GI96: Florida Commercial Real Estate in 2021 with Eric Odum

GI96: Florida Commercial Real Estate in 2021 with Eric Odum

Eric Odum is a commercial broker located in Tampa Florida and focuses on the acquisition and management of many different asset classes including; retail, office, land and industrial.

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Announcer:
Welcome to the Global Investors Podcast, a show that focuses on helping foreign investors enter the lucrative US real estate market. Host, Charles Carillo, combined decades of real estate investing experience with a professional background in international banking to interview experts in all areas of US real estate investing. Now here’s your host, Charles Carillo.

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host Charles Carillo. Today we have Eric Odum. Eric is a commercial broker located in Tampa Florida and focuses on the acquisition and management of many different asset classes including; retail, office, land and industrial. So, thank you so much for being on the show, Eric.

Eric:
Hey Charles, thanks for having me.

Charles:
So, What was your background prior to starting and running your current brokerage?

Eric:
I was a commercial real estate lender with a bank with a local bank and ended up getting scuffed up by Bank of America. And in between there, I was, I went to graduate school and then also ran a import business for awhile. And ended up back in commercial real estate is kind of where my, my roots are. My family was in real estate. So probably where I feel most comfortable.

Charles:
That’s awesome that you have the lending background too, that much really must really assist your clients when you’re working with them to purchase properties.

Eric:
Yeah, I mean the Linden games changed a bit, obviously. You know, I think the prime rate was seven or 8% with banking, so time to change quite a bit. Right. I mean, things are considerably different now than they were then in terms of the environment, but yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s some understanding how to underwrite a credit that hasn’t changed. It’s still the same. And I certainly can sort of separate the wheat from the shape on the, on the, on the lending side for short.

Charles:
So can you give us a little background on your firm, Florida ROI, what services you guys offer and an asset class that you guys focus on and geographic areas within Florida?

Eric:
Yeah, we’re based in Tampa and handle the greater Tampa Bay region all the way to Orlando, depending on asset class size. We mostly focus on the retail market, but we also have we also do industrial and office as well. Not so much. Multi-Family you know, residential, stuff’s a different animal. Not that we haven’t transacted multifamily. We, we have, we have done a lot of multi-family. It’s just not something we, we focus on. It’s sort of a different animal. But most of your, your other commercial related assets, we, we deal in and from a management standpoint of sort of that sweet spot for us is the five to 50,000 square foot retail neighborhood center. That’s sort of our, that’s sort of our bread and butter. Okay.

Charles:
So what is the state of commercial real estate right now for retail and office in, in greater Tampa, throughout Florida and has demand started picking up since COVID?

Eric:
Well, we’ll start with industrial because I think that’s the asset class that probably has undergone the most changes over the past decade. We’re seeing a phenomenal move from retail into industrial because of the internet. Amazon started that the people think about Amazon. It’s not all just Amazon. We have janitorial supply companies who sell online. We have you know, there’s I’m looking right now for, we’ve got an assignment with a company that manufacturers windows and doors, and they’re, they’re looking for of space and they sell online. They also distribute through home Depot, whatnot. So the Internet’s made a big change and it’s consolidate a lot of what’s happening in retail. Industrial is something I’ve never seen before if the market’s completely on fire. And this is across all asset classes, that sizes and, and product type for example, there’s a waiting list right now. We have clients that are, would traditionally be your construction you know tradesmen, your carpenters, your plumbers those guys want 2000 square feet. They can park trucks, maybe park a vehicle overnight and put tools. And there’s just no product available for them. It’s hotter than a pistol is not going to change. Zoning does not change fast enough planning and zoning inside of these valleys. Don’t change fast enough. They have not handled this change very well. They do not handle changes quickly. So there’s a lot of what would be considered a commercial general, which is more of your retail and office space that needs to be converted frankly, into industrial, because there’s not enough dirt to go around to, to, to fill those industrial spaces. And we’re having to do zoning changes to force some of those hands on some of those, but the comprehensive plan doesn’t allow it. Then it’s, it’s hard. It’s hard to do anything about it, but there’s a big backlog there. That’s really all. You need to know. The on the retail side, it’s interesting. Retail and office probably has two of the biggest misconceptions that are out there. We talked to people all the time to go you’re in retail. You must be doing terrible. No, that’s a big, big misconception. People see international mall. They think that’s retail. That’s a fraction of the retail market. The biggest by square footage, ports are the retail market is your neighborhood center. That’s your Publix anchored center, your wa your whole foods anchored center. Those things aren’t going anywhere and it’s not going to change. People say, well, there’s all kinds of Vegas that is nonsense. Drive them down. Any of the roads that the main thoroughfares in any of your major cities. And if you’ve had an a, if you’ve got to thrive in grocery store, there’s th those centers are filled and there’s, there’s a fight for space. So I think people have to be careful when they’re saying all retail is bad. It’s not, or saying retail is bad. There are sectors of the retail market that are under extreme duress. And that’s your covered mall. Anything that can be replaced by the internet is under duress, but your drug stores, your, your, your your, your anchor, you know, you’re like, we’ve got a center. That’s a, it’s got a large national restaurant chain in it. And they did really well during the they’re in COVID. But everybody’s still in there. Everybody’s still happy. We’re not all the delinquency has dried up. We’re not, we’re not really seeing any historical change from the norm on the, on the retail side in terms of delinquency. But yeah, the covered malls are in bad shape. The big box stock is a big, bad shape, but they’re reinventing themselves the targets and the beds, you know, bed, bath, and beyond, and the and the best buys they’re there. They’re changing. They’re downsizing, their footprint. They’re splitting their boxes. People still want to go and look at electronics for the buyers. They’re just adjusting and times are adjusting. And it’s a retail is not a problem, except for the covered mall. The office space is a different animal. And again, we have the same people off as no one’s going back into the office. That’s nonsense. We, we talk every day with C-level execs and their planning about what to do next, how to plan next. You cannot build a company culture with zoom. I’m going to say that again. You cannot build a company culture with Zhou. And that’s what I hear repeatedly from people that are making decisions. This is just not something that pumps somebody read in Newsweek or the, or the wall street journal. This is what’s happening in the street. And most C-level execs want to get their employees back in the office as soon as possible. Now, will there be a change in how they work? Yes. We believe that we believe that that there’s going to be because they’ve seen people be able to go home and beeper and some not all have been productive, and some people are good workers just to be left alone. Others. What they’ve seen is that the social fabric of the company of the organization is very important to that productivity of that employee. And they’re trying to shake that out now. They’re trying to figure out how, what, they’re, what it’s gonna look like. Do I think the need to take a bigger footprint or lesser footprint? Yes, I do. I think that there are they going to, are they going to try to downsize? Are they going to not expand as much as they were in terms of for sports-based? Yes. I believe that too, but officer’s not going away. Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s nonsense. You know, we’re w we have right now in Hillsborough County, we have a very high level of sublease space in other words, space coming back on the market, but that’s going to evaporate fairly quickly just from my conversations that I’m having with people they’re not giving up their office space. They’re just rethinking how they’re going to use it. Does that make sense?

Charles:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I totally agree with that. I’m located in St. Pete. So Tampa Bay as well area, and right behind our place, there is a anchor public center with probably 15 other retail storefronts, and maybe two have left since COVID or two are vacant right now and small ones, right? Like insurance agency and something else, but that might’ve gone online, but it’s funny that you say that about the offices. I was talking to a developer last week out of San Jose. So Silicon Valley, and he was telling me that the week that Jack Dorsey came out in the beginning of COVID from Twitter and saying that now everybody from Twitter can work at home for like the rest of their life or whatever. He said they got an LOI to, from Twitter to lease their whole building that they had just finished developing. So it goes to show you that it’s, it’s people that are listening, you know, it’s people that are listening to what they listened to. You know, they’re listened to multifamily and someone’s pushing them this way, or they’re listening to self storage and Hey, this is why everything else is not the asset class to go. But it’s just very interesting when you hear that, because whenever I talk to actual retail office investors, they’re buying more I’m actually talking to one of my family members is from one of those large retail centers, high, higher up. And he says that they’re not looking to buy locations. That, so it’s, it’s completely opposite of what you would think from obviously listening to the news, which is, which is no surprise, I guess. Yeah.

Eric:
I mean, people listening to the news, they read the paper, they’re getting some cursory, the press LOBs you know, controversy. And so, you know, the next big commercial real estate is the office markets get employed luck in New York city. That’s not Florida, you’re a city. How are they getting people to come back in, in into the main city? I think eventually it’s going to change because at the end of the day, I keep telling my people, am I in our investors that will, that, that we manage properties for at the end of the day, people are going to be people. And if you’re going to bet against them needing human interaction, you are going to lose period. Yeah. And so what we’re seeing, and this is the type of things that are, we’ll see if that materializes or not, but the conversations that are being had a lot of folks that are saying, not sure I’m comfortable going back into an elevator. My people are uncomfortable going into elevator. Again, the fact that we got locked out during COVID was a very uncomfortable situation, and we’re not sure we want that environment again, but we know we need to have the interaction with our, with our peers, with our, the folks inside of our company. So what about the suburb offices? Let me tell you what the suburb offices have been dead. Forget about. COVID, they’ve been dead for a while because everybody wants to come back into social environments, into large areas, like look at St. Pete downtown. That’s where everybody wants to be, but it’s exploding. And there’s a reason for that because people crave human interaction, but you’re, there’s this debate going on? Are we going to go back into a high rise building? To what extent are we going to do that? Maybe we look at the suburbs. And so we’re, there’s a lot of those conversations that are going on. I think at the end of the day, they’re going to come back right to downtown St. Pete, come back to Manhattan. They’re going to come back for all the reasons that they were there before. They just might not have known the reason for that. And it really is about social interaction. And it’s about their employees, like being in the middle of something and feeling like they’re part of something. I think you get that you definitely don’t get that on a zoom meeting. And I’m not sure you get that in a suburban office park. So they might experience a little bit of a short-term Renaissance. And maybe some people that stick there. I don’t know. We just got to wait to see how it shakes out, but the office Mark’s not dead. Don’t listen to people tell you that.

Charles:
What do you think for the next 12 to 24 months that’s coming through with retail and office

Eric:
Retail? All, I mean, let’s forget about retail because it’s nothing has changed in retail with COVID. The only difference is that COVID has accelerated that move towards towards the internet. So anybody who’s in a big box is going to be continued to have pressure on there. But look, man, that was happening before COVID Tori was already doing these smaller footprint stores, bed, a bed bath, and beyond best buy and grab a list of them. They already had a plan for how to deal with the internet. There grew, they’re growing the internet exposure. They’re decreasing their footprint, that there’s nothing in retail. That’s unusual right now, other than restaurants in restaurants is interesting. Piece of, of of retail restaurants you’re closed. Again, all this did was expedite the process, all those 80 concepts, seventies concept restaurants were really kind of first-generation restaurants because understand that most people ate at home in 1955, where they ate at a cafe. And so we have this exposure, this explosion from McDonald’s to fast food, you know, all the subways. And then that kind of emerged into your white tea, your white tablecloth, your white tablecloths got crushed, they got crushed. And it also, your, your seventies and eighties brands are tired and they were going out of business before COVID too, you know, and you know, Bennigan’s is an example of that, but they’re all everybody’s going the way of Bennigan’s TGI Fridays. Everybody’s going that those older concepts, they run their course and then they have to, they have to evolve, but COVID is expedited that. So I think it would have seen a feeding frenzy on the retail side with the, with the next generation of restaurant. And it’s going to be interesting to see what happens there, because there’s going to be some vacancies on the restaurant side, and there’s going to be some opportunity for investors. There’s opportunity for new operators. There’s going to be opportunity that’s happening now, we’re in the middle of it. We’re trying to do a lot of prospecting right now to get it, you know, get to networking with the restaurant operators. And also the owners of these folks who might’ve owned a steak and shake for 30 years. And it basically been clipping a coupon on their returns. But they’re in their late seventies and eighties now. And they’re, they’re like, okay, well, we got notification that steak and shakes not opening again. And they’re going to, they’re not going to renew the lease. And so we have to figure out what we’re gonna do. It’s going to be a major rework on the building, but these locations were first-generation. So they’re terrific locations. They’re going to be an opportunity for the investors to come in and say, okay, we’ll get a carve this up because we don’t need a 4,200 square foot footprint anymore. What we need is, is to split this into two pieces, and then we’re going to have a small white tablecloth and a Jimmy John’s next to it or whatever it’s going to be. And some other retailers, but it’s, it’s, it’s going to take somebody with some vision to come in there and take over some of these 80 concepts, which eighties and seventies concepts, which tend to be a much bigger footprint then, then then what people are asking for now. So there’s opportunities there on the, on the restaurant side, but it’s going to be a really, you asked for 12 to 24 months, I think that’s, what’s going to be happening most in the retail side, the restaurant’s going to be up. There’s going to be a lot. You’re going to see increase in turnover. A lot of new faces coming in as a COVID sort of starts to wind down and, and folks coming in and we’re seeing it now, seeing folks coming into Florida and banging on doors and seeing what, what can we get? What can we do? You know, we’re trying to expand our, our, our, our brand and, you know, we wanna, we want to add locations. So yeah, that’s, what’s going to happen in retail, also office space, we talked about.

Charles:
Yeah. So on you, you gave one example there of like, I guess it was a triple net lease individual site, like a steak and shake those being repurposed. What other opportunities for investors are out there for repurposing? Like for example, I used to see a lot of investors that go warehouse space. They make it in the self storage, it was repurposed, whole different thing. Especially up in the Northeast where you had a lot of vacant factory space, where, what are you seeing now where investors are coming in and getting creative and repurposing and making things work again that maybe, like you said, the mall under the roof not working anymore.

Eric:
Well, I think a lot of it’s already shaken out on the retail side. The big boxes have downsized or laughed and, and, you know, there were some re-purposing there and you saw some self stores come in and take over some of those churches or other sorts of things they’ve been doing, trying to repurpose. So I can talk to you about where the demand is to industrial. And if there’s some way you can figure out to rezone, what are these sort of borderline zones between, you know, heavy retail and light commercial, and you can figure out how to convert that there there’s, there are so many, there’s such a massive demand for warehouse space of all sorts. Yeah. But the biggest pressure of course, is in the smaller sizes. That’s two to 4,000 square foot space that would house a, you know, a plumber, a handyman a drywall company, plumbing company, et cetera. There’s nothing available in that 5,000. There’s just nothing. It’s hard. And so those were the opportunities. If you can figure out how to turn that if you can figure out how to turn to your Rubik’s cube to make it work, there’s tremendous opportunity there. Tremendous.

Charles:
Yeah. The other thing too, with an industrial that I’ve seen as huge and I was reading and I was talking to some people about it, and they were saying that industrial in Florida is obviously there’s so much demand for it, but especially specific parts of industrial, like cold storage, which is another thing that just feeds on the whole thing from which was accelerated by COVID with food being delivered and everything else. And so there’s so many different facets within industrial that pure using as well is someone that needs a part, two trucks or three trucks or four trucks. The only other place they’d have to go, it’d be self storage, and it would cost them a ton of money to do that. Whereas they could actually buy industrial park their stuff inside of it, which is amazing. I’ve never even looked into that. That’s a very interesting,

Eric:
Charles are most of your listeners in Florida, they all over the country, the world

Charles:
They’re all that we’ve got about a 60% in in the us and 40% abroad. And I would say the largest portion is in Florida in the United States.

Eric:
I, the reason I asked that I asked that is, and I, I tell anybody listens, this is the best time and the best place to be in real estate in the world, along the I four I four corridor, which is there’s, some people call it the the [inaudible] triangle. And so, so let’s, let’s call it a triangle a little bit bigger footprint, but for Jacksonville to Tampa, to Orlando, that area really Jacksonville to Tampa to let’s say, Daytona beach, new Samona area. And that’s why every major institutional players in this market, because they understand this is where the growth is. COVID is expedited. That situation. If people, people are complaining right now, the residential side that, that housing prices have increased. You haven’t seen anything yet. It’s going to get a lot worse. And so whether you’re owning multi-family or you’re owning single family, residential, or you’re owning you know you know, 15 unit small space or industrial space for a tradesman, it doesn’t matter. There’s going to be tremendous pressure over the next five years, COVID expedited all those folks in New York that were maybe they’re 60. And they’re like, well, I wait to move to Florida. They’re not waiting right now. They’re like, I’m not going to get stuck here again. And I w I need a place to go to, and we were going to retire at 40 anyway. So let’s go ahead and just go ahead and acquire. Now, you’re going to see an acceleration of asset prices worse than it is now. I said this before Fort Kogan, and I got hate mail for some of my listeners. They’re like, you’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m like, yeah, I do. You, whenever you get stimulus and you listen, anybody who thinks that you have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger have you heard of Dunning-Kruger before?

Charles:
Yeah, I’ve read, I’ve read about it before I haven’t I haven’t looked in. Yeah.

Eric:
So I’m kind of stepping over the line a little bit here. Gave you a little Dunning Kruger, Dunning Kruger, or there were two researchers that basically said the more confidence that you have in your position and your knowledge, the probably the least accurate you are. So what are your people pounding the table and say, Oh, I’m right. I’m right. And usually they’re wrong. But I was right here. I mean, it’s like the blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. This happens to bid mod, one of mine. It’s you know, it’s, it’s, it’s when you have stimulus, you have people already people moving to Florida that freight train has been running down tracks, and he put a super turbocharger on it. We live in a single family environment in Florida, and people can have, COVID all they want. We’re going to get infected because it go out, be quarantine, walk around their lawn, put it outside, get their little waiting pool out, fill it up with water and sit out in the sun and get their vitamin D and, and, and never be affected by this type of situation ever again. And so you’ve got an acceleration, you have $1.9 trillion of stimulus, more stimulus going on. That was before that. And we’re seeing the results of that. And it’s, it’s the next 12 to 24 months in the state of Florida. I don’t know where it’s going to add it. Usually he sends things, ends up bubbles, right? Usually ended up in an acceleration pricing, goes parabolic, and then people get stupid. All of a sudden you’re you know, your, your housekeeper starts speculating on flipping houses. And the next thing you know, they’re at someone’s home, the music stops and somebody left standing. Usually a lot of people left standing. So that’s probably where it ends, but it’s not going to be that situation for the next 12 to 24 months. I’d say that right now. Yeah. It’s saying that it’s saying that since the first stimulus.

Charles:
Yeah. It’s amazing. There’s so much money coming into it. We have one asset in Tampa and we have three brokers, pretty much knocking down our door for a 60 unit property that we have there and paying almost given us offers of almost twice of what we purchased it for. And it’s, it’s completely nuts. Well, that aside that’s awesome. Yeah. That’s great. That are you seeing anything else with, in regards to like when you, you guys do a lot of, do you guys work with land and development, anything like that? Where are people going to? Are they going out more or are they trying to, I mean, where are people starting to work in commercial developments outside of Tampa? Is it a

Eric:
Yeah, I mean, you know, look, you’re seeing th th th the previous governor basically turned up growth management, the Turk tour, the growth management act, and made it much easier. We’re seeing the results of that. I’m not sure that’s good. We, you know, we went back to what we did in 1980, which was growing before the infrastructure was in place. And I know developers love it, but I’m not sure it’s good for us. That’s what, it’s good for. The people who actually live here, you end up getting stuck in traffic. What’s in South Bay right now in Tampa. You know, it’s going to take an hour and a half to, to drive 30, 30 miles to work. And you cannot build roads fast enough to keep pace with what’s going on. And, and so, but that is what’s going on. They’re going out further again, we had rain that in to some degree and try to build more, more density inside of our urban cores in Florida and waited for that, that transit component to the infrastructure component to catch up. And of course that was all, it was all trashed. So we’re, we’re, we’re basically off to the races again. And I don’t, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing for the people here, but I mean, it is good for builders and it’s good for construction and is good for people, people that have a need for housing big beginning. So,

Charles:
Yeah. So what mistakes do you commonly see newer and experienced real estate investors make?

Eric:
You know, I’ll talk about my asset classes, because what we’ll see frequently are people dabbling from the residential side in the commercial side, and they are night and day different. And they’ll see an office complex and plant city for the folks that don’t know plan cities now suburb of Tampa, really, but it’s its own little town, but not a hotbed of office activity. And they’ll see that property. And it’s 20, 30% lower than, than construction costs to, you know, replacement cost to build it. They think that must be, it must be mismanaged, no people playing city don’t go to an office anymore. They’re not going to the opposite plain city except for your doctors. And and even then we’ve had major shifts in medical office that used to be that was Obamacare killed that Obamacare killed the investor market in the, in the, in the in the medical, in the medical market. So people will see those two, lots of doctor’s office doctor live in here. No, they won’t. That ended with a barbecue that, that, that parade is over. You’ve got some, you know, a handful of doctors, the market’s much smaller. It’s much, much smaller than it used to be because doctors because of the bureaucracy on the medical side of the business are forced into the BayCare into the, into the large institutional handlers to be able to process their work. So what you’re seeing is more specialty doctors, your concierge doctors you know, you’re seeing you know, maybe somebody’s podiatrist that doesn’t offer something else that’s sort of outside of the [inaudible] they’re th they’re they’re still, but not in the numbers they used to be. So we see people acquiring those, those assets thinking, well, look how cheap it is. It’s cheaper reason. And that’s what I see people making their forays into. They just don’t understand the levers of what’s happening with these individual asset classes and assume because they’re buying a cheap that all of a sudden, they’re going to be able to make money out of it. They’ll be able to turn it around. That’s not the case. These see these see asset classes that are office you know retail, they’re tough spaces, they’re tough spaces. And you better, you better make sure you are peeling back the onion before you make an investment in those why they’re not, they’re not performing.

Charles:
Yeah. The concierge doctor thing is huge. I had one of my old doctors. I was a part of their practice that was or a patient of the practice that went to it and it just simplifies their going from several hundred clients to a hundred. And they’re cutting down office space and all this kind of stuff that goes with it to make it a more, and you just pay a flat fee as one of the patients for an more more specialized, I guess, a more personal service. But so of my last question here before wrapping up, which I always like to talk to commercial brokers. So if an investor reached out to your brokerage, interested in investing in properties, what could they do to show you that there were a serious investor that you would warrant?

Eric:
Wow, that’s an interesting question. We know we, we look, I mean, literally every day we get investor calls and I mean, I apologize to you in advance if I’ve not returned your phone call. But it’s just, it’s the reality situation we can only handle we can handle. And somebody who’s inexperienced, you might get a polite call back, but there’s not going to be, it’s not going to be a lot of seriousness taken. If you’re, if it’s an, it was a new investor, they have to have. What I want to hear from them is that they have their financing. They know what they want, they know why they want it. And there has to be a business purpose behind why they’re doing what they’re doing, because if we’re having to educate them on the asset class, we’ll go bankrupt doing that. There’s too many people out there looking, I wish there were something better. We started our PA our podcast, the invest four to show for that reason to try to say, Hey, we’ve got somebody like you listen to this, and we’ll kind of educate you a little bit. And then if you’re still interested, there are your focus and come back and talk to us. It keeps those conversations short. The challenge is that commercials, big boy game. And th th th the, the nice asset classes you’re well, North of a million dollars, you don’t have the advantage of the debt markets that you have on the other residential side, because the debt markets are much tighter. It requires much more equity down. And so folks that are just sort of like thinking about migrating from multi-family over, or from single family over there are so many hurdles for them to overcome that it’s usually not worth. We know what’s going to happen 19 out of 20 times, that person’s gonna, they’re gonna, we’re gonna spend an hour or two with them, and then they’ll disappear. So we don’t entertain those folks. I mean, it’s, it’s a sort of, one of those things. They have to have their ducks in a row. They have to know what they want, why they want some sort of business plan in their financing law. If that’s the case that we might we’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk to them. And then there’s an opportunity, but it’s just, it’s a very steep learning curve. It’s a steep equity curve. You have to have a lot more equity. You’ve got to, you know, come in, ready to play that game. And and you have to, and the bank situation is completely different completely. There was usually, you know, hometown banks or God forbid, bank of America that you’re having to deal with. And you gotta, you know, you, you have to have, you have to have that letter from them that you’re ready to go, and they are there and they bought your business plan, right. There’s no point in talking to us really.

Charles:
Yeah, it’s really, they got to have that relationship with local bank or with the local credit union. And obviously that you know, that there’s a lot more money and then a lot more money that they’re gonna have to put down. Like you said, a lot more equity, that’s gonna have to take bigger down payments for better assets. There’s gonna be even more compressed of a cap rate. So the returns aren’t going to look as sexy, I guess it was back in residential. So, yeah, and whole different management. And the other thing too is I’ve had, I have some mixed use properties and I got financing all from local banks. And it’s a much different animal renting out a commercial unit than it is, I guess I was just joke. I can rent out like a, you know, small complex, a residential complex over the weekend, right. But with commercial, for good commercial tenants that are actually going to be there for the five years or whatever it was that is not an easy thing to come along, come, come and find. And I don’t think people understand that when you’re going into it. And when I’m always looking at mixed use properties, you always have the commercial sometimes up North always be vacant, and then it’d be a hundred percent occupied in the residential. And because a lot of older landlords, mom and pops don’t even want to deal with the commercial. So it’s it’s awesome. Okay. So how can our listeners learn more about you and your company?

Eric:
Yeah. I, first of all, I would start with our, with our, with our podcast. I mean, we’re a little different that we’ve had to show up, I think seven or eight years. I don’t remember if I lose track of time, but we cover the state of Florida. And although it’s good for antibody, I don’t care. You can get ideas from our show, even if you’re at Michigan or Washington or United Kingdom, it doesn’t matter. You get ideas from us, but we cover specific markets in Florida. So if you’re interested in investing in the, in the state of Florida all of our, all of our guests, we’ll talk about the asset class and the areas around the state that they’re investing in and why. And so I think really that’s the best place to start is the invest Florida show.com and that you can kind of get a flavor for what we’re about. If you want to talk about the, the commercial real estate side, and you’re already, you know, you’re, you’re already ready to like, make a decision or you want to talk to us about one of your properties or an investment strategy. We’re at ROI, real dot state, that’s www dot ROI, real data state, no.com and just ROI real estate. And you can contact us through there and we can help you. We’ve got, no, I think we’re up to about seven or eight agents now. And and we can help you pretty much in every asset class. I don’t want to say Sans multi-family because we still do some multifamily. We’re just not, we don’t have anybody concentrating in it. And the the market that we were engaged in was a feeding frenzy from 2012, as you know, from 2012 to like 2017 all that pent up demand of potential sales from 2008 to 2012 before the credit markets loosened up. So we still do saw maybe one or two a year, but it’s not, it’s not a focus of ours anymore.

Charles:
Okay. Yeah. Definitely check out their show. It’s very good. Eric and his co-host Steven, they kind of go through all the different guests and then they give a little summary of it afterwards. So I will put the link to both the show and then Eric’s brokerage in the show notes. So thank you so much for coming on Eric.

Eric:
Hey Charles. Great talking again, brother. Good luck to you, man.

Charles:
Thank you to you too. Have a great rest of your day.

Eric:
I’ve got to take it easy.

Charles:
Bye-Bye

Charles:
Hi guys! It’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in get involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me at schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.

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About Eric Odum

Holding a BSBA in Finance from University of Florida and a Master of International Business (MIBS) from University of South Carolina, Eric W. Odum, a Sarasota native, serves as the Managing Broker for ROI Commercial Property Brokerage. Eric began his commercial real estate career in banking as a lender for First Florida Bank, in Tampa. He focuses on acquisition and management of retail and office properties, but has experience across the major asset sectors.

His experience in development ranges across numerous retail projects, including freestanding Starbucks locations and retail strip centers around the State and country. He enjoys giving back to his community, as he served as the Founding President of the Gasparilla International Film Festival and has participated on other artistic boards, such as the Gasparilla Music Festival. Additionally, he served on the board of the Downtown Tampa CRA, a position appointed by Tampa City Council. He currently co-hosts the Invest Florida Real Estate Show, www.investfloridashow.com . Eric is conversant in both Spanish and Portuguese, allowing him to form lasting relationships with diverse clientele.

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