On this episode I interviewed Colin Carr, founder of CARR, a leading commercial real estate firm for healthcare tenants. With 1,000+ physician deals closed, Colin has mastered medical office leases. He shares his proven system for lease negotiations that regularly saves doctors 6 figures. You’ll learn sneaky landlord tricks costing physicians at renewal, how to access favorable financing to purchase your own space, and commercial real estate investing basics to set you up for success.Whether you want to stop overpaying rent, buy your existing office, or build wealth through property investments, Colin brings in-the-trenches expertise. His clear advice can save you money and optimize your most critical business asset.
CARR is the nation’s leading provider of commercial real estate services for healthcare tenants and buyers
https://carr.us/
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Transcript
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: [00:00:00] Happy New Year! We are back from a quick break, the BootstrapMD podcast. And today I’m going to talk about one of your favorite subjects and that’s real estate, specifically commercial real estate. It is 2024, the year that you’re going to start investing in commercial real estate.
Here to help us answer that question is a commercial real estate expert. He’s completed over a thousand transactions and he specifically works with healthcare professionals to maximize their profitability through strategic real estate planning with nearly 15 years. He focuses fully on working with doctors, dentists, veterinarians.
On the call, we’re going to talk about questions such as when is the best time to buy commercial real estate, big mistakes to avoid when renewing your office lease and some step by step advice for doctors interested in commercial real estate investing.
I know you’re going to get tremendous value from his knowledge and experience. My interview with Colin Carr on this episode of BootstrapMD.[00:01:00]
Welcome to BootstrapMD, the physician entrepreneurs podcast. Your source to help you, the entrepreneurial doctor, live life on your own terms. Get new ideas and inspiration to help you find more balance in your professional life. If you’re ready to get the knowledge without all the hype, you’ve come to the right place.
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Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. This is the podcast for healthcare and physician entrepreneurs. I know you guys love when we discuss real estate. So I thought it was. It’s been too long for us to find a truly a commercial real estate expert, and I believe I found one. This gentleman has successfully completed over a thousand commercial real estate transactions, while saving his clients hundreds of millions of dollars.
He founded and scaled CARR, a nationwide commercial real estate company, to exclusively represent the unique needs and interests of healthcare providers. He’s mastered several different niches in the healthcare real estate industry and he’s passionate about helping others. [00:03:00] He goes through maximizing profitability through real estate. Today his company of the nation’s leading healthcare real estate advisor with a team of almost 150 experts that span coast to coast. Every year thousands of healthcare providers trust this company to help them achieve the most favorable terms on their leases and purchase negotiations.
So we’re going to discuss everything commercial real estate with my interview today with Mr. Colin Carr. Colin, how are you doing today?
Colin Carr: I’m doing excellent. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thanks. Thanks for reaching out. We’ve been looking for a commercial real estate expert. I know my audience, anytime we talk about real estate, I look at the downloads. And so I know this is a topic that’ll be of interest.
So a little bit of background about yourself. I read your introduction. Maybe you could talk about, how you got into commercial real estate.
Colin Carr: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll try to give a short version. I met a gentleman when I was 18 that, that owned a bunch of apartment complexes. And so I started just doing a little bit of work here and there for him.
[00:04:00] And that was my entrance into property management. I did property management on mostly multifamily for a number of years. And then I got my real estate broker’s license when I was in my early twenties. And I started working for a guy that did mostly large national retailers. So Walmart, Wendy’s, Blockbuster, like large national brands you’d recognize.
And so that was my entrance into the brokerage side of things. Couple of years later, I got into more office and industrial. And after, doing a couple hundred transactions being around things for quite a while, I just settled into the health care space and started focusing exclusively on health care.
And that was basically the beginning of 2009. Started our current company called CARR, and we are now coming up on our 15th year anniversary here shortly. We represent health care providers with anything with their real estate. Buying real estate, renegotiating leases, scaling to multiple offices, relocating. Anything with real estate for your practice we [00:05:00] specialize in and we have the privilege of representing several thousand healthcare providers every year.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And so you talked about your and again thank you for that. Any particular reason why healthcare and I know you’re speaking at some prominent conferences like M. G. M. A. These are pretty big associations. Any particular reason why health care? Any background in health care or perhaps in your family?
Colin Carr: Yeah, no, no background in the family. A couple things happen to me. When I worked with Walmart and Wendy’s, there was like 15, 20 brokers always in line to try to take over that account. Like if you didn’t do a good job, you were a commodity and you got swapped out. When I was doing landlord work, it was the same thing. There was always another broker in line. And then I started working in the healthcare space and I was, I started on the landlord side of things, working for some very large medical landlords, some REITs, publicly traded companies.
These health care providers were showing up to these properties and they were getting involved in [00:06:00] negotiations without representation. And I was just I was honestly Astonished at how many health care providers were trying to figure out how to do a commercial real estate transaction whereas you just you would never see that with a starbucks or a chipotle or a Wendy’s like they just that doesn’t work. They always have representation.
They always have experts involved. Same thing like large national like office groups, like a Lockheed Martin or Charles Schwab, like you never got a random call from someone who didn’t know what they’re doing. And so I was on the landlord side of things, and I was just taking call after call from doctors asking me really bad questions.
They shouldn’t have been asking me. They were saying things. They were telling me motivations and things they shouldn’t have been telling people. And I watched a number of healthcare providers just get completely crushed by some of these landlords, and they didn’t even know it was happening. They were signing up for these leases where they were overpaying by hundreds of thousands of dollars in like a five, seven, or ten year period of time.
And for me, I just, I didn’t, it just didn’t feel right. I [00:07:00] just. People should be smart enough to realize that whether you do your taxes properly or not, if you do them wrong, the IRS is going to come for you and make you fix it. Like people are smart to realize that if you break a law, the police don’t care if you didn’t know about the law, like you break a law, like you’re going to have to get a punishment that’s warranted by the crime.
In commercial real estate, these people were showing up and they had no idea that there’s rules of engagement. They had no idea how much money is on the line. They had no idea that a landlord will take you for the highest amount of money they can take you for. And so just, they were just ignorant of the rules of engagement.
So anyways, long story short for me, I had a number of deals where I worked on the landlord side. I watched doctors get completely manhandled and I just said, you know what, these guys need help and they need someone to help protect their interests. And they’re incredibly intelligent clinically and medically and in the healthcare space.
They’re just, they have not had the training nor they probably ever have training in commercial real estate. And so I just, I saw an opportunity there and I started doing [00:08:00] a handful of tenant rep deals for healthcare and I started showing the doctors how much we’d saved them and how much how much we protected them.
And they were more appreciative and cared more than any deal that I’ve ever worked on in the past for large national groups. And for me, might sound a little altruistic, or just, I just, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the interaction. I enjoyed the appreciation. And just like a health care provider, when you make a difference in someone’s life.
Like it makes it worth it. It makes it people have tough days. You have good days, bad days, but when you know that you truly made a difference in someone’s life and that they truly appreciate and care about you. It just makes you want to keep doing what you do. And I just, I got that feeling working with healthcare and decided to go for it.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I love it. So let’s first talk about-
As a doctor, I wasn’t used to asking for help, especially when it came to subjects outside of medicine. But then I found physiciancoaches.com. In [00:09:00] an instant, I found hundreds of experts to help me in all aspects of life, on areas I was afraid to ask. Dealing with burnout, starting a side gig, money management, even help with my marriage.
And the best part? Nearly all experts are physicians themselves. After reading their profile and a quick chat, I knew I found the right mentor for me. At physiciancoaches.com, help from professional colleagues is just a click away.
Practice owner and this is probably self serving, but I’m a practice owner. I’ve got a few locations on here. We usually we think about leasing but then, you know recently I’ve been thinking about buying. So what you know put yourself maybe in the practice center? What should be what should we be thinking if we determining which way to go?
Colin Carr: So the first thing I would tell people is you can always have a preference if I want to lease or purchase, but I would highly encourage people not to [00:10:00] pre or not to make the full decision until you’ve gone to the market.
And here’s why it’s important. You might be one of the few that says, why I only want to lease, but there could be an amazing opportunity for you to purchase and it could totally change your net worth, your future. The real estate could be worth even more than your practice. And so you could be missing out on this amazing opportunity.
To increase your situation financially or be in a better location or better property because you just said I don’t want to do that. And the other side of the coin is there too you can say hey, I have to own but you might be obsessed with choosing a property for ownership that might be inferior in location and quality and attracting quality staff and patient referrals.
And it’s okay to go into a transaction with a preference, but you want to look at all your options. That’s one of the biggest mistakes people make is they fall in love with one property. If they only look at a segment of the market, and that’s not a good strategy for truly understanding what options are available.
So knowing your options is very important when it comes to owning. If every month you can cut a check and [00:11:00] your net worth will increase because you’re paying down principal. And after 15, 20 years, you’ve got a building paid for, which could be worth a million and a half, 2 million dollars or more.
That’s a tremendous way to prepare for retirement, tremendous way for you to build an additional asset. And again, a lot of times that real estate is worth more than the practice. And a couple other things. When you own real estate, you get to also depreciate it. So you pick up additional tax deductions.
So most health care providers would say to you, I’d love to find ways to save money on taxes to pay less in taxes. Owning commercial real estate is a really savvy strategy to do that too. If you have a chance to own real estate, it comes down to concepts like, do you have the down payment? Can you afford to get into the transaction?
If you can’t, then let’s come back to that idea in the future. If you can, let’s go to the next concept. Are there good buildings available that you would like to be in for the next 10, 15 years that are going to make your practice successful that you can see yourself being there? Is the size work? Does the location work? Do the neighboring tenants [00:12:00] work? That’s a consideration. What’s the cash flow on a monthly basis? There’s times when you say, I’ve got the down payment. I like the property, but to own this property is going to cost me 30, 000 a month and I can lease for eight.
You have to decide if it’s worth the premium. So on a cashflow basis, does it pencil? So long story short, there’s all these different things we’re looking at and considering along the way. And we got to make sure that we’re checking the boxes. If you miss one of those, you can find yourself in a really bad situation where your practice is suffering or you’re suffering financially, or you’re trying to undo a very costly mistake.
So a lot of reasons to purchase. Great, phenomenal way of building wealth. The investment’s predicated upon you as a tenant. Are you going to pay your own rent to yourself? Most people say, if I’m going to bet on anybody, I’ll bet on my own self or my own practice. So That’s a great way to do it.
And then on the other side, people say, why would you want to lease flexibility? You get a chance to move. You don’t get locked into one location. Landlord pays for a [00:13:00] portion of your build out. They give you free rent. They give you free build out. There’s flexibility. And it just, it helps you from a cashflow.
It usually costs less to lease than own. And so there’s a lot of things on the lease side that can be very attractive too. So again, that’s why don’t fall in love with one option, go to market, look at all your options and then make an informed decision based upon those criteria.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That was very helpful. And is there a standard like down payment that’s usually required? And maybe you can talk about too is, let’s say you don’t have enough. Is this, can you get, should you be focused on getting loans, whether through the SBA, getting partners involved? What do you think is a good strategy to follow?
Colin Carr: Yeah, that’s great. So I’ll start by saying this. If you are a mainstream healthcare professional, if you’re a physician, a veterinarian, a dentist, versus there’s some ancillary health care, it’s more health and wellness related. But if you’re in mainstream medical or health care, there’s a handful of lenders nationally that specialize in [00:14:00] health care and every bank will say we’ll say they specialize in health care but there’s some banks that truly specialize in health care. Not just like a tab on their website that says medical or physicians but they actually that’s all they have departments that do and those lenders they have an appetite for lending to the medical community.
And so I would tell you, typically those lenders are going to do deals at 10 percent down. And that they could be an SBA loan, but a lot of times they’ll do loans at 10 percent down. 20 percent down is going to probably be the highest you have to come to the table with for most transactions. And then on the other side of the coin, there’s some lenders that they’ll do 100 percent financing.
And even if it’s an SBA loan, they’ll lend you the 10 percent for the 10 percent down payment for the SBA. If you have an MD, or a DDS, or a DVM at the end of your name, you can probably get financing that other businesses cannot. That restaurants, or CPAs, or people like that can’t get. There’s really attractive lending opportunities that are available.
It depends on [00:15:00] the type of property, depends on the strength of your practice, it depends on if it’s your first location, or if you’re established. Again, there’s a lot of variables there, but I would say if you’ve got 10 to 20 percent down payment available, on the real estate, not the build out, not the tenant improvements, not the equipment, but just the real estate itself. The odds are you’re going to probably be able to find someone that can help you purchase that property with very favorable terms.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: As someone who’s currently renewing my lease right now, I heard something that you can help healthcare providers maybe get more money in their pocket the next time their renewal is up. You want to, I’d like to hear a lot more about that.
Colin Carr: Yeah, that’s a great question. So The number one transaction in all of commercial real estate, whether it’s for office, industrial, retail, take all the different industries, specialties, medical. The number one transaction in all of real estate is the lease renewal transaction.
Every time you see someone put up a new office or a new location or move, there’s probably 10 to 20 lease renewals happening [00:16:00] at the same time as that one new location. So it’s the number one transaction. And it’s the number one transaction that landlords love because they make more money on those transactions.
It costs them less to do those deals. It’s also the number one transaction where tenants, specifically healthcare providers, lose the most amount of money. And so let me start by just setting the table. Most leases, again, we’re talking like 98, 99 percent of leases have an annual increase built into them.
Okay, you sign a lease at like $20 a square foot, or if you’re in, if you’re in California, it’s a per square foot per month. So $2 a square foot or $3 a square foot. And then every year on the annual renewal date. It increases up 3% or 4% or 5%. There’s some trigger mechanism, which increases that lease rate and then other costs also go up too.
And so you sign a 10 year lease, that thing has nine increases in it. And so you might’ve started out, let’s say a $20 lease rate and you finish that lease at 30. The reality is, in the vast majority of [00:17:00] scenarios, the market rents have not capped up with those increases. The increases have outpaced the market rents, and so people get to the end of the lease, whether they’ve been in there 5, 7, or 10 years, and the vast majority of those leases, they are above the current asking rate that a new tenant would pay, or a landlord would be seeking to release that space.
In addition, you have to understand that if you were to move out of that space, what does it cost the landlord to release that space? They’re gonna they’re gonna spend money on helping to build it out. They’re gonna get free rent. They’re gonna have a free build out period. They’re gonna have higher attorneys costs on a new lease and they would unleash renewal. And there’s all these other costs that go into a new lease that are a lot higher than on a lease renewal. In addition, They also have downtime that space could sit vacant for 6, 12 or 18 months.
It’s a lot of money a landlord has to lose or to win. And so the underlining idea here is, don’t jump into a lease with your current landlord [00:18:00] just to get it done because the landlord has a lot of money. They’re willing to invest in that deal. If you’re properly represented and if you have a strategy, so most tenants will go to their current landlord and they’ll say, send me a proposal or what would you do for me if I’m willing to stay?
And that sounds like a reasonable statement or question, but it actually is not because you’re indicating to the landlord. I don’t really want to move. I don’t have time to hire someone. That’s why I’m talking to you versus an expert. I’m probably willing to pay a premium and I’m not going to push you as hard as a new tenant would.
And so you don’t think you’re communicating that, but you really are. So the landlord goes into the transaction. They hear the tenant respond with, send me a proposal. I don’t want to move. What would you do for me? And the landlord thinks no downtime, no very minimal attorney’s fees, very minimal build out or renovation, no free.
Like they just go in there they start thinking i’m going to save a ton of money. And they just they come with terms that are usually not that competitive to the market versus if the [00:19:00] landlord thinks, Hey, Mike’s got three or four other options. He’s already been to market. If he vacates my property, this thing might sit vacant for 12 or 18 months.
I’m going to lose a couple hundred thousand dollars. I better get competitive. So one strategy says you go to your landlord, says, say, send me a proposal, ask some questions. Tell the landlord things you’re not supposed to tell them. The other strategy says, hire an expert, go to market, look at your top options, and then have your expert come to your landlord and say, listen, we know what a market lease rate looks like.
We know what other landlords are willing to do. We’d love to talk to you about what a lease renewal might look like, but it’s going to have to be competitive. It’s going to have to compete with other options because we can’t justify overpaying by a couple hundred thousand dollars over the next 10 years just because we’ve been here.
We’re going to have to be more competitive. And so the strategy is one where you have to take time to go to market. You have to negotiate with other landlords. You should be hiring representation to help you. And the one strategy results in the [00:20:00] landlord coming down on lease rate, giving you free rent, giving you TI allowances to renovate or update your space, etc.
The other one, the landlord hammers you and it basically assumes you’re not going to move, can’t move, don’t know how to move, etc. And so the net result of those deals, it’s a couple hundred thousand dollars you either win and keep or you lose and forfeit.
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Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. I think you were trying to talk with me about sending an email on a proposal, in aerospace. We just recently. Left, but in all honesty, we found a better opportunity, but I can certainly understand how having an expert come in. And I think now they’re you know, they did accommodate somewhat, but I think they could have accommodate a lot more and death sound like really having an expert who really knows the area and what is the what other competition where could we go could have really come in handy. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So I’m going to talk about so we talked about leasing versus owning as a practice owner. Now, let’s just talk about investing as a number of my listeners.
We’re interested in real estate at the time of this recording, [00:22:00] unfortunately, real estate, at least on the residential side, isn’t as attractive with higher rates. I know you can’t predict the future, but tell me about the commercial real estate at the time of this recording.
Colin Carr: Yeah, absolutely. Let me start by talking about interest rates for one second because people right now are saying, Hey, I’m going to hold off on buying something. That’s fine. If that’s what you prefer to do. I would highly encourage people not to let interest rates determine whether you do or don’t transact or not, because here’s the reality. If you look at a, if you look at a chart for where interest rates have been over the last 30 years, they go up, they come back down, they go up, they come back down.
We’re at the highest they’ve been like in the last 25, 30 years. Guess what? They’re going to come back down again. Okay. So if you find a deal and it makes sense right now, and it pencils right now, even if you’re paying more than you want to just, you have to look at historically the odds of you paying this interest rate or a payment for this interest rate, this high for more than a year and a half, two years, it would have to, it’d have to buck the trend of the last couple of decades.
[00:23:00] Yes, they’re high. But they’re already talking about bringing rates back down again. We are encouraging anyone right now who’s looking at deals don’t sit on the sidelines just because the interest rates are high. If it makes sense now you’ll be refinancing in a year two or three and as long as you can afford it for the next two three years. Realize you’re going to find yourself in a very different position in the near future.
And so that being the case, now, if you can’t afford the property because the rates are too high, then you do have to put weight until the future. But in the commercial estate market right now, it’s staying very strong. Residential is definitely softening. I could give you a bunch of stats showing you how prices are coming down. How inventory is going up, how time at a market is increasing.
But in the commercial real estate world, there is definitely some softening, there’s different areas. For Class A retail, for medical space specifically, it’s staying very consistent. Certain areas like Class B, Class C office, yes, that’s struggling right now big time, but that also provides an opportunity, like there’s a lot of opportunity right now to go out there and purchase Class B or [00:24:00] Class C office because landlords are getting more motivated.
Yeah. And there’s more competitive pricing in that area. I’m an optimist. I think there’s always a deal to be had nothing wrong with being patient waiting on the sidelines. People that want to invest, there’s still some deals out there. And again, if it pencils now, it’s going to really pencil and a year or two when rates go down two, three, four points and you’re refinancing, just like you did with your house.
I bought a house, eight years ago, and then I refinanced a couple of years ago. And I’m, I think my main residence has a 2.1% interest rate on it. It’s ridiculous. So if you’re paying seven or eight right now and it makes sense. You’re going to have a chance at fives or fours or threes in the future. So just don’t turn off that as an opportunity in my personal opinion.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about investors, physicians. On the program, we talk about increasing your net worth, develop more passive streams of income. What’s a maybe you can go through the process. [00:25:00] Someone who’s interested in commercial real estate.
What’s the step by step? What should they be thinking about? Should they be looking around in their area? What are there are certain parts of the country they should be thinking of? There’s always a hot sector that they should go into lots of information that they can get.
But coming from an expert, what would you suggest a step by step process? They should be start thinking about commercial real estate.
Colin Carr: Okay, I’ll give a couple of things here. Number one, the easiest way to get involved in commercial real estate is a property that accommodates your own practice. So if you are a healthcare provider, that’s going to be the best way for you to get involved in commercial real estate to start.
If you’ve never owned commercial real estate, that’s going to be your best way. And here’s why. You’re going to get what we call owner user financing. Meaning that 0 percent down, 5, 10, 15, maybe 20. Whereas if you just go buy an investment property, most lenders are going to look for you to put down probably 30, 35, 40 percent.
It’s a very different underwriting process. When [00:26:00] you’re the of the tenants in a property that you own, the landlord, or sorry, the lender is going to say, look, you can carry the property. You are the make or break and as long as I like your practice, that’s why they give you much better financing.
So now you might choose in a year or two that you want to sell that practice or that location or you want to lease the entire property out. There’s nothing that says that you can’t lease all the units out, but if you use your practice even if you’re only occupying a portion of that building, that’s going to put you in a place where you get much better financing with most lenders.
So that’s a great way to get involved in it. And I know, we have a lot of healthcare providers that will buy real estate and then they’ll swap out the lease to another provider. And as long as the numbers are there, the lenders say, Hey, we’re fine. Let’s go help you do this again. And they want good quality deals and good quality loans.
So that’s a great way to get involved. If you’re looking at just purely from an investment standpoint, you’re not going to be a tenant there. You’ve got to surround yourself with experts and you’ve got to ask questions like, if there’s a problem, am I going [00:27:00] to be the person that’s going over to see, what’s going on in the parking lot or with the HVAC, or am I going to have it professionally managed?
And I’m a big fan of owning real estate in areas that you can get to excessively versus you don’t want to have to jump on a plane and then go across the country or go figure it out if you can help it. Now, I’m not saying don’t buy a property across the country, but again, just practically speaking if you need to get a different property manager, if there ever is a big issue, if something’s broken and you want to see it before you agree to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to fix it or 10, 000 or whatever.
It’s just nice to be able to drive down the street or get on the expressway and go see it, whether it’s half an hour away or it’s right next door. So I’m a big fan of proximity. And then anything else, you just, you have to be willing to invest in the educational process. Like no one’s going to start probably like picking stocks and investing randomly without taking time to understand what’s happening to some extent.
It’s the same thing in commercial real estate. Any investment mechanism, if you’re going to put legitimate amounts [00:28:00] of money into it, which if you’re going to own real estate, you’re going to put tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars into it. You’ve got to take the time to become an expert in that area, not overnight, but you have to be willing to invest in the educational process or another way to say that you got to invest in yourself.
You’ve got to be willing to invest in the terminology and how properties are run and how to capitalize and help them be worth more money like that takes time just like healthcare takes time or becoming a good real estate agent takes time. If the quickest shortest route to commercial real estate ownerships through your practice, and then if you do that, you can get a one tenant property or one unit property where you’re the only person there.
Or you can go buy a retail strip center or a multi tenant office building. Maybe you carry the day, maybe you carry the majority of the payment, but you lease out other units, people start subsidizing the overall cost of it. They’re helping to build your net worth. They’re helping to pay down principal. That’s a great way to do it as well.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So again, this has been tremendous and I could [00:29:00] definitely see the benefit of hiring an expert. So maybe you can talk about your company what exactly you do as an expert commercial real estate agent, maybe can cover that costs, etcetera. So they can get more of a feel about what you do or what this type of work involves.
Colin Carr: Absolutely. And I’ll say it a couple ways, look we have a national company. We’d love to help as many healthcare providers as possible. But if it’s not us, let it be somebody else. And I think it’s the same sentiment that a healthcare provider would say, listen, I’d love to take care of you. But if it’s not me, go to someone else.
Don’t go to a healthcare provider. If it’s a choice between, Okay. One provider versus no one like go to the provider like don’t self diagnose don’t again depending on what the situation is Obviously, but it’s the same concept. So we’d love to help you. We have a nationwide company, but the whole idea is that there’s just a lot of money on the line and anybody can get a transaction done.
Anybody can call on properties. Anybody can say send me a proposal. Anybody can counter and [00:30:00] offer. The question is, did you lose a couple hundred thousand dollars getting that deal done? Just like anybody can pull out a tooth, but an oral surgeon is probably better than a set of pliers at your own house.
There’s a right and a better way to do things. Health care providers hire real estate agents they want to save time. The average transaction takes couple dozen hours of time, 30, 40 hours. You want to save time. It’s valuable. You want to save money. You don’t want to overpay even by a couple thousand a year, let alone by tens of thousands per year.
You want to capitalize. You want to avoid pitfalls and complications. Like you don’t want to find out that you have to replace the HVAC unit on your space because you didn’t negotiate properly. And you got to spend $40,000 to replace a rooftop unit because you weren’t paying attention to that negotiable item.
And at the end of the day, you want peace of mind. You want to know, Hey, I did the best I could with what I had, and I don’t have to regret my decision for the next 10 years and wait for my lease to expire to fix the problem that I could have avoided if I would have just called someone. So [00:31:00] lease renewals purchases.
Buying land, building buildings, scaling, anything with real estate, there’s going to be an advisor who can help you the process. And then the, one of the top questions comes up. Okay. I like what you’re saying. That sounds good. How much does it cost? And that’s one of the best parts about real estate as a whole.
Most industry standards, whether it’s residential or commercial has the landlords or sellers paying the commissions. Now, there can be exceptions to that, but that’s kind of how most markets work. I can’t say every market, but the vast majority of markets, that’s how it works. And if you go to buy a house, it’s very rare for the seller of the house to tell you, Hey, you have to pay your agent’s commission.
No, they have a commission set aside with their listing agent and that listing agent splits it with the buyer’s agent. That’s how it works. If you show up without a broker, an agent, the listing agent gets a double commission. So just like residential real estate, you’re not saving money. If you’re a buyer, not having an agent, you just helped the [00:32:00] seller to make more money or you helped the listing agent get a double commission. Same thing, commercial real estate. And that’s usually when people hear that, they’re like, Oh, it’s a no brainer. Then why would I not hire someone? It’s exactly the same thing.
And I love analogies. So I’ll give you one. If you have a patient who has an insurance policy that covers a certain amount of coverage or money per year, and they haven’t used all that they’ve met their deductibles, they’ve met their out of pocket and there’s money set aside there.
Most healthcare providers call that patient and say, listen, let’s get you in for this treatment or this procedure because it’s a use it or lose it scenario. Dentals like that, you know, you pay for a certain amount of coverage per year, you get it. Dentists are calling all their patients in November, December saying, hey, come in and let’s do X, Y, and Z because you’ve got 500 sitting there.
If they don’t come in, that insurance company is not paying the patient back. They’re not going to cut up a check for not using it. And they’re certainly not going to call the doctor and say, Hey, here’s 500 for doing nothing. The [00:33:00] insurance company keeps that money. It’s the same thing in real estate.
You show up without a real estate agent, that landlord just keeps the money or the listing broker keeps it. So it’s a use it or lose it scenario. You can hire representation, you can get expert advice, counsel, you can protect your interests, save a lot of time. And if you hire the right people, they should give you a very positive result, and you should not be paying for that service.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, and doctors were busy. You’re dealing with your own patients. We got enough to worry about. Certainly, if you want it did, I always advise hiring an expert who knows what they’re doing. This has been amazing one. Where can people reach out to you if they want more information about you or your company? What’s the best place to do that?
Colin Carr: The best place to get in contact with us is our website, and that’s carr.us. So it’s carr.us. You can click in the upper right hand corner to find an agent in the city or market that you’re located in. You can click to get a free lease evaluation. We have a resources tab if you want to get educated.
If you [00:34:00] like to self educate, you want to watch videos, read articles. We’ve got literally hundreds of blogs, videos, FAQs, glossary. So you don’t have to become a commercial estate professional, but if you want to get educated in certain areas or just increase your skill set there. We’ve got enough information to keep you busy for quite a long time.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: All right. So that’s carr.Us. We’ll also put it into the show notes again. Thank you for dropping so much information on there. I know that people are going to listen to this again and again. Any last minute advice before we end the call today?
Colin Carr: I would just say just like a health care provider would tell someone just to take care of yourself, like realize that your health is your most prized commodity and don’t take it for granted.
Don’t overlook things that you could easily have taken care of. It’s similar in healthcare, real estate. Don’t overlook a couple hundred thousand dollar margin of negotiation. Don’t just assume it’s going to work itself out or it’ll be fine. Give it the attention it deserves, give it the respect it deserves, and then try to do the [00:35:00] best you can with what you have.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: All right. Well, thank you again, Colin Carr from CARR. Go ahead and check out his website, Carr. us. They’re experts in commercial real estate. Thanks again for joining us on the program today.
Colin Carr: Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And thank you for listening as always, guys. As an entrepreneur investor, you’re going to ups and downs in life. As Colin said, just take care of your health, in your personal health, as well as in your business. You’ll do fine. And just remember, you’ll have ups and downs, but as always do something a little something each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.
You’ve just listened to the BootstrapMD podcast. For more valuable resources as well as past recordings of our show check out our website at bootstrapmd.com. Now let’s get to work.