048. The Current State of Retail Real Estate with Adam Williams

The Current State of Retail Real Estate with Adam Williams

Retail Redeveloped Adam Williams specializes in helping dynamic brands grow and destination retail projects thrive. Based in Uptown Charlotte, with a regional reach throughout the Southeast, Adam has the proven ability to successfully drive retail and restaurant projects for top tier brands and Landlord/Developers. As a Principal and top-producing agent at Legacy Real Estate Advisors since 2006, Adam focuses on retail and restaurant commercial brokerage services. After graduating from Elon University, with a degree in Marketing and Economics, he immediately started pursing his passion for real estate and is a licensed broker in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. As a Charlotte native, Adam has seen the Charlotte market transform from a small city to an international business and financial hub. Outside of retail brokerage, Adam is as an owner of Charlotte hot spot, 10 Park Lanes, and founder of Charlotte’s #1 restaurant blog Restauranttraffic.com, a local source for restaurant news and reviews. This experience as a restaurateur and digital marketer enables him to be a true strategic partner with his retail clients. Outside of work Adam has a passion for cars and track driving, exploring the best chefs and restaurants in the Southeast, and spending time with his family. Adam and his wife Genevieve have two sons and live in the Chantilly neighborhood of Charlotte.

The Current State of Retail Real Estate with Adam Williams
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394. The Deal Doesn't Make You Money. The Financing Does.
394. The Deal Doesn't Make You Money. The Financing Does.

Your bank charges you 7%. Your equity investors are costing you 20%. Here's why that's not a mistake. If that math surprised you, this session will change how you finance every deal you do from here on out. This is the full recording of Capital Stack 101, one session from our most recent CRE Central Mastermind weekend in Nashville.

I break down the four layers of financing in every commercial deal, why the "cheapest" money isn't always the smartest money, and why the order you stack it in decides your returns as much as the deal itself.

393. Chick-Fil-A Already Did Your Real Estate Research
393. Chick-Fil-A Already Did Your Real Estate Research

Chick-fil-A spends millions researching a single street corner before they commit analyzing traffic counts, daytime population, growth trajectory, co-tenancy, and then they publish the answer for free. It's the restaurant.

392. How Developers Build Affordable Housing
392. How Developers Build Affordable Housing

Everybody asks how developers make money on affordable housing, so I sat down with Evan Holladay of Holladay Ventures inside Stonebridge Lofts, his $70M, 311-unit community in Goodlettsville, to walk through the entire playbook.

391. I Bought an Abandoned Mill Outside Chattanooga (Peerless Mill Update)
391. I Bought an Abandoned Mill Outside Chattanooga (Peerless Mill Update)

Four years ago, I took on one of the biggest projects of my career: a 1.5 million-square-foot abandoned textile mill just outside Chattanooga.

At the time, a lot of people thought it was too risky. Environmental concerns, vacant buildings, financing challenges—you name it. But I saw the opportunity to create something that could transform an entire community.

In this week's episode, I'm giving you a behind-the-scenes update on where the project stands today. I walk through what's been completed, why we chose to build self-storage before tackling restaurants and retail, how we're thinking about cash flow versus long-term vision, and what comes next as we continue redeveloping the 29-building campus one phase at a time.

390. Why Single Family Rentals Will Never Replace Your W-2
390. Why Single Family Rentals Will Never Replace Your W-2

If your goal is to buy enough single-family rentals to eventually quit your job, you may be chasing a strategy that was never designed to get you there.

In this week's episode, I break down what I call the W-2 Paradox—why your paycheck is actually one of the most valuable tools for building wealth, why trying to replace it too early can slow your investing down, and why so many residential investors eventually hit a ceiling.

389. He Found a Commercial Building on Facebook Marketplace (Yes, Really)
389. He Found a Commercial Building on Facebook Marketplace (Yes, Really)

Bob spent 13 years as an electrician and quietly built a 75-door residential portfolio on the side. Then his first daughter was born, the tenant calls at night burned him out, and he decided to make the jump to commercial.

A year after he joined the CRE Accelerator, Bob closed on an 8,000 square foot flex industrial building in Lansing, Michigan. He paid $200,000 for it. And he found it on Facebook Marketplace.

388. Watch Us 5x Our Returns in Self Storage (Deep Dive)
388. Watch Us 5x Our Returns in Self Storage (Deep Dive)

Self storage is one of the best asset classes out there, but most investors leave the biggest gains on the table. They buy a facility, raise rents, run it a little better, and call it a day.

That works. It just doesn’t get you to a 5x return. The real money is in adding units. In this episode I sit down with Jamie from Storage Designer to walk through a 105-unit facility we bought in Madison, just outside Nashville, for about $1.7M. It came with extra land, truck parking, and a couple of vacant lots already graded and ready to go. We pull up real CAD designs and work through three different layouts live, weighing unit count against truck access, customer experience, and code. Then we run the numbers.

387. The Real Reason the Best Deals Never Hit the Market
387. The Real Reason the Best Deals Never Hit the Market

Most commercial real estate investors are fishing the same picked-over pool on Crexi and LoopNet, then wondering why nothing pencils. The best deals never get there. In this episode I'm breaking down the three channels off-market CRE deals actually live in, why brokers preview the good ones to a small list of buyers before any listing site sees them, and a real deal from inside the CRE Accelerator: a $1.5M off-market RV park that's projected to be worth over $5M after a turnaround. The seller never listed it. No broker ever marketed it.

A member of ours found it through direct outreach to the owner. If you're an active investor who keeps losing bids on listed deals or feels like everything you see is already overpriced, this one's for you.

386. How I Bought My First Commercial Property at 25 (just copy me)
386. How I Bought My First Commercial Property at 25 (just copy me)

In February 2019, I wired $575,000 to a title company and closed on my first commercial property. A former community bank in a Nashville suburb that two different buyers had already walked away from. For the next year, I questioned whether I'd just made the biggest mistake of my life.

385. The 1031 Move That Lets You Buy Before You Sell
385. The 1031 Move That Lets You Buy Before You Sell

Most investors hear "1031 exchange" and immediately think the same thing:

Avoid capital gains taxes.

And while that's true, it's also why so many investors use the strategy incorrectly.

A 1031 exchange is one of the most powerful wealth-building tools in real estate, but it should be part of a long-term portfolio strategy, not a last-minute reaction when you're getting ready to sell a property.