How to Build Wealth Without Leaving Your Neighborhood
In this episode, Tyler interviews Nathan Weinberg, a Nashville-based real estate developer who got his start during the 2008–2009 recession - broke, unknown, and armed only with hustle and conviction. While others fled the industry, Nathan leaned in, picking up the phone faster than seasoned agents and betting on East Nashville before anyone else saw the opportunity.
Nathan shares how his background in hospitality shaped his people-first development approach, why he focused on one neighborhood for over 15 years, and how being rigorously authentic became his greatest asset.He dives deep into the challenges of small-scale mixed-use projects, the importance of community input, and the overlooked power of thinking through your exit strategy before you build.
This episode is about grit, vision, and building generational wealth without chasing skylines - by planting roots and serving the place you live.
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:
Embrace an Entrepreneurial Mindset:
Viewing downturns as opportunities and having determination are crucial for breaking into a new field like real estate.
Apply Past Experience:
Skills from other industries, such as hospitality, can be valuable—especially when focusing on meeting client needs and delivering exceptional personalized experiences.
Focus Local for Impact:
Building wealth and lasting business success can be achieved by investing in and serving a specific neighborhood, building deep roots, and understanding the unique opportunities and needs of that area.
Listen to the Community:
Community input is essential for successful development—projects thrive when local concerns and feedback shape the design and intent.
Balance Financials with Neighborhood Needs:
The best developments serve both investors (by being financially viable) and residents (by fulfilling real, evolving community needs).
Learn from Mistakes:
Being willing to admit when you’re wrong and adapt quickly can make or break a project, especially in community-focused real estate.
Plan Your Exit Strategy Early:
When developing mixed-use or unique projects, it’s important to consider the needs of both large and small investors and to plan for how you’ll successfully exit or sell the project in the future.
Authenticity Over Appearance:
True, lasting success comes from being authentic in dealings and interactions—not by focusing on superficial indicators like driving a nice car.
Community Engagement Yields Stronger Brands:
Integrating business with community (e.g., combining a coffee shop and real estate brokerage) can build both business success and community goodwill.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
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
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.
Speaker 1 0:31
I had the exact right entrepreneurial mindset to not pay any attention to the fact that everybody else was getting out of real estate. And I saw it as an invitation. I saw it as an open desk this is back when you had desk phones. The intercom would turn on, and the intercom would be like any available agent. And I knew that I was faster than every one of those gray haired in that building, and I could grab that phone and do it. I was convinced that when I got started in real estate, no one would take me seriously in the Nissan Sentra that Jennifer and I shared in that first year in real estate, I learned that who cares what car I'm driving, who gives a if I am rigorously authentic in everything I do, I am more likely to be successful In everything that I do
Tyler Cauble 1:20
while most developers Chase Skylines. Nathan Weinberg planted deep roots in one neighborhood and never left. He moved to Nashville in 2008 got his license during the recession and started putting deals together in East Nashville, my own home neighborhood, before the rest of the city realized what was coming. Over the last 15 years, Nathan's quietly built a real estate business that includes development, brokerage, property management and even hospitality focused entirely on one thing, serving the neighborhood that he lives in. In this episode, we'll talk about how he built his portfolio by focusing small, the trade offs of staying local versus scaling big, and why he believes that relationships, not spreadsheets, are the foundation of any good real estate business. We also dive into how he navigates growth in a changing city, the risks that he took early on, and how he helps others use real estate as a tool for generational wealth, if you're trying to find your place in real estate or figure out how to build something that actually lasts. This one's for you. Let's get into it. Nathan, you moved to Nashville in the wake of the great recession with no network, no experience in real estate. What was going through your head at that time,
Speaker 1 2:40
gosh, I had to do something different. It was desperate to do something different. I had been in the hotel business for 15 ish years, basically since I could vote. I had been a hotelier and I was newly married in a place I didn't know anything. They didn't know anything about me, and it felt like the perfect fresh start. I was lucky. I had a really supportive partner in Jennifer, and she had a great job, and she didn't think I was super crazy yet, and so she said, go for it. And I knew, I knew that I would be successful. I knew that I could do it. What I didn't know is how long it would take, and I didn't know if I was going to have to do something else while I was doing it. And so I remember, like, six months in, thinking to myself, This is scary, and I'm gonna have to get a job being a bouncer at a bar downtown. And that worked because we lived right downtown. We were one of the first residents in downtown Nashville. We rented an apartment in the Benny Dillon, and on the weekends, none of the traffic lights worked downtown because wasn't a popular place yet. I thought I could walk down to lower Broadway and just be a bouncer at night, and then I could answer the phones in the morning. I could go and sit at a cubicle. And so I just, I was, I had blinders on. It was, it was easy to imagine just doing this, and nobody being in my way, and I knew I was the fastest kid at the gun, right? And I just went
Tyler Cauble 4:07
after it. What was it that initially sparked your interest in real estate? The
Speaker 1 4:11
things I loved about hospitality were working directly with someone who had a need and helping them, not just giving them something, but helping them achieve whatever their goal was. In hospitality, it seems simple that the goal is to have a comfortable space away from home that you can relax and use as a launch pad to go and explore. But it's not that simple, because nobody sleeps well when they're not at home, nobody has a fully baked plan, and if they say they do, they're lying, and everybody's experience changes the minute they step foot off of the airplane, because there's a bunch of unknowns. And so what I loved about hospitality was servicing a need of somebody who was delirious from traffic. Level, I knew that the top priority for that person, whether they knew it or not, was a good night's sleep. And I couldn't change out the mattresses or the bedding. I was lucky to be working at a place that had really exceptional stuff in that manner, but I couldn't change those things out. But what I could change was all of the barriers that they would have to go through before they could put their head down at night. How do you check in? What are the pain points as you're checking into a hotel or moving from an airport to a hotel? Or the pain points around thinking about where you're going to eat, lunch, dinner, breakfast, whatever, or thinking about what kind of tools or clothes am I going to need for the next day or the next adventure. Anticipating those needs and deploying them for a guest before they could even get to their bed was magical, and it created these magical moments for guests that I felt really confident I could translate into the real estate world. Because the goal is obvious in real estate, the goal is, we need a place to sleep, so it's not all that different from hospitality. The difference is you might be more thoughtful about where you're going to buy a house, and you might be more thoughtful about what all the amenities in that house are, and all of those things are easy. That's all written down, and nobody is a specialist in granite countertops or four bedrooms or anything like that. But what we are specialists in are helping people find fit and synergy in a neighborhood, because when they get to the house that they love, it might be the perfect home in exactly the wrong spot for them, or it might be exactly the right spot for them and exactly the wrong home. And so navigating through all those things and thinking about, okay, they're going to have a kid soon, and they're telling me they only need two bedrooms, but I know that it's not like one and done for them, and so maybe I should be looking in the same price point, but something a little larger so that they can grow into it. Or maybe I be need to be thinking about, okay, they want low maintenance because they travel a lot, maybe a condominium is what they really need, but don't know they need. And so we're going to look at those. And I've got great stories about showing people things that they express that they didn't want to see, but I knew that it was right for them, and I wouldn't have known that it was right for them had I not had that hospitality background that taught me to think outside the box and start anticipating some of those needs.
Tyler Cauble 7:30
How do you think that other people that maybe don't necessarily have that hospitality background? How can they bring something like that to the table when they're doing their real estate projects?
Speaker 1 7:39
Everybody's got something right? If you're a teacher, you can think in an empathetic way that other people can't. If you're a salesperson, you can be thinking about, what are the things that I can say that will resonate well with this person and make them start thinking about the space that we're in differently, right? So a teacher is going to be thinking about, okay, they're they don't feel good here, or I need to help them understand something differently. A salesman might be looking at a space and saying, Okay, if I describe this space in X way, because they're a software engineer, they're going to understand what I'm saying differently, and it's going to be something that resonates with them, and they're going to start attaching themselves to the spaces. So it doesn't really matter what background you have, if you're a special operator in the military, there's something that you bring to the table. If you're a cook, that's an easy one, right? Like, if you were a chef, you can come into a space and be like, Oh, look at this kitchen. I'd make the best Bolognese you've ever had in your life in here. And people start thinking about, Oh, what could I cook in this space, or grilling outside, or whatever it is. And so I think that it's exciting, and it's interesting to say that I was in the hotel world and that I drew a connection there. But I don't think that that's special. I think that everybody's background lends itself well to real estate if they think about it correctly. And you have to think about it from a sales perspective. The biggest failure that anybody can make in any job is failing to think about what the sales process looks like, even if you're not in the sales role, what does the sales process look like? Because if you don't have a fundamental understanding of how the thing is going to be transferred, then there's no job. It's the most important component of any role anywhere, and it's the one that people understand the least. The Psychology of sales is what matters the most. And you can approach the psychology of sales from whatever your background is, yeah. What is the customer experience? Look at yourself similar experience. What are the touch points? What are the things that don't just make you a one and done customer, but make you a long term customer? What are the things that people latch on to that are both constructive and de. Productive in the development of a deal moving forward, and how do we manage those emotions? I can't tell you how many Realtors I've mentored that I'm like, listen your client the way you're describing them right now. That's not the person you met in the Taco Bell parking lot. That's somebody who's making an emotional decision. You have to tap into that emotional decision and be there with them in a really unique way. You have to start steering the ship, because right now they're rudderless. That's a hard thing to teach somebody if they don't have any sales experience, but I do believe everybody can be taught that.
Tyler Cauble 10:32
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't long into your journey when you started Green Line development and you started MW real estate, and both of those companies were focusing on East Nashville. What was it about East Nashville that made you want to build there, not just sell homes. There
Speaker 1 10:46
it was, is the largest geographic block of residential housing in the entire city of Nashville in Davidson County. So if you look at a map and you look at housing blocks in particular, East Nashville was this untapped gem, and it when I I'm not an analyst, but I love data like that. And I studied study economics in college, and it was something that really lit up in my head. And so when I look at the math of it, I was looking at Green Hills. Because when I, when I just did the most basic thing ever, which is like, this looks like it's about two inches, and that looks like it's about two inches on the map. It's like, well, those two inches are worth $500 a foot on residential resale, but East Nashville's two inches are worth $150 a foot. But we've got a river, and we've got this giant green park, and we've got adjacency to downtown and access to mass transit and access to a freeway system and all these things. So what gives like? What's the real difference here? And I mean, the answer is obvious. There's some there's some big, obvious answers, right? The money had moved to green hills, and so they had had an opportunity to redevelop their spaces a lot faster than East Nashville did, but what I saw was a space that fundamentally had the upper hand on green hills, and as a result, the delta between value was such that there was only opportunity to grow there. It couldn't. 35 years ago, East Nashville was on every episode of cops. It was dangerous place. It was scary. And I didn't live here, so like someone else, can say that that was their experience, and they will. But what I saw was these really unique spaces. Some of them were historic. Some of them were blighted. Some of them were just in this sort of purgatory of, what are we 80s, construction. And I saw this great opportunity to and it wasn't just me, by the way, like it was me and my business partner. We saw this great opportunity to change a space that we called home and start helping it achieve the kind of value that you could see in other parts of the city. It did not take a mathematician or somebody with 300 IQ to figure out that East Nashville is the next thing. Are we there yet? No, we're not done. It's, I mean, East Nashville continues to surprise me and grow and expand. And politically, it's doing that, and civically, it's doing that, and that's exciting. It remains an exciting place, even though I'm not in the real estate development like World of East Nashville anymore, at least not the residential side
Tyler Cauble 13:24
of it. Yeah, you spent just shy of a decade focusing on real estate before you kind of wandered back into the hospitality world. The coffee shop by Matt basically every morning. Thank you, of course. Yeah, no, Steve. Steve sent me the the breakdown of like, y'all's highest paying customers of all time, and I'm number two. Like, who the hell is number one? Just got to
Speaker 1 13:43
beat him. Tyler, bring your wallet. You can do it. I got to work on that.
Tyler Cauble 13:49
So y'all did something really unique there. Yeah, you noticed something that your agents were doing at indo, you real estate, and you decided, why have an office if we could maybe fuse a coffee shop with the office? So tell us about the like, how you came up with retrograde.
Speaker 1 14:03
Yeah, so we, we had decided to form our own brokerage, and the reasons behind that had nothing to do with the place that we were Realtors at that time. That was a great place, and we were really proud to be Realtors there. What it came down to was they were not getting anything from us other than money, and we weren't getting anything from them at all, and that's not a good relationship. And so we thought we can do this on our own. There's nothing stopping us, but if we're going to do this, it's a business. It deserves to grow like any business does. No business is worth starting. If you're just going to be two people or three people, that's not a worthwhile endeavor, in my opinion. And so we thought, what are what's the difference maker? What's the thing that differentiates this brokerage from that brokerage, from this brokerage over here? And we're sitting around a coffee shop having our weekly meeting. So. And Steve said jokingly, sort of looked up from his ham biscuit, and whatever it was that we're eating, goes, what if? What if we had a real estate office that was inside of a coffee shop? And, oh, that's ridiculous, so silly. Went home that night and I didn't sleep. I did not sleep at all. And I, anyone who knows me knows that I fall asleep fast and I sleep through the night. I didn't sleep a wink, and I get up at five o'clock every day. And those poor bastards that I was at coffee with, they do not but I woke them up at like, 6am it's like, Guys, I couldn't sleep. This is something that we have to do. I've never felt more sure about anything. And as it turns out Steve had felt that way too. I think Davey was kind of along for the ride at that point. And we had enough building experience where we thought we can do this, and we can do it faster than anybody else, and so we'll find a space. We'll build it out quickly. It's going to be bare bones, but we need to do it right. So we need to learn about coffee. We knew enough to be dangerous, like we liked good coffee, so we got connected to the head chocolate roaster at Alvin Sinclair, and he was a friend of Steve's and Davies, and we poached him. I like, I love Alvin Sinclair, so please don't shoot me, guys. But we poached him. We said, What do you know about coffee? And he had known a lot about coffee. Had done that before. Said, can you come and help us develop this coffee concept? Sure. So his original job was just menu creation, menu creation, helping us develop the need for the shop. So what equipment did we need? We didn't know any of this stuff. And so we thought, okay, we're going to have to work here a little bit too, so we'll work behind the counter. Learn. Gonna do the best I can to learn how to do Latte Art, how to pull an espresso shot. And six months later, we opened the doors. It was July the fifth, 2018 and about a week later, we had the acting mayor come, Mayor Briley, and he did a ribbon cutting, and seven years later, now this shop is a fixture in the community, and that brand has eclipsed MW real estate, which is interesting, because branding wise, that wasn't the goal, right? It was, it was a supportive, it was a it was, it was a surrogate for MW real estate, and MW has thrived. Just has done terrific, but retrograde coffee has exploded, and now we've got four shops. We have a roastery that we were talking about before we got on the air. Here. We have a separate roasting brand, and all of our shops are thriving, and it's exciting. It's really exciting.
Tyler Cauble 17:46
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot of fun, and it's well branded. But, I mean, the best iced coffee can get in town, I think that 90% of what I've spent there has been, yeah, yeah. Okay, so since around that same time, actually, you were working on some smaller neighborhood mixed use project, some of your earliest ones. I mean, you ended up doing the Edison the Boomerang, both of which I was involved in, but I was often in the Volta, yeah. I mean, after we had to let the big national guys flounder a little bit, right? But talk to me about that one because, I mean, one, how did you decide to jump from just building homes to building a three story mixed use project, that's a leap, right. But two, what was the vision behind that building and how did the community respond to it? That's
Speaker 1 18:30
a great question. It felt like a natural next step for us to go from residential to something that had residential as a component of it, but let us dip our toes into commercial development. We were familiar with Englewood. We had built a lot of houses in East Nashville, especially Inglewood and the Volta, the property that that sits on, had been for sale for a minute, and we thought that it was an attractive piece on a major corridor that was really important to us. And in addition to being an attractive piece on a major corridor, it had scale in such a way that you didn't see much on those corridors anymore. And we needed an office. We needed an office for ourselves. We did not need the office we built for ourselves. We built something crazy. Because when you discover something like that, and you have a little bit of money behind you, you're like, oh, we'll build the fancy thing. We didn't need that, but we built this beautiful office for ourselves. We built an additional suite, which you were involved in, next door, two of them, and then we had apartments upstairs. We thought, we'll get into property management. Why not? Like, let's make things really challenging. And you're I was the property manager, as it turns out, like I am. I'm an awful property manager, not a slumlord. In fact, I'm the opposite of that. I care too much about these folks, but I am not a good person to call in the middle of the night with your problems. I am not like I'm not great at so. Many of the parts of property management that are really key to that role. And so we did this for a while, and I had, you should have seen my desk. My desk looked like I was operating like NORAD. I had all of these phones on my desk. And so depending on who would call, the different phone would ring and I'd pick it up. And so I was in charge of leasing. I was in charge of property management, which meant when the fire alarm went off at two in the morning, I drove over there and I would it was a little bit of a game for me. I'd try to beat the fire department there, which is funny, because the fire department was like 300 yards away. They always beat me. And so we built this building, and it was interesting. You know, there's a lot of history and lore behind the property itself, but as we were developing this building, we knew that we needed community involvement, because this particular parcel had a very interesting overlay on it. It was a landmark overlay. And that had been done because Dollar General had been buying up parcels and building just these god awful looking buildings all over the city, especially in neighborhoods that they felt like they could make a lot of money off of. And so really, this landmark overlay was designed to prevent exactly their model from building there, but it also required us to have an enhanced amount of neighborhood engagement that we otherwise wouldn't have had. And what did that take the form of so we developed, we built the design. We had a design for this building, and originally, the design of that building was reflective of sort of a Southern California. I don't even know what you would call it, mixed use, kind of. It was very pretty, but it was not in keeping with the neighborhood. It just wasn't, you know, if you look to the right or to the left of that building, it's filled with these beautiful old tutors. And this was not a tutor structure that didn't have to be, but it did not mix well with the neighborhood. And so we had our first community meeting, and I came into that meeting prepared to talk about why the building was going to be so great for the neighborhood, how it was going to raise property values, how it was going to do this, that and the other thing, I had preconceived what I thought the neighborhood cared about, and I was wrong on every level, every single level, to the point to the point where I had to take my own advice, like I was about two points into my talk, and I realized I had lost the room. They were not interested in what I had to say, and I just realized I'm wrong about this. I need to just listen. I need to listen to what the neighbor is saying. And so just shut up. And I let them talk at me. And it started out really sort of vitriolic, right? Like they they were not happy. They didn't they didn't like the design. They didn't like that someone was building on this parcel that had been empty forever. They didn't like me, they didn't like my partners, they didn't like development in Nashville. They didn't like all these things. And I kept waiting, because I knew at some point somebody was going to accidentally say something that they liked about the project. I knew that would happen, and I knew that that was my opportunity to start talking. And it did. It happened at some point somebody said, this thing has just been sitting here, and we're missing all of these great opportunities for food and retail and whatnot all over East Nashville, and we need something here. I said, I'm so glad to hear that. What do you think that might be? And this was sort of my sales mentality coming into play, because I knew that if I could get if people had all of these thoughts about what it shouldn't be, certainly they could start thinking creatively about what it should be. And I just started taking notes. I was standing at the front of the room taking notes, and as people saw me writing stuff down, they became less and less aggravated and more and more excited about the project and the possibility, and by the time we got done, I think we were there like almost three hours. By the time we got done, people came up to me and said, we're really excited for you to do something different here, and we're going to be at the next meeting when you bring your new design and can't wait to see what you do. And I don't know that I've had that kind of success since in turning a crowd, but it was a great reminder that maybe one of the best and most important lessons in sales is just shut your mouth. And I did that, and we came back with a design that is tutor in its overall sort of form, but is modern, and actually benefited us in a much bigger way, because it was bigger and that was a great project, ended up being a terrific project for us. I
Tyler Cauble 24:22
mean, really, what you're talking about is kind of the balance between the financials, like making a project work, which is incredibly important, and the demands or the wants or the needs of the community. So in your time as a developer, I mean, what have you learned about developments that sell versus developments that serve
Speaker 1 24:41
that's a really challenging question. The fundamentals of development are pretty pure, and if the math doesn't work, you just don't do it, you can't do it. And so the other side of that coin, though, is the neighborhoods and the people that live there. And if you can, please make. Majority in those neighborhoods, then you've done a pretty good job. You've done a pretty good job. Developments that are successful are developments that meet a financial benchmark or hurdle. It meet a timeline or beat it. Leave investors wanting to invest again. That's an important one, and leave the principal stakeholders feeling like they're excited about their next project. Developments that serve are developments that hopefully did all of those things, but additionally take into account the missing needs of a community. And we don't get to dictate what those missing needs are. We have to ask. We have to think about it, right? And so do we need 100 more bubble tea places on Gallatin pike? Probably not. Could we use a really good pizza place on Gallatin? Yeah, right now it's Madison pinky ring shout out to my friends up there or down into five points, right? So maybe that's something that should go in here retail. Is there a space that you could buy kids clothes? As an example, we got a lot of young families in East Nashville. Is that a benefit to the community? Is that serving a need in the community? Is there a missing health component? So I don't mean like a gym, but are we thinking long term, sort of cradle to grave development? That's a service minded sort of approach to real estate development, and it's the harder of the two things to achieve. You can always say no, if the math doesn't work. And so then the development goes away. But the needs of a community evolve, and they can evolve rapidly, including during a project the Volta is a great example. That was an apartment building, and the needs of the community dictated that we needed more affordable residential purchase options in Inglewood, and so we sold it. We sold them individually after we had rented them. That was less about us not wanting to property manage. I did not want to property manage anymore. It was more about the community. Had a need. We knew that because we were in real estate and we could service and satisfy that need with product that we already had.
Tyler Cauble 27:15
Development's tough. Dealing with communities is a challenge, even when it's not over the years. I'm sure you've experienced quite a few of the ups and downs as any real estate developer has. But what was your biggest challenge or your biggest mistake, and what was the lesson that you kind of pulled out of that teach
Speaker 1 27:33
my kids, that I try to teach my kids one really important thing, and that you that thing is that you have to have a willingness to be wrong. Without a willingness to be wrong, you will fail, and there's lots of reasons, mostly, you get left behind when you don't have a willingness to be wrong. And youth doesn't teach us to be okay with being wrong. Youth teaches us to be confident and to charge forward. What do they say in the tech world? Move fast and break things. There's a fundamental component to that, which is a willingness to be wrong, but that's not really what they're talking about. And so I mostly disagree with it. I didn't learn my own lesson early, and so I was steadfast in that first meeting at the Volta that I didn't need to listen. I didn't need to be wrong about this. I just needed to convince people that I was right. And I'm glad that I took my own advice that could have ended that project, and that project is what ultimately sort of jump started the commercial components of mine and my business partner's career, I've got a lot of mistakes over the years, a lot of mistakes, and the one that I would have regretted the most was not being willing to be wrong. And I'm so glad that I caught myself. I'm so glad What do you think the fallout would have been? The project wouldn't have happened. It would have the neighborhood would have driven us into the mud, and we would have had to sit there spinning our wheels. We would have lost Council support. We bought that project at the turn of a council seat. So Karen Bennett had been the council person previously, and then Nancy van Reese took over, and I had Nancy on my side. I had Karen on my side too. We would have lost both of those people, and those people were our buffers for the neighborhood. They were the people that could help translate when we needed it. We would have lost their support, without Council support, we would have lost the ability to have that bill written that allowed that property to be rezoned and then to be built, and then we would have lost the ability to earn income on that project, ultimately sell it and make money on it, and that jump started a bunch of other developments for us, it would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of everything. I doubt very much that retrograde would still be alive today had the Volta failed. Well, because we use when retrograde started, we didn't make any money, and so we absolutely were putting money into those projects until they could do it on their own. That that project in particular, failing would have been a very it would have been, I'm probably not sitting here today. We're probably not having this conversation because I'm not important
Tyler Cauble 30:16
enough. That's not true for those of you all that don't know. Nathan and his partner Steve helped me get my start in East Nashville, I had to hound them to get my first listing with them, and I'm grateful that I stayed on top of that. So that is a lesson in perseverance. But Nathan, you guys have done some amazing small scale neighborhood mixed use projects for anybody listening that's interested in delivering these three story, 30,000 square foot type of deals, right with ground floor retail or office and some sort of component of residential above aside from listening to the community, what piece of advice would you give
Speaker 1 30:52
them? I think that one of the things that we consistently fail to do is be thinking about our exit strategy on the back end. And so what we tend to do is build the thing that we like and the community likes, but we don't think about what the future user might like. And what I mean by that is there are tipping points for every investor group that exists on the planet. And so if you're building a project and the ultimate disposition of that project is to sell it. You should be doing all the things that make everybody as happy as possible on the front end, making sure community is happy, making sure that your investors are happy, making sure all these things are right. But the thing that you also should be thinking about, and we hadn't done it, is, is this something that can sell down the road? Because if you're too small, the large scale investors are uninterested in you. And if you're in the middle ground, which is where most of our projects ended up being, if you're in the middle ground, the small investors can't afford you, and the big investors don't care about you. And so you have to start working a lot harder to find your exit strategy. And so thinking about exit strategies on the front end is key. And so think about this like a war, like we're going to get in a war here, and how are we going to exit down the road? We have to have an exit strategy. Whether that strategy remains in place or not. Down the road is irrelevant, but we have to have thought about what that looks like. If you don't think about what that looks like, you may find yourself in a in a very painful financial position a year, 18 months, 24 months after the project's completed and you're looking to exit from it.
Tyler Cauble 32:35
Yeah, for those of you wondering, the solution that they did end up coming up with was undoing everything out. Yeah. So they sold off the retail on the ground floor as commercial condos, as well as all the residential components, which worked out pretty
Speaker 1 32:48
great. It did work great. And, you know, it did not leave out the opportunity for someone down the road to buy the whole thing, because the structure of the ownership is such that there's still this umbrella of ownership over the whole thing, and so someone could come in and buy all of the common land and then ultimately buy each of the units and have a whole project if they wanted it. It still remains both that one and boomerang and several others too small for a big investor to buy and too little, too big for a small person to
Tyler Cauble 33:21
buy. But hey, you've seen that in New York City, where these guys will come in, they'll buy up every condo in a building. And
Speaker 1 33:27
their strategy, though, is different, and this is where Nashville has to change. Ultimately, their strategy is, I want to buy this building because this building isn't worth anything to me, but if I own this building, then I can buy the ones on either side of it, and then I start to assemble a block. And when you own a block of real estate anywhere in the world, you've got some real control.
Tyler Cauble 33:48
Yeah, Nathan, it's 2009 you are going back and giving yourself one piece of advice, as you're trying to convince Jennifer to let you jump into real estate. What would you tell yourself?
Speaker 1 34:01
That's a great question. I said this to you when we started don't rent a car, I was convinced that when I got started in real estate, no one would take me seriously in the Nissan Sentra that Jennifer and I shared when we moved to Nashville, and so when I finally started getting people that were interested in looking at houses with me, I would go to hertz and I'd rent a car every time I went to show houses. I mean, 1000s of dollars I spent rent. And I didn't have 1000s of dollars, by the way, like 1000s we Jennifer and I did not have 1000s of dollars spent on rental cars, but I spent it. And I would tell, like you'd show with a different car every time, right? And so I'd have to come up with sort of a stupid lie about why, right, oh, my car's in the shop, or, Oh, this, that, or the other thing. But I was convinced that if I didn't have a car that was nice, people wouldn't believe that I knew what I was doing and what I learned in that first year in real estate, I learned that if I am rigor. Authentic in everything I do, I am more likely to be successful in everything that I do, and that changed everything for me. If I don't like something, I say it out loud. If I love something, I say it out loud. If I think you should do something differently, I say it out loud when I kept my mouth shut. Nothing good happened. I'm not rude to people. I want to be very clear about that, like I Will not I would never be able to live with myself if I was rude to people. But I also don't keep quiet when there's something important to be said and who cares what car I'm driving. Maybe I am Dave Ramsey, right? Like, maybe I'm just I don't believe in cars because they're depreciating assets. So who gives a shit like I'm driving my Nissan Sentra because it's cheap, and I spend my money on things that appreciate and earn me money, and somebody who I'm working with is going to appreciate that, and that's a lesson that I wish that I had. I wish I hadn't been so full of hubris, like somebody told me that that was important, and I believe them. And they're they're wrong. They're just wrong.
Tyler Cauble 36:04
Nathan, if anybody listening wants to learn more about retrograde, or they want to check out Lilly hall or Lost and Found, or any of your other ventures, where can they
Speaker 1 36:13
find you? Best place to find us is on our retrograde website. If you really want to find me, there's, there's an info email on that retrograde website, and that comes to me like, I'm not that hard to find, like I'm on LinkedIn. This episode
Tyler Cauble 36:32
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.