Colin is the Founder and CEO of CARR, one of the nation’s leading providers of commercial real estate services. He has personally completed over 1,000 transactions and has been in real estate since 2000. Colin goes into medical real estate investing and what it looks like in his business.
Colin Carr Real Estate Background:
- Founder and CEO of CARR, one of the nation’s leading provider of commercial real estate services
- Has been involved in commercial real estate since 2000 and has personally completed over 1,000 transactions.
- Licensed real estate broker in ten states
- Based in Denver, CO
- Say hi to him at https://carr.us/
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Best Ever Tweet:
“I like to help healthcare providers maximize their profitability through real estate.” – Colin Carr
TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless. This is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast, where we only talk about the best advice ever; we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff. With us today, Colin Carr. How you doing, Colin?
Colin Carr: I’m doing great.
Joe Fairless: Well, I’m glad to hear that, and a little bit about Colin – he’s the founder and CEO of CARR, one of the nation’s leading providers of commercial real estate services. He’s been involved in commercial real estate since 2000, and has personally completed over 1000 transactions. He’s a licensed real estate broker in ten states, based in Denver, Colorado. So with that being said, Colin, you want to get the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Colin Carr: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Excited to be here. My background is exclusively real estate. I started managing apartment complexes when I was 19 – mid-rise, high-rise, rural; moved to Denver in my early 20s, kept managing apartments for a few years, got into brokerage, few years after that did Walmarts, Wendys, Blockbusters, a lot of national retailers, moved into other aspects of office, industrial, investment, healthcare, and then started a firm about 12 years ago, and we are now operating in about 40 states, and we touch a couple thousand transactions a year and have a pretty good pulse in the market.
Joe Fairless: What’s your personal area of focus right now?
Colin Carr: I’m the CEO of the company and I oversee over 100 agents. We have a healthcare division, we have a commercial division, an investment division and a senior housing division. So I oversee our agents’ best practices, and I do a lot on the investment and development side.
Joe Fairless: Alright, so I was typing as quick as I could… Healthcare, senior housing, and I know I missed a couple. What are some others?
Colin Carr: Yeah. Commercial, and then just an overall investment platform as well.
Joe Fairless: Okay. So when you say commercial, I think of senior housing facilities as commercial real estate. So what’s commercial? How is it defined here?
Colin Carr: So we would differentiate commercial being corporate uses, CPA’s attorneys, architects, oil and gas, financial services. So everything that we do is commercial real estate. We have a just traditional commercial division that also touches those focuses of commercial tenants and buyers, and then we actually have a senior housing division and then an investment division as well.
Joe Fairless: Okay, when I hear investment division, I think, ‘Well all of these are investments.” So how is the investment division different from senior housing investment or healthcare facility?
Colin Carr: Great question. Our investment division is going after investors that are looking for income-producing properties, and we’re helping them on the buy side, the sell side, the due diligence side. So our commercialization is corporations, helping them with their real estate. Our healthcare is helping healthcare providers with their real estate investments, income-producing properties with savvy investors looking to grow portfolios, acquire, dispose of, etc, and then same thing on the senior housing side – it’s investors, developers, operators. So a lot of these overlap though, there’s investment deals happening in all those sectors, and it’s a lot of overlap.
Joe Fairless: Which division is your least profitable?
Colin Carr: That’s a great question. All of our divisions are profitable, which is great. Senior housing is our newest one, so we’re touching a couple of dozen deals in that sector right now in a handful of states, but that’s our newest division that’s only a couple years old. So still got a great expertise there, but that’s one of our newer platforms.
Joe Fairless: What are some reasons why you created a new division for senior housing, and how do you hit the ground running in order to grow that quickly?
Colin Carr: So senior housing came to us because people knew how much healthcare work we do. We help a couple of thousand health care providers each year with their real estate. So we touch a lot of deals there, and so there’s a lot of investors and a lot of developers that are involved with medical office buildings, complexes, and they want to get into the senior housing game. So we get a lot of people that try to come to us for advice in that world, but that’s how senior housing came to be. It’s just very ancillary and complementary to our healthcare world.
Senior housing is an interesting niche because it’s not just the real estate component, it’s the operations, and really the operations drive the value, as you know. So that’s a world that just takes a little bit longer to get into. Whereas a lot of profitability, a lot of opportunities, the amount of product that’s needed in the senior housing market is one that literally cannot be met over the next 10, 15, 20 years. So there’s a huge opportunity there, but there’s more complexities too, with compliance and operations and licensing. So it’s a little bit different world.
Joe Fairless: From a broker standpoint, why is it harder to get into because of operations? This is my ignorance showing, but I wouldn’t think that you all would be involved in the operations part. So it’s like, alright, you’re selling a property, so why does it matter that the operations are really important with senior housing?
Colin Carr: That’s a great question. So to understand how to value a senior house facility, you’ve got to understand the operations, and you’ve got to actually get in there and get under the hood and figure out how the property is being run, because the operations are what drives the income. Whereas if you’re looking at an apartment complex or a multi-tone office building, you can look at a rent roll, and it’s pretty clear to figure out what’s happening. There’s so many different variations of senior housing facilities, and there’s a lot of concepts of, “Is it government subsidized?” There’s so many different facets of senior housing, and there’s different revenue streams in addition to just “What do they pay per month for that room? What are the other services that are provided?” So to understand or read a senior housing facility, you’ve got to understand how it’s operated.
Joe Fairless: And is that as simple as hiring one person or bringing on one person who knows the industry, and then he or she can train your team, and now you’re off and running, or is it more involved than that?
Colin Carr: It’s really more involved than that. It’s a skill set that takes, in my opinion, years to really understand and learn, and I’m not trying to make it larger than it is or more complex than it is, but there’s so many nuances. Is it independent living? Assisted living? Is it memory care? Is it a skilled nursing facility? Is it Medicaid? There’s so many aspects to that world. And then on top of that, from a buying and selling side, the facilities don’t get put onto a commercial MLS or listing service predominantly, unless it’s a really challenging property that is less than desirable.
Whoever controls the listings controls the opportunity. So it’s not one that you can get on to an online database and preview 15 facilities and see their income statements and rent rolls and balance sheets. You can’t do that. So you got to understand how to evaluate them, number one, and then you’ve got to figure out who controls the opportunity, number two.
Joe Fairless: It makes a lot of sense how you got into it, given your connections with healthcare. So can you talk about your healthcare business or division and what’s a typical transaction look like?
Colin Carr: Absolutely. So our primary healthcare division represents healthcare providers. So dentists, physicians, veterinarians, and we help them with every aspect of their real estate interests. So finding land, developing properties, new locations, relocations, a lot of lease renewals… And in doing so, we work with a substantial number of landlords, large REITs, developers, and we work with a lot of owners trying to figure out how to make their properties more valuable, how to increase occupancy, etc.
Joe Fairless: What’s a recent transaction that comes to mind, or a recent deal, whether you’re finding the location or the actual property itself, or selling it? …just something that we can talk about.
Colin Carr: So an owner purchases a building, wants to attract healthcare uses, gets us involved in the process, figures out where’s the deal got to be priced at, what we have to do to make it attractive to healthcare providers, is it a viable healthcare option… And then if we can assist them in that process of bringing them numerous buyers, we can create a lot of opportunity out of changing a property from an office use to a medical use, etc.
Joe Fairless: What are some questions that you ask the owner during your due diligence process to determine if that office can be used for medical?
Colin Carr: Some of the initial stuff– we go through all the zoning, we go through those concepts, but really it’s does the owner have a desire to invest heavily in the process? Medical office is a very attractive asset class of property. Markets go up and down, the economy changes, it will correct; everyone knows that. So if you’re an owner, you’ve got to look at it and say, “Who do I want on my property?” You want a franchise that maybe has thin or no margins, and they’re just trying to buy a market share to see if they can later sell, and it’s not really a long term viable option.
Are you concerned if you have a retail center and you’ve got a bunch of apparel and soft goods, and you can pull up their income statements and realize these guys are losing money quarter after quarter, and what’s going to happen when you lose the 20,000 square-foot Forever 21 store that doesn’t renew and how do you backfill that with four or five other people and who’s going to backfill it? Or do you look at a medical opportunity and say, “You know what, even when the market goes down, that dentist is not going to decide to start a landscape business. Or the plastic surgeons, they might tighten the belt, they might trim some staff, they might work four days versus three days a week, but they’re probably not going anywhere, they’re probably not gonna change industry.”
So we do a lot of education with landlords on why it makes sense to invest more money into a healthcare deal. Why if you can lock down a ten-year deal, the tenants are gonna go in there and pump a couple hundred thousand dollars into the space; they’re more invested, they’ve got more skin in the game – why that makes sense to stretch further to make that deal, and why that deal, even though you might have to put a little bit more money into it or invest more, why that deal actually ends up being a safer investment for you.
You put more money in, so some people would say, “Well, no, that’s more risky,” but you’re securing a more valuable blue-chip tenant in a lot of scenarios. So we do a lot of education with landlords and developers on why they want these deals, and then you get the right tenant, they sign a ten-year lease, they’ll probably be there for 20, 30 years. So you can literally do a deal and not always – there’s definitely changes, – but a lot of times, you put that thing to sleep for a couple of decades.
Joe Fairless: You mentioned asking the owner, do they have a desire to invest money into it, but then you talked about how the tenant will put in a couple hundred thousand to get it to fit their exact needs… So what is the owner putting money into the property to do, versus a tenant?
Colin Carr: Good question. So the tenants put a lot of their own money into the spaces because landlords are typically not going to front the entire cost of the buildout or the finish. We do ask the landlords to contribute as well. We’re looking for both sides to be invested in it. So a traditional office deal or industrial deal or retail deal, the landlords are going to put money into the space to attract good tenants.
A lot of times on the healthcare deals, we ask them to put in a little bit more than they would for a traditional office use or retail use, but we, in turn, put in more money than the traditional user as well, and a lot of times we’re doing longer-term leases, and we’ve got a much lower default rate. Most of our healthcare uses have less than a 1% default rate, so it’s a more secure investment. So we ask the landlords to put more money in because our clients are putting more money in, and they’re willing to do longer-term leases, and they carry a higher success rate, lower default rate with them.
Joe Fairless: Is the landlord putting in money prior to getting a tenant?
Colin Carr: Typically, we tell them, “Don’t touch the space on a healthcare deal until the actual healthcare provider or tenant shows up”, because you think they want that type of lighting or ceiling or walls or bathroom, and then they want to change the location of the finishes… So we don’t like landlords to put money into spaces. A lot of times, landlords will try to put into a vanilla shell format or vanilla box, and we don’t want that, because they’re going to upgrade it almost every time. So that’s another way for landlords not to waste money on vacant spaces. Wait till the tenant shows up, don’t spend money in advance.
Joe Fairless: Is it usually 50-50 on improvements or what?
Colin Carr: No, it’s usually a per square foot basis that comes into line with the lease rates to where some landlords say, “Hey, I’m not going to put in more than one year of total rent into the deal” if it’s new construction and they’re financing the money, and they’re going to turn around and sell it in a couple of years. They might put in two, three, four years of rent into that initial space. So it depends. Is it first generation? Is it second generation? Are they a long term owner? Are they gonna try and sell it? Is it the cash they’re putting into it, or are they going to finance it? So it just depends on who the owner is and the structure, but typically, on most healthcare spaces, it’s between one to two and a half years of total rent usually gets put into the concession package of TI allowance, free rent, stuff like that.
Joe Fairless: So for someone listening to that, and if they’re thinking, okay, so, in a medical transaction, where you bring a health care provider, if I’m a landlord, I’m gonna have to put in, on average, one to two and a half years of total rent that I receive. So I’m not making any money for one to two and a half years. Why would I ever do that? You mentioned it already, long-term, but is there anything else that we should be thinking about where it’s like, “Oh man, the first two years are gone. I’m not making any money.”
Colin Carr: A lot of landlords are going to finance that tenant improvement allowance and a lot of lenders are going to be more prone to give money for that tenant improvement allowance, especially if it is a healthcare use and a long term lease. So there’s definitely owners that want to put cash in upfront and not go to the bank, but if you’ve got a loan on the property already, which most landlords do, most lenders are going to give money for that tenant improvement allowance to secure that tenant. So at that point, it’s [unintelligible [00:16:25].25] game.
The other thing that comes into play too is for the landlords that are willing to put money into the space, they’re going to typically capture a higher lease rate, which means the property is worth more. So whether you look at it as having a long-term owner, that’s fine, but most people are always looking at “What’s my exit strategy?” and so the higher the lease rate, the better the cap rate, the higher the property. A lot of landlords are looking at properties, “Hey, if I could buy this property, and let’s just say it’s getting $20 a square foot for rent, and if I were to put a little more money into it and get a healthcare use in there, I could maybe get $23 a square foot in rent. Well, $3 a square foot on a six cap or seven cap, all of a sudden my property’s worth 200 grand more, 800 grand more, whatever it is, depending on the size of the property.”
So it’s a numbers game of “Can I put more money into this space to attract better tenants, longer-term lease, and then a better cap rate, because it’s stronger credit tenant, lower default rate, and then can I raise the value of my property?” So that’s the game – if you’ve got a property and you’re normally getting local mom and pops retailers or short term office leases, and you can attract the long term healthcare use, you can raise the value of your property substantially by getting healthcare in there.
Joe Fairless: What’s been one of the more challenging transactions you’ve personally worked on?
Colin Carr: How many hours do we have for me to run through that list? Almost every commercial deal we do has some–
Joe Fairless: A specific one. I’m looking for a specific example that you can tell us a story about.
Colin Carr: Man, that’s a great question.
Joe Fairless: It could be a recent one. I’m just looking for a story from you about a transaction where there was a challenge, you overcame it, and here’s some things we can learn from it.
Colin Carr: I would say, a specific deal I’m thinking of right now is, you find a landlord – and this is a specific deal – they bought a building a number of years ago, the tenant had an above-market lease rate when it was purchased, annual increases push the lease rate up 3% every year, and then you come to the lease expiration date, and you get ready to do a lease renewal, and the landlord is 100% set on not reducing the lease rate because they don’t want to discount their cashflow and discount the value of the property… But the deal is way over market, the tenant’s not going to stay. So you end up in an arm wrestling match with the landlord, and they’re assuming that the tenant’s not going to move, but the tenant has to move, because they can’t pay that type of rent.
So the landlord has come to grips with the fact that they didn’t do good due diligence upfront and it was an above-market lease rate, and they can’t capture and maintain that rate moving forward. And once that lease is over and that tenant moves out, they’re going to have to come to market with the real deal for the next person. So that’s a traditional deal, that’s what I’m thinking of right now, is “Hey, you’re 20% above market. I know it looks good on paper, I know you bought it thinking it was a great cash flow, but it’s not real.”
So it’s kind of a pro tip – you’ve got to make sure that you’re not dealing with inflated rents that are not renewable in the future, and if you lose that tenant and you have to go to market, you’re gonna have to come up with a real deal.
Joe Fairless: What a great piece of advice mentioning that… Because if I go to look at deals, and I see an office building and the seller says, “Hey, the market is X amount of dollars, but I got you even better at Y.” I think, “Ah, that’s awesome. This is gonna be a better deal than I’ll get it anywhere else, because I’m getting better market rents,” but as you said, there’s some pitfalls to that when the lease expires.
So then what I would need to do in order to make sure that the deal still makes sense is determine what type of market demand there is for that type of tenant, and if there’s a whole lot of demand for that tenant, then — I guess, I still shouldn’t assume that I’ll be able to get above-market rents upon the lease renewing, but at least there’ll still be more tenants to fill in if this one leaves.
Colin Carr: Absolutely. You’ve got two sides of the coin. You got, “Why the lease rate’s below market?” and “Is that really the lease rate?” They say, “Well, this is a below-market lease and you’re gonna be able to bump it up on a renewal.” “Well, alright, show me that you’ve achieved that the last couple leases you’ve done and show me where the market’s at, so that I have the track record that you’ve been able to do that.”
The other side of the coin is, “Hey, look at these lease rates. They’re capturing premiums, and these are a lot higher than our competing properties in the market or other comps.” And the question is “Is that sustainable in the future? Do I need to discount that value and underwrite it differently?”
The same concept applies with – you get a property as a 100% leased, you’ve got to put a vacancy factor in there and assume that you’re gonna run a vacancy over time and on average. You’ve got to put a 5% or 10% vacancy factor in there. So yeah, there are definitely pro tips as far as if it’s below market – why? If it’s above market, why? I think really the question comes down to what’s sustainable, and that’s where you’ve got to tap market experts to give you that advice and just make sure that you’re doing your due diligence.
Joe Fairless: Based on your experience as a real estate professional, what is your best advice ever for real estate investors looking to purchase, or in the industry of buying healthcare, or having commercial properties that cater to healthcare professionals?
Colin Carr: My advice would be just find the people that are the most likely to bring you those tenants. So when you’re talking about buying a medical building, and you’re talking to the seller, look at what they’ve done as a track record, because that’s a great indication of hopefully what you’ll be able to accomplish as well, too… But it’s really easy just to talk to the selling party and let them give you all the information, all the play by play. But at the end the day, they’re not going to be the ones to try bringing you the new people for your space, or helping you to renew those people. So I would say, find an industry expert like a company that represents healthcare tents and buyers, and then ask them, “What would be your objections to bring in your clients to the center? What would we have to do to attract your clients for the property? Do you think the market can sustain these lease rates? What type of TI allowance do I need to do to put into these deals?”
Get a perspective from the other side of the table with someone who’s not involved in that transaction. Not the listing agent, not the seller, but talk to somebody who is viably going to bring you an option or bring you a tenant for the future and get their perspective on it, because it’s going to be very different than what the seller’s selling you, trying to sell you the property.
Joe Fairless: We’re gonna do a lightning round. Are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?
Colin Carr: I am.
Joe Fairless: Alright, let’s do it. First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:22:55]:04] to [00:23:38]:03]
Joe Fairless: What’s a bad piece of advice that you’ve received over the years?
Colin Carr: Thinking the market’s not going to change. Thinking that, “Hey, we’ve got this the last five years, it’s gonna continue to be that way”, and just not realizing the market is gonna shift.
Joe Fairless: What’s a best ever resource that you use in your business that is really helpful for you, whether it’s an online resource, an app, some website, something like that?
Colin Carr: The same answers two times ago – talking to the market expert who’s not involved in the transaction to give you an independent third party perspective on how viable is this location, this space, this deal, this price, and how would you critique it for your clients if you bring us a tenant or buyer for this?
Joe Fairless: What’s been one of your favorite transactions that you’ve done?
Colin Carr: Favorite transactions… I would lump them together as beginning deals in the business, grinding out the dirtiest, lowest-priced, worst location industrial deals you can possibly imagine, and just learning how to put together a deal, learning how to treat people, learning how to figure out how to solve problems, and just thinking back to the worst property you’d ever want to go to, and then getting that deal done and making no money on it whatsoever, but realizing you found a way to make a win… And at the end the day, even though it was a down and dirty property, the tenant was happy to be there, and learning how to do deals.
Joe Fairless: How do you not make money when you transact a deal, even if it’s a bad deal and a bad area?
Colin Carr: As a broker, you’re paid usually upon– it could be a per-square-foot commission, but a lot of times it’s a percentage. So I’m thinking of the 1,100 square foot machine shop industrial deal with a $4 lease rate, where you spend months on a deal and you make a couple hundred bucks or something like that, where you look at your time and you’re like, “Wait a second, I think I ‘ve made $1.50 an hour on this deal.”
We’ve got monster success stories of making a ton of deals, and that’s great, but honestly, it’s the deals that you learn to cut your teeth on, and even the ones where maybe, you lost some money, but you learned a lot. Those are my favorite because that’s the foundation you build upon.
Joe Fairless: Best ever way you like to give back to the community?
Colin Carr: I love sharing information and helping people take what I’ve learned, and then help them become more successful… Because that’s really what I’ve done over my career – I’ve had the benefit of picking people’s brains, asking the exact questions you’re asking now, getting their insight, and then taking a lesson that a guy took 20 years to learn, and then he shares it with me and saved me all the heartache and pain. So doing the same thing of taking my information, the skillset, the contacts, introducing people to those same people, those lessons, and then helping them to build upon the foundation that I’ve laid, which is really the foundation of hundreds of other people before me.
Joe Fairless: How can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you?
Colin Carr: Website is carr.us, and in the upper right hand corner, you can find an agent. So if you want to talk about the viability of a deal or get a perspective from us before you buy a property or invest in and pick someone’s brain, our team, our agents are happy to do that. We do it every day. They won’t charge you for it. They’ll just give you free advice and give you their thoughts, and you can get in touch with someone locally that could give you a lot of information that could help you to process.
Joe Fairless: You’re a wealth of knowledge. It’s so nice talking to people who are so knowledgeable about what they do, and it is very clear that you know your industries that you’re in, and it’s just fun. I love talking to people like you. So thank you for being on the show, talking to us about the four divisions of your company, talking about how you got into senior housing as a result of being in healthcare, and then going deep into healthcare in particular, from an investor standpoint, and what to look for. So thanks for being on the show, really enjoyed it. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you again soon.
Colin Carr: I appreciate that. Thanks so much.
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