don't think I'm exactly the right partner for what you're describing, but I'm also bullish on Atlanta, and I have one residential rental property in Georgia. Plus, I work in the commercial world, so I might have some insight to share with you. If you'd like to chat and brainstorm ideas, my dm's are open.

Just going to piggy back on what others are saying here with a simple question you should ask when considering buying any existing property, assuming you aren't buying with the plan to demolish and build something new:

- When my current tenant leaves, what kind of tenant will replace them? It's a bad situation when you have a property that only serves an extremely limited pool of potential tenants, i.e. Dollar Generals et al. Apartments? Pretty much anyone can replace an outgoing tenant. Same applies for other broad asset classes (office, industrial, retail). Gas station? Pretty much only another gas station operator would move in there. Can't really convert it into a Starbucks without a cost-prohibitive amount of capex.

Congrats on that leasing activity! 

This is the $100,000,000 problem of most office landlords and will be for the rest of this decade (and beyond, probably).

This is a fantastic list. Thanks for writing it up, @Kristi Kandel!

Mine? Well, based on the floor plates of this particular building, there's not much to be done. We're in that sweet spot of too big to chop up into resi, and too modernized to justify the cost of either demo or cutting into the structure to make it "E" shaped. 

Definitely not unique to Utah. At least here in Southern California, the story is exactly the same (for most assets). For Landlords who don't have to sell, they're waiting out the storm, so to say. This is especially true for properties without debt. 

Hey @Chandler Butler, did you end up getting your license? Did you join a CRE brokerage?