Commercial real estate - Growing up, growing out

Commercial real estate is the soundest, most secure method for investing monies within the American free economic system. To an investor, his properties can yield significant income benefits, appreciation and tax shelters.

Overall, commercial real estate professionals have been pleased with Central New York’s economy and its impact on real estate properties over the past decade.

In the thriving commercial real estate world, one finds an arena for sophisticated businesspeople, who, if they’ve mastered the game, can make “big bucks”. It’s a business that promotes tremendous competition, excitement and energy. Commercial real estate, like all industries, has a jargon all its own, yet the terms all lead to one basic action.

Typically, investors include brokers, developers, syndicates, limited partners, speculators and out-of-town investors. Reasons for investing in commercial real estate are as diversified as the people who do the investing. But the basic attraction of real estate investing is an assumption that property represents a long-term, sound investment.

Commercial real estate development occurs because you have other things going on within the city to create a demand, particularly other businesses filtering into the area. There is a proliferation of office development due to a growing service sector. Manufacturing space is static, and retail is like the tail wagging the dog. Retail will do well if the economy is doing well. It seems as though industry is booming in office, warehouse and industrial properties.

Mary Clare Codd, partner with the John Lynch Company, Salina Meadows, doesn’t view the move of city tenants to the suburbs as being extremely worrisome. “What I think we’re seeing in many instances are suburban businesses expanding within the suburbs to create more office capacity,” reported Codd. “For example, General Motors recently moved from an 8,000 square foot facility to a 13,000 square foot building within the same area.

A major trend of the 90s has been the rehabilitation of downtown buildings and districts. Every building downtown has turned over at least once if not twice.

Fortunately, for most investors, the real estate market has been a solid vehicle. The 1996 tax law, however, put a damper on some investment transactions as tax shelters were stripped away from non-residential real estate properties. The 1996 tax law really made a dinosaur out of tax shelters. That’s why it’s important that real estate deals today must make economic sense. Investors now look for cash returns on their investments as tax shelters have become basically obsolete.
Over the past nine years, real estate professionals have been cutting small pieces out of the same size pie. Their greatest concern has been that real estate seems to keep shifting buyers and sellers from the city to the suburbs, and yet not enough new business has been generated to warrant these changes. Part of the shifting is due to small investors buying their own business properties. Why rent out space when you could conceivably purchase property and make a profit at the same time?

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