What are NNN leases, what are the benefits, and what's the best way to find national tenants? Adam Carswell answers all of those questions, he has been working on NNN leases for over five years and shares his insights.

You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/2XGgCV5

What are Net leases?

Net lease or NNN lease to put it simply, there's no toilets, no taxes, and no termites. I find it really interesting how this particular asset class gets overlooked in the commercial real estate investment space. I think it's for a few reasons, one, there really isn't just a lot of information out there on it. And then a lot of these assets are probably a little bit lower on the cap rate side of things, if you're looking for major value add projects, where you come in and make a ton on renovating the asset, then it might not be your cup of tea, but from a cash flow and stability perspective, I don't know if there are many other commercial real estate assets that exist that are as dependable as NNN leases. Some examples are Walgreens, CVS, McDonald's, Starbucks, Advanced Autoparts, Chick-fil-A, and most national brands, typically called national tenants. So you have the amazing credit backing with a lot of these tenants and wondering whether or not someone's going to pay you on a monthly basis normally is not a concern. This is another reason why, especially if you're looking for stability and cash flow, you want to check in the mail every month from Wendy's, that's it.

How do people typically approach a national tenant, especially if they're just starting out and they don't have experience with national tenants?

The biggest hack in meeting the tenants and the reps that you want to work with is the networking piece. So how do you go about networking? From my observation in working with Michael, who's been in the space for close to 35 years now, the relationships are very key. If there's any sector in the world of business that tends to move slow as far as adopting technology and new ways of thinking, real estate is a slow moving beast. With that being said, you might not like it, but if you want to become sophisticated in this space very quickly, you have to start cultivating relationships with the old guys. You want the people who understand retail and have 30 plus years of experience. And a lot of them didn't have Rich Dad Poor Dad to introduce them to the real estate space, and they know all the people.

One place that Michael brought me to was Vegas a few years ago to ICSC, the International Council of Shopping Centers annual conference, if you are thinking about getting into the retail sector, I highly recommend getting into that network, that's where all the cool kids hang out in the retail space. Going to that conference in Vegas really opened my eyes because it aggregated the entire US and international retail space into one massive networking event. You can meet reps from BP, McDonald's, all the fast food places, Walmart, and brokers from everywhere, you always want to have relationships with brokers even though people can say brokers are annoying, you still want to be friends with them.

One company that I worked for once upon a time was Sherwin Williams. Those properties are also NNN lease deals and I've relationships with the Sherwin reps now because of that. It comes down to relationships. But if you can zone in on the actual brand reps and become friends with them, I think that could probably benefit you a little bit more than just becoming friends with brokers.

Adam Carswell

www.carswell.io

Nothing But Net Podcast: https://apple.co/3kaSl17

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