August 11, 2020

What is a Stranded Asset? 2 Examples of How to Find Opportunities in Stranded Assets.

17 minutes

What are some ideas of how to think outside the box and negotiate real estate deals during these times? We asked Victor Menasce, host of The Real Estate Espresso Podcast, author of Magnetic Capital, and experienced investor and developer.

You can read this entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/what-is-a-stranded-asset-how-to-look-for-opportunities-in-stranded-assets/

What is a stranded asset? And then we can jump into some examples of stranded assets.

I'd like to make a distinction in defining the stranded asset. Most of the time people are thinking about distressed assets. Now, in a lot of cases, those distressed assets haven't appeared on the market yet, or if they are, it's really just the very beginning. We're in the midst of a moratorium on evictions, a moratorium on foreclosures. But we know there's a backlog at this stage of millions of distressed properties. I read a report last week that showed that 4.5 million homes in the United States are in either in default or in forbearance. And that happened literally in a very short time period. Now, if you think about the entire financial crisis that took five, six years to play out, a total of 10 million distressed properties, we have gotten half of that in just a few months. So the speed with which this market is gone into distress is unprecedented. A lot of money's sitting on the sidelines today just waiting for those distressed assets, whether it's single family homes, hotels, office buildings, retail, there's going to be a ton of distressed assets on the market and all the money will be chasing those distressed assets.

Now the stranded asset is an asset that is a perfectly good asset. What makes it stranded is you can't get to it from here. One of the examples that I give is the following, there's a there's a lighthouse in Prince Edward Island called the Baywatch lighthouse. And you can actually book this lighthouse on Airbnb, and you can stay in it on for the weekend. It's in all the tourism brochures and that would be a wonderful income producing asset. Now, if you take that same lighthouse and you put it out in the middle of the Atlantic, and it's a little bit stormy, and it's not very safe to get to, it might be another very good asset from the perspective that it would be great to spend the weekend, that would be a unique experience, but it's stranded because you can't get to it from here, where it's difficult to get to it, it's inaccessible in some way. And that's what distinguishes a stranded asset.

Now, we know that there are a lot of restaurants out there that are shutting down, because they've gone through several months now with no revenue, or insufficient revenue. In some cases, the owners are simply tired. I've come across several restaurants just in my own home community, where there's no reason for them to shut down other than the owner is 75 years old, and he doesn't want to go through the energy of restarting again.

there are going to be a lot of commercial kitchens for sale, those are maybe distressed assets. Maybe they just shut down because they decided that they're getting out of the business. Those aren't distressed assets. They're just stranded assets. But there's an even more important stranded asset, and that is the relationship between the customer and the menu. You pay them a royalty for every sale, and you deliver their favorite items.

Victor Menasce

http://victorjm.com/

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