Why You Shouldn’t Buy Commercial Real Estate (Until You Do This One Thing)
Too many new investors are skipping the most important step in commercial real estate: defining your Buy Box.
In this episode, I’ll walk you through my Accelerator Buybox Framework—the same system I use with students in my program to bring total clarity to what you should (and shouldn't) be buying. If you're browsing listings, meeting with brokers, or analyzing deals without clear criteria, you're not investing—you're gambling.
You’ll learn how to:
Define your investor identity and goals
Choose the right property type for your lifestyle
Pick a market where you have a competitive edge
Set clear financial filters to avoid bad deals
Decide how hands-on (or off) you want to be
I’ll even walk you through a real-world example of how one of my students used this framework to confidently find and fund his first deal.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
Don't gamble in commercial real estate - have a clear strategy
Develop a Buy Box framework with 5 key steps:
Investor Identity
Asset Class Clarity
Market Focus
Financial Filters
Operational Boundaries
Know exactly what you want before investing:
Your investment goals
Desired property type
Target market
Minimum financial returns
Level of personal involvement
Benefits of a Buy Box:
Saves time
Reduces risk
Provides clear investment criteria
Helps quickly eliminate unsuitable deals
Focus on:
Local market knowledge
Matching properties to your personal investment style
Having clear, predefined investment metrics
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.
Episode Transcript:
Tyler Cauble 0:00
Most newer commercial real estate investors are completely winging it, and it's costing them millions. If you're out there, scrolling loop net, talking to brokers or walking properties without a defined Buy Box, you're not investing, you're just gambling. I know that sounds harsh, but I've seen it happen too many times. Smart, motivated investors dive into commercial real estate with no clear filter, no criteria and no roadmap, and then they wonder why they end up in a cash eating office building or an empty retail center. But here's the thing, this isn't about intelligence or hustle. It's about having the right foundation before you spend $1 tour a space or even run a cap rate. In this video, I'm going to walk you through my accelerator Buy Box framework, the same tool that I teach in my program, to help you get laser focused on what the right deal looks like for you, and by the end, you'll have total clarity on what to buy, where to look and what returns to aim for, and what to avoid like the plague. If you're serious about commercial real estate, don't wing it. Let's build your buy box right now. I'm
Tyler Cauble 1:06
Tyler Cobble. I'm a commercial real estate investor, and I've been at it for over 12 years now, and I've helped hundreds of people move from residential real estate investing over to commercial real estate. My Siri accelerator mastermind program. Learn more about that in the link below, before you ever underwrite a deal, tour a property or talk to a lender, you need one thing, clarity, clarity about what you're actually trying to buy and why. That's where the accelerator Buy Box framework comes in. This framework gives you the guardrails to make smart, fast decisions so you stop wasting time on deals that don't fit you. So here's how it works. Step one, investor identity. The first question you need to answer is, Who am I as an investor? What is that Zoolander? Who am I? Are you looking for stable mailbox, money, cash flow, or are you hunting for long term equity and appreciation? Are you an operator who needs to be hands on, or are you trying to build something a little more passive? You can't build a portfolio that fits your life if you don't know what role you actually want to play as an investor. Step two, asset class clarity. What type of commercial property are you focused on? Multifamily, office, industrial, retail, mixed use. They all have different tenants, financing structures, risk profiles and operational needs. This is where a lot of new investors go wrong. They chase whatever's trending instead of locking in on what actually fits their skills, their time and their goals. Avoid the shiny object syndrome and ask yourself what asset class aligns with the lifestyle and the outcomes that you're trying to build. Step three, market focus. Look at your geography. You don't want to be looking at deals in five different cities, pick one to two markets that you can deeply understand. That means knowing the job drivers, the population trends, inventory pipelines and even zoning quirks. Local knowledge gives you an edge and helps you move fast when the right deal shows up. Step four, financial filters. Now this is where we get into the numbers. You need to define your minimum acceptable metrics before you look at a single offering memorandum. That means your minimum cash on cash return, your targeted cap, rate range, acceptable loan terms, risk tolerance, on vacancy and rollover. Because if you don't define your floor, brokers and sellers will gladly do it for you, and I promise it won't work out as well as you hope. Step Five operational boundaries, and this is last but not least. But how involved do you actually want to be? Are you ready to manage tenants and handle repairs, or are you looking for a triple net lease that basically runs itself? Do you want value add, stabilized, ground up development? Your buy box isn't just a filter for deals. It's a filter for how your life looks too once you own them. So that's the accelerator Buy Box framework, five questions that give you total clarity and keep you from wasting months or hundreds of 1000s of dollars on the wrong opportunity. Now I'm going to show you how to actually apply this in real time, so you can use it to screen deals this week. Let's say you're an investor named Matt. Matt is in his early 40s, has a few single family rentals under his belt, and he's ready to level up into commercial real estate. He's working full time, but wants to build a strong, cash flowing portfolio to eventually exit his w2 so how would Matt go about building his Buy Box? Let's start with the investor identity. Matt wants steady, predictable cash flow, but he's not looking to quit his job tomorrow and become a full time property manager. He's probably willing to be hands on for a few hours a week, but wants something lower drama. So we define Matt's investor identity as cash flow focused, risk aware, semi passive investor, building long term wealth. Then we move on to asset class clarity. Matt doesn't want to deal with tenants calling about toilets every weekend. He's already done that with residential. He's also not interested in office right now. It feels too uncertain. Post covid, he's leaning towards small. Industrial Buck space. It's lower maintenance. You also get long term tenants. He also likes retail strip centers with triple net leases. So now we've narrowed the asset type, and that alone cuts 80% of the listings off the table. Then we get to our market focus. Matt lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's growing. It's business friendly, and he knows the area really well, so we lock in the Charlotte MSA as his primary market with a secondary look at surrounding cities within a one hour drive. That's his competitive advantage, local knowledge and boots on the ground. Then we get to our financial filters. We have to determine his deal metrics. We come up with a minimum cash on cash return of 8% a target cap rate of seven to 8% now that's stabilized. So that doesn't mean that he needs to buy it at that a price range of probably one to one and a half million, based on how much cash he has, with a loan structure of 75% loan to value, fixed rate, preferred Max vacancy on the property, 15% again, he doesn't want too much to deal with. We don't want any major structural issues or full gut rehabs. These filters become an automatic no system for Matt. If a deal doesn't meet these criteria, it's out and then operational boundaries. Last but not least, Matt doesn't want to manage tenants or coordinate repairs, so he's only looking at properties with either triple net leases or room in the deal to budget for third party property management. He's also avoiding value add projects that have big capital expenditures upfront. So let's recap. Matt's Buy Box, small bay industrial or triple net retail assets in the Charlotte MSA between one to one and a half million dollars at an 8% cash on cash return, or seven to 8% cap rate stabilized with low touch or outsourced management, and they're stabilized or light value added with strong tenants. Now that's clarity, and with this level of clarity, Matt can move fast and ignore the noise and actually enjoy the investing process. And that is exactly what I want for you. They're more spreadsheets and guesswork, just focused, confident action and the right deals for you. Now I'm gonna show you exactly how to use this Buy Box in the wild to screen a real deal listing in under 90 seconds. Let's go All right, so we'll pull up Craxi. I'm gonna go into all types. We'll sort by retail, and I'm not gonna do all industrial. Do flax, just flax. Let's get rid of gas stations, grocery stores. Really just wants shopping centers, no QSR, no daycare, no convenience stores, no banks, right? So you can see already, right off the bat, we've eliminated a lot of our options, which, again, kind of sounds counterintuitive, but it's helping you narrow down your search, giving you a lot of clarity. I'm gonna go to the Charlotte MSA. We're gonna find a bunch of properties for sale. Now I'm gonna filter by the price. Minimum is $1 million he's got some cash that he wants to deploy. Maximum is one and a half. He doesn't have too much cash he wants to deploy. And that brings us to five results in the Chattanooga, MSA. So look at that already. We're down to five properties that probably check his box. Now, several of these are unpriced. I always find that pretty annoying whenever I'm looking at these. This one says it's industrial. That doesn't really look industrial to me. That's land. This one's unpriced, all right? Well, right off the bat, I can tell you, because we have that buy box in place, all five of these would be eliminated right off the bat, and that is how I would use this Buy Box to filter through the deals. I would know immediately these aren't even worth digging into. Maybe this one right here that's, you know, unpriced is probably worth at least calling on. But if it's unpriced, it's probably not even close to my price range, which means it may not even be worth a call. Now, in a scenario like this, if I was Matt, I wouldn't necessarily start changing my Buy Box and expanding it to try and fit the market that I'm in. I would sit and think, okay, am I comfortable expanding outside of my comfort zone? Or should I just wait and try to dig up an opportunity within the market that I'm already working in that may not necessarily be on crexy or online or listed somewhere? Maybe I need to start marketing to off market deals, calling brokers, trying to find what could be available in that market with that Buy Box. And the great thing about a Buy Box is that you can just send it to brokers and tell them, hey, this is exactly what I want to buy, and they will remember that this deal is 12,750 square feet. It's been on the market for 78 days. All right, looking at the flyer, let's see if there's a price on here. Well, this checks several boxes, right? It's, it's 100% occupied, so we don't have to worry about any vacancy here. It's in a decent area, no pricing, so we have to worry about that. I would imagine it's probably not gonna be at a cap rate that would check Matt's boxes, but worth digging into. Basically out of every property that we looked at, we narrowed it down to five. Out of those five, we basically narrowed it down to one. Now it's just time to make a call. Now you can see how powerful it is to have a clear Buy Box. This isn't just about filtering deals. It's about protecting your time, your capital and your sanity. Most newer investors waste months chasing shiny opportunities that were probably never right for them in the first place. But when you're working from a defined Buy Box, every deal becomes a binary decision, like what you guys just saw it either. Fits or it doesn't, and that's where real momentum for investors starts. You want to build a portfolio that supports your life and doesn't consume it. You need this kind of clarity from day one. So here's your next step. Define your investment criteria using my accelerator Buy Box framework. It's a simple tool that has saved me and my students from walking into some very expensive mistakes, and now that you know how to define what you want to buy, check out this video here on what is the easiest property for beginners to own?
Everyone knows what the wealthy drive and wear — but few know what they buy to build true wealth: Triple Net (and absolute net) properties.
These “boring” commercial real estate deals quietly deliver predictable, passive cash flow month after month, with tenants like CVS, Dollar General, and 7-Eleven paying not just rent but also taxes, insurance, and maintenance.
No clogged toilets. No late-night calls. Just checks in the mail.