We Launched an App for Commercial Real Estate Investors! (Office Hours)
Not all real estate tools are built with investors in mind. That’s why we built our own.
In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the brand-new CRE Central App—our all-in-one platform for commercial real estate education, mastermind coaching, and deal analysis.
Here’s what you’ll find inside:
Access to our mastermind coaching and courses
AI-powered deal analysis trained on 50+ live underwriting sessions
Community, events, and challenges like “30 Deals in 30 Days”
The roadmap to the first trade school for commercial real estate
If you’ve been piecing together strategies from scattered sources, this episode will show you what’s next: a centralized hub built for commercial real estate investors, by investors.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
CRE Central App Launch
New mobile app exclusively for mastermind members and course participants
Will centralize courses, events, and resources in one platform
Upcoming Education Platform
Launching in January 2026
University-style commercial real estate education
Majors in brokerage, investment, and development
Aims to be an affordable alternative to traditional college education
Raising Capital Strategies
Start building investor network before finding deals
Reach out to potential investors early
Create multiple "fishing lines" (personal brand, online presence) beyond cold calling
Prospecting Techniques
Use affordable tools like white pages instead of expensive platforms
Focus on adding value during cold calls
Build relationships and personal brand in the industry
Upcoming Events
30 Deals in 30 Days Challenge in October
Mastermind event in October focused on raising capital
Live deal underwriting sessions
Future Plans
Developing an AI deal analysis tool
Expanding educational resources for commercial real estate professionals
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
So 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 live from the cobble group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee, today for another round of office hours once a month, I am going live and I am answering whatever questions that you all have on commercial real estate. So if you are looking at doing your first deal, you're trying to figure out how to analyze deals. Whatever it is, doesn't matter what those questions are, brokerage, development, investment, that's what this is for. Dive in, ask your questions in the live chat. I'll be sure to get to them today. I have a treat for you guys. We might be diving into an interesting tool that I'm considering releasing here pretty soon, that we have been working on, and I might give you guys a quick preview of that. It's a tool to help you guys analyze deals. Trained on honestly, a lot of my coaching calls from the CRE accelerator mastermind on how I analyze these deals with our members and give them feedback. We might be able to release a little Tyler cobble AI deal analysis tool. So stay tuned. We'll be diving into that today. Little bit of catching you guys up on what I've been up to for the past month, the CRE accelerator mastermind is officially two years old, which is kind of wild to think about. I shared on my Instagram last night a little bit of the background on how we started the community. You know, back in 2020 when I started the YouTube channel there, I had no intentions of doing a course, doing a mastermind, doing the live coaching, in person events, nothing like that. I was genuinely just hoping that somebody would see my videos on YouTube and call me and either invest with me in my deals or hire my brokerage to help them find Commercial Real Estate Investments. Because, you know, we had nothing else to do. So I figured, let's, let's try this whole YouTube thing. Then over the years, it just became, you know, hey, do you offer more in depth coaching? Can you consult on this project? Can you do a course? Have you thought about doing a mastermind and so in the spring of 2023 I launched a discord channel, which is hilarious looking back on now, because I'd never used discord before, but you know that was going to be like the platform that we should use in order to create a little community online and just start sharing more and more information about commercial real estate investing. Well, within probably four months, it grew big enough to the point to where we had to actually create a legitimate one. Not necessarily that discord couldn't. It was a few 100 members, so not that discord couldn't necessarily handle that. It just wasn't delivering the type of community that I wanted to have, and so we moved everything over into Kajabi officially started and launched the mastermind in August of 2023 and that's been a great platform for us for the past couple of years, but as of last night, if you were following me on Instagram, you saw that we launched an app. We officially launched the CRE Central app. It is not currently available to the public at the moment, because it is specifically for our courses, for the the masterminds, all of our, you know, online events. Everything will be hosted centrally in this app, which is really, really cool and exciting to see. And so we will be moving everything over to that over the next week. And then my plan is, hopefully, with one of the tools that I'm going to be showing you guys today, that we will be able to start offering some, some, you know, free access to the commercial real estate communities through that as well, and access to some of our tools that you'll be able to use in there too, one of which I might show you guys here in a minute. We are also this January, completely changing the game when it comes to commercial real estate education. You know, when I first got started, back in 2013 there was nothing really available. And now one of the first things I always said was, as soon as I understand enough about commercial real estate, I'm gonna teach other people how to do this. And that's what has grown us to where we are today. And I'm sure you guys notice I'm very entrepreneurial. I'm constantly thinking of things outside of the box. How can we continue to grow this? How can I continue to offer even more value to my audience about commercial real estate? Because there's not a lot like even though I've got 600 videos on this channel, there's still not a lot of opportunity out there for you to go and find classes on commercial. Estate or get CE credits if you're a commercial real estate broker that are specifically around commercial real estate outside of CCIM. So in January, we will officially be launching the first online education platform designed inspired by the university style teaching for commercial real estate. So we are launching majors like brokerage investment development. At some point, we'll probably launch an analyst major as well. You'll be able to minor in things like tax and wealth strategy or construction, even syndication as well, which will be really, really neat. We're gonna have 100 203 100 level coursework. There will be hundreds of classes that you could take on all aspects of commercial real estate, no matter what you are wanting to do. My goal is to be able to offer a true commercial real estate trade school that could replace college for some of these kids, you come out and you start looking at it, and you know, college is 20,000 30,000 plus per year. A lot of students are graduating with a lot of debt. They still can't get the jobs, and it's because they don't have the industry specific knowledge like an apprenticeship might actually give you when you're trying to go into the workforce. So there's no differentiator for you when you're getting into the commercial real estate industry. And so my intent is with this trade school for less than $20,000 overall, for a two to three year education, you will be hyper educated and knowledgeable on commercial real estate brokerage or investment or development, so that you can either go get a job in that industry, you'll be certified through us as well, or you could just feel confident in knowing that you know how to go about doing things the right way. So that's what we will be focused on in 2026 is creating and launching the 102 100 level coursework, hopefully we can get to the 300 I've got some experts that are coming in that are helping put together all of the different classes in their respective fields, which is pretty neat. So obviously I will not be the one teaching you guys about tax strategy. My CPA, CFO will be doing all of that. So really excited for that. So keep an eye out for it, and we'll be promoting it starting midway through October, with a challenge that I'm going to invite everyone to. You'll be able to download and join the community the in the app for our 30 deals in 30 days. Challenge. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go live and I'm going to underwrite a deal a day. We'll find one on YouTube, we'll go live on YouTube, we'll find one on LoopNet, crexy, whatever, and I'm going to take you through the full underwriting process, so that way you have 30 whole classes that you can take just watch on how I go and find a deal. The things that I think about when I'm underwriting them, the things that I look for, and how I actually go about that process. So it's going to be it's going to be really cool. Troy is asking if I have a school group. No, I do not. Troy. We have our own portal that we actually just launched as part of that community, dot cre central.com, so even better than school, because it has all of those capabilities, but it is our actual platform.
Tyler Cauble 8:25
And then finally, we've got an event in October for the mastermind members. If you are not in the mastermind and you want to start coming to these events, go to cre central.com book a call with me and the team to learn more about joining the mastermind. That one's gonna be great. It's gonna be three days on raising capital. We've got workshops planned, we've got some speakers, we've got some property tours. It's gonna be here in Nashville. It's gonna be a great time. So looking forward to that. It's what a way to close out the year. It's been a great close to the summer, beginning to autumn, and I'm just excited to continue growing this honestly, it's very humbling to see how many people care about hearing my opinions on commercial real estate. So thank you all. I mean genuinely, I really appreciate you all for coming on this journey with me. Never would I have thought that we'd be closing in on 100,000 subscribers on YouTube for a guy that just talks about commercial real estate investing, I love it. Apparently, you guys too. I just didn't think that there was going to be that big of an audience that genuinely cared about it. All right, let's get to somebody else questions first, and then, if I have time, I'm going to dive into this. This AI tool that we've created for you guys. All right, Mr. Syndication is saying, hey, now I just became an LP on two RV parks. Congrats, man, that's awesome. I love RV parks. I'm learning how to capital raise and become a general partner. My question is, should I build a group of investors to pitch to or find the deal? First, great question. Mr. Syndication. Yeah, look, I am a big believer that you are already raising capital today. You have to be right. It doesn't matter if you have deals or not. If you don't have the investors to pitch them to, then you're not really gonna be able to go anywhere. And so what I say is, you're raising capital today. You're already working on your investors and who you need to be coming in these deals with you. So what that means is reaching out to your network now starting that process, letting people know what you are going after, what you're looking for, so that when the time comes and you have a deal to pitch, you actually have people to pitch it to. There's this train of thought in real estate investing in general, that, Oh, if you find the deal, the money will come. No, it won't. It's not just going to fall out of the sky just because you find a deal. And you also want to make sure that you've built a relationship with all of these people prior to actually getting under a time crunch like you will be in your due diligence period and trying to raise this capital. So give yourself as much room as possible to go through and start that capital raise. So the I would say, go through your phone today, find 100 people that you think could invest 10,000 25,000 or more, and start texting them, start calling them, let them know what you're doing, ask them what they would like to see in terms of an investment, and take it from there. Let's see. Mr. Syndication says, Would you advise joining a good program to teach commercial real estate, even if it costs 10s of 1000s of dollars? I mean, yes, obviously I'm biased. Our mastermind is definitely in the five figure range. I wouldn't say it's 10s of 1000s of dollars, but some of these programs get crazy expensive. They're 2030, 40,000 plus. And as long as you know that what they're going to teach you is something that you can implement, then, yeah, I mean, even if you spend $100,000 honest, like, I wouldn't go out and spend $100,000 but even if you had to go if you had to go out and spend $100,000 learning how to do this. I mean, I've had students, or members of our mastermind go out and make six figures on their first deal. I mean, we've had a student land seven figures of equity on his first deal. I mean, imagine that he'd never done commercial real estate before, had never raised capital, had never gotten a commercial loan, goes through, does this deal, and he and his investors, day one, walk into a million dollars of equity. I think they would have gladly paid $100,000 for it. So I would say, Mr. Syndication finds somebody that you resonate with. I mean, if you want to check out the Siri accelerator, we're not going to be in that 30 to $40,000 range. By any means, we're much more affordable than that. You know, what I would say is, is you get out of it, what you put into it. You know, if you pay $100,000 and you never show up, then yeah, obviously that's not a great investment. If you pay $500 and you show up to every single call and you actually implement it, then yeah, 100% that's worth the investment. So the investment. So I think it just comes down to what, what are you actually going to to implement, and who's going to be the best teacher for you? See, he's saying, I'm going to start learning and watching you for advice on how to run a great channel. Well, great. I appreciate it. Glad you're enjoying the channel. It's it's been a lot of fun doing this for the last five years. Gee, what's going on? Man? He's saying, Good morning. Good morning. Tyler, congrats on the CRE app. What would be your advice to a solo commercial broker with access to costar for prospecting and creating business? It's a great question. So first of all, just double check everything on costar. I have found so much incorrect data and platforms like that, which is why I don't pay them. So I mean, we, I haven't had co stars since 2020 to be honest with you, that being said, when you're first getting started, just being able to go through and at least have an idea of how to start looking for things can be great. I prefer white pages. Actually, that's what I use. I'll go into the especially G, since you're here in Nashville, you know, I go into the white pages, I look at the Metro maps here in Nashville, and I just pull the tax records. You could also do this like any, any market that you're in will have a tax office, right? Tax records office, so typically it's under the tax assessor. But, you know, some municipalities call it something different. So you could call them, if they don't have a good online platform, and ask them to send you a list of, you know, certain, you know, types of properties or whatever you can kind of get as specific as you want. I want to look at all industrial buildings and 370, 206, zip code, whatever, right? And so from there, I mean, white pages, I pay the annual subscription for it. It's really, really cheap, and it actually works, like I get really, really good information on that. And so that's how I get a hold of people for prospecting. I think white pages might be 100 or 200 bucks a year. So you compare that to, you know, 100 200 plus bucks a month for co star, probably worth it, in my opinion. Yeah. But that being said, Just go through, pick whatever asset class you like the most man and start hammering the phones. He's saying. Everyone says to cold call. Can you specify where, what, how your insight is appreciated? Yeah. I mean, I think cold calling is great, especially when you're first getting started. You know, one thing that we emphasize in the brokers mastermind is like cold call as much as you can when you're first getting started, and then as quickly as you can make sure that you're starting to build a personal brand, create an online presence and put out what I like to call the fishing lines, right? Cold calling is hunting. You are going out one shot at a time, trying to make it happen. Whereas, you know, if you've got LinkedIn, a great LinkedIn profile, you've got a podcast, you've got a YouTube channel, whatever, you've got all these fishing lines that are out there. So even if you don't catch anything on the hunt that day, hopefully you've got something on the line when you come back. Right? That's kind of how I look at that. And so, yeah, I would say absolutely cold call, but make sure that you're throwing out some fishing lines as well. When I cold call man, I mean, I like to keep it really simple, you know. I mean, some people think that, oh, there's some sort of secret script that I could use. No, not at all, you know, hey, this is Tyler Cobble. I'm a commercial real estate investor in this neighborhood. I saw that you guys owned, you know, 123, Main Street. I actually own a building down the street from that. Wanted to see if you guys would be interested in maybe selling that one day. That's it. You know, typically, people that are, that are commercial real estate investors and owners want to hear what other people have to say, even if they're not necessarily in the market. Like, yeah, what would you offer? What? What else is going on? Oh, by the way, I just bought the building down the street from you for 400 grand. You know, now they've got a nugget. They've got a nugget, they've got a piece of information, something that you can share. If you're calling as a broker, right then you could say, hey, you know, I'm Tyler Cobble. I'm a commercial real estate broker in East Nashville. We specifically focus on properties in this area, and I saw that you just had a tenant move out of this property, and I wanted to see if I could come in and share all of the comps that we've set in this market with you to see if we might be a fit for helping you fill this vacancy. Super easy, right? You just try to add value as much as possible. Why should they continue to be on the phone with you? That's kind of what I think through whenever I'm doing them. Mr. Syndication is saying I use a special template spreadsheet for doing commercial real estate underwriting. I hate it. Seems like there is no consensus on tools to use in the CRA community. What do you like? Yeah, I mean, I've got my own spreadsheets, like, we've created our own spreadsheets that we use, you know, we've got a, like, a very advanced one that is specifically just for mastermind members. And then I have one on my website that, you know, we use for everything, right for like, underwriting deals on YouTube and stuff, and you can download that spreadsheet, you know, either on my website or through our deal analysis toolkit that I have out there. In my opinion, tools are only as good as you know how to use them, right? So find a spreadsheet that you like and just get really good at it. That's what I would say. Yeah, Troy saying 40 to 120k
Tyler Cauble 18:06
for a four year degree. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's absolutely true. I mean, hey, if you can get a four year degree for 40k That's pretty cheap. You must be including some some federal aid or something like that. But, yeah. I mean, when I was going to the University of Tennessee, when I pretended to go to college for a little bit. I mean, I want to say it was like 24,000 a year, including, like, room and board and all that kind of stuff. And I got to tell you, I don't think I was getting much better than a free public high school education for that much money. So to me, it wasn't worth it. Ted is saying good morning. I'm looking at a 10,000 square foot flexibility flex space building that's currently 65% occupied at $8.75 a foot triple net. The owner wants $850,000 the taxes and insurance for $15,000 what would you offer on the deal? You know what? Ted. This is a great one for the deal analysis toolkit, or the deal analysis like GPT I was just telling you guys about. Let's see what it thinks. So this is pretty cool. This is a program I've been working in called pickaxe, and we have trained this chatbot on how to analyze deals like me. So we've trained it on, I want to say, like 50 coaching calls, almost from the mastermind, where I have been giving people advice. So let's, let's run this through. I'm looking at buying a 10,000 square foot, flex space building that is currently 65% occupied at 875 per square foot triple net. The owner wants 800 feet. 50k taxes and insurance are $15,000 which doesn't really matter, because it's a triple net deal annually. What? What should I offer on this building. Now, keep in mind, we got to give it a lot more information on this, because we don't know where it is. We don't know what market rate rents are. So I might have to make a couple of things up Ted just to see what this says. But I would have to know some of the same things that you know this. This GPT is probably going to ask us, like, where is it? What are market rate rents? What is driving demand in the area? What does the building look like? You know, are there any physical upgrades that you can make to it? $850,000 sounds pretty cheap, right? I mean, that's $85 a square foot. You should be able to rent it out for $8.75 a foot, triple net for the entire thing, and really make it work. But that being said, there's, there's a lot that I just don't know about, about the property, all right. Well, let's see this thing's gonna work or not. Maybe it won't. Maybe we broke it. I Let's see All right. Well, while that's loading, Kelly's saying, Hey, Tyler, it's been a while since I've caught a live session. Good to see you. Thank you, Kelly. Appreciate you. Jumping in. We're having fun with these. I enjoy them. I wish I had more time to do these. Now, Ted is saying, when raising capital, are you looking to buy the property outright or just the outright, or just the down payment? Ted just the down payment, like, unless it, unless you underwrite it, it really makes sense for you to go through and pay 100% equity. Typically, your returns are going to be horrific compared to what it could be, even if you just brought, like, 50% down or 50% debt. So that's one thing that I would keep in mind. I don't know this is gonna work. Let's see. Try this again. It's
Tyler Cauble 22:18
weird to have it running on this computer. So I wonder if it's something to do with a Mac. It's not wanting to load on the computer. All right, let's see. Junior is saying, what are the different design options of a commercial ground lease, where the tenant will carry refurb and ti costs of a commercially zoned building that is in bad condition? What are the different design options of a commercial ground lease? I mean, Junior, you would just rent them on an annual basis, on the land, right? And then, basically, however they decide to structure it on their behalf, as to, like, what all they can do with the property. I guess this isn't gonna load. I don't know what that is. That's too bad, all right. Well, I'll work on it. I'll bring you guys back some more information on it. But, I mean, look, it's really just gonna come down to what their permissions are gonna be in order to lease the ground, and then what can they build on it? Right? You're probably gonna wanna have some sort of sign off on like, what they can actually do. But in terms of design options, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, other than maybe that is that what you mean, just like the structure of how that could come together, trading for science is saying looking to build spec homes here in Houston, Texas, any courses on construction? So trading, we don't do any residential. I have built some residential in the past, but everything that we talk about now is all commercial real estate. We will offer classes as part of this education launch that we're doing in January on what investors and developers and brokers need to know for commercial construction, but nothing specifically on like, Hey, if you actually want to start building yourself and become a GC, here's how to go through this. So yeah, sorry about that, but that's if you're looking to do that honestly, like if you want to just start building homes, the best thing that you could do, in my opinion, is to hire a general contractor for the first few, make sure that they fully understand, you know what you're going for, and that you want to learn from them, and then have them teach you, kind of, as you're going through that process, that'll make it so that you can really, you know, see how a professional does it get really good at like, I would, I Would I would do that for the first few like, even if, no matter what it is, if you're looking at doing your own leasing, or if you're looking at doing your own commercial property management or construction, hire a professional see how they actually do it. Get as involved as you possibly can to make sure it's something that you actually want to do. Because, like, once you pull the trigger on it, you're kind of stuck. Uh. Having a having to do all that work. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes it's a pretty bad thing, you know? So that's what I would do, is to just make sure that you follow a professional and get it done kind of before that. So anyways, guys, appreciate you all for joining me for this month's office hours. We go live the second Tuesday of every month. If you are enjoying these leave me some comments on YouTube. Ask me some questions. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Leave a review if you're listening to the podcast, and we'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.