The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.
Before getting into commercial real estate investment, it pays to know just what you want out of it and out of the relationships you form. Explore and discover the market, determine the types of equity and debt you want, and go into the market with a knowledge of what you’re actually after rather than experimenting all along the way. While some mistakes are learning experiences, others may be able to be avoided by conducting your research first.
Richard Wilson: What do you see from your particular view, first, that most investors and investment firms don’t realize or is not obvious?
John Manes: I mean, for somebody starting out trying to do what we’re doing, I think the biggest thing is, what I see, is knowing what type of relationships you want to deal with, and knowing what type of money you want to deal with is really helpful. Like for us when we started we had a general concept of the type of equity that we wanted, or the type of debt that we wanted, and we explored those and explored is probably a good word, actually probably experiment is a better word, because, you know, we made some mistakes along the way of different relationships that we’ve gotten into from an equity standpoint and from a debt standpoint. That had we known all of that in hindsight we probably would have done it a little bit differently, and through that education we truly know what we want now, and we focused more on that than saying “Okay, let’s try this.” We focus on what it is we actually want now.
Richard: Right, great.
