Andrew Lofredo has nearly three decades of commercial real estate experience as a broker, property manager, attorney, and asset manager.
Andrew is currently CEO of CRE Vertical Advisors, which provides real estate asset management, property management, and advisory services to direct investments and select third parties, concentrating on retail, industrial, and office properties in the New York Tri-State Region.
Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast . I’M your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Andrew Lofredo. He has nearly three decades of commercial real estate experience as a broker, property manager, attorney, and asset manager . Andrew is currently CEO of CRE Vertical Advisors, which provide s real estate asset management, property management , and advisory services to direct investments and select third parties, concentrating on retail, industrial, and office properties in the New York Tri – State Region. Thank you so much for being on the show!
Andrew:
Great. Thank you for having me. So
Charles:
Please tell us a little bit about yourself, both personally and professionally, because everybody has a different story. But you you’ve been in here for three plus decades or so. Everything’s starting from, I belief, like as a real estate agent, an attorney, all the way to what you’re doing now. So if you can just let us know kind of how you made your way to your current role here at CRE Virtual advisors.
Andrew:
Sure. So, you know, it’s, it’s been like you mentioned, a good three decades. I don’t always like saying that, but it’s been, it’s been good three decades. I, my career has always centered on, on real estate, you know, even as, and I don’t come from a real estate family or anything along those lines, but even as a teenager, I saw real estate as a very merit-based industry. And that’s really why I made the decision to go in there. And I excluded from the, from the three decades, but I actually was briefly a residential broker while I was in college. But that, that really wasn’t for me. You know, as you mentioned, I’ve had a number of roles within the industry, right? So it’s, it’s really started off doing tenant rep brokerage in, in office space in Westchester and actually southern Connecticut.
Andrew:
So in the Fairfield and in the Greenwich area. It really just kind of snowballed from there. You know, I then became a property manager. I worked for a small firm, which was actually a great introduction into the real estate world. Started off as a, as you know, doing the, the tenant rep work, but then they ended up acquiring a building. And since there was only a handful of us at the company, I ended up taking on property management and really, you know, realized how important operations were. And that kind of fit into my type of personality, what I like to do, and really the kind of snowball ahead a little bit. You know, I ended up just taking over property management while I was doing that. I went to law school in the evenings. Again, really all, never with the intention of going to partnership track and just becoming a, you know a lawyer you know, full-time practicing lawyer at a, at a, at a firm.
Andrew:
I really wanted to be a better real estate person. You know, I came from a blue collar background, didn’t really have much of that, you know, white collar knowledge. And I was trying to decide between an MBA and the, and the law degree. And I liked what the lawyers were doing. After law school, I actually practiced law as in-house counsel for CBRE for a number of years. But then as I mentioned, I transitioned back into the asset services role and, you know, took over about 9 million square feet of office properties in the city that were under my portfolio and really kind of built from there. So that was an exciting time in the sense of really just handling soup to nuts. You know, we worked with investment sales, we worked with brokers. And then, you know, moving on from there, and I’ll try, I’ll, I won’t go through every detail because like I said, it’s been 30 years, but what the, what really led me to CRE to create CRE radical advisors was, you know, while I was at CBRE, I’d worked with some, what I would call, you know, family owners and more entrepreneurial owners.
Andrew:
And I ultimately ended up leaving CBRE in oh nine. So right after the oh eight issues that we all dealt with. And then subsequently ended up joining a family owned, a large family owned investment company. And what they wanted from me was to bring, bring together the institutional quality management and operations, but to be able to function in an entrepreneurial and fluid environment, which is not an easy undertaking <laugh> by any means. So, you know, I ultimately ended up taking on their property management division, growing that into more of a SVP of operations role where kind of rebuilt the department, putting in policies and procedures but again, remaining flexible in the entrepreneurial environment. And I had some subsequent roles like that you know, as the head of asset management for another family owned company. And as I’m doing this, you know, I realize the importance of the value add or kind of bringing those procedures, we’re staying flexible, right?
Andrew:
And then working with the nuanced needs of family owned companies. And speed ahead a little bit. You know, I originally formed CRE Vertical Advisors in 2019 with the plan of providing asset management and advisory services to family office and, and private investors. But then Covid start came right, <laugh>. So I ended up joining a family office directly as their CEO and general counsel got them through covid, they were large retail owner. And then subsequently discussed my firm with them and my ambitions and how I feel I could provide better services to them. And they ultimately ended up becoming the first client of CRE vertical advisors. And we’ve been growing since.
Charles:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. So it sounds like the majority of your primary clientele, you’re providing a much more, almost like a holistic approach, I guess you would say, to advisory services because I think when people hear property management, I do, it’s, it’s pretty much just like boots on the ground, you know, collecting rent, stuff like this. And when I’m preparation for this episode, I really like kind of drilled down to see what you guys were really doing. And I found out that a large part of what you’re doing, your portfolio was really on the advisory services consulting and really even out to fractional COO services. So are these pretty much these asset management advisory services, are they usually utilized by family offices? Is that really the main, kinda your main clientele for these services that you provide? I mean,
Andrew:
Yes. We, we, I definitely design the firm for that type of clientele for family offices or maybe, you know, that’s always a, a little bit of a vague definition, right? Of what exactly constitutes a family office. Some are very clear, some it’s questionable. But really for that type of client, the family office, the high net worth family and some, you know, high network private investors. And the reason I kind of designed this firm with that, with that in mind is again, understanding the flexibility that they need. And I don’t mean this in a bad way, but the handholding that they may need, which is different than, you know, I’ve had just large institutional clients and they, they, they were great in the past, but they might not need kind of the handholding and the really granular work. So, you know, as you mentioned, yes, property management is an important part of what we do.
Andrew:
You know, we do have those boots on the ground and it’s very needed to add value. But I think what differentiates us is the advisory and the asset management work where we essentially step into their shoes. You know, we, that, that’s how I like to operate. Like we have a seat at the table, we’re there to help them develop their strategy. Because the objectives aren’t always clear. That’s one of my first questions to clients. And, you know, not only, not only new clients, definitely the new clients, but even my existing clients to see if their objectives change over time, right? So we look at those objectives, and as advisors and consultants, we then work with them to define that objective and then build a strategy and then execute. But at gra and, you know, across the board at, at every level of the, of ownership.
Charles:
That’s great. How does working with a private investor or family office that’s say created their wealth differ from one that’s inherited, that maybe it’s a second generation that had a connection with that founder, or maybe it’s third generation that really doesn’t have never worked with the person that generated the wealth, right.
Andrew:
You know, it’s, it’s debt. There’s definitely differences, right? And you know, there is, I don’t know the exact stat, but there is kind of that, that understanding that after three or four generations, a lot of times the wealth is gone by that, by that point. Part of, part of what I’m here is to help them keep that wealth, right? You know, when you’re working with the founders there, there’s obviously the historical knowledge of what it took to create that wealth, right? So it’s a little bit more, we would, we work with those types of clients more almost as partners. Like we’re here to help them execute the, the strategy component might be more set in stone. You know, they, they’ve, ’cause they’ve built that strategy, they have kind of the knowledge and the interest and frankly, in certain respects, they knew what it was like before they had the wealth.
Andrew:
Whereas when you have subsequent generations, and this isn’t necessarily a negative thing, it’s just a different mindset. They’ve always had that wealth. So, you know, it’s a different type of understanding, you know. And what I also find is, you know, let’s say for speaking families, let’s say it was, you know, two siblings that started a business or something along those lines. In the beginning it was two siblings. Now you get down to the third generation, it could be 15 people, you know. So now the wealth is spread out, it’s a little bit unclear as to who should be in control. So as you get further along from the founders, the actual dynamics and the management of the family group starts to take on a different life of its own. And in some respects, that’s whereas like an advisor comes in can actually add value because the family can set up a board. But you can have an advisor that comes in and executes.
Charles:
Interesting, interesting. Do you, do you prefer handling both property management and asset management on the properties you work on? Or is it easier to just take one role
Andrew:
Or,
Charles:
I mean, I guess depends on how easy it is to work with the owners or kind of how many people you have to answer to.
Andrew:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, you know, the preference preference is certainly for us to do both. You know, again, because of the way we’re designed, we are very holistic. You know, as you had initially mentioned, where we do in terms of executing the strategy, being able to have that high level view, but then also the boots on the ground execution really puts us in the most control, right? In, in terms of controlling the controllables. That’s something where, you know, we can handle it throughout our team, right? And the communication just naturally the communication’s better when we’re handling everything. We do have clients that we only provide asset management on. And we also have clients that we, you know, we, we only provide property management on. So we are flexible and we will work with that. But ide, you know, the ideal scenario is that we you know, that we’re handling both, but we have systems and procedures in place. You know, there are some, you know, good quality property managers that we, you know, that we oversee, you know, we work with some syndicators, you know, as part of our kind of expansion. You know, we provide asset management to some syndicators as well. And in some, some of those scenarios we may not, may or may not handle the property management, and we just help supervise the managers.
Charles:
Oh, yeah, that’s a, that’s a great I saw that as one of your services you provide. That’s, that’s a very unique service that I don’t really see too many firms really offer. I mean, it’s it’s definitely, definitely a, a, a niche because you’ll have a lot of syndicators that want to handle their operations and do the asset management, but also if they’re in a area that they might, they shouldn’t really be buying property there, but if they’re, you know, or maybe they take over a deal that wasn’t a portfolio and one of ’em is, you know, farther out here, and that’s where they might bring you in there. You know what I mean? They don’t really know exactly the best of how to handle that.
Andrew:
Yeah, and, and part of the reason that where we came up with that service was, you know, I’ve kind of obsessed over setting up our, our infrastructure here. You know, and just thinking about our procedures and our systems and, you know, I’ve come across just any industry, right? You know, it’s come, come across a couple of syndicators who have access to capital and they’re acquisitions people, right? So they like doing the deals. But like I like to say sometimes is, you know, a some of the value we add is in the, maybe the less sexier side of the business in terms of the operations. So we, that’s, that’s how that kind of came about is we spent the time to build the infrastructure. We have the team in place, we have the accounting, you know, we have the, the property management software and all of that good stuff. So it puts us in a good position to actually partner with a syndicator where they can focus on their core strengths but then rely on us to, to execute. So we have a number of clients that we, you know, try to provide those services for.
Charles:
Yeah, that made perfect sense because within syndicator circles, usually they’re talking about deals and cash. There’s not as much talking about execution, which is extremely important. And the majority of the business. Yeah, right.
Andrew:
You have to do something with the building after you buy it, right? Right. And so that’s kind of where we come in and kind of help execute that.
Charles:
We’ve worked a few times with family offices and I’m kind of all blown away a little bit sometimes when I speak to them about how simple, but how much makes sense with the systems that they have in place. And what are some main differences? You’ve seen, you’ve worked directly for some, you now have a number of them as clients. What are some of the differences you see between high net worth individuals, like family office investors and normal retail investors other than just their bank
Andrew:
Accounts? Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, that’s definitely a part of it, but I, I think, you know, it, it’s, some of it is the complexity that gets involved with their ownership. You know, when you have a family office as an example, you know, I’ll, so I’ll just give you an example. You know, if, if as a regular retail investor, you might just join as an LP in something, right? And a lot of times you’re gonna have it in your own name maybe an LLC, you know, when you dealing with family offices, you’ll have trusts, you’ll have LLCs, you’ll have different beneficiaries. Maybe one family is the, is the trustee of something else, and it gets complex. And, you know, one of the benefits that I have, you know, as being an attorney is and first of all, I don’t provide, do, do not provide legal services to any of my clients.
Andrew:
I kind of keep that separate. But we have the knowledge base, and it allows me to kind of speak the language of some, of, some of the attorneys is, you know, understanding their org chart and their ownership structure, and then taking into consideration things such as estate planning and taxes. Do we work with estate lawyers we work with, with their tax consultants and frequently you know, I like to joke, but it’s very, it’s true, is I know more about their ownership structure than they do right? So, you know, we have to, it just, it’s, there’s a certain level of complexity beyond just investing in the deal. You know, and, you know, there is also an expectation of that things will be taken care of, <laugh>, you know, so having an advisor come in and kind of take care of that, but that’s really one of the biggest differences is it’s not just the investment. It’s not just putting regardless of the size of the check. It’s not just putting money into something as an lp. It’s, what’s the ramifications of that? What’s the tax consequences? How does it fit the estate plan? You know, there, so there’s a number of things that need to be juggled. No,
Speaker 3:
That’s on, that’s not great information. One thing with your, you know, with building out a team, because since this has, you have many different, let’s say almost divisions, levels of your company, and, you know, a normal property management company might just have, you know, you have the, and when I see like local, single office property managers, management companies that have worked with before, you know, there’s like the head person, there’s a couple there, admin people, and then there’s people that go on the ground, you know what I mean, type stuff,
Andrew:
Right?
Charles:
You’re adding like a whole nother thing with advisory. I mean, how do you effectively like build a team when you manage property and advise on a level of almost like a COO for some of these properties and some of your clients? You know? And it,
Andrew:
It’s hard. I mean, just I think every business realizes it’s hard to attract and retain talent. But I mean, a number of things that we’ve done is, one, is really try to think of the positions that we’re creating. So, you know, for example, I have somebody on my team who I haven’t seen this title and I’m not like, you know, the one to make up titles, you know, just throw the word ninja in front of it and make it sound cool. But, you know, I have someone on my team that is an account and systems manager,
Andrew:
And the, it’s the systems that are important. So, you know, one of her roles is to continually make sure our operations are functioning, kind of cross the part, you know, a across multiple departments, right? Because if there’s one, you know, the transparency and the communication is critical for us. So just make kind of constantly watching those feedback loops to make sure we’re, we’re working well, just internally as a team. You know, I had seen, I forget which what I was either reading or listening to, but one of the, one of the comments which really hit home was that service businesses are also recruitment businesses. Because you have to really kind of constantly look at your team, how you’re recruiting, it’s our talent that, that helps execute this. One of the things that we did as part of this, you know, like you said with the advisory and kind of the COO service was I looked, I asked our, I asked the question to myself and the team is where, where can our services really be outstanding, right?
Andrew:
Because what can, what can we deliver at a true if r if r the, the, the, you know, the baseline that we’re setting for ourselves, our standards, if it’s really to be outstanding, where can we accomplish that? And then look at some of the things where, where is it kind of just more commodity like services, right? Not to bore folks, but you know, your, your, your listeners will understand like, you know, property management, things like COIs and paying bills and all those, those types of processes. You know, we’ve looked at where we can automate and outsource some of those services. So we’re, our team is focusing on the real experience based thing, the decision making, the execution so that I’m not bogging down my team with things that could be automated or possibly outsourced. And I think that’s been a way to kind of help us grow and focus our, our services as opposed to driving ourselves crazy with, with everything.
Charles:
That makes sense. One thing you mentioned there was on transparency, how important it was for your clients to see this. And I see this if you’re doing property management and asset management, and one example I have, when we were working with a family office to get, to get distributions out to our past investors, we had to submit this request, right? And it like multiple pl to sign off. I mean, it was a, it was a project. It was like, you know what I mean? And, and that’s obviously, you know, they have all these checks in place to make sure that it’s not fraudulent and that there’s money to pay taxes and everything else before we start, you know, sending out money to people makes perfect sense. What, what do you see like this normally with you know, what are they looking for? Like how in depth, I guess is a transparency that when they’re reviewing it how much control do they have I guess, over the checkbook when they’re doing this? And this must be, if it’s anything similar to what we’ve done before. I mean, it’s pretty intensive and it’s something that’s complete follow up because they just, they’re not in a rush to, to sign off. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Andrew:
I mean, one thing is, and it takes time, but you know, I I, I’d say that, you know, again, talking to my staff, talking to these about recruitment is obviously we we’re here to provide real estate services, but I tell people, you know, what we sell is peace of mind. And that’s kind of critical, right? Because these families and high net worth people that we wanna work with, that we need to show them, first of all, that we have checks and balances in place. Now, luckily, you know, because of the nature of what we do although I have plenty of checks and balances in place, like I’m off in a signatory on the accounts, so, you know, it takes a lot of trust. I provide you know, again, and I’ll, I’ll answer this in a moment, but transparency into the system.
Andrew:
But by them giving me a certain amount of signing authority, I’m able to kind of execute and get things done. And again, because that comes to the granular level of, of where we work, but it really comes down to the availability of information. And I do find, frankly, that once you make it clear that that information is available, I also tend to notice the review of it actually declines because it just helps to build trust. And like, here it is, you got, you know, our value, and I, I, I tell people this all the time, our value doesn’t come from keeping hoarding information. It comes from executing and the, the, the, you know, our experience and the actual execution and developing the strategy, not because we know, you know all the secrets and, and we keep it from everybody. So we really try to just share information with our clients, let them know where they are. And if they tell me, you know what, after a while, they don’t need to know all those details. And they, they trust that we got it fine, we got it, but it’s, it’s ready to go you know, at the snap of a finger. Because that’s how we try to keep our, our information and a number of our clients, we have dashboards that they can access anytime. But frankly, like I said, after a while you notice the logins decrease because they trust that the information’s there. Yeah,
Charles:
That makes, that makes perfect sense. It’s always that when I’m working with new property managers, you kind of like start off with, oh, here’s kind of, here’s the number of the threshold, and then it goes from here. And then after you work with them for years, it’s like they’re calling you and telling you, well, this was fixed, this was fixed, this was all stuff fresh. Yeah. And you’re like, that’s perfectly fine. Right? And then there’s certain things too, like you, you don’t, there’s hot water heaters out or HVAC system, like get all this stuff there. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, we’re not waiting, you don’t need me to tell you to provide normal services to
Andrew:
Well, that’s the thing. I mean, you’re there to do that, right? So if you have to go to them for everything, then they start the question, well, why do I have you? Yeah, if I, if I’m doing all of this. So there’s a little bit of that balance, but it takes time.
Charles:
So we normally talk about residential property management or residential owning property, multi-family on the show. Myself being a multi-family investor since 2006 and self-managing properties for years, I couldn’t find out that it was a lot of tenant, you know, you’re dealing with a lot. Property management was really you know, repair, oversight and dealing with tenants and constantly leasing. Now, how does this differ? Like where do you, can you explain a little bit about when you’re getting into single tenant properties, multi-tenant, retail shopping centers, how does your time and where you focus with these properties differ? From what I just explained? That’s probably a typical day in the life of a residential property manager. I mean,
Andrew:
It’s, it’s kind of one of those things where there’s, there’s certainly similarities, right? You have tenants and you have maintenance. It’s just the structure is different. So, you know, at, at the property mat, on the boots on the ground level you know, it’s, it’s tenant relations is critical. Now, the, the, the relations are different. You know, you’re not dealing with somebody in their home. You know, you’re, you’re also dealing with sometimes the tenant’s emotions are, are not quite as crazy as they can be in the multifamily <laugh> in the, in the residential world, because you’re not dealing only somebody in their home. But it’s a compliance, right? Generally we are responsible for maintaining the roof, the structure of the common areas, the parking lot or what have you. But the tenant relations come into play. You know, a prudent property manager needs to make sure, although the tenant is responsible for the interior of their premises, right, is we have to make sure that they’re actually following that maintenance, right?
Andrew:
Because we may get that space back. So, you know, are they maintaining their air conditioning, they, their rooftop air conditioning unit, if it’s a restaurant, are they keeping their grease traps clean? So it’s kind of just watching over that. There’s definitely the monetary aspects of it, the, the, you know, rent collection. I mean that that’s going to come, you know, across with everything. The leases and the lease structures are certainly more complicated. They, they’re longer term there’s going to be escalations built in there. And on the retail and industrial properties, most of ’em are gonna be triple net. So you really have to kind of watch the expenses. You have to do more complicated common area maintenance reconciliations or tax reconciliations and explain that to the tenants and kind of handle that. So it’s a, the lease structures are certainly different and just require a bit more work.
Andrew:
And then, you know, there’s also the vendor, there’s still, we always have to deal with vendors and vendor maintenance and management. And then, you know, capital capital projects, we also have to look into things, you know, synergies matter in certain areas like, you know, with retail, right? We want to, the tenant mix is critical. So it’s just a somewhat different strategy in terms of, it’s not just leasing and turning leasing over, it’s, you’re dealing with, you know, tenant exclusives. You’re trying to find complimentary uses. So you have to take a lot of that into consideration. Now, some of what I’m explaining gets a little bit more on the asset management side, I would say, as opposed to property management. But you’re looking at the property as a business and you need to take into consideration the types of tenants that you have. And again, the longer term leases means maybe a different type of underwriting when you’re looking at leasing a space to a tenant that’s signing for five or 10 years and is, and it’s still very hard to get out of for some reason they fail.
Charles:
No, that’s a lot of great information. I’ve, I’ve found that before when myself not coming from this commercial real estate retail type background, but if you go to really you know, zero vacancy type plazas and stuff like that, and you can see how they’ve strategically that are really busy, right? So it’s like you can see this mix of how they’ve structured their tenants, which is something that I don’t see, I would never think of anything residential, you know what I mean? Like this is just like, but you see like, oh, this is a restaurant, this is this, this is that, this is, and like everything works together where you have people going into multiple different businesses. And this is like how the whole thing has been structured, but it’s a lot. They, you know, people just kind of pass by, but it’s also how you strategically have set everything up for yourself and for success of your tenants. Yeah.
Andrew:
And you know, the other thing, again, this might be more asset management, but they’re setting that up and then, you know, because we’re dealing with longer term leases, we also look into things like you know, the, the lease rollover. Like we try to stagger our leases because you don’t want to have a center again, unlike residential where you’re gonna have shorter term leases. We don’t wanna sign five, you know, it’s, let’s say whatever, it’s a six unit shopping center. You don’t wanna have five of those leases all expire in the same year, right? That’s gonna make, that’s gonna make obtaining a loan difficult. You’re putting yourself at significant risk. So when there’s just a different type of strategy you need to focus on, maybe stagger some of the deals so that you’re not facing a large vacancy at, at one time, because, you know, the lease, the, the absorption time from when a tenant moves out till you get a new tenant in is going to just be longer, naturally, you know, to get the lease done, construction, permitting, all of that stuff. So you need to take into consideration kind of that downtime and, and spread it out a little bit.
Charles:
Yeah, my dad had a partner that was a large commercial investor down in New Haven in Connecticut. And he would tell me, he said, you know, ’cause my dad was only in multifamily and he would tell me that it’s, you know, commercial when it’s all rented, it’s, it’s great, right? Everything’s going right. But it gets very expensive when it gets, when it’s vacant, you know what I mean? And it’s like you said, it takes many months to find that right tenant hopefully not years compared to residential where, you know, lease up with some flags and stuff and <laugh> sure. You’re
Andrew:
Probably great. Well,
Charles:
I got
Andrew:
Somebody ready to go in the next day. Yeah, true,
Charles:
True. So one, one thing before we wrap up here is, I just had a question between, maybe between kind of circling back to the high net worth individuals, the retail investors, how do they change really? Do you see differences in their debt structures or their kind of timeline for investing? Where I know for syndicators our thing is like three to five years, or we’ll say five to seven years, really, which really isn’t that long for real estate. I mean, this is a long-term investment. How do you see it differ with maybe your wealthier clients when they’re buying properties?
Andrew:
That’s a very good question. ’cause There’s certainly a difference. You know, with, with the family office side, there tends to be, and this might be slight difference between a real family office and high net worth investor, family office side, they tend to think generational, right? So we’re not buying properties to flip. We’re basically buying them for long-term holds. And you know, that and generally passing on to the next generation. Now, having said that I have certainly when I bring clients on, will evaluate their portfolio and if something makes sense to sell because it’s no longer kind of fitting, it’s not a great generational thing, they’ll certainly sell it and then move the money into something else. But the, the hold periods do tend to be longer. And that changes the strategy, right? Because we’re not looking to flip immediately with, there can be somewhat more patient money, right?
Andrew:
A lot of times the, I mean, it depends on the family. A lot of them do, you know, some family members might be living off of, you know, the, these distributions. So it’s analyzed more on a cash, on cash basis or just a distribution basis as opposed to an IRR, you know, based on a sale three years from now. So it’s kind of, the metrics are different, but it also provides different strategies. You know, just a quick example with this higher interest rate market that we were in, I had to do a number of refis only, only because the loans matured. You know, if I could have waited, I, I would have, but we were able to do swap swap structures on those. They tend to have a higher you know, prepayment penalty, for lack of a better word, when you do a swap deals.
Andrew:
But we knew we were holding these, you know, we, so it gave us the flexibility to basically lock in a rate a significantly lower rate because we knew our strategy was to hold and, you know, to stick with it that way, some of our higher net worth clients may look a little bit more for like the shorter hold periods where they’re just now to put their money into the next, into the next deal. So that certainly does, does vary. And you know, our syndicators, again, we’re structured to work with them, but our syndicators are more along those lines, kind of what you talked about of anywhere from three to seven years
Charles:
Holds. Yeah. An older investor told me years back, he’s like, if you buy property cash flows, you know, pardon buildings, and you can keep it from 10 years, I guess it goes for any property type, that’s where you’re gonna make money. The problem is when people, when you disrupt that, you know what I mean? And you gotta sell ’em three years or seven years or whatever it is but if you can keep it 10 years, even if you’re gonna go through some choppy waters, the whole thing is that, you know, get into that decade plus hole, that’s where you really build wealth and real estate, which I’ve, you know, you, you figure out as you’re in this longer that that person was, was right. You know what I mean? That’s, that’s how you make money. Yeah.
Andrew:
And, and you know, I mean, you know, tax strategy start to get a little different if you do eventually unload a property that you’ve held for 20 years, because you probably have a zero basis or a negative basis, but thank, you know, thank goodness. And if it stays, you know, the 10 30 ones, that’s what they’re, that’s what they’re for. And then you, you know, you buy something else and kinda put that into the fold.
Charles:
Andrew, as we’re wrapping up here, I have one more question before we let people know more about your firm. What are some common mistakes I guess, you see commercial real estate investors make over all the years you’ve been doing this?
Andrew:
I think, you know, one, one of the things you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit where just understanding the difference, you know, in, in the type of asset you’re buying, right? You know, a a commercial property, retail office or what have you. But, you know, since we were mentioning retail, sticking with that is the, the, the risk of downtime and kind of the need to be patients and what it takes to to stabilize a property. You know, it’s just, it’s, there’s a certain level of patience that comes into it. There’s a certain level of risk if a tenant goes if a tenant goes out. And just un understanding things like absorption time and costs that go into that, that go into a deal. One of the biggest things I tell, like I said, I I, whether the client’s been around, I’m not pretending like I’m here to educate every client.
Andrew:
Some, you know, they’re very, they’re successful for a reason, but I always use, when I have the conversation with them, I always talk about objectives. What are your objectives? Because I do have, some of my clients will, they might just look to put some money in an LP or something like that, you know, as an LP investor, and they’ll come to me and they say, is this a good deal? And I’ll look at it and say, well, it depends what’s your objective, right? And I think that some, some investors can actually lose sight of that. It’s a little bit more of that fear of missing out thing, but not necessarily understanding, well, what’s the objective? Is it something that’s not going to give you distributions for three or four years, but it’s promising something that is gonna sell and then you’ll, you’ll get a major return, but you have to realize you’re not gonna get any distributions, right? So I think it’s kind of understanding the deal and not just getting excited about some metrics that you’re, that, that you’re seeing, you know? So I think that’s kind of important. Yeah,
Charles:
People comparing the IR between deals and stuff, so which, which happens all the time. Oh no,
Andrew:
Absolutely. But, you know, again, it may be digging deeper into it, I think is, is important. Andrew, how
Charles:
Can our listeners learn more about you and CRE or vertical
Andrew:
Advisors? Well, I think, you know, certainly our website, cre vertical.com is a, is a great place to start. You know, we have some articles up there and we’re looking to do more in terms of trying to provide hopefully some, you know, some valuable information. In terms of social, we’re probably mostly active on LinkedIn, so you can just look me up, Andrew Laredo, you know, my, my name is simply there on, on LinkedIn and we do have a company page on LinkedIn as well. You know, if ke and if people check out the the website and sign up, you know, we are looking to launch YouTube channel, hopefully providing some, you know, valuable educational and hopefully at least somewhat entertaining information <laugh>. So not sure not but we’re looking to launch that as well so they can sign up. And we’ll be sure to let them know once we launch that. Well, Andrew,
Charles:
Thank you so much for coming on today and looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future.
Andrew:
All right, great. Thanks for having me.
Andrew Lofredo has nearly three decades of broad commercial real estate experience, as a real estate broker, property manager, attorney, and asset manager, along with leadership roles in both institutional and entrepreneurial environments.
Andrew is currently CEO of CRE Vertical Advisors, which was founded to provide comprehensive real estate asset management, property management and advisory services to direct investments and select third parties with a concentration in retail, industrial and office properties in the New York Tri-State Region. Previously, he was CEO of MCP Real Estate & Investment Management, a real estate family office; Head of Asset Management for Fortis Property Group, overseeing investor/lender relations, leasing and operations of a commercial portfolio in excess of 6 million square feet in the Northeast US and Texas; Senior Vice President of Operations at Ashkenazy Acquisitions, responsible for running a national retail portfolio, including all operations and construction; in-house counsel and Director of Asset Services in NYC at CBRE, with corporate management responsibilities and oversight of over 9 million square feet of commercial assets in NYC, Westchester and Connecticut.
He currently serves as a Co-Chair of the New York Commercial Real Estate Industry’s Spirit of Hope Event to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Additionally, he has guest lectured on multiple occasions for The Real Estate Associates Program and was an adjunct professor teaching real estate asset management at the Fordham Real Estate Institute’s MSRE program and New York University (NYU).
Are You a Fan? Subscribe, Rate, Review & Share – Click Here To Learn How
What question do you always wish I would ask but I never do?
Connect with the Global Investors Show, Charles Carillo and Harborside Partners:
