He’s not interested in residential, and believes that the evolution of an investor starts with a single family house and turns into commercial shopping centers. He also turned a shopping center around in as little as eight months, that’s fast! Hear how he did it!
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Danny Newberry Real Estate Background:
– Founder and president of Value Investment Group, a commercial real estate investment firm
– His firm has acquired more than 20 properties since its inception in 2008 acquiring assets in 7 states
– Owns over 250 rental units and now invest in high end commercial deals and retail shopping centers
– Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado
– Say hi to him at http://valueinvestmentgroup.com/
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Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluff.
With us today, Danny Newberry. How are you doing, Danny?
Danny Newberry: Good, how are you doing, Joe?
Joe Fairless: I’m doing well, and nice to have you on the show. A little bit about Danny – he is the founder and president of Value Investment Group, which is a commercial real estate investment firm. His firm has acquired more than 20 properties since its inception in 2008, and that’s across seven states. He owns over 250 rental units and now invests in high end commercial deals and retail shopping centers. Based in Cedar City, Utah – with that being said, Danny, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your focus?
Danny Newberry: Yeah, thank you, Joe. Just to clarify and give everybody enough data, I have officially moved to the beautiful state of Colorado. I am officially a Colorado Springs resident, and originally from Southern California. I was born in Mexico, my mom is Columbian, my dad is American, and I couldn’t tell you how I ended up being born in Mexico… But I’m here now.
I’ve definitely had the privilege of investing as a young guy. I’m 28 years old now, and I’ve been able to accomplish some pretty good things based on the mentorship that I’ve had and the people that I’ve had in my life to help me and propel me down my path. It’s been a lot of fun, I’ve been enjoying the ride, I’ve been having a good time, and again, thanks for having me on.
Joe Fairless: What are you buying now?
Danny Newberry: I’d say my core focus is shopping centers. I’m looking across the spectrum of [unintelligible [00:03:48].07] commercial, so retail shopping centers, medical office buildings and industrial complexes… I’ve got a mix of all three right now. I’m really not buying any more apartments right now; I’m a little bit burnt out. They are a little bit more management intensive, but I heard this the other day and it kind of made sense to me – someone told me it’s the evolution of a real estate investor, going from residential to apartments and then ultimately into commercial, and I wanted to wrap my head around the different sectors and learn them, so that way I could identify opportunities in different marketplaces across different asset classes, so that’s what we’ve been doing for the past couple years. I’d say over the past 24 months I’ve really focused on the commercial side.
Joe Fairless: Tell us about a shopping center you’ve bought.
Danny Newberry: I actually just bought one last week here in Colorado Springs, a little over 20…
Joe Fairless: Congrats!
Danny Newberry: Thank you… Yeah, I’m very excited about it. It was a small shopping center in a neighborhood with an outparcel. It’s a little over 20,000 square feet. One of the names [unintelligible [00:04:48].14] other than that we have some mom and pops in there. Just signed a lease with a cryotherapy group, and we’re also working on a distillery right now, so that would be a pretty interesting tenant to get in the shopping center if we ultimately commence with them.
We bought that for about 700k, so it was only $30/foot when neighborhood shopping centers are going for about $125-$150/square foot. Our goal on this deal is a flip, it’s not one that we are necessarily interested in holding in our portfolio long-term. Our goal is to get in there — we’re gonna put a new roof, a new parking lot, a new facade, new signage and stabilize the rent roll, and then put it back on the market probably… I’m hoping to get it back on before the end of the year, we’ll see.
Joe Fairless: Wow, what a quick turnaround… That’s less than 12 months. That’s an eight-month turnaround.
Danny Newberry: Yeah, we identified this opportunity and we already had a team in place in Colorado; I bought a medical building about a year-and-a-half ago out there, so we already had boots on the ground, had a good team, a good leasing agent, my construction guy is ready to go… So this one – we looked at it, we looked at the numbers… Rents were below market, everyone was either on month-to-month or very short-term leases. We were able to renegotiate a few of those already, and we’re bringing them up to market.
The previous owner – I hope he’s not listening, but he did a terrible job of managing this place and left so much meat on the bone, and that’s what we focus on… It’s a value-add opportunity, so our goal is to have it on the market for about three and a quarter at the end of the day.
I’ve got a bet with one of my friends that we have to buy it, fill it up, stabilize and flip it this year, and sell it for at least 2,5 million. If we can do that, then I get a free ski trip to any ski resort in Colorado, so I’ve gotta make it happen now.
Joe Fairless: [laughs] You said you’ll probably put it on the market for 3,25 million, right? But you wanna sell it for 2,5. Okay. And you bought it for 700k. How much will you put into it?
Danny Newberry: I’m looking to put about a quarter million into it. My roof’s about under a hundred, parking lots about 55k, monument sign is about 30k and the facade is gonna be about 50k.
Joe Fairless: Will you say those again but slower? Because I’m taking notes, I wanna write that down.
Danny Newberry: So we’re under a hundred on the roof – it actually came out to 88k (I’ll give you specific numbers), brand new roof. Then we’re going to do the parking lot, which is 52k. We’re gonna do a new monument sign, it’s gonna be about 30k, and then the facade work is 44k.
Joe Fairless: So all in about 250k, as you mentioned.
Danny Newberry: [unintelligible [00:07:32].07] tenant improvement… Like I said, I just signed a cryotherapy groups – they freeze your body below the head, for inflammation. We’re doing about 26k in tenant improvement for them, and they’re signing a ten-year lease. A quarter million is our capex, and then we’ll be anywhere from another hundred to up to 200k in tenant improvement, to basically stabilize the center.
Joe Fairless: How many spots do you have to get filled between now and when you put it on the market?
Danny Newberry: We had two tenants before we closed the shopping center, and as soon as we closed, we signed a barber for about 1,000 square feet at $12 triple-net; that means the tenant pays for the taxes, insurance, and common area maintenance, and that’s another reason I really loved commercial property, our triple-net.
Anyways, we signed them, and then we ended up signing, like I said, the cryo-group at about $13 triple-net. We’ve only got one space available now that’s about 4,000 square feet, and that is the one that we’re talking to a distillery about.
Joe Fairless: I’ve interviewed successful investors who focused on shopping centers, and they say it’s desirable to have destination tenants, so companies that you actually have to drive to, versus you could buy online. Clothing store – not a destination tenant; you can buy on Amazon or Macys.com or whatever, whereas a barber shop would be a destination tenant, so would be the cryotherapy, because you actually have to go there to get your whole body frozen, and other things. Do you take that into consideration when you’re flipping a product?
Danny Newberry: Absolutely. It’s all about having a good tenant mix, and that’s what we look at. We look at what are the demographics to this area, what’s missing, who needs to be there, who’s gonna do well? So when we look at the tenants, especially when we buy and we have an area that we know that’s really strong, that there’s good demand, good absorption for space, we can pick and choose the tenants that we want in our center, so we absolutely look at that. We’ll look at their financials, we’ll look at their previous history, current locations, and then we look at the business and look at everybody else’s in our center and say, “Hey, is this a good fit for who’s in there now?”
Joe Fairless: After eight months, let’s say things — congratulations, everything has gone perfectly according to plan; you’re on track to getting your ski trip. Why wouldn’t you do a cash-out refinance on this, instead of selling it?
Danny Newberry: That’s a great question, and the biggest reason is we do have properties that we hold on long-term. I’ve got three shopping centers that [unintelligible [00:10:20].00] This is the reason I’m holding the other shopping centers versus this one – I’ve got three shopping centers that are extremely well located. One is a Walmart [unintelligible [00:10:29].11] shopping center, all national tenants in there, and then I’ve got another [unintelligible [00:10:34].27] to a Home Depot and a WinCo Foods and Pepco, and then all the tenants around that are all national. My neighbor to the right of me is Carl’s Jr., to the left of me is [unintelligible [00:10:43].24] behind me is Big O Tires… These are locations that I don’t think that there’s gonna be much, if any, high vacancy, or an area where let’s say the demographics are trending downwards. Those are areas where the demographics are trending upwards, the population is growing, the income is growing for the residents in the area…
But on this center, this is more off the main road. Academy Boulevard, the one we’re talking about now – it doesn’t have the traffic counts that I would necessarily like to hold on to a property long-term. It’s under 15,000 traffic count, but it’s definitely a destination neighborhood shopping center.
If you live in the area, you know about it, but it’s not necessarily like you’re picking up traffic from people going from one end of the town to the other. In the long-term view this property is older, this property is off the beaten path, and it doesn’t necessarily fit with our business model of the type of tenants that we want in there. We’re not gonna have Verizon and Subway; some of the other ones could be Einstein Bagles and those type of tenants that are a little bit more high-quality.
Joe Fairless: That makes sense, location and age… But in that order, it sounds like location first and foremost, and then age – it doesn’t quite fit your long-term hold. You’ve done one of these turnarounds before, obviously… What do you know is going to come up as you start doing the roof and the parking lot, the monument sign, that you’re gonna have to address? You just know, you’re expecting this issue to come up, based on your experience?
Danny Newberry: Well, first of all, tenants. No one’s happy if they have to have all their customers park out on the streets or on the other half of the parking lot and have to go around, and a lot of times you’re gonna have a lot of noise when you’re doing the parking lot or doing the roofs or doing the facade, and those types of things. So it’s going to be an interruption to our tenants, and we always wanna make it as painless as possible, so we always shoot to do a lot of these things, if we can, on slower days. If Sunday is a slow day and most of the tenants are not open for business, that’s a great day to do it. Otherwise, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to be a little bit slower, especially at this shopping center, so we would try and get everything done for the big stuff or the loud stuff, or where we need to actually cone up certain areas where they can’t go into – we’ll do it on those slower days.
Joe Fairless: That brings up a good point – is there some sort of clause that they have, or have you heard of any tenant going after a landlord for lowering their sales because of ongoing improvements that hurt them and maybe didn’t allow them to pay rent, or something like that?
Danny Newberry: You know, I haven’t… I’ll tell you what I have done though in the past – when we know we’re doing something like this and it is disrupting their business, we want to create a really good atmosphere with our tenants and we wanna make sure they’re taken care of and they don’t feel like we’re not addressing their needs. So a lot of times we’ll talk to them, we’ll figure out “Hey, what day works best?”, we’ll have our contractor involved in this conversation, and a lot of times at that point everyone’s happy.
If they’re not, what we’ve done in the past is maybe we’ve done like “We’ll give you a couple days free off your rent. We’ll give you a pro rata for five days off if we’re really having to cut your customers in half of those five days.” A lot of times they’re gonna be like, “Oh, that’s great. That’s fantastic.” I’ve really only had to do that once, but you can stop that by just getting everybody involved and letting everyone voice their concerns, and then addressing those issues.
Joe Fairless: When you’re evaluating a shopping center and you talk through the rent per square foot and what you buy per square foot – I’d love for you to just recap how do you evaluate if you are going to purchase a shopping center or not?
Danny Newberry: We look at it from three different views. One is who are the tenants, what do their leases look like, how long are they going out, what kind of strength do they have, how long have they been in business? We look at it from that standpoint.
Then we look at it from the cost approach – if I had to build this brand new, what’s it gonna cost? I’ve gotta buy the dirt, I’ve gotta build it, I’ve gotta fill it up. Then the other thing is looking at it from a cap rate and price per square foot comparable. On the comparables you look at what are prices going for shopping centers that are similar to this property in this area, and then also what are the cap rates that people are paying in this area for this type of product. So we’ll look at it from all those different aspects, and then we can say “Okay, this is about a 7-8 cap marketplace (I’m just giving you an example of this shopping center)”, and the shopping centers, depending on your tenants, will adjust that cap rate.
Then looking at the price per square foot, everything that’s selling in the immediate areas, between 125-150 is the most average price per square foot that things are selling for, and then looking at it from the standpoint of who your tenants are… We’re gonna have more mom and pop type tenants. We do [unintelligible [00:15:50].06] and then we’re got a children’s feeder where parents bring their kids and drop them off and they are doing dance and theater stuff and all that. Then we’ve got the barber, we’ve got the cryo, we’re looking at doing some other tenants over there that would make sense…
At the end of the day, these are mostly gonna be your mom and pop tenants, so when we look at it from a disposition standpoint, we’re gonna be on the higher end cap rate, so we’re shooting at an 8 cap, and we’re probably gonna be between 2,5-3 million on a disposition when we look at what the price per square foot is and what the cap rate is gonna be. So looking at it at the low end on a price per square foot of $125/foot on a sales price is 2.6 million. Looking at it at $150, you’re above 3 million. So it all just comes down to who we end up lending, what those leases look like, and obviously, what we do to the center, as well: doing the new roof, the parking lot, the facade and signage… That increases the value for the tenants, but also for buyers.
Joe Fairless: What type of financing do you get on these properties? On this one in particular – we’ll keep staying specific with this deal.
Danny Newberry: This one we just bought cash because it was an easy takedown, 700k; it really didn’t make sense to get financing when we knew we were going to flip it in a year. And even if we had to hold it, that’s fine, it’s gonna cash-flow like crazy, but at the end of the day we do a little bit of both. I’ve got partners that like to go into long-term deals for the cashflow and the depreciation, and on the other side I’ve got deals where it’s like “Hey, this is a perfect one for us to pick up, fix it up, stabilize it and turn it around and make a nice profit.”
Joe Fairless: The 700k – is that investor cash, or just you and your company’s cash?
Danny Newberry: On that one I’ve got two partners. What we did is we basically split it up to where we were able to take down the 700k, and then we had another couple hundred thousand that we needed for our tenant improvement dollars and our capital improvement budget.
Joe Fairless: And how did you structure that with the two partners?
Danny Newberry: I used syndications, and just like you, Joe, I started out in this business and really I had to build up an investor pool. I started off with friends and family, and then that started to morph into more relationships as we grew, and right now I’ve got about two dozen investors that I work with that come into our deals. Usually, it’s our a little bit bigger capital raise deals that I’ll have several partners on, but on this one specifically it was just the three of us total. We did a [unintelligible [00:18:27].06] we just did the operating agreement, subscription agreement, questionnaire, and ended up opening up a banking account in the name of the LLC that we purchased it in, which was a brand new entity formed in Colorado, and everyone comes in with their own entity; it’s for the equity and their ownership.
Joe Fairless: Okay. And do you do a proffered return, or what is your investor partner structure?
Danny Newberry: No, we don’t really do preferred returns. What we do is we just do “Hey, look, here’s the deal, X amount. We’ll get you X amount of ownership in it.” Most of our deals we’ll do [unintelligible [00:18:59].23] and a lot of people like that bonus depreciation or that depreciation that you can give out to people that are either considered full-time real estate investors or can use it in other faculties of their W2’s. A lot of times when we set these up, each deal can be a little bit different, but for the most part they’re pretty cut and dry at the same time.
Joe Fairless: Based on your experience, for a Best Ever listener who’s interested in shopping centers in particular, what is your best real estate investing advice ever for them?
Danny Newberry: I think the best advice for the Best Ever listeners would be make sure that you have really good mentors in place. I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to do all these different asset classes, from residential, multifamily, retail, office, medical, industrial – all these asset classes, without having professionals and people there that can help me on my deal when I’m going through it, and being able to ask the right questions, and being able to have people when things come up and you’re not sure exactly what the next move is.
Joe Fairless: Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Danny Newberry: Yeah.
Joe Fairless: Alright, let’s do it. First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:20:14].00] to [00:21:07].29]
Joe Fairless: Best ever book you’ve read, Danny?
Danny Newberry: Best ever book I’ve read – I’d have to say Think And Grow Rich. I know that’s not very original, but when I think about it… I read it every year, that’s how good it is. And I can’t say that about a lot of books, that I read that often.
Joe Fairless: Best ever deal you’ve done?
Danny Newberry: We’ve bought a medical office building and we were able to turn it and stabilize it in under a year, and then we sold it on month 13th and profited over a million bucks on it.
Joe Fairless: Best ever way you like to give back?
Danny Newberry: Right now I donate to three charities. I really enjoy giving back, but one thing I’d like to do more of is mentoring, and giving people skills that I’ve learned over the past few years.
Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake you’ve made on a deal?
Danny Newberry: A mistake that I’ve made on a deal… Trying to be my own attorney. Don’t ever try and be your own attorney, always hire professionals. Always make sure that you have qualified people on your team to review all your documentation and to help you from A to Z on any of your deals.
Joe Fairless: What’s the best way the Best Ever listeners can get in touch with you?
Danny Newberry: They can go to my website, which is www.valueinvestmentgroup.com, or they can reach out by phone at 435-590-9095.
Joe Fairless: Shopping centers – that’s the focus of our conversation, and you walked us through a case study for the shopping center that you’re doing, as well as some previous examples of deals that you’ve done, what you’re expecting to work through, like any time there’s interruptions with capital improvements on the exterior – there’s gonna be some interruptions with tenants, so doing it on slower days, as well as just walking through how you run the numbers and the things you look for on evaluating the shopping center, the tenants, the cost approach if you were to build brand new again (or rather the replacement) and the cap rate and price per square foot comps. Talking through the type of tenants that you’d like to have in there, and the strategy that you use, why do a refinance versus a long-term hold, and in this instance on the deal we talked about it had to do with the location first and foremost, then also the age – that’s why you’re looking for an exit versus a long-term hold.
Thanks so much for being on the show, lots of great information. I have you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Danny Newberry: Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it.
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