328. Bribery and Corruption in Real Estate | Office Hours

Bribery and Corruption in Real Estate | Office Hours

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In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the shady side of commercial real estate. Bribery, corruption, backdoor deals—it all happens more than you’d think.

I’m sharing stories straight from my own experience and from other brokers and investors who’ve seen it firsthand. Everything from brokers getting offered cash under the table to steer deals, to politicians mysteriously “changing their minds” after a developer cuts a check, to contractors inflating bills mid-project hoping you’ll just pay up to avoid a fight. And yeah—I’m in the middle of a $102,000 roofing debacle myself that’ll make you shake your head.

Here’s some of what we get into:

• The ways shady deals go down—and how to spot ‘em

• Why trusting your broker is absolutely critical

• How to protect yourself from contractors trying to pull a fast on

• The real talk on “double-ending” deals and why it can cost you big

• Why your reputation is worth way more than any quick payday

Look, commercial real estate can be an incredible business—but it’s also the Wild West. If you’re gonna play in this arena, you’ve gotta keep your eyes open.

Listen in and learn how to protect yourself—and your investments—from the dark side of CRE.

Tune in and learn how to keep your investments (and your reputation) safe.

Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com

Key Takeaways:

• Commercial Real Estate Corruption:

• Bribery and corruption are prevalent in the industry

• Common issues include:

  • Brokers taking backdoor payments

  • Sharing confidential information

  • Bribing politicians for zoning approvals

  • Contractors inflating project costs

• Investment Advice:

• Always get agreements in writing

• Trust is crucial when selecting a broker

• Understand market dynamics before analyzing deals

• Get multiple bids for projects

• Be cautious of potential conflicts of interest

• Industry Insights:

• AI is increasingly impacting commercial real estate

• Spreadsheet analysis is less important than understanding market dynamics

• Ethical practices are critical in deal-making

• Recommended Practices:

• Always counter offers

• Verify contractor work and costs

• Build long-term relationships over short-term gains

• Be transparent and maintain professional integrity

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About Your Host:

Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.

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Episode Transcript:

Tyler Cauble 0:00

This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast. We are live from the cobble group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee for this month's office hours every month, the second Tuesday of the month, at 8:30am Central Standard Time. I'm going live and I'm answering your questions. We used to do it weekly. I don't have time to do that every week anymore, unfortunately. Sorry. But jump in second Tuesday the month, and we'll dive into those questions before we dive into those. While you guys are dropping them in the live chat, I'll catch you up on what I have been up to the past few weeks. Because I guess technically, it hasn't been a full month since we have gone live with one of these. And then I have a pretty interesting Reddit thread for us to dive into around the corruption and bribery that exists in commercial real estate. It is not, unfortunately, uncommon in this industry, although, to be fair, it is not uncommon in any industry where there's money involved. So Question of the day, what shady practices have you seen in real estate, and how do you avoid them? I've got a pretty interesting story about a roofing contractor that I'm more than happy to share with you guys, because that has been a very interesting saga for me. But let me catch you up on what I have been up to this past month. A couple of weeks ago, I had, or I guess, really, the past couple weeks, couple weeks ago, we had an in person event for the serie accelerator. We had the brokers mastermind here in town as well, and it was awesome. We had 51 people here for a deal analysis and underwriting workshop, weekend, two days diving all in on that. Logan Freeman, good friend of mine and my co founder of the brokers mastermind, flew in town as well and helped me teach it, thankfully. Because, I mean, I don't know how people teach all day, but I would have lost my voice. I almost lost my voice just from teaching for the two days. So if I, if I hadn't had Logan there to help me out, would have been really tough. So that was pretty great. We taught a bunch of classes on on how to analyze deals, because, you know, when you're coming from the residential side of things, understanding how to actually properly analyze a commercial real estate deal can be one of the more intimidating aspects of investing in commercial real estate. And I think I kind of surprised everybody, because the first day, I told everyone, we're not gonna be cracking open a single spreadsheet, not one, even though this weekend is all about diving into underwriting and deal analysis. We're not looking at spreadsheets because I'm a big believer that 90 to 95% of underwriting is done before you even get to a spreadsheet. Let me tell you more about what I mean about that. When I when I'm underwriting a deal, it takes me five minutes to just input the numbers into my spreadsheets, right? All it is is just dropping the numbers in and you're done, right? You look at it, you stress test it, you kind of understand where it is the what really takes the longest is understanding the dynamics of the market. What are the rental rates? How much is it going to cost for you to actually, you know, renovate the space, right? How long is it going to be vacant? If you know the market incredibly well, you know all of these things right off the bat, so it's very easy for you to understand, which is why it's so easy for me to underwrite deals in East Nashville. I don't have to go out and analyze the market every single time I'm looking at a deal, right? I already inherently know all that kind of stuff, but if you're looking into a new market, then you may not know that. And so that's kind of what we dove into. We did record it, by the way, so we will probably be releasing that as a little mini course if you're interested in deal analysis. It was, it was a great workshop. We had a lot of fun doing it, and then we actually surprised everybody with an in person tour of one of my properties. I gave everybody the information, and then they put all of their skills to the test that weekend of going through and fully underwriting that that property. And then everybody presented their findings in teams, which is really cool, because you would think that everybody would kind of somewhat come to the same conclusion, right? But that's the thing about analyzing these deals, every single team had a different conclusion as to the value, as to the price, as to their approach, how they would do the deal. And you know, some teams were spot on with my opinion on it, some teams were vastly different. But that. That's how commercial estate is, right? There's kind of a lot of opinions involved. That's just really how it works. After the event, I was in the office for one day, and then I flew out to Harvard for a leadership program, the young American leadership program that they had out there. What an honor to be a part of that. It was, it was really cool. There were 10 people from Nashville. Phenomenal group, amazing group of people that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. There were, I believe, 14 cities that were involved in this. You know, Nashville, Chattanooga, we had Minneapolis, St Paul. We had Sacramento, California. It was, it was a really cool, eclectic mix of cities, and we dove into four days of analyze of case studies, basically from these cities, of what they were doing right in all different sectors, from affordable housing to managing their public schools to the nonprofit sector and healthcare, and What these cities were doing to just better their community. Better their communities. And so it was really interesting to to go in and study what everybody else was doing here from all of these different sectors, right? Because you had for profit entities, right? Like, I'm a developer, I'm for profit. Then you also had representatives from mayoral offices there, which was pretty cool, or public servants. You also had individuals from the nonprofit sector, so hearing everybody's different takes on all these different case studies. What a mind opener, what a phenomenal week. And also, Harvard Business School's campus is absolutely beautiful. If you ever make it up to Boston, the Cambridge area, you should go check it out. It was really cool just getting to walk around and see what's going on there. I definitely snuck into the library and spent a couple hours reading in there. It was pretty cool. Anyway, then I had my girlfriend come up to Boston for the weekend, because it was my birthday on Monday, so I figured, hey, it's a good excuse to get her up here. And I proposed to her on Friday night. So we were getting married. So it was a good surprise, great weekend. I don't know how I'm gonna top that week with, you know, one of our biggest Siri accelerator brokers, mastermind events, in person, the Harvard event, getting engaged, and then, of course, my 33rd birthday. So I guess I'm just gonna have to pack it up and go home for the rest of the year. You know, it's who knows it was. It was a great week. Other updates were 45 days out on the hotel. That's what I'm hoping it's it seems like the just drags on and on and on, and unfortunately, once you get to this part of the process in a development, there's so many micro decisions that you have to make that unfortunately, things just start to really, really drag on, not necessarily because people are dropping the ball. It's just there's so many things that have to come together all at once that it's really tough to coordinate everything. You know, it's everything from like, Okay, well, we need to get the furniture on site, but we can't get the furniture on site until we have our door locks in place. Well, we can't get the door locks in place until we have Wi Fi. Well, we can't do the Wi Fi until we move the cables from overhead to underground, because if they're not underground and a storm hits, then everybody in the hotel loses Wi Fi, right? So it's like, okay, we can't put furniture in the rooms because Wi Fi. That makes no sense, right? But, you know, that's, I guess it is what it is. So that's, that's the fun stuff about being in development is that there's, you know, sometimes there's just aspects of you that you don't like, man. I mean, I'm not a fan of that side of things, but you know, we're getting close. We're at the one yard line, and hopefully, you know, we're already planning our next in person mastermind event here in Nashville in October. I'm planning on everybody staying at the hotel and booking it out, so hopefully, at least we're open in September, that way we can have things a little ironed out. We're also getting close to opening up our storage facility out in Chattanooga that is on the one yard line as well. We're so close. So it's been, it's been a good summer. You know, we closed a few weeks ago on a building that I'm going to convert into an event space for the mastermind events and for my YouTube studio, we're gonna actually build out a new YouTube studio, which will be really cool, so I'll be able to actually lease this out to somebody else and move my business somewhere else and do something that's a little more intentional. This is great. This is a great space for those of you all that have been to the studio, which you know, if you're in the mastermind you have.

Tyler Cauble 9:42

It's great, like it's laid out well. It works really well. But for this next phase, which is going to be focused on a lot more content, it's time for us to kind of grow up, which is pretty cool. All right, let's get to somebody else's questions before we dive into corruption and bribery in commercial real estate artists. Thanks, sup, bud. Been a minute heart. Hope you're doing well, man, I need to get up to Chicago and and see how things are going. Hope, hope things are doing well up there. Gee, what's going on, dude? He saying good morning. Tyler, what would you recommend to someone starting new at a commercial firm, not a newbie in commercial Gee. I mean, what I would recommend, man, is going out and finding a firm that really fits, you know, what you're trying to do, because every firm is different, like, that's what a lot of people don't understand. Every firm has its own personality, right? CBRE is night and day, different from Cushman and Wakefield and Avison young. And then you get into the boutiques, right? You know, my firm is different from, you know, the other three boutique firms, or whatever, however many there are here in Nashville. And so, you know, finding one that really fits you and is going to be able to provide you with exactly what you need to grow, right? And some of them are very different, right? Like, some of them are more company business based, right. Mine happens to be more brand based, right? It's got my name on it, right? So they all have different needs, wants, personalities, all that kind of stuff. So what I would say is just find the one that fits you. Vic is saying, Hey Tyler Vick, and what's going on? Glad to glad to see you here. Jorge is saying, Hi, Scott, hello from Athens Greece. Scott, nice man. Hope you're enjoying Athens. That sounds pretty nice. Eric is asking, can I novate? Commercial, effective, Eric, I'm not sure if that's a complete sentence, and if it is, maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't really know. I don't really understand what you're asking there, Jorge, saying, Tyler, wishing you well. By the way, I received your deal analysis toolkit. Thank you so much. That was very kind of you. Blessings, absolutely. Jorge, glad you are enjoying that. If you guys want to download my deal analysis toolkit, it is free. It is the link is in the description below. It includes my, my deal analysis spreadsheet. It includes some some checklists for when you're going through that process. So we'll definitely help you as you're going through that hardest saying congrats on the engagement, dude. Thank you so much. Appreciate it hard. Yeah, you met Linna at at BP con down in San Diego a few years ago. So yeah, man, we're excited. Eric is saying, What would an equity agreement be better than an assigned agreement, Eric, I'm still not fully understanding the question. He's saying I'm an idiot. My bad. You're not an idiot. Man, it's okay. It's I'm just trying to make sure I'm properly understanding your question so I can give you the right answer. An equity agreement better than an assigned agreement. I mean, are you asking in terms of, like raising capital from investors? I don't know what an assigned agreement would be compared to an equity agreement. Jorge is saying, congratulations. I appreciate it, Jorge, thank you guys so much. All right, let's dive into this article, and Eric, we will jump back to your question when we get back to it. Okay. Okay, so this is from Reddit. It's saying, what types of corruption and bribery exist in commercial real estate? I work in a BAC anti bribery, anti corruption in a different industry, and I've always been curious about commercial real estate specific risks. Honestly, this is an aside from me, personally. This sounds like somebody that wants to figure out how they can commit I can commit corruption and bribery in commercial real estate anyway. What kinds of corruption Have you seen, or do you know exists? I can imagine procurement fraud and conflicts of interest, blowing out the cost of projects and bribing for permits. But other than that, I'm not sure bribery for permits is a legit thing. I I know for a fact that there are developers in Nashville that have bribed public officials in order to get their projects through, like smoking gun. Have seen the smoking gun, and unfortunately, it just never really goes anywhere, because most people don't care. It's crazy. Anyways, this first person saying, as a broker, I've been offered backdoor money or a part of a deal to steer it toward a particular buyer. That is why it's so important for you, as an investor to make sure that you really trust your broker, and you've got a really good broker involved in your deal, because the broker is going to be a gatekeeper, for better or worse, to your deals. And so if you have one that you trust, that's a great thing, right? They should be bringing every single opportunity to you as the seller or buyer, so that you can properly make a decision, right? If you are not really seeing the full picture, because somebody's saying, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna offer you $500,000 less than asking, but I'm gonna give you a $50,000 commission on the side, additional if you can get this done, or 100,000 $1,000 to get this done. You know, if you've got a bad broker, I mean, hey, they may try and convince you to take a less amount, or they may just not show you the other deal or the other offers. Unfortunately, brokers have a lot of power when it comes to that. This person's saying debt brokers are the investment sales brokerage will also steal steer a deal to buyers, who will use them for the debt, which is partially unethical. Brokers will also share confidential information with buyers they like that isn't in the seller's best interest, like the distress driving the sale, or where other offers on the bid sheet are. Brokerage rife with conflicts of interest, but if it gets a sale done, then maybe everyone wins and all is well, that ends well, so that, I mean, to be fair, maybe I'm coming from the brokerage perspective, but I am also heavily on the investment side. Now, sometimes I actually agree with that, with a broker, kind of sharing semi inside information, as long as it's not like fully laying all of the cards on the table. I mean, you as an investor probably shouldn't be telling your broker all of your cards anyway, but for a broker to share some of that information just to get a deal done isn't always necessarily a bad thing. I mean, look, everybody wins when a deal gets done, and if sharing a little bit of information to make a buyer feel like they're in the know and they're getting a better deal, and so they should get this done faster, or pay a little bit more or whatever that is. To me, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody wins when the deal gets done, right? That's how I feel. But I mean, there are limits to that, like very clear ethical and moral limits to that. When I was at a big shop, it was very common to make it clear to would be buyers that not using the same shop's debt team was not to their advantage, and the broker always got a referral fee. Whew, that's a tough one. I mean, you'll see some of these bigger firms, you know, like Marcus and Millichap has a capitals group. CBRE has a Capital Markets Group. I mean, like the bigger groups, they all have a Capital Markets Group. And those groups want to place the debt on all of these deals. It's a different brokerage team, technically, right? So, like, you've got your broker that's actually handling the investment sales, and then you've got a mortgage broker basically on a separate division that's handling the debt on these assets. You are never required. You are never required to utilize somebody's debt just because you're using them as a broker. I mean, unless you sign an agreement that states, hey, I'm going to use you as a broker and I'm going to use your guys for the debt. I mean, if somebody is preventing you from getting a deal done simply based on that, then you need to go around that broker. I mean, that's probably a very controversial opinion, and I'm saying that as a broker, there are times when it makes sense to go around a broker. I mean, if they are not responsive to you, or they are not giving you the full picture. I mean, look, if I, if I was a seller and my broker was ignoring a potential buyer or just not responding to them, I would want to know that, right? And there's this kind of unspoken rule in the industry of, oh, you never go around a broker. I agree with that to a certain extent, to like, there's a hard stop to where I don't believe in that anymore. If that broker is unresponsive, and they're not trying to get a deal done, and they're not actually operating in my best interests, I do not care if somebody goes around them, like, if I, as the owner, get a call from somebody and they say, Hey, I've been trying to get a hold of your broker to to get a status update on my offer for two weeks now. I can't hear anything back. I'd want to know that that is affecting me and my investment. So yeah, is that broker going to be pissed, of course, because it makes them look bad, and it should, because they're doing bad things. So maybe that's my, you know, emotional take on it. But look, at the end of the day, if you're going to be a bad broker, get out of the business. We don't need you.

Tyler Cauble 19:12

45 year broker only had one issue in my career, multiple offer property deal. One buyer offered me $25,000 cash to push the seller to accept his offer. Told the buyer his offer was $200,000 under other offers, and I had no interest in his offer. Buyer got pissed, and I never heard from him, since that is a good broker. That is exactly how you're supposed to do it. Who cares? Because that $25,000 cash in your pocket is not in your seller's best interest. It's not you have a fiduciary responsibility to your seller, to your client, to make sure that you are getting them the best possible outcome. That's how I believe it in Colorado, bribery happens with zoning issues. Donate to a politician and the issue disappears and the council votes in your favor. I don't think that that is specifically a Colorado issue. You, I've seen that in Tennessee, and we're pretty far away from them, so I figured it could happen pretty much anywhere. Unfortunately, 25 years at a commercial real estate company as a general contractor. While I could never prove anything, I am mortally Sure. I've never heard that mortally sure that some of our leasing agents took brown envelopes from brokers to make sure their clients got preferential treatment. It doesn't really explain what those brown envelopes mean, unless he's talking about bribes or something. I'm not sure. Speaking of GC, I told you guys about a roofing issue that I'm dealing with. This is wild. You'll see this quite a bit, actually, maybe not to the extent that I'm gonna tell you guys, but a lot of times, contractors in this industry will turn around and just start trying to inflate their bill throughout a project, right? You'll agree on a price, and then all of a sudden, at some point, oh, well, this part's more expensive, or we've got to do this, or, Oh, we didn't account for that, because it wasn't, you know, whatever, right? And they start trying to inflate their bill so that they can make more money. Obviously, we had a roofing contractor that came out and decided to replace twice as much roof as what was agreed upon in our initial bill. Didn't tell me about it, or in our initial bid, didn't tell me about it until three days before, when they sent me a change order after they had done all of the work for $50,000 I said, I'm not paying that. I didn't agree to any of this work. Obviously, in our agreement, it states that we have to agree to a change order in writing ahead of time before anything is done. Right? So I That's ridiculous. They say, Okay, well, we'll talk to our CEO and try and get this figured out. CO comes back. He says, hey, no worries. I'm gonna work on this. Let me, let me do some accounting to make sure that we understand what's going on this job. He comes back and sends me an itemized list for $102,000 stating that we want $102,000 over budget. Keep in mind, this was $166,000 roof. So they went roof, so they went 70% over budget on a roof because they just decided to do double the roof. I was like, Dude, I'm not, I'm not paying that tough. So, you know, now we're, of course, fighting over that. And, you know, unfortunately, it's, it's not uncommon, you know, I mean, we've got our attorney involved. They've got theirs involved. We've got an agreement that very clearly states that any additional changes in scope and price must be agreed to in writing beforehand. So make sure that you've always got everything in writing, because it will come back and probably protect you at some point. There are so many people that do shady stuff in this industry that it is worth spending a little bit of money on a lawyer to make sure that you're protected. I had a buyer who was going to re trade a deal. I was representing the seller on I told him the seller wouldn't accept a Retrade for the asset. His response was, I'll give you 25% of however much you can get the price lowered by back to you in cash. That's insane. Wow. Pretty much every local politician, regardless of political party, is receiving benefits of some sort from developers. Man. Politicians get called out in this thread. I can't prove it, but I'm 100% certain that preferred developers for certain triple net deals. Certain triple net deals give kickbacks to people at those companies they get to develop for the margins, at least they used to be, were too ridiculous for those companies to not get anything out of it. I'm not gonna make any comments on that as a PM, I was offered kickbacks by contractors if I inflated their price, didn't do it, of course, even if I was only making 50k at the time, yeah, I mean, it's there's so much of it in this here's another one. I procured a buyer for an off market deal in SoCal in mid May, great property priced below market. The buyer waited for the listing agent to put the deal online in early June, the buyer subsequently circumvented me, went direct to the listing agent, because the listing agent was double ending the deal with my buyer. That's almost always a recipe for disaster. You can tow it very well, but sometimes it can lead to disaster, having somebody work both sides of it. He and the buyer leaned on the seller to accept a price below what the market would bear. So I got circumvented, and the seller probably lost out on at least $250,000 the listing agent had 10 offers on the property, but magically didn't counter a single one. The listing agent shared intimate details of the other offers with his now buyer. This enabled the buyer to appear to have the best offer. The listing agent could then tell the seller there's no need to do a multiple counter, because this offer is above list and much better than the other nine offers. Meanwhile, a round of counters would have delivered a much higher price to the seller, but the listing agent wanted to double in the deal, so he convinced. Seller not to counter cost me $100,000 yeah, that's that's a tough one. Don't ever let a broker. I mean, in my opinion, you should always counter every single deal, every single offer. You never know what's gonna come from it. In my opinion, you really, really never know what's gonna come from it. Because there are so many shady brokers like this that will try and double in both deals. I mean, think about it, if they're getting one and a half percent to 2% commission more on doing a deal than they would be if they're splitting with another agent, they're going to be heavily incentivized to take a lower price to offer, because they're still gonna be making more money, so they don't care. So it's, it's just worth I mean, gosh, you got, you really have to make sure that you have a good broker involved and that you trust them. I mean, there's, there's just so much of that. Let me see if I can. I mean, there's a whole lot of comments in here. Let me see if I can try and start getting rid

Speaker 1 26:02

of them. I right,

Tyler Cauble 26:08

let's see narc alert, that's great. The entire city of Miami, the high end luxury condo market in New York City. Should I continue fair appraisers and bogus valuations. You know, one thing that I do have a problem with this is, I see this more on the residential side than I do anywhere else, is that appraisals magically come in at the number that you're under contract for, or within like five to $10,000 How does that happen every time? That's interesting, but don't look at me. I'm just the guy asking the questions. All right, let's get to somebody else. Somebody else comments in here because we're coming up on it. All right. Hunter, saying, Good morning, good morning. What's up? Hunter, thanks for jumping in, dude, John, I'm happy that I checked in today. Congrats on the engagement. I've been married for 25 years. I've been together 10 been together together for 27 congrats, John, that's awesome. Man, you have so much fun ahead of you. I'm really excited. We're very we're thrilled. We're over the moon. Man, Scott is saying congrats on the engagement. Happy birthday. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. Oh. Man. Goldsby Tyler, Wagwan. MABA, I don't know what that means, gold speed, but thank you so much. CBA, where is AI changing real estate, and how detrimental could this be to young people looking to join Oh. CBA, we could do an entire, like 10 hour podcast, in my opinion, on AI and how it's impacting commercial real estate. You know, I didn't think that it was too big of a deal, because I was like, oh, you know, residential real estate, Zillow, you know, Zillow is going to take out residential agents before commercial agents will ever get you know, have a possibility of getting replaced. We're starting to see some AI come out that is actually replacing at least the number of commercial real estate agents, you'll still need agents involved, not nearly as many, though, and that's pretty interesting. So maybe one of these days here, pretty soon, we'll do, like, a commercial real estate AI that, like, I'm using what we're using, because there's some stuff that's, that's, you know, pretty, I don't know It's game changing. I mean, you can, you can create offering memorandums in five minutes, just by dropping some info in. It's kind of wild. Scott is saying reputation is worth a lot more than 20k 100% that's, I mean, it was, that's a broker that's playing the long game, right? They know, I don't need 20k right now, because it's going to bring me back multiple six figures, having a good relationship with this person later, right? CBA is saying, from my experience working with GCS, it's the subs are always kind of tapping them with hunting trips, football tickets, steak dinners, etc. It feels hard to trust your GC. It makes it feel hard to trust that your GC is really on your side. Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's, there's a lot of that. I mean, there's always, I mean, that's why I always make sure that my GC is getting at least three beds. I don't care, and I want to review them. Yeah, I know that my GC has his preferred guys, but for that exact same reason, I don't want you to just give it to the guy that takes it to a Titans game. First of all, bad taste, man. Team hasn't won since 1999 so what are you doing? Right? Like, come on, Hunter is saying, I think it means what's going on. My boy could be wrong, though, yeah, you're probably right. Maybe that's what, yeah, maybe that's what it beats. I could not read that big it's saying, Tyler, do you have have to have a property to get a loan from a lender, or is there more than one way to get a loan? Vic, and I'm not exactly sure what you're asking here. I mean, if you're asking if you need to have a property, like if you need to be under contract to get. A loan to buy that property. Yes, you can't really just go out. I mean, I guess you could. You could get a line of credit based on your existing assets that you could then go and deploy. But yeah, typically you just get a loan whenever you're actually closing on a property. CBA, with commercial real estate being the wild west of business and not very regulated, relatively to other businesses, in my opinion. I mean, that's a fair opinion. I think it's important to know the sleeve, the sleeves bags this field can attract and always be cautious, 100% I mean, come on, man. I mean, it's like Wolf of Wall Street is still very much alive in commercial real estate. That is for sure. Guys, appreciate you joining me for this month's office hours every second Tuesday. Jamal, the Titans catching strays. Lol, but true. I mean, it's true. It's true. Jamal, thanks for joining, man. Guys, it's nine o'clock, so I have got a ride, but thank you for joining me every Tuesday, every second Tuesday of the month. Once a month, we go live. We do office hours. I answer your questions. Jump in, ask them, and I'll see you guys in the next one. This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more you.