(intro)

Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast, with your host Pancham Gupta. This podcast is dedicated to helping the high-paid professionals to break out of the Wall Street investments and create multiple income streams. Here’s your host, Pancham Gupta.

Hi. This is Russell Gray, co-host of the Real Estate Guys Radio Show, and you are listening to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast.

(interview)

Pancham Gupta

Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. This is Pancham. I really appreciate you for tuning in today. Adam Craig is my guest on the show. He is the founding member of CLE Real Estate Group, a real estate investment company located outside of Cleveland, Ohio. After earning a BA in Finance from Kent State University, Adam began to pursue his passion for real estate investing. Since 2013, Adam has closed more than 70 deals and has accumulated rental portfolio, topping $8 million in residential and commercial real estate. He has a great story of going from single family homes to commercial real estate, and how he has really compounded on the returns that he has generated from commercial real estate sector. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Craig

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Pancham Gupta

Thanks for your time here. Before we get started, are you ready to fire up my listener breakout of Wall Street investments?

Adam Craig

I’m ready. Let’s do it.

Pancham Gupta

Let’s do this. So, before we begin, Adam, why don’t you talk about your background, how you got started out in this business where you’re in right now?

Adam Craig

Sure. So, I was born and raised just outside Cleveland. So, I went to college in 2009. Shortly, after graduation in 2012, I couldn’t decide if I was going to go into the finance world—which is what I went to school for. Maybe I was going to start or continue on with the business that I had started my last year of college. So, it wasn’t until shortly after I was pondering those decisions, that my e-commerce business—that I did start in college—started to do pretty well. So well, that it surpassed the entry level income that I was going to be able to get doing a financial advising or an analyst job. So, I said I’m going to run with this thing. If it doesn’t work out for more than a couple of years, at least I said that I could try.

But luckily, for me, it did work out pretty well. I still do this business to this day. Without getting into any major details, it’s an e-commerce business, online retail. I sell a lot of consumer electronics like older video cameras, digital cameras, lenses, things of that sort. So, it doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning, but it does pay the bills. So, it’s not quite like real estate. Real estate is what I’m passionate about. But this has been a nice business that plateaued in probably about 2015, 2016. But it’s still a really nice income for me.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. That’s pretty awesome. Something that you started in college, and you still have it going. That’s pretty awesome. So, did you come up with that idea just as a project for your finance, in one of the courses?

Adam Craig

No, I would say ever since high school, I was looking for—as many people are—an online pitch or any kind of entrepreneurial niche that can give me some good income. I’ve had lots of small little things over those years from high school into college that made me a little bit of money, but I finally found something that worked. The gist of it is getting defective equipment, getting repaired, and reselling it. But it got to the point where for three years in a row, I did over a million dollars in revenue. It since dropped down to about $600,000, $700,000 in revenue. But again, it’s still a pretty good business.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, just spending two minutes on this. You get defective equipment. So, they ship it to you?

Adam Craig

Yes.

Pancham Gupta

Okay. Then you get them fixed?

Adam Craig

Yeah, so I get the equipment—anything from broken liquidation pallets to eBay online auctions, to just marketing through my website that we buy back, used electronics. Then I have worked out. I would guess you would call it a bulk repair fee with a couple of repair techs around the country. I send everything to them. They send it back, and I essentially middleman it, and sell it on Amazon and a little bit of my website. But Amazon is about 90% of my sales.

Pancham Gupta

Oh, wow. Cool. That’s awesome. You still have it. That’s an amazing part. So, do you have help that helps you with that, or you do it yourself, all of it?

Adam Craig

It’s been all me with some part time help for mostly my family. My mom, for a few years, needed some part time work. She helped out with it. My wife has been a big help. But for the most part, it’s been all me. Not too many businesses you can do a million in revenue with just yourself, but that’s the joy of online sales in 2022.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. Good for you. You had this thing going, right? What happened? Why did you pivot to real estate?

Adam Craig

So, it didn’t take long at all. I realized I was going to be able to pay off my student loans. I’d be putting some money in the bank. But the fear of having to go to a 9 to 5 really kicked my real estate passion into gear. Nothing against the 9 to 5. Plenty of people do it. Plenty of people are happy with it, but I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. After I got a taste of it after college, I said this thing is great. But there’s so many outside factors that can cause it to go down. Amazon can restrict third-party sellers, which they’ve done in certain respects. So, I knew I had to find an outlet that was going to enable me to stay. I guess, you would call it financially free. I knew real estate was it.

Even before I started investing in real estate in 2013, I had thought about it during college. Part of that came from 10 years caddying at a couple of different country clubs as a young kid. I saw a lot of doctors. I saw a lot of business owners. I saw a lot of attorneys. But once in a while, I came across real estate guys, developers, things of that sort. I went to school. I wouldn’t say I excelled in school, and I didn’t want to go to school for a lot more time after I graduated. So, the doctor, the attorney thing did not appeal to me. But real estate, there’s no schooling in that. I knew it was pretty lucrative. Everyone always says real estate is there forever. It’s true. A lot of businesses and jobs come and go, but real estate really is there forever. So, that was my kick in the butt to say, “Hey, I got to get something else going so I can stay self-employed through the rest of my life.”

Pancham Gupta

Wow. What year was that when you made that decision?

Adam Craig

It was probably in college when I decided I wanted to be a real estate investor, but I thought I was going to do it very passively. I thought maybe I would accumulate a property here, property there in over 30 years. I’d have a handful of properties and a nice retirement. So, it wasn’t until about two years after I bought my first property that I said this is what I want to do. I went full blown into it.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. So, this is very interesting that you had your online business in college. Then you also decided in college that you want to go into real estate. Really, the two years after graduation, you bought your first property, right? That’s what you said.

Adam Craig

Right. Yeah, I had money to do it. I was putting a bunch of money away. But without documented income, you can’t really buy real estate. So, I just sat on the sidelines, really anxious, and educated myself as much as I could. Then I made my first purchase in 2013 on a single-family home.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. Awesome. Since then, tell us where you’re at now. What’s your niche within real estate?

Adam Craig

So, the first couple of years, I was self-financing and going broke fast, buying maybe one or two properties per year, doing carpet and paint style rehabs. I would say minimal cash flow. Then year number three, I came across what’s famously known as the BRRRR strategy. Back in 2014, I don’t even know if it was called that. It was more of a concept than it is now. But I essentially tried it on a really disaster style home. It worked out really well.

After that, I did nothing but the BRRRR method going forward. For anyone that doesn’t know, that’s the buy, rehab, rent, and refinance. That just really accelerated things. I went from using my own money to finding a hard money lender, doing a couple of deals a year to doing 8 to 12 deals a year. Most of those, my goal was to rent them out, but I did throw in some flips. A lot of that was because I had to. Over leveraging and things like that did happen early on. So, I’ve done roughly 70 deals since 2013.

In 2019, I purchased my first commercial building, a little bit by accident. Just real quick on that story. I had my first child in 2018. Prior to that, I had been working at home. Home office was great. You can’t beat it. But then you have kids, and the home office is not quite as appealing as it once was. I got a dog annoying me. I got the kids crying. Not productive at all. So, in my hopes to go find a little office, that I can get out of the house and rent, I found a building that was for sale in my neighborhood, in a great downtown area. I bought the building. I’m actually sitting in this building right now. I occupy about 700 square feet. I lease out about 4,000 square feet. They worked out so well. I did another and another. Finally, I realized what everyone said—that single family rentals are great, but commercial real estate can really get you to where you want to go a lot faster. So, I’m strictly a commercial real estate investor at this point.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. That’s pretty awesome. That building that you bought— actually before we get there, you had these 70 homes. You were doing BRRRR strategy, and it was going great. You wanted an office, so you accidentally— not really accidentally but you had a need. You bought this, and that’s how you got into commercial real estate. Right?

Adam Craig

Yeah, I didn’t own 70 properties. I had done more than 70 deals, but I only had a portfolio of about 38 single families before I bought my first commercial. Yeah, that’s exactly it. I stumbled into a building that was for sale when I was looking for offices for lease.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. At the time when you bought it, when you were looking at it, was it the entire 4,000 square feet occupied, or was it all vacant? Was it half occupied? What was the state?

Adam Craig

So, it was completely vacant. An attorney who owned the building had purchased it in the 80’s. He rehabbed it in the 80’s and hadn’t done a thing almost since 1984. So, it was in pretty rough shape. It wasn’t so rough. A lot of the single-family homes that I was buying, they were a major overhaul. It was mostly cosmetic updating. I purchased it for $275,000. I put about $50,000 to $60,000 into it, and then it appraised for $450,000. So, I paid back. At the time, I was still using my hard money lender to finance that deal along with a little bit of seller financing. I have since, I guess you could say, graduated to private lending. So, I have private investors instead of hard money lenders where I’m paying significantly less of the monthly interest rate. So, that’s made things a lot easier. The hard money lender got me into where I’m at. It’s hard to do bigger deals at 15% interest.

Pancham Gupta

So, you had this vacant. You rehabbed it. It got appraised at 400 some dollars, right? Did you go for appraisal after you had it rented, or do you went after it was still vacant?

Adam Craig

After I fixed it up, we leased it out. Shortly, after we started leasing, COVID started. So, I was nervous going into this purchase. I was very nervous after that happened. But after about three months of I would consider the real nervousness of COVID, businesses started, given picking up the phone and trickling in. So, I was able to fill the building during, what would I say, the height of COVID. But I did put a lot of stipulations and concessions into the leases that, hey, if COVID gets worse, if you can’t open for business, you’d have to be out. I wanted to get the building full. I was willing to make a lot of concessions in order to do that. Luckily, the tenants that occupied it at that time, their businesses succeeded, or they were already in a business that was succeeding. Most of them are still here. Again, I was very nervous about finding tenants for that building. But when I realized that there were businesses everywhere looking for space, that gave me the confidence to buy more retail and office buildings.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. So many great lessons there. It’s very easy to put the towel down and just give in and not do it, given at the height of COVID, to do retail. What kind of tenants did you find during that time? I’m curious. How did you divide that 4,000 square feet? I know 700, you took. The remaining 3,300 square feet, how did you divide that?

Adam Craig

It’s a pretty chopped up building. It’s actually an 1854 historic home that was converted into an office building. So, we have history on the building of civil war events being operated on by doctors. So, it had a lot of cool, little backstory to it. On this building, we did a pretty nice rehab. It’s right at the edge of a downtown area so it warranted a pretty nice design. It attracted a lot of tenants. Strangely enough, they’re all female tenants. That must say something about the design that we did. We have a chiropractor. We have a couple of attorneys. We have a financial advisor, and then we have a wellness business in the lower level. All those have been here since 2019 when we leased the building.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. Pretty awesome. Going back, coming from this residential real estate side that you were in and now you got this because you were there, how did you decide on the leases and tenants you want to put in? Was it like, I’m just gonna put this out and see who shows up, and then figure out the leases with them just like you did with residential real estate? Was it any different, or did you hire help to write leases for you?

Adam Craig

There was a lot of trial and error. I didn’t really have a mentor in the space or anything like that. Aside from a little bit of help from my attorney to review some contracts, we were just winging it. We’ve tightened things up in four years since that first purchase. But it was a lot of, again, trial and error.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. Really awesome. How did you decide on those rents in the first? It’s per square feet as opposed to when you go to rent a house, you can also call that as per square feet. But really, whether it’s a three-bedroom or a four-bedroom, or two bath, three bath, all that. Here, how did you decide on the rents?

Adam Craig

I just did my best to look at the market. I called around a few places. I saw what they were going for. With this building, especially, I would say most of my buildings that I buy, which are typically 100% vacant, I’m pretty anxious to get them filled and get my private investors paid back. So, I will sometimes go a little bit below the going rate in the market. But also, I offer a lot of concessions—one or two months free, flexible leases. I don’t require a three- or five-year lease. We have buildings next to some of our buildings that have had ‘for lease’ signs in their windows for years sometimes. People think I’m crazy buying in these areas, because you see a lot of these vacancies. But the only thing I can think of is that a property manager with an inflexible owner is not willing to rehab the space or not willing to give any concessions on the leases, and the property just sits. But me, as the owner, I’m hungry to get these things leased up. So, I’m very flexible on the lease terms, and I am willing to go a little bit below market, especially on a vacant building. After we have a full building, and I have one occupancy, one vacant unit, maybe a little tighter on my criteria. But with a full vacant building, I’m loose.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. There are so many lessons there. Get it filled up, and then worry about it. So, that’s awesome. Now you’ve done that, how long after that you bought your second commercial building?

Adam Craig

It was about a year after that. COVID was still in its heyday. Luckily, for me, there were a lot of buildings on sale. I knew COVID probably had an end date. I knew people were going to go back to work. Everyone was doomed and gloom about office space. I just didn’t believe that office space was going to disappear. So, I picked up a building about a year after that purchase. That was about twice the size, another completely vacant building. I got it at a great deal. It’s 600 square feet. I picked it up at $165,000. You can consider it as a C plus, B minus market, which tends to be my specialty. I don’t go in a lot of A markets. I find the cash flow and the returns are better than the middle markets, at least for my current strategy.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. So, you pick that up. Again, how much did you put in if you don’t mind sharing the numbers?

Adam Craig

This one was a $165,000 purchase. It was probably about $150,000 rehab, but we had it appraised for I think $610,000 at 14 months after that. So, it was a nice cash out refinance. It just solidified what I had been reading and learning and listening to about commercial real estate, in terms of being able to do these monster cash out refinance and kept going from there. The building that we did shortly after that was a 22,000 square foot mini strip plaza. It had KeyBank as an anchor tenant—which I’m sad to say, after 22 years at that building, they did leave us this past year. But again, that was a terrific deal. We purchased it during COVID. We’ve seen some good deals recently. But the deals that we saw during COVID, you can’t beat them.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. KeyBank. That must be a big space. Are you able to fill that up?

Adam Craig

The, I guess, good thing about them leaving is they’re actually going to pay us our lease fee. Essentially, they told us they were leaving this past spring, but they’re going to pay us through the spring of next year to honor their commitment. So, they’re paying such an inflated lease rate that we’re not going to be trying to fill the space until the end of their lease— essentially, until they stop paying. So, we are pretty marketing that for availability next year. So far, not a lot of bites from banks or anything, but we’re going to get that income from KeyBank until the last day.

Pancham Gupta

Wow. That’s a good thing about those. But that’s also the sad thing about those. When they leave, it’s very, very hard, especially with the anchor tenants, right? That’s one thing with these malls. Was it something you knew going in, or is it something that was a surprise to you?

Adam Craig

This building, again, it was about 22,000 square feet. It had a vacant restaurant that went out of business during COVID. Then it had KeyBank and two other businesses in there. Then the rest of the 50% of the building was vacant or needed rehab. So, we did not know at the time that KeyBank was leaving. We didn’t learn that until about nine months after we purchased the property. They were consolidating with the nearby branch. So, yeah, that was a big blow. But in those nine months, we had added approximately $7,000 to $9,000 in rents from the space that we rehabbed. So, we’re about 85% full on that building. Our hope is to be close to 100% by the time we stop getting that money from KeyBank. So, yes, it isn’t great that KeyBank left, but it’s still an outstanding building if you just look on the number. It was a $350,000 purchase. Again, about a $200,000 rehab. We had it appraised at $900,000. That’s with 85% occupancy. So, if this thing was 100% full, we’d be right around $1.2 million.

Pancham Gupta

Did you tell that to KeyBank?

Adam Craig

I thought about negotiating with them, but then I soon realized that the lease is a very minor expense for a bank. There’s a lot of reasons they decided to leave.

Pancham Gupta

Of course, yeah. Okay. Cool, man. Well, this is awesome. So, now you’re fully only doing these commercial buildings. Are you fully focused only in Cleveland?

Adam Craig

Right now, I’m trying to do an hour less drive. I’m not sticking to just office retail. I’ve looked at industrial. I’ve looked at a lot of asset classes. I actually thought I would be buying apartment buildings early in my career. I thought maybe I’d do 100 single family homes, and then I’d be buying big apartment buildings. But with red sky high, the valuations on these apartment buildings are also sky high. I don’t typically buy anything that is not a big value-added component. So, I’m just going for some of the less popular asset classes, which tend to have a lot less competition.

Pancham Gupta

Cool, man. This is awesome. Anything you would like to mention before we move on to the second part of the show?

Adam Craig

No, other than I have nothing against single families. I think a lot of people could do single families their entire life and do really well at it. I had a lot of social media following on my Instagram that really loved my single-family stuff. Then when I started posting a lot of the boring office retail stuff, you don’t get as many likes. So, I still try to educate a lot of my followers on the single-family side because I still think that’s a terrific asset, especially if you’re getting started.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, I know. I think this is see everything, whatever works for people. Single family, the reason you’re getting—and this was my guess. You were getting so many likes there. It’s because people can relate to it. They live in one of the houses, and they can relate—bathroom and all that. Office building, you have a desk and a room. What more you can show? So, we’re cool, man. Thanks so much. We will be back after this short message.

(break)

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(interview)

Pancham Gupta

Adam, let’s move on to the second part of the show, which I call Taking the Leap Round. I ask these four questions to every guest on my show. My first question for you is, when was the first time you invested outside of Wall Street? Was it that single family home?

Adam Craig

I actually invested a small amount of money into a friend of mine’s carpet business. It was just strictly a loan that worked out okay. But that would be the first small investment I did outside of Wall Street.

Pancham Gupta

Was it when you were in college?

Adam Craig

It was certainly after college, yeah. Within a year after graduating.

Pancham Gupta

Did you have any fears that you had to overcome when you invested in that?

Adam Craig

If he wasn’t such a good friend of mine, and I didn’t see exactly what was going on behind the curtain, I may have. But no, I felt pretty good about it. He was a guy who really had his stuff together. He just didn’t have his credit together. So, I tried to fill that void.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. My third question for you is, can you share with us one investment that did not go as expected?

Adam Craig

Yeah, so about 2016, I purchased a house. We worked on this house for the better part of 10 months, when it should have been a three-month rehab. It was a combination of inferior workers. One of the worst things we did was, the house was about 2,500 square feet covered in velvet wallpaper. The wallpaper, normally, we rip it down and paint it, or skim over it. Well, this was in really bad shape. So, we ripped all the wallpaper down. We were skimming walls for the better part of two months. I don’t even know want to know how much money we spent just to try to get the walls clean and neat. But the lesson I learned there is, if walls are in that bad condition, start over with new drywall. That was just one component to why this deal was really bad.

Another thing was the property was next to a very ugly property. So, we had a beautiful, shiny property. But when it went time to sell, no one wanted to be next to this property. So, I lost money on the deal. It was a ton of work. We didn’t lose a lot of money. But when you work on something for 10 months, and you lose $5,000, it hurts.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, I know. It’s not just the money. It’s the time. But the good part is you learn from all these things that happened to you. My last question for you is, what is one piece of advice would you give to people who are thinking of investing in Main Street that is outside of Wall Street?

Adam Craig

I would say try to educate yourself. A lot of people— even when I tried to raise private money, I think people understand what I’m doing. But really, people have no idea what I’m doing. So, I have to try to remember that when I go and try to explain this is what I’m doing. This is what we’re going to use the money for. Once they understand it, they feel a lot better about it. So, I think there’s a lot of people with cash on the sidelines that are just too afraid to invest in things they don’t know.

Wall Street has been historically where you put your money, stuck it into the 401K. You’ll have it when you retire, but there’s a lot of other ways to make money in 2022. So, I am not against Wall Street. I think putting money in a 401K and into Wall Street is great, but it’s still good to be diversified and put some money into other asset classes as well.

Pancham Gupta

Great. Well, thank you, Adam, for your time here. How can listeners connect with you if they want to find out more on what you’re doing?

Adam Craig

Social media, I am on Instagram. It’s @adamtheinvestor. They can also go on my website which is CLEinvest.com. All my contact details are in there.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. Thank you, Adam, for your time here today.

Adam Craig

Thank you. I had a great time.

Pancham Gupta

Thanks for tuning in today. If you have questions, do not hesitate to reach out to me at p@thegoldcollarinvestor.com. That’s P—as in Paul—@the gold collar investor.com This is Pancham signing off. Until next time. Take care.

(outro)

Thank you for listening to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. If you love what you’ve heard and you want more of Pancham Gupta, visit us at www.thegoldcollarinvestor.com and follow us on Facebook @thegoldcollarinvestor. The information on this podcast are opinions. As always, please consult your own financial team before investing.