If You Were Mentoring Someone, What Advice Would You Give Them If They Were Just Now Starting Their Commercial Real Estate Investment Career?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

For those just starting out in real estate investing, building your own small team is one of the most important priorities you can make. Your team doesn’t have to be huge or difficult to build, but it should include a real estate attorney, a real estate broker or someone who can provide you with advice, an architect, and outsourced individuals like civil engineers and those who can make condition reports. With a team behind you, you can build a strong foundation in smart and informed investing. 

Richard Wilson: If you were mentoring somebody, what advice would you give them if they’re just now starting their commercial real estate investment career? Or endeavor. It could be they already have a successful career as a doctor, but now they’re just starting to invest in commercial real estate. 

Robert Borris: You need to kind of build a small team. This is really kind of a team sport in the sense that you need some people that you can depend upon for honest information. The team isn’t complicated, it’s not hard to do, but the team is a lawyer, I would really focus on a real estate attorney because I’ve had lots of problems with attorneys that don’t understand real estate. They argue about the wrong things. They waste your time on stuff that’s not important and they miss the important things. Second thing is if you have somebody that you can rely on for some real estate advice, not a residential real estate broker, but somebody that’s got some experience, friends or whatever, other investors that you bounce ideas off of. That’s another thing I would suggest. And then you need a small group of people you can outsource, people who can do property condition reports, and civil engineers, and an architect maybe, that you can just – a lot of people will respect your time just to help you out. But you need to have a small team because they know that they can save you, make you tons of money, and worth whatever you pay them. And as I said a lot of the times they won’t charge you. 

Richard: Right, right.