How Do You Handle Vacant Big Box Suites? | Office Hours
After taking the summer to recharge, Office Hours is back—and we’re diving straight into one of the biggest opportunities in commercial real estate: vacant big box suites.
If you’ve ever driven past a shuttered anchor tenant and wondered what’s next for that space, this episode breaks it down. Tyler walks through the anatomy of a 30,000-square-foot former Big Lots—what to look for, how to evaluate build-out costs, and the smartest ways to reimagine these oversized vacancies.
We also share updates from inside the CRE Accelerator, including our new 30 Deals in 30 Days Challenge (yes, you can join for free), plus a sneak peek at a first-of-its-kind trade school for commercial real estate investors, brokers, and developers launching next spring.
Whether you’re brokering leases, underwriting deals, or dreaming up your next value-add play, this week’s insights will help you think bigger—literally.
Join our underwriting challenge to get all the tools, resources, and coaching on underwriting your deals: 30 Deals, 30 Days starting on October 22nd, 2025 - https://crecentral.com/30deals30days
Key Takeaways:
Commercial Real Estate Insights:
Big box retail spaces offer value-add opportunities
Most successful retail chains lease, not buy, their real estate
Demising large spaces requires careful analysis of walls, plumbing, HVAC, and layout
Investment Trends:
Current market is unpredictable
Leasing rates vary significantly
Some investors are aggressive, others are waiting on sidelines
Upcoming Opportunities:
30 Deals, 30 Days challenge (free commercial real estate education)
New educational platform for developers/investors launching soon
Mastermind event on raising capital in October
Practical Advice:
Don't get stuck on complex software
Focus on user-friendly tools that you'll actually use
When starting a business, lease first before buying real estate
Hold brokers accountable with weekly activity reports
Technology Tips:
Useful apps: Land Glide, ChatGPT, White Pages
AI can help quickly analyze real estate data
Always verify AI-generated information
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
I 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, and we're back. Baby office hours is back. I took the summer off. I had actually not planned on coming back and doing office hours weekly at the time. To give you guys a little bit of background, this past spring, I was live streaming two to three times a week. We were sending out a fully produced YouTube video every week, on top of teaching two to three mastermind classes a week, and I just got a little bit burnt out, and so we paired it back. I took the summer off. I'm now fully recharged, and we're getting back to it, baby. So we're going to be back every single week, every Tuesday, 8:30am Central Standard Time, if you have questions about commercial real estate, if you have a deal that you'd like me to take a look at, feel free to submit that office at the cobble group Comm, send the your offering memorandum, send your site plans, whatever we can dive into them on here. This is basically a taste of what you guys get when you join either the Siri accelerator mastermind for my investors or the brokers mastermind for the brokers. Of course, you can learn more about both of those series, central.com if you're interested in joining either one of them. If not, you can have me here every Tuesday, 8:30am Central Standard Time for roughly half an hour, typically. How these work, just so you know, we dive into some updates what I've been up to, because I'm not just somebody that sits here as a talking head on YouTube. I'm actually out there buying deals, making things happen, or at least trying to, sometimes not very successfully. But hey, you know, we do what we can, and then I come in here and share that with you guys. So catch you up on kind of what I've been up to, what we've got going on. We'll talk about a post on Reddit that I really enjoyed, that I think that you guys are going to really like, because it has to do with big boxes. What happens when you get a vacant big box in a shopping center? What should you be looking for? This is something that we're actively dealing with, because we have a listing about 10 minutes up the road from my office, on a property that we manage and we lease for roughly, you know, 30,000 square feet. So this is actually 30,000 square feet. It's very, very similar, and it's something that you all will be coming across, right? There's a lot of value add opportunity in these shopping centers that have a big box vacant suite. So we're going to talk about that today. And then, of course, we're going to be getting to your questions, whatever questions you have around deals that you're working on, getting into commercial real estate, getting started as a broker, whatever that is, we can dive into it. Be sure to drop those questions in the live chat. I always get around to them. We also have a poll going today, so feel free to jump in and answer the poll. If you had a million dollars, this is the question of the day, right? Same as the poll, if you had a million dollars to invest, right now, what would you buy? Answer it in the poll, we're talking about industrial under which I'm including flex space, which obviously is industrial anyway, but we're also including self storage, right? Some people may or may not consider that I only have four slots, right? So I had to put it somewhere office, retail or multifamily. I'm always surprised at how many people still today are interested in buying multifamily. I mean, I get it, you know, I'm hopeful I'll buy a lottery ticket every now and then once, you know, the Powerball hits a billion dollars. And you know, I'm pretty hopeful that that's gonna work out for me. It never does. And you know, that's kind of like investing in multifamily today, probably not gonna work out very well for you. All right, what have I been up to? Oh, gosh. So Tuesdays are back. Oh, big announcement. This is gonna be a lot of fun. You guys ask me all the time about underwriting commercial real estate. How can I get better at underwriting commercial real estate? How do I make sure that I'm analyzing deals the right way? How do I find operating expense comps? How do I find lease comps? Well, I've got the challenge for you coming up, starting Wednesday, October 22 we are going to be launching a 30 day challenge called 30 deals, 30 days, where I'm going to be going live on YouTube every single day for 30 days, finding a random deal and underwriting it live. So you guys will get to follow along. You'll get to join me for that go through the process, ask questions. Questions. If you join the challenge, we have all this free stuff that you get inside of our app. So you get access to my course for 30 days for free. So that's definitely worth it. There's like 120 lessons in there, by the way, it's $1,000 if you wanted to just go buy it. So join the challenge if you just want to get access to the course, I'm going to be going live inside of that challenge once a week, answering your questions about underwriting, your deals. You get access to all of our underwriting spreadsheets, checklists. I mean, literally everything, right? The course is in there. So it's all of our downloads. It's a whole bunch of stuff. You get access to my AI tools, which I might show you. If I have time today, we'll do it today. If not, I'll do it next week. But we've created a bunch of AI tools that only members of the mastermind get access to. So you will have access to that as part of the 30 days, 30 deals challenge, or 30 deals, 30 days. It's the same thing either way. But those tools, we've got an underwriting coach in AI, you can literally go through and give it all of this information. It's going to ask you some more questions. You're going to answer them. It's going to ask you even more questions based off of that. And it will help you actually underwrite a deal and think through it in a more three dimensional way, instead of like two dimensional, which is what I consider a spreadsheet to be, right? It's it's not very dynamic. This actually helps you think critically about every single aspect that you're putting into this deal, which I think is very, very fascinating. It's very, very cool. So if you Oh, and also, as part of joining the challenge, you will be able to comment inside, because we'll have a chat as part of all of this your city, and what you want me to be looking for in that city and your area might be chosen, so I might go and find a deal that you could actually go out and then buy based off of what we find and what we underwrite. So it's going to be a lot of fun. The entire intent is over 30 days, we're going to see such a wide variety of different problems that we have to figure out different types of deals, different geographies, different size cities, right? Whatever that is, so that you feel incredibly comfortable going through and underwriting deals on your own. So if you want join the challenge, I will put a link in the description. It's cre central.com/thirty, deals, 30 days. That's all one word. It's three zero deals, three zero days, right? Like I said, I will leave that in the description below. It's free to join. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's the first challenge we've ever done, and I'm excited to see how it turns out. Kvg is saying, I made it. What's up? KBG, thanks for making it. Glad you're here. Rich is saying, This sounds awesome, absolutely, man, I'm glad you think so. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. We've never done anything like this, and I'm pretty excited to be diving into it. So we've got that going on this spring. We are launching a first of its kind, educational platform for developers, investors and brokers. My entire intent is to get this accredited in the next couple of years as a trade school for commercial real estate. There's nothing like this out there right now, and it's one thing that I wish I had had when I was first getting started, the opportunity to go through and take college style classes on different aspects of commercial real estate. So you'll be able to go in and do one class at a time, right? Just like you could any online course, or you could say, hey, I'm interested in the investor track, and we will give you a whole plan of all of the classes that you need to take, from investment to tax and wealth strategy, how to make sure you're not paying too much in taxes. We'll talk about construction, how, like everything that you need to know about construction from a developer, investment or brokerage standpoint, right? So it's a very, very well rounded when I tell you that there will be hundreds of classes in here, I'm not even remotely exaggerating. We're building it kind of true to like a college style course, right? So there's a level 100 and on the investment side, it's 101 through 108 each of those 100 level courses has eight classes, right? So just the 100 level investment class is 64 classes. So we'll have it through level 300 400 is going to be the mastermind, or we may come up with a 400 level at some point, but it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. So stay tuned for that. We will be releasing more about that as we can. We are working on it behind the scenes. I've got some amazing experts in each of their respective fields that are helping me put this together. So because I am not the only one that is going to be doing this, we have been unbelievably busy the past 30 days. I've got
Tyler Cauble 9:55
our biggest mastermind event in person. How. Opening at the end of this month, 24th and 25th here in Nashville. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Including my team. We're gonna have 72 people here in town. It's all about raising capital, which is just what the majority of members had requested inside the group. So I've got panels from people that have successfully raised capital talking about what it was like going through their first race. We've got guest speakers coming in, talking about what limited partners want to see from somebody that's raising capital for these commercial real estate deals. We're going to be touring a bunch of my properties. I'm throwing a party for our mastermind on Friday night, and then we're having a day full of classes on Saturday. It's going to be really, really cool. I'm looking forward to it. Logan's going to be in town. He's going to be helping me teach it again. He's my partner in the brokers mastermind. So it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of planning that goes into those I can't wait to have my own event space so that we can just have it there, and I don't have to coordinate with all these different places, but it'll be good. G is saying, Good morning, Tyler, first of all, congrats. Looking forward to the 30 day challenge. What is the link? Let me confirm, and I will drop it in the live chat with you guys. But it is series central.com/thirty deals, 30 days, and I'm gonna drop this. And there and there it is all one word, so no hyphens or anything like that. So three zero deals, three zero days. So it's fun, and there's just a big red button that says, reserve your spot now. So yeah, go sign up for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have all sorts of discussions going on inside the portal. Because, you know, we launched our own app about a month ago, and it's been awesome actually having that inside the mastermind for everybody. What else this week's mastermind call was a lot of fun. We dove into a deal that I am, that I bought here in East Nashville earlier this spring. It's actually the first deal that I have ever bought by myself. Most of you guys know that I've been buying commercial real estate since 2019 we've acquired over $75 million worth of real estate. At this point. I have partners and raised capital, so I've syndicated all of it, right, like I didn't just go out and make $20 million to put into $75 million the real estate, right? I leveraged other people's money, right? Which is a phenomenal way to do it. But at a certain point you get, you start to think, you know, hey, I would love to just start owning things by myself, where I don't have to send out a report every quarter, or where I don't have to wonder, you know, if this is better, like, which direction is going to be better for my investors instead, right? I get to just kind of make decisions for me. And so that's pretty nice. So we bought a building here in East Nashville earlier this year that we just got our schematic designs pulled together on for a YouTube studio and event space, which is really, really exciting. It's about 4000 square feet, and we'll be able to hold, I think, up to 120 people inside the event space. So one thing that I have found is that this side of town, it's very difficult to find space to put together conferences. So this is one thing that I think is very interesting. If you are thinking through what kind of tenants or what kind of space you would like to have in your commercial buildings, go through the process of what it would be like searching for spaces like that in your neighborhood. I mean, I there is almost no good conference space, any snashville for 30 to 40 plus people that has AV that is easily accessible and easy to find when I go in there and I look for it, almost nothing comes up. The things that come up are largely better suited for music videos or smaller conferences. They charge crazy prices too, by the way. And so as I was going through it, I was like, You know what? Maybe I should open up this space for some third party events, because if I can't find it, I know other people are having that problem too, and they're probably just skipping over East Nashville altogether and not making that a thing for them. So now I've got a new business idea. I wasn't originally planning on monetizing this building in any other way, other than just owner, occupying it for myself. And I'm looking at it going, Well, I'm not going to be using the event space every single day. We could put it on pure space, which, if you are not familiar with peer space, you should go check it out. Or a, they A, V, V, A, y. I think both of those are really good for, like, renting your space by the hour for photo shoots, video shoots, conferences, meetings, whatever. And you know, it's a great way to just monetize some space. So go check that out. I think that that'd be pretty interesting. So we're pretty excited about that. Let's see. Rich is saying, is it true that leasing is slower in the summer versus spring and fall? My lease up rate has been super slow, and I have a brokerage leasing and managing the property. You know, rich, it completely depends. It's a good question. It depends on where you are. It depends on the type of market that we're having. I'll tell you this year specifically, is a very weird year. I think that the economy is in a very odd place. I think that a lot of business owners like we have some business owners that are very aggressively expanding, and we have some that are like, total crickets. We've got some investors that are very aggressive on buying more real estate, and we have some that are just waiting on the sidelines to see what happens. So, you know, it's weird. I used to, like, back in 29 it's like a post covid thing. Honestly, back in 2019 I could tell you, like, almost to plus or minus one week, how quickly we could get a space leased, just because it was so consistent. Like, if we did X, Y and Z for the marketing, we could take it out and we'd have, you know, this amount of interest, and it would get done now, I don't know. We'll list a space and it'll fly off the shelf and we'll all be surprised by it. We'll list another space that we think is going to fly off the shelf and it's still sitting there six months later. We don't know. It's not a pricing thing, because, you know, we typically don't take anything on that's that's too highly priced. It's not a space issue, because, you know, we price either the rent or the TI accordingly to the space. You know, we're very conscientious about that. I've got better things to do, and so does my team, than to just sit around with like, messed up spaces they just aren't a lease. And so it's just a very odd market. I don't really know what to say about it. So you know, here's here's the thing, though, rich a lot of investors are not properly holding their brokers accountable for what their weekly activity is. So if your broker is not presenting you with a weekly or at least every other week traffic report showing you, here's how much our inbound traffic was, here's what our outbound traffic was, here's the activities that were driving that outbound traffic, right? Like I'm making cold calls, I'm posting it on social media, I sent out an email newsletter. If they can't share with you all of the activities that they're doing to drive traffic. They're probably not doing anything right. And so that could also be the issue. There's a lot of lazy commercial real estate brokers out there. You know, as a commercial real estate broker, I'm allowed to say that, all right, rich. He's also saying, How do you feel about food truck parks on vacant land and high density areas? 100% I mean, look, I wouldn't say, like, Let's go buy very expensive land in high density areas just to put up a food truck Park. I don't think that you're going to make money doing that. However, if you're looking for something to get you by, to make some money, maybe cover some carrying costs, maybe to just get the community on your side, do something cool for everybody, right? Then, yeah, 100% but I mean, it's kind of tough to justify going out and paying the high dollars per square foot, or whatever that you're gonna have to pay for vacant lots in high density areas and then make enough money from a food truck. Typically, those food trucks aren't willing to pay you too much, just depending on kind of how it's set up. So I think they're crazy. They're cool though. I mean, I really like food truck parks. They're relatively inexpensive. You know, we're looking at, you know, finding some sort of ways to do that at peerless mill. You know, I've got a building that has a roof that has fallen in at the mill, and we're talking to a structural engineer about getting the building stabilized and secure, but just leaving, like not putting a roof back on it, leaving the steel skeleton that is, that is holding the building together, kind of exposed, and then turning it into, like a beer garden, you know, removing all the windows, leaving the openings, so that it just becomes this kind of like, you know, shell of what used To be, but how cool of a beer garden would that be? You know, like you're hanging out in this old 1930s 1920s brick building, where you can kind of see the bones of it, but it's outside, so we can throw up some string lights, you know, put a couple of fans up, and it's a nice little area to hang out. So I think doing cool little things like that really gets people's attention and makes your life substantially easier. All right, let's dive in on this.
Tyler Cauble 19:31
This space here, this Reddit thread so it's titled, What an owner actually looks for in a vacant 30,000 square foot anchor, a detailed walkthrough of a former Big Lots. This guy had a big lots go dark at one of their centers. There's a lot of big companies today going dark, which I think is interesting. You know, even even Starbucks is closing a lot of stores, Walgreens is closing a lot of stores now, Walgreens is probably a different situation than Starbucks, in my opinion. Union, right? I mean, Walgreens is now fighting with with online, but Starbucks, you know, hey, they kind of have an aggressive expansion program. They'll go out, they will open up a bunch of stores, figure out which ones do well, and then they'll close the ones that don't, right. So, you know, when you're when you're like, negotiating a Starbucks lease, they typically have a two or three year kick out, which means, like, hey, two years into it, three years into it. If we don't like where our numbers are, we get to walk away from this lease, which is kind of wild, and it's one of the reasons I don't do a Starbucks with one of those kickouts in it. If there are some that you'll see that don't necessarily have that. But if, if you're buying a Starbucks, make sure that you're looking for that kick out clause, because that could totally change what you're buying anyway, he's saying this Big Lots wasn't just a big rectangle. Was actually three separate spaces, 16,000 feet, 7300 feet and 6900, feet that they had combined over the decades with some 10 foot openings. So it looks like they didn't actually fully tear out the demising walls. They just over time, kind of did some big cased openings. Let's see here. All right, so here's the non negotiables that they look for, demising walls. Are they actual firewalls? Do they go to the ceiling grid, or do they go through to the roof deck? So if you're not familiar with what that means, typically in these retail centers, they'll have a drop ceiling, right? That drop ceiling can be two feet below the actual roof deck, which is like the the true ceiling, or it could be 10 feet below that, or 20 feet, I don't know. I mean, just depending on how tall it is, these, these drop ceilings can be pretty far away from that. So you want to make sure that the walls don't just go slightly above the ceiling grid, right? Because if they do that's it's Well, obviously it's good because it's not a load bearing wall, but it's also not a fire rated wall, which means you may not be able to put other tenants in next door. You'd have to actually put in a fire rated wall all the way to the deck. They do that just for fire and life safety, so that it's difficult for fire to transfer between spaces. Right? In this case, the original walls went between the three spaces. They were concrete blocks CMU all the way to the deck. That is a massive win. Gosh. That's so expensive to do nowadays. It means that if they closed those openings, all you have to all would be is a simple framing job. So, you know, CMU already has a fire rating. It's very difficult for fire to transfer through concrete block ceiling height to the deck. A lot of tenants have specific height needs. They measure from the floor to the bottom of the roof deck. So not the ceiling grid all the way to the roof. Right? They had 14 foot clear. That's pretty good. I mean, that's not great. That immediately rules out like trampoline parks or concepts that need 17 to 20 feet next time you go into a big box store, whether it's a Barnes and Noble, a target a Walmart, take a look up and just get a feel for how tall those spaces are, what you'll start to realize is that a lot of these, a lot of these big box stores Best Buy, right? They're actually giant warehouses that just make you think that they're nicer than they really are, right? So the nice thing about having those 17 to 20 foot ceilings, as opposed to 14 in some of these areas. When you get into a class B or class C shopping center, you will actually have the ability to transition over to an industrial use, depending on the zoning. If you have those taller ceilings, tenants like it, it can become flex space, right? So something keep in mind, keep in mind space depth. The box is fairly shallow, which is great feature. You don't want to be too deep relative to the width. He calls them. What does he call bowling alleys? I think that's, that's pretty funny. I like that. I call them shotgun suites, right? You know, it's, it's 15 feet wide and it's 100 feet deep. I mean, you're like, you know, you've got a hallway going down the side, and everything is to the right. You know what? I mean, it's just some of those spaces can get really, really crazy, and it's just because they've been demised in an interesting way for years. So make sure that this space isn't too skinny and too deep, because it's just not going to be conducive for most uses, if not honestly, pretty much all plumbing in bathrooms, chasing plumbing across the slab is incredibly expensive. They checked each of those three spaces. The two larger ones already had bathrooms. The smaller one didn't. They quickly found out at. Used to have them, meaning that the plumbing was capped at the slab. That could be a huge cost savings if they do not have to go and trench through all of the concrete. So when you're demising spaces, the demising walls are not the only expense that you need to keep in mind. Think about everything that you're going to have to have when you're going through that process. So if a new tenant is coming in, they need a bathroom, right? They need their own emergency exit. They may need their own loading dock or roll up doors in the rear to be able to get product in. So does the space lay out well enough to be easily demised into smaller spaces, or are you going to have to spend the money to make that happen? Even HVAC units, do you have, you know, three giant HVAC units that are not going to be very easily split up, or are you going to have to add some more? How is that going to work, right? Storefront? Does the storefront still work for demising into three spaces? Can you just remove a panel and add another door? Or do you have to completely redo that storefront? Think through those things before you start really exploring demising these big box spaces. Because, look, I mean the amount of 30,000 square foot tenants that are out there today, very, very low. There's not a whole lot of people that are really looking for 30,000 square feet of space. So chances are good you're going to have to demise these spaces. So always good to be thinking through, okay, what are all of the waterfall issues that could come from just splitting this space in half? Okay, there you go. They're talking about rear access and loading. You've got to have that. And then, of course, I watch go on HVAC. Okay, I didn't read ahead, but that is everything that you should be keeping in mind when you're going through and splitting up these spaces. So next time you're inside one of those spaces, just look at it. Will it very easily demise. I like to think through some of these scenarios. Whenever I'm just doing my shopping right, whenever I'm going to our shopping centers, I like to just envision what a space could be if it wasn't what it is, right? So for example, we've got about 30,000 square feet of space that's vacant. And one of our spaces, like I mentioned earlier, and you know, it could very easily be demised in two, but not three, unfortunately. And so that just makes it very tough for us to go and get that released. Are there things that we could do Sure? I mean, it could actually make a pretty cool indoor self storage facility, but depends on what the owner wants. So there you have it, for diving into big boxes and seeing what's going on there. We've got a couple of questions coming in. Kvg is saying, if I was trying to start a chain retail business in multiple areas, would it be best to lease or buy commercial I'm coming from stock market investing, so I automatically pair this idea with invest, which I understand can be wrong. Kvg, that's a great question. Most of these big like most of the successful big box groups, do not own their own real estate because they're they are able to get a better return on their money from selling their product than they are from buying real estate. It also ties up a significant amount of your capital to buy a location than it does to lease it, right? Because, let's assume you're going to go buy a big box store, you know, maybe it rents for 15,000 a month. Or you can buy it for 2 million, right? If you're buying it for 2 million, you're having to put $400,000
Tyler Cauble 28:26
down at least, right? Then you're probably going to have to build it out on top of that. So it's going to cost you a lot of money, whereas, if you just lease it, you know, Hey, it's $15,000 a month, you know, plus, you know, maybe 100,000 $200,000 to build it out. So your upfront cost is going to be substantially less. Obviously, those are numbers I've just made up, but it's going to be substantially less for you to go through that process on on just leasing, especially when you're testing something out. The last thing that you want to do is go and start a business that you aren't sure if it's going to work or not right. And you're buying real estate, it's a lot more capital that you're gonna have to raise on the front end, which means you're gonna have to give it more of your company, or just take on a substantial amount of debt and put the company at risk. So what I say, especially for the first like five years of a business, just go out and lease. You don't know what you need, yet, your company might expand rapidly. You might say, Hey, I thought I needed 30,000 feet. We actually only need 15,000 feet. You might start off with 15,000 feet and realize, oh, I need 30,000 feet, right? And so if you start buying real estate, yes, it's a good investment in the long run, but it could actually end up being a hindrance to your business. So that's why I say, like, especially when you're starting out, keep them separate. Maybe you could go and raise a separate fund to buy the real estate for the business and treat the business as a captive tenant, right? Hey, you know real estate investors, if we go and buy this building, my business over here, which has these great financials, can afford to lease the space from us, right? So you can, you can kind of treat it that way. Jason Sneed. Saying, Hey, Tyler, I know you've stated before you haven't used an MLS type platform for a while, crexia, loop, net, etc. If you had to pick your top three softwares for commercial real estate, what would they be? Ooh, that's tricky. I mean, I do like crexie. We I use crexia a pretty fair amount. Man, if I had to pick three top softwares, chat, GBT. I mean, that's probably cheating, but maybe whatever your favorite AI is, I think that AI is incredible when it comes to quickly sifting through a lot of the data that we pulled together as real estate investors, as real estate brokers, you know, it's, it's, it's not the end all be all by any means. Like, look, AI is kind of dumb sometimes, because it's just a computer program, right? So at the end of the day, you know, it's, it's only going to be as good as the information that you're giving it. And if you give it one wrong piece of information, it's going to give you wrong outputs. So just be conscientious when you're using that. I think, I think it's great. I'm trying to think of what else I mean, honestly, like Google Drive, I don't know we really like, we're not super tech savvy, maybe white pages.com. I use white pages all the time to find ownership. I think it's great. I'm not sponsored by white pages at all, but we that is the, in my opinion, the best piece of software to find somebody's contact information, at least from what I found, like for what I need. Specifically, I'm not a broker that's making 1000 cold calls a day, but, you know, that's my opinion on it. Man, I'm trying to think through like, we don't use a lot of of software on the on the brokerage or the investment side, like we use Excel for our underwriting. I use gin spark AI to put together our slide decks, like our pitch decks and stuff outside of that man. Now that question's got me feeling like maybe I'm living in the stone age. I don't think that it needs to be overly complicated. I think that what you find, when you find something that works, it works, and for me, like I really just haven't had to change up what we're doing, because it's working really, really well. I think that, yeah, I don't know. Sorry, man. I feel like that's not really a good answer, but I think that that also hopefully makes you realize, like, Hey, you don't need to be super, super stuck on on tech he's saying. Have you ever used land glide, reonomy, or specific CRM, so I love land glide. Yeah, I've got that on my phone. I use land glide all the time. So I don't know why I didn't think of that, but that's probably hands down the number one app that everybody in commercial real estate should have, aside from my cre Central app, of course, come on, guys, no. Land Glide is awesome. It taps into your local tax records, and it pulls up the ownership of every property around you. So it's super easy to go in and see who owns everything. It's really, really cool. It'll show you all the property lines, everything so and I think it might be 10 bucks a month or something like that, like when land Glide is awesome. Kvg is saying thank you for the information. Absolutely happy to do it. Also is this recorded. I want to distill this 500 times I'm a college student. Is how I learn absolutely. Man, yeah, all of this stays on the channel. The title might change just because I have it set as office hours when I go live, so everybody knows what to jump in on, but I do change the titles afterwards just based on the topics that we dive into. So Jason said it's an honest answer. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, absolutely. Man. I think so many people get caught up in what software is to use, and it causes another form of analysis paralysis. Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. I mean, we've used HubSpot for the longest time for our CRM, we just switched to go high level. Go high level is 1/100 of the cost of HubSpot. I mean, it's kind of insane, how much cheaper it is, and we're getting better email open rates on our newsletters. So, you know, to me, I don't know that it necessarily matters. Just find something that works, that you actually use. I think that's the biggest thing is, like, is it user friendly enough to where you're going to actually want to use it every single day? Oscar is saying, we need to reconnect. I'm ready to develop in Cleveland. Absolutely, Oscar. I'm here. I love the Grouch picture. You got there. He's got Oscar the Grouch in his profile. If you can't, if you're listening on the podcast. But anyway, I'm here to help whenever you need me. Guys, thank you for joining us back here for office hours. I'm excited to be back with you guys. We will be doing this every Tuesday at 8:30am Central Standard Time. So if you have questions about. Commercial Real Estate. If you want to have a discussion with me about something that you're working on, jump in. Jump in and ask those questions. Also feel free to shoot over documents, you know, if you want me to review a survey with you, or dive into a construction budget or whatever, if I have time on these live streams, we'll do it. Send those emails to office at the cobble group Comm, and we'll be sure to pull them up on these live streams. If you are listening on the podcast, please rate and review. If you are watching this on Youtube, LIKE and SUBSCRIBE And leave me some comments. Let me know what you guys would like to see or hear more of in the future. I would love to make sure that we're delivering that for you. So other than that, guys, cheers. I'll see you next week. This
Tyler Cauble 35:47
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