What $250,000 Actually Buys in Commercial Real Estate (2026)
Six months ago my team started testing a piece of software inside the Accelerator Mastermind to kill the spreadsheet for good. This week I turned the cameras on and ran it live, on air, to find and underwrite a real commercial deal for under $250,000.
Real numbers behind every step. 6,138 retail properties nationwide fit that price filter alone. The one we landed on: a 5,088 square foot strip building in Macon, Georgia, listed at $249,000, sitting on a highway with 14,500 cars a day right next to an O'Reilly's, 318 days on market with a listing so bad it didn't even have interior photos. First pass at the math — a $376,000 renovation bill, $8 a foot rent — came back a .12 equity multiple. Terrible deal. Second pass, after negotiating the purchase price down to $199,000 and pushing rent to $12 a foot triple net: a 1.87x equity multiple, 17% annualized cash-on-cash, and a projected $180,000 profit on $200,000 in cash over five years.
That's the whole point of today. Just because it's commercial real estate doesn't mean it has to be expensive — you just have to know how to find it and how to run the numbers. Stick around, because I'm walking through the entire underwriting live, mistakes and all.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
Thousands of retail properties nationwide fit a sub-$250K budget — the "no good deals" excuse doesn't hold, but you may need to look outside your immediate market.
Cheap deals often come with catches (deferred maintenance, bad listings, long time on market), so always underwrite before assuming a low price = a good deal.
Quick math check first: apply your target cap rate to price/sqft to see what rent you'd need — if it's realistic, dig deeper.
On the Macon deal, the first full underwrite came back terrible (.12 equity multiple) because rehab costs ($376K) blew past the purchase price ($249K) while rent stayed too low.
Fixing it took both negotiating price down ($199K) and pushing achievable rent up ($12/ft) — one lever alone wasn't enough.
Final result: ~$200K invested turned into a $780K exit value, a $180K profit, and a 1.87x equity multiple over 5 years — doubling the money.
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.
Tyler Cauble 0:05
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. All right, we seem to be having some technical issues this morning, so sorry about that. All right, just because it's commercial real estate doesn't mean that it has to be expensive. Today, we're going to be diving into commercial real estate deals across the country under $250,000. Now, if you're at home running the math, 20% of $250,000 is going to be roughly around 50 grand. That's what you would need to come up with for a down payment. Although you could also get creative on that as well and see what you could possibly do there too. So, why don't we go ahead and dive on in and see what we can find for $250,000? If you are joining us, we are live. This is live from the Cobble Group Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. Feel free to drop in any questions that you have on deals and deal analysis, and we will get you taken care of. I'm not even actually going to pick a location yet. Let's just go to retail. It's going to be the easiest for me to show you guys this, and let's just go to search. All right, we're going to go to price. We're going to put it at at least $1 and cap it. Oh, $250,000. We're going to hide undisclosed prices. I don't like when people want me to appraise their deals for them. I'm not in the business of doing that for free. Okay, so if we are looking at opportunities, you know what? Let me fix my camera real quick. Make this a little bit smaller for you guys, so y'all can see some more. Boom. Okay, if we're looking throughout the United States, it looks like we have 6138 properties. This is just retail. 60 over 6100 properties throughout the United States that could work for this. Okay, now I am in the South. I typically tend to invest in the South. Let's see what is going on in this area that might be worth taking a look at. Okay, looks like we've got some auctions in here. I'm going to go ahead and drop some of the auctions off. And guys, by the way, we're going to be underwriting this here as well. I'm going to be running you guys through our deal analyzer, how that works, and how I would actually make this deal work if we were going to go buy something for 250 grand. Let me see if I can take auctions off of here because we don't want to deal with any auctions. No, no, no. All right, I am not seeing any way to get rid of auctions. Let's ignore that for now. Let's see here, Nashville. We've got one right outside of Nashville. What is that? $199,000 inside sales. We're currently averaging ah like a gas station or something. That's the fun thing with stuff that's under 250,000. You're going to have a lot of not so fun things to deal with. I mean, there's a ton of properties here. So, oh, look at this historic downtown building in Warrenton for sale. That's cool, but I have no idea where Warrenton is. That could be. It could be a good deal. Could be a bad deal. I'm actually going to come up here. Let's let's set our total price per square foot. It looks like I probably won't be able to do. Okay, I'm not going to be able to do a total price and a price per square foot. I guess I could do a minimum building Detail, so minimum of let's say 2500 square feet. That puts us. Oh, that's not right. Building size. Here we go. Minimum 2500 square feet. That says at least 100 bucks a foot or less. I guess probably the best better way to say this at most 100 bucks a foot. All right, look at the West Seaboard Street.
Tyler Cauble 4:48
We got a lot of stuff in North Carolina or something for 75 grand in Talladega, Alabama. All right, $250,000. Rossville, Georgia. That's right down the street from Peerless Mill. Standalone restaurant. Let's look at this because this is-I mean, 801 McFarland. That's literally right down the street from Peerless Mill. Okay, it's right here. This is all Peerless. That's hilarious. This is two blocks away. Tell you this, definitely not worth 250 grand. Let's see, it's 2500 square feet. I would probably pay 30 bucks a foot for that, considering the condition that it's in, because it's gonna you're gonna need to fully redo this entire thing. Anyway, that is not why we're here. Let's go back. Let's see. I mean, come on. Like, there's some nice things under $250,000. Now they may not necessarily be in your backyard. You might have to be willing to travel out a little bit. But come on, look at this historic brick showpiece with balcony and stage, 2700 square feet in Washington, Georgia. This looks like it might be. This is just outside of Athens, Georgia. I mean, pretty cool looking. Definitely under 100 bucks a foot. Greensboro, Georgia, Sparta, pretty popular spot or growing, it seems like. Huntsville, Alabama. Okay, let's see. Let's zoom in on some of these areas so I can just kind of get closer to maybe Atlanta or Chattanooga, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Birmingham. Let's see here. What is interesting? I mean, all of this is actually interesting. There, there's some businesses that they pull into here, which I never appreciate or like. I mean, here's an interesting one: 5000 square feet in Macon, Georgia, for 250 grand. I mean, Macon's not far from downtown Atlanta. Let's take a look at this deal. I like this opportunity. Looks like it's it's right on a highway, 14,500 vehicles per day, right next to an O'Reilly's. Yeah, O'Reilly isn't you know, I mean the top of all national brands in terms of like site selection and location, but they're pretty good at it. Like they know what they're doing, they know how to find their demographic. So for this building, it's 5000 square feet. There's no interior pictures. We can assume that it's probably going to need some some love. It's been on the market for 141 days. I'm not even going to bother with a flyer. Okay, so if I was going to run the math, I mean we're looking at $49 per square foot. All right. Before we dive into that, let's go back. Let's go to for lease, and let's see what's going on in Macon, Georgia. In terms of retail, I mean, really, this kind of looks like it could be also flex. So I'm gonna select industrial as well. We'll come in here to size. We'll say 2,500 square feet to 7,500 square feet. That'll give us a good range, kind of on either side of this deal. And we're talking okay, 15 bucks a foot for some retail. We've got seven to 11 bucks a foot, eight bucks a foot, 15 to 17. Let's say that I don't want to fix it up too much. I want to treat it a little bit more, kind of like flex, and we're going for eight bucks a foot. I mean, when I run my back of napkin math on on $49, which keep in mind, guys, all you do is just apply the build to cap rate that you want on it. Now this isn't going to include a lot of expenses and stuff like that. That's why I'm doing a 12% cap rate because there's going to be expenses and stuff that comes out of this. But if I was going to get a 12% cap rate of 49 bucks a foot, I've got to rent it out for $5.88 a foot triple net. So if I feel pretty good about being able to get $8 a foot, triple net, then this is probably a deal. All right, so let's pull up our deal analyzer. By the way, guys, we're eliminating spreadsheets. You can get this software. You can test it out for free at tylercoble.com/analyzer. You can upgrade to the full suite of every piece of software that my team uses, that all of our mastermind members use as well. From there, there's an upgrade button you just click to that. I mean, it's going to be super cheap.
Tyler Cauble 9:52
Anyway, okay, we'll expand the inputs. I'm going to go into full mode here. Project name. Let's just go with Macon, Georgia. Building rentable square footage. I think they said it was 5088. I mean, it's a $249,000 building. This is exactly what we were hoping to find today. 5088 square feet. Year built probably does not matter. Year renovated 2023. Doubt it. I mean, come on. Look at that picture. There's no way. Let's see. There's just no way it was renovated in 2023. These guys have no pictures. What a terrible listing. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't matter either way. All right. Let's see. Purchase price. Let's just say that we do pay 249,000 for it. Capitalized rehab. I am going to assume that we've got to fully gut the interior, and obviously there's some stuff we're going to have to redo in the exterior. I would assume probably 60 to 70 bucks a foot for that. Now, as part of this, as part of this suite of tools, go to seriescentral.com/dealdesk. You'll get access to the deal desk, which will have all of these other tools in it. But I can come here to my cost estimator, which is pretty sweet. Put in Macon Georgia, and let's see what it's going to cost. So we're going to do a full gut renovation. Building is 5088 square feet. This is pulling in a ton of aggregated data from construction jobs all over the country. So all I have to do is click full gut renovation, and it's going to give me down to shell all new interior MEP etc. I can come down here and I can actually see what all is selected, so I could come and add some more stuff if I wanted to. So okay, full gut demo, you know, 350 to five bucks a foot, give or take. Exterior of the building, I do want to add in. Let's see, exterior paint commercial, probably some power washing before we redo that. I'm going to assume that we need some window replacements because when I'm looking at this picture here, everything's boarded up. Let's assume that there's four windows on either side. These front ones do not look boarded up, so let's just say that we're going to replace four windows. So I'll just select four units there, and there we have it. This is a retail strip center. Building condition is, I'd say it's probably 1980s. All right, we calculate our estimate. Okay, so it's saying probably about $372,000 here, and it'll give us also an estimated range, including contingency, between 208 to $668,000. This quote, by the way, is also going to be specific to Macon, Georgia, because it's at 95% of the average cost of construction nationwide, and it'll run us through everything that we have going here. Okay, so right off the bat, I noticed I probably didn't select the right thing when it came to exterior paint commercial or power washing. So let's get that updated. Power washing square footage. I would say, I mean, it's it's probably it looks to be, let's say eight feet tall. That's probably seven feet tall by 100. Let's call it 200 feet. So 1400 square feet, give or take, that needs to be pressure washed, and then we would also have 1400 square feet that needs to be painted. So it's going to be about the same. All right, there we go. Let's get this updated. Okay, that is a closer estimate. So that's pretty cheap on the paint. That sounds pretty cheap. 3200 power washing 360 bucks. I mean, I bet at making Georgia, you could probably make that happen. Okay, so it gives us a full breakdown of everything that we're spinning on. So you kind of have like at least it's not going to be 100% accurate, right? This isn't a takeoff from an actual contractor. That it doesn't have specific plans, but you will be able to actually use this to guide your yourself through the full renovation. So, with that being said, I mean I can I can send this to my underwriting. I can attach this to a deal in my deal desk, which is our deal pipeline like CRM that we have. But I'm just going to take this $376,345. We're going to go back into our underwriting tool, I'm just going to drop that in there.
Tyler Cauble 14:44
Closing costs say 1% down payment 25% loan to value 75% interest rate you could probably get six and a half, maybe 720, years. Let's do a seven year loan to. Loan origination fee 1% minimum debt service coverage of 1.25. This is what this is so much easier than doing spreadsheets. That's why I love this software. It's amazing. Operating capital reserve. I'm probably going to go with a monthly basis. I'm going to go with six months, just in case. It might take us a while to find a tenant here. I mean, that's actually one thing that I could look at on Cruxy is to see. Let's look at the insights. Okay, let me sign in real quick because I have Krexie Pro, and this will actually give us some better insights as to how long it might take to get these actually leased up. Okay, well. Okay, never mind. Apparently, I don't know my password. Let's see, days on market. That's really all I was needing. Anyway, 318 days on market. So that six months of carry is probably actually not going to be enough. So I'm going to come back in here, and I'm going to say we need 12 months. It's it's going to be a year before we actually get this leased out, which sucks. Okay, let's do winder funded soft costs. So we just select those toggles. If if the lender is funding your soft costs, such as your interest, I mean it breaks it down right here. What all of that is, you can select that interest only period. Don't mind if I do. We'll go for one year because we're doing some rehab. Then we got to get it refinanced, so that'll help us. I'm not going to model a refinance event or do any subdat or mezdat. Let's see here. We're going for one tenant, suite A, 5088 square feet, $8 a foot. Start date would be. I mean, let's just say it does take us. Hmm. Let's say that it does take us 12345678, Well, I'm going the wrong way, aren't I? All right, 1-234-567-8910, Let's say it takes us until June of 2027, and we sign a 60-month lease, 3% annual buffs. I mean, hopefully, obviously, we'd be able to to get this lease up faster than this. But hey, it's a $250,000 building. We're we're not taking too big a risk. Might as well really account for whatever we're gonna need to do. I'm turnkeying the building, so we don't need any TI allowances here at all. I'm gonna assume 5% commissions, no free months because it is ready to move in. And then my baseline vacancy rate, I'm gonna set that to 7% Just like even when we're 100% occupied, a bank is gonna put a baseline vacancy rate on you anyway. So you might as well just go ahead and count for that right now. Second gen assumptions. I'm not even gonna bother with right now. But if I had a second generation of tenants moving in, say this tenant ends in five years, and actually, yeah, I mean, I guess I probably should. Let's just go ahead and do this. Vacancy will do three months new lease term 60, a 5% increase year over year, 3% bumps. Let's say $5 a foot in TI allowance, 5% commissions again, and we'll just leave it there. I mean, we don't need to get too crazy on it. Now, I will be structuring this as a triple net responsible lease. The tenants will be responsible for 100% of the operating expenses incurred by the tenants. And instead of like breaking it down on a current op, because I would imagine since this building's vacant, they're probably not going to have any operating expenses, right? Yeah, you'll have property taxes and insurance, but you're not going to have hardly anything else. They're clearly not taking care of Cam. All right, so I'm just going to assume 35 of EGI. That's your expected gross income. That is standard commercial real estate numbers. 30 to 35 percent is where your operating expenses should be, give or take. It depends. It technically doesn't matter since this is a triple net lease. The tenants are paying for 100 of that, but I also like for it to balance on my accounting. All right, so keep that in mind.
Tyler Cauble 19:09
Now on operating expenses, if I was going to syndicate, I'd go through some of this, but I'm going to say that we don't. We're not going to do that. I will take 15 cents a square foot in reserves, and I'm going to do a cost segregation study so that we can figure out how much money I'm going to save on my taxes by doing this. We're selecting retail. It's going to auto select my five-year, 15-year, you know, depreciation or bonus depreciation. How much of that is eligible? You can get granular with this. You can actually specifically pick different things, but it will give you some typical ranges for the type of asset that you're working on, and it'll show you what your savings could be. Exit cap rate. I'm definitely going with a seven and a half percent on this one. You know what? Let's just make it an eight. Closing cost 1% Commission six. Primary exit year. Let's go for year five. I'm just gonna go with sole ownership. I'm not gonna break it out in any sort of specific way. Let's see what that comes out to be. Ooh, terrible deal, terrible deal. Equity multiple .12. What's going wrong here? Let's look at our cash flows. Okay, so we are losing $50,000 the first year. Makes sense because we are not bringing any tenants to the table. We're still covering our operating expenses, so that kind of sucks. And then we're never really covering our debt service. Our gross potential rent just is not high enough. So here's the thing: the problem is I said we're going for eight bucks a foot, but we're spending $376,000 on this building, which is over $130,000 more than what we're buying it for, just to get it fixed up. If I'm spending $376,000 on this, chances are good I could probably get higher rent than what we are really seeing out here, so let's go and look at some stuff that's a little bit more comparable. 15 bucks a foot. We're probably not going to be as nice as this shopping center, so I'm not going to be able to charge that. So that's a ceiling right now. Seven to 11 bucks a foot for this like abandoned looking Kroger shopping center. Looks a little scary. I don't know what's going on there, 15 to 17 bucks a foot, 18 to 72. Wow. Let's see, man. There's a lot of undisclosed rates, and people are really secretive in Macon, Georgia. Okay, 11 bucks a foot. I feel like we could definitely compete with this. Look at that building. Come on, if we can't compete with that, what are we even doing here? So let's say that we're able to get 12 bucks a foot. Now, obviously, this is just back of napkin math, right? I'm just trying to see will this deal work or not. If I was actually seriously interested in doing this deal, then I would be calling brokers and be getting actual market data to see what we think that we could lease it for and what we should actually be renovating to. So come back up here, calculate my returns. Now we're at about a 1.42 times equity multiple. Generally, when I'm underwriting a deal, I want to see a two times equity multiple over five years, that ends up giving you about a 20% annualized cash on cash return. You're doubling your money in five years, and somewhere between like an 18 and 22% IRR. It just depends on kind of how the deal shakes out. So right now, like our average debt service coverage ratio is good. Our projected IRR though not so great. It's 7.6% What that says to me is that a lot of our return is going to come from the sale of the property, which is not super exciting to me. Yeah. See, we're not like we cash flow every year, but it's not a super exciting cash on cash return. Bully that. I mean I am getting $24,000 in estimated tax savings in year one. Pretty nice. Okay, so basically where we are at, we've either got to rent it for more, we've got to pay less for the building. I'm going to come back in here and I'm going to negotiate down. I'm going to pay 199 for this building, and I'm actually going to put less into the building as well.
Tyler Cauble 23:26
Let's just say that we're going to cap it at 350,000. Now I only dropped it by 26 grand, not a ton, but we do need to get that figured out. So overview, okay, our equity multiple went down. Annualized cash on cash return went down. What did I do wrong? Purchase price. You know what? I still have 12 months of reserve in here, and technically, I actually messed that up. We are bring we're getting monthly reserve anyway because it's telling us here's how much interest carry reserve you need to bring. So let's fix that. Okay, totally fixes the deal. I was like, there's something going wrong here. So now we're at a 1.87 times equity multiple. That's a deal worth looking looking at. I mean, over a five-year period, you are doubling your money. You're getting a 17% annualized cash-on-cash, a 14% projected IRR. Not super great, but not terrible. All right, and this is what's cool about this calculator is it's going to tell you on this dashboard everything you need to know. So total cash to close and carry $207,000. So I mean, just because it's a $250,000 property doesn't mean that it's going to be you know super cheap. You're still going to need to find a way to bring some money to the table. All right, not every deal that's 250 grand is going to be exciting. Some of them are though. You know, I mean, this is one of those deals. It's like okay, if we can get 12 bucks a foot for the deal, it's. You know, kind of exciting to look at. All right, let's see here. See if there's anything else that I might want to try and negotiate on this deal. I feel good on three months of interest reserve, lender funded soft costs. We do have an interest only period for a year still. Let's see. Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel good about all of this. Okay, yeah, I wouldn't change anything. So, if we're going to really dive into this deal, I'd come over here to the cash flow tab. And if there's ever anything on this cash flow tab, by the way, that you have questions on, just hover your mouse over it, and I'll tell you exactly where that, how that's being calculated, where it's coming from. So we've got our vacancy and credit loss coming out. Let's see, total income 79,000 a year. We're paying $22,000 in operating expenses. That leaves an NOI of 57,000. After debt service, we're cash flowing 15 to 20 grand a year in years two through five, not terrible, right? But I mean, if we're putting $200,000 down, we get up to 10% by the end of the. I mean, that's pretty good for our cash on cash return, up to 10% towards the end. If I come over here to my returns tab, this is really going to tell me what we're expecting. So gross value by the time that we sell it is going to be $780,000. So profit of 180 grand, not bad for a small little deal. You know, again, you're putting $200,000 into it. You're profiting $180,000. I'll take that deal. You know, those are those are pretty good deals. It'll even run you through your 1031 tax benefits if you're in a 1031 exchange this this opportunity. Coming here into the sensitivity tabs, we can kind of see like, hey, if things start to change a little bit, what does this deal look like? And then the nicest part about this is I can actually export this memo. Look at this. I just send this straight over to my my investors. Send this straight over to my lender, my partners, whatever it is. They get to see exactly how we are operating on it and what the plan is, and we would take it from there. Super simple. So, anyways, there you have it. I mean, look, we found that deal in like five minutes. It's in Macon, Georgia. That's absolutely drivable if you are from Atlanta, so I don't like to hear these excuses of Tyler. There's no good commercial deals. Commercial real estate's so expensive. It's not really. There's so many opportunities out there for you to to be able to find something cheap. You just got to actually go out there and find it. Jason is saying, "What's up, brother?
Tyler Cauble 27:39
Jason, how you doing, my friend? Good to see you, man. Hunter saying good morning, good morning, good morning, Hunter. Ted, good morning. Thanks for being here for us. Absolutely, guys, happy to do it. Jason is saying I'm one of Tyler's students. Please send me your commercial or residential deals you need help with. Jason is kicking tail, by the way, down in Florida, I believe. Is that where you are, Jason? Send Jason some deals if you guys got them. Let's see. Nacio just said my team just listed a storage site in Macon. There you go. Well, Nacio, I might have just gotten you another deal, man. You should go look at that one. Python saying Tyler analyzer is gold. If you had a seller carry value add deal with a heavy rehab bid, would you front load the capex with a high purchase price or a higher pref to the owner on the back end. Other options, Pythus. The the biggest issue that you will have with seller carry and doing any sort of rehab is that you will have to either get the seller to agree to taking a second position behind a construction note, or you will have to bring that cash to the table yourself. It is, you know, most construction loans they want to be in first position. They they just want to, and so unless you can convince the seller, which I would never take second position as a seller, but there are some sellers that are willing to consider that, depending on kind of how you decide to structure it, I guess they will. They will do it. So that's that's the way to do it. By the way, if you're joining me late, I don't know what's going on with my camera this morning. Sorry that I'm on half a screen, but hey, you guys can still see me. It works out. Husny is saying hello, guys. What's up, Husny? So there you have it, guys. I mean, if you want to dive in and use this calculator, you can do it for free. Go to tylerkabble.com/analyzer. Check it out. If you want to upgrade and get the full suite of what you were just seeing, that button is on there as well. This is something that we've been working on for the last like nine months. I think we've been testing it inside the CRA Accelerator Mastermind for the last six, and it has more than doubled the amount of deals that our members are analyzing. It is wild. Spreadsheets are dead. They're just annoying to deal with. They take away too much time. There's too much of a learning curve, and plus, this is way prettier, way easier to do. Scott is saying 100% agree. You gave to go find the deal. It's not going to. Find you, yeah. Oh, you have to go find the deal. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you got to get out there and find them. They're not just gonna fall in your lap, although sometimes they do, and that would be nice if that happened every time. But all right, guys, thanks for joining us on this week's office hours. Hopefully, this helped you understand. Like, hey, those opportunities are out there. Go find a deal under 250 grand. You're not gonna make a ton of money, but hey, doubling $200,000, not a bad deal. All right, I would, I would take a doubling of my money every day, especially in a five-year period. Appreciate you guys. I will see y'all next Tuesday, 830 a.m. Central. Boom. 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.