212. Jerry Alexander on Owning your Commercial Building

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212. Jerry Alexander on Owning your Commercial Building

00:00:01 Welcome to the everything co-working podcast, where you learn what you need to know about how the world wants to work. And now your host coworking space owner and trend expert, Jamie Russo, Welcome to the everything coworking podcast. This is your host. Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me today. This podcast is for you. This episode is for you.

00:00:37 If you have a coworking space and you've had moments where you've thought, you know what, next time I want to own the building, I want to be in control of the property that my coworking spaces in, or if you're thinking about starting a space, and you're thinking about how to go about investing in this business, how to sign a, lease,

00:00:58 how to raise capital, owning the building, buying the building might be the right step for you. So my guest today is Jerry Alexander. Jerry is a commercial property investor developer and flex space operator. And he has been doing this since 2004. So he knows what's going on. He has seven locations and owns all of the buildings that he operates out of and has a team that runs his operating business.

00:01:26 He's both a commercial property investor and operates his coworking business. He's also a podcast host and he's passionate about mentoring folks who are thinking about investing in commercial property. So his podcast is called commercially commercial property investor and his coworking brand is called Liberty's space. And he is on the east coast of Scotland. And we go through this in our intro. So before we dive in with Jerry,

00:01:54 if you're working on opening a coworking space, then I want you to listen to this episode. I also want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space. If you are working on starting a space, I want to share three decisions that I see successful operators make when they're creating their coworking business.

00:02:15 This masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour, which includes some Q and a. If you'd like to join me, you can register at www dot everything, coworking.com forward slash masterclass. And if you already have a space, I would love to invite you to enroll your community manager in community manager university. It is a training and development platform for community managers to get them started from being brand new.

00:02:43 We call them newly minted to get them to being pros and developing throughout their role into a general manager role. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the community manager role, including community management, operations, marketing, finance leadership. The core content is laid out in a graduated learning path so that your community manager can identify what content is relevant to them and their experiences.

00:03:09 And kind of dive in. We also have resources templates. We host Q and a calls. Every month. We have a slack group and we host live training every single month as well. So the platform is really designed to help your community manager develop their own network of peers, to solve problems faster, get things up and running faster, and also to access the training and resources and templates.

00:03:34 They need to manage the space. We cover things from reusing Facebook ads to getting started with your virtual mail program. To let me think of, oh, SEO. I mean, you name it. We cover it, planning community events, how to be strategic about client planning, events that work for your particular membership. So it's really designed to help your community manager be more successful and get the resources they need to act faster because we know that role is really challenging and there's a lot that goes into being successful in that role.

00:04:06 And we are here to help. So you can check out all the details and enroll in community manager, university at www dot everything, coworking.com forward slash community manager. Okay. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Jerry Alexander. Welcome to our episode today. I have a special guest with me, Jerry Alexander, who is a commercial property investor developer and flex space operator.

00:04:34 He is also a podcast host and mentor for folks that are trying to get into commercial property investing. And his brand is called Liberty space. He's on the east coast of Scotland. Jerry, I don't have many other podcast hosts, maybe one other that I've interviewed that I can think of. And I've never interviewed anyone from Scotland. And I'm so excited for our conversation today.

00:04:58 So thank you for joining Me poorly. I'm looking really forward to thanks to me. Yeah. Yeah. So Jerry, I think I, you reached out to me and then I said, well, let's do a swap. So Jerry's podcast is called the commercial property. Wait, hold on. I've got it. Nope. Tell me what it is.

00:05:16 I haven't looked initial Commercial property investor. You got me going now And we can find it on all the usual places where usual platforms. Yeah. Yeah. I listened to a couple of episodes. I haven't linked up in the show notes already. So Jerry and, and LinkedIn, the podcast I love to get your podcasts is not coworking or flex focused,

00:05:40 but it's part of your background and it's part of your commercial property investor. So it's kind of woven in. Yeah. And, and, you know, I've been listening to your podcast too, and yours is so much more focused of course, on schoolwork. And there's a piece of what we do, but we don't do it anywhere near to the depth that you have.

00:05:58 It's something that we add on to our kind of our general offer. So being able to do a podcast interview with you for our mini series about coworking is fantastic. I'm looking forward to recording that later on and just have a chance to have a conversation here about what we're doing in coworking is good. I love these conversations because the meek, you try and articulate what you're doing.

00:06:20 You have to think about it, don't you. Right. Totally. So I have to tell you I've been to Edinburgh one once it was right before, I think it was in between my two years of business school. And I ended up going by myself on a bus tour, but it was beautiful. We spent a couple of days in Edinburgh and all over Scotland and I can't remember every place we went,

00:06:43 but it was absolutely stunning. I would love to go back at some point and take the family. I don't think my husband's been, my daughter certainly has not. So Yeah, it's a beautiful place. It does rain, but that means everything's green and vibrant and yeah, it's a lovely space. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So tell, let's talk about flex first.

00:07:04 You have seven locations. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about you and your flex story, and then we'll talk about real estate and everything else that you do. Okay, Brilliant. So I like a lot of people who look to get into property in general, I started investing in residential family homes really. And after a few years of doing that,

00:07:26 I started looking around and thinking, how do I find kind of a bigger deal? How do I find something that's got a bit more going on under one roof, instead of buying lots of roofs over here, we didn't, we don't really have multifamily. We tend to just have single units, although it is coming. And I ended up buying a multilayer commercial building.

00:07:46 I didn't know that it was going to be the deal, but that's what I ended up being. Right. And at the time has been running, but run by somebody who had another business. And it was really just a case of somebody agreed. It was a license of sorts. They agreed that contract had the keys we'll see later. So there wasn't really much service.

00:08:06 There was just a space and a key and he's saying and stuff. And then over the years we redeveloped that building. It was just a kind of on the side thing that I was doing. And then when I had it revalued, after we did all this improvements, wow. I realized how much we affected the value of the property. And that's when I realized I need to do this full-time.

00:08:26 So after that, we started investing in more commercial, doing the same thing, redeveloping them. And of course became an operator. Not, not because we set out to become An owner. I was going to say, you just came an operator, but really not. Of course, yeah. How did that happen? What was, Well, I guess that first property,

00:08:44 we, we, we got it, there was about 20 customers in it. You kind of roll your sleeves up. We, we moved our own business in there and we started managing the building as part of our offer, what we will do as some staff. And they would, they would help with the building, running the building. And then as we did it up the,

00:09:02 I guess the, the quality of the space improved, but also the service requirement improved. And we just kind of offer that as part of what we were doing. And it was only when we bought the next building that I realized that actually, you know, at some point you need an exit or at least you can't run everything as a Sage street or something else you're doing,

00:09:22 you need to have these buildings running independently. So then just certain scale, they need a certain quality or type of team to make them operate. And it was really then that I realized I'm not even sure if I realized, I think I just did it anyway. We just put in the team to do that. But as I've grown in the business and realized actually where there is definitely four different pieces here,

00:09:45 there's the investor, there's the developer, the part, you know, the combination, she does all the developments, the operator, and then often there's the advisors, right? And on each one of those pieces take apart of the money equation from real estate. And we've decided to stay really in all four. We, we, we invest in the properties,

00:10:05 we develop them ourselves. We have an operating business. And as, as you mentioned our own, I know, advise others on sort of making that statues from, to commercial. I think I probably, I do have a tendency to take things on when maybe I should be better at seeing new Well, Jerry, the, I think the interesting thing maybe about your personality and I'm curious,

00:10:29 what year, what year was this that you kind of got into even accidentally into the operating business? Well, 2004 is when we bought our first commercial. So 16 years ago. Yeah. So co-working, I mean, executive suites were for sure a thing, but the sort of short term smaller space was still new at the time. And I was thinking about this cause we talk a lot in the states,

00:10:53 at least about management agreements and operators are so interested in management agreements and you might tell them, just buy the building. Right. But, but the, the challenges like landlords are typically, right. Especially if they're sort of professional investors and real estate is what they do, but their mindset is not to have an operating business typically, right. Because their mindset is,

00:11:16 well, I don't want to operate a thing. That's why I'm doing real estate. Right. I don't want this like day to day thing. I want to look at deals and I want to do deals and it's a longer term thing. And I want, maybe I have property managers that manage the building and operate the business. And so it's, you know,

00:11:33 it takes, and of course in a management agreement, you hire an operator to do it, but you know, it takes us a special landlord to even want to consider sort of that, you know, that extra yet you were like, we'll do it all. We're okay. That's a really valid point. I think probably it was just because of the evolution of what we were doing.

00:11:54 So if we were just, you think about it, we're just buying single-family homes, doing them up, refurbishing them, putting in a tenant and trying to refinance. It was a pretty basic model. And I just kind of applied that to commercial. Really. I just thought, well, we'll do it up. We'll increase the rent or refinance. And then when we get the next one,

00:12:12 but the operating side gave us an opportunity to add, I guess, quite a bit more income, but also by owning the property, you have so much more leverage in what you deliver. So for instance, that first building, we still have it, but it is quite different from what it was when we started. And if we had it as a lease,

00:12:37 man, the dilapidations and everything now would be horrendous. But because we own the building, we've been able to tweak, increase the income, which improves the valuation of rails. We've been able to create a product without having to bring a landlord with us or to have the disagreement about pricing and who's investing and everything else. But ultimately, if you want to grow really big scale,

00:12:59 then yeah, you're right. You need the two separate and it may be that you are in charge of one and not the other. But I still believe myself. My main business is not necessarily operating licenses and shipping containers and offices and warehouses and all that sort of stuff. What it actually is, is finding buildings that people don't quite know what to do with secondhand buildings,

00:13:22 redeveloping them into the fit for what current demand is and therefore totally increasing the value of the property. So originally eyelids commercial property and thought, well, it's a passive investment. You buy it for an income that you park your money and I'll make my money somewhere else. And then I'll buy a commercial building park. It have my interest rate, my yield.

00:13:45 But actually when you work out, when I learned about our model about the flex space, it allowed me to re to recognize that when you take on that building, initially, you can get some bums on seats and get some income whilst you then respond to what the market is really looking for developer. And then you've really increased the value. So my main business is actually redevelopment and then leveraging that.

00:14:10 But the operations piece is totally integral to making that actually work. Yeah. So in your typical commercial building, is your flex space sort of one of the tenants or is it typically the entire building? Oh, so our, so we don't, in terms of schoolwork, we have a mix in our different buildings, some buildings we have just offices, some one building we've got just industrial.

00:14:40 Some, we have a mix in our most recent, almost complete building. We have, we developed a court which was divided into different of memberships. So there was some hot desking, there were some fixed desks and some cluster areas, but in the end we actually let that whole space for another company. And based on what our inquiries, where we actually push that apart,

00:15:07 because it was, the offer was quite wide and there wasn't much traction in the middle. There was people wanting to fix desks and there's people wanting low value, short kind of short term memberships. So what we actually did was we developed a cork on the upper floor, which had fixed X and S very small units that were all quite exclusive. The only way you could use that space was having EDI score E-Space you couldn't have a hot desking.

00:15:37 And then we developed a business loan in another part of the building, which is doing really well with members, but all those memberships are, you can only get in between nine to five o'clock it's a part-time or possibly a full-time, but that space might be used for other things. It's much more flexible. And it's one of our kind of bigger breakout spaces,

00:15:56 adding value to everybody else. And when we first started, I thought, well, we'll just develop this schoolwork, but just be in the middle and we'll build all the offices around it. That's nice you, our customers wanted, so we've managed to flex and it's been quite interesting in that journey and would definitely do that on our next building that we're developing just now putting in a business lounge and a separate kind of video for,

00:16:17 for what I would call core. Okay. Interesting. Are they just two separate sort of segments of users? Oh, of users, I guess. So, but you know what it's like that you have people from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of businesses. We haven't really had to niche into any particular area. I'm just curious, What is the difference between the business lounge and the,

00:16:44 and the coworking? So the, the core work is 24 hour access, the price points higher. There's only a fixed number of people and they all have individual space. There's no hot desking in there. So anybody who wants anybody's in there, it feels a little bit more superior as everybody else. Right. And They're on the top floor, they're on the top floor.

00:17:09 Right. I had this space, it was six stories up, Jamie knew lift. So I'm like, how do I make this space work? And By adding a left Yeah. By say that I left. Yeah. Yeah. So originally I was going to put up, try and find our company to put in it. In the end, we developed a,

00:17:28 is this court with fixed desks and around the perimeter, lots of small, almost like cubicles, just small rooms, private booths. And it's the value it's bringing in. There's only one other floor does better than that. Now the business loans is right down on the ground floor and it's kind of part of the entrance and we're adding food and Bev. I was,

00:17:50 I was really interested in a podcast you put out recently. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's like, right, this is interesting. Yep. Yep. And we've also got a restaurant in one of our buildings that, that we run ourselves and yeah. Yeah. I know exactly. I can't say no, I didn't say that. Right. So you put,

00:18:10 it's really interesting. And then how, because a hospitality is really what we do, isn't it in the flex space. So the restaurants taught me a lot and it's also helped me bring some of that culture or trying to bring some of that culture into what we deliver on our, on our workspace, but having food and Bev and that model you were discussing,

00:18:30 I thought it was really quite interesting. I think there's some parts of it that I've learned don't work for sure. But there are some bits there. I think there are, that are going to provide a lot of stickiness for customers to hang around. Yes. I'm curious. And you may do meters. We might have to convert here. How so if I walk into one of your buildings,

00:18:50 is this flex space, the only tenant, or do you have other tenants in the space? Like, is it all yours and operated by us? It's all ours. So for instance, the, the building, I'm talking about the six story building, it's only 13, 14,000 square feet in total. So each floor is two and a half days building And you can make it all flex and kind of right.

00:19:12 But to your point, you, you own the asset. So you have this long-term view on shifting things, right. And if you need to put up some walls or it's not like, oh, well, it's a five-year lease and I don't want to spend more money on this fit out. Right. Your longer term view. And to your point,

00:19:30 you see the equity on the other side, I think it's, it's, I'll have to start listening to your podcasts. There's not a lot. Or do you know, have bigger pockets, podcast, bigger pockets. So it's a really popular podcast. It's probably us focused. They've talked a lot about re residential investing and I always poke it around. Like,

00:19:53 occasionally they'll have something on there that's commercially focused. But to your point, they talk about single family multifamily commercial. They'll talk about like storage. I think that's sort of, you know, but they don't get into actual like sort of commercial or office at all, but it's a great podcast for understanding what you described about the value you can put in a building by making improvements and how,

00:20:20 you know, you have access to that equity. So it's good for sort of the math and the real estate model side, which most coworking space operators don't know much about. Right? Most of them is rent to rent. Isn't it? That's the model. Yeah. Is so huge and wide. And people talk about commercial as though it's a single entity.

00:20:38 It's not the so much diversity, isn't it. But the label woman for me, Jimmy Wright, was I bought the first building. I bought a 10% or ROI at the time. And then we increased the income and all that sort of stuff. And when I had it revalued, we had tripled the net income, which is great. What I hadn't realized until I had the coal back from the value was we tripled the value of the building.

00:21:02 That was a real light bulb moment. It's like, okay, I've been doing all this office stuff and letting out and enjoying the cashflow and redeveloping else, but look what we did. So then I realized, okay, we need to try and do this multiple times. But the value of that is you can refinance. Right. And then pull money out to go do the next one.

00:21:23 Exactly. So that's been talking about light bulbs, just listening to yeah. Understanding like how that whole system works, because if you're not in it, you don't kind of know that that's. So the next building and that we bought was nearly three times the size did have some income, but the bank paid the bank Lantus all the money for it because of the value and the equity we had in the other one.

00:21:54 Right. So in houses, most people think, oh, well I have to re re mortgage this or whatever. They don't take that as a deposit on this other one will actually in commercial, don't have to do that. You just add security over that, get the next one. So they paid for the whole building. They didn't pay for, but they linked for the whole building.

00:22:14 And I had another 50,000 or something to start the process of doing it up. And they've done that a few times, but because the, the security, they had all the, on the other stuff that we build valued. So yeah, it's, once you get the, once you get the wheels turning a, the momentum going, it really does become quite exciting.

00:22:31 Right. And if you need to raise capital to do the build-out, which is the hardest part of getting into this business, right. But if you're signing a lease, you don't own that. It's not yours. And I see one of the biggest mistakes I'll see folks make is they'll proforma a space with it and they want a short lease, right?

00:22:49 Because if you've never signed a lease, much less bought a building, it's like high anxiety around signing a lease. So they want a short lease and it's hard to pay off the buildup, you know, depending on the size and how much work needs to get done and what the landlord covers, but you're coming out of pocket for some of that. And you're giving it to the landlord,

00:23:10 but the landlord doesn't love it either. Right. Because then landlords get to do it again for the next person who comes in. So you've CR, which is the other advantage to running your model in your building, right. You are not constantly paying for, I don't know if there's a broker system where you are here, you know, the broker Commission brokers And,

00:23:31 and fit out costs. Right. So you're not in that constant cycle because you're running this operating business. And if, if you make a decision to make some changes, then for Sure. Yeah, yeah. And tax over there will be slightly different than over here, but there's advantages to that to consider if you're developing out and depending on where you are and your own cycle as to how much you capitalize and how much actually goes down,

00:23:53 it's just repairs and maintenance and all that lovely stuff. So there's, there's lots of advantages there. But the other thing of course about if we're talking specifically about coworking, the big advantage for, for us. And I think the hybrid model is really the way to go, is that when you have those small incubators or startup businesses, and I appreciate that the more the audience is changing,

00:24:19 but when they grow out of the core work, where are they going to go? If you don't have space, they're going to go to somebody else. And the core, it provides a real vibrancy to the building at the energy, especially if you put it in the right place that people pass by and see it. And it, it, the whole building can feed off it.

00:24:38 Whereas if you're just doing a call, I'm sure, you know, who might tell in here teaching you to suck eggs. But, but obviously, you know, with coworking, when it first came out, a lot of people just did coworking. And then over here, the serviced office or the executive centers were all kind of looking over there with a bit of the state and seeing that.

00:24:57 Yeah. And then, and then the op starts looking over here and the service market saying you're all old fuddy and dead, you know, and of course, actually it's the middle ground, isn't it? Between the two. And I think You talked about that on one of your podcasts. I think I was like nodding my head, like, Yes.

00:25:13 And there's still some people that look from and threw stones from one side to the other, but it's the middle. Yep. So I'm curious if you were to kind of talk to an operator who was thinking about getting into flex or commercial real estate, like what are steps to take? Like, so start listening to your podcast. I presume, but yeah.

00:25:37 How do you, how do you start in your, your sort of mentorship process with folks who are interested in commercial real estate? Because I think some people to your point, like don't know what's possible, or how did you know, raise capital? Do you have to have, you know, sizable capital to get your first place? Or, you know,

00:25:54 what are the options? Yeah. So that other than legal, there are no rules, right? So, you know, well there isn't, is there, I mean, you can, you can structure deals in any way you like residential is a bit more tricky, but in commercial you could. I mean, I have previously done rent to rent on,

00:26:14 in, on units, in a building that we're hoping to buy. So you could do rent to rent. And then eventually when you buy, you just subsumed them, you know, there, there's lots of different ways of doing, doing these different deals. You don't need all of your own money. You do need to be able to convince somebody to give some money.

00:26:31 Of course, you have to be a good sales person, at least. Yeah. That's going to throw it out yet. But I think the most important thing is you have to sit down and like all businesses, you have to out what you want out of it. And that will help give you a framework for what is a distraction and what actually would be a really good thing to do.

00:26:52 So for instance, your, your investment criteria might say, well, actually I want really, I want to actively grow the value of my portfolio or the other person might say, well, actually I don't want to be involved at all. I just want passive income. And so those will set you off in different paths. And then the other one might be,

00:27:11 well, actually, I just want some cashflow to replace my day job income. So then you start making decisions based on that. And I think those are the fundamentals first. Then you've got to start. Yeah, you've got to study and learn and listen to podcasts and all that sort of stuff. But you've really got to focus in on an area and get under the skin.

00:27:32 So for me, I tend to look for buildings. First. A lot of people go out in the commercial market with a model, a cookie cutter, and they look for a building that's going to suit them. The problem with that is you have to cover a really big area to find multiple sites. And when you go to a new area, what do you know about it?

00:27:52 Probably not a lot. Whereas if you go in building first, what you're doing is you can reduce the area you're looking at to smaller geographical spread, really look and focus on problem buildings. This is my model, problem, buildings or buildings that have perhaps some potential, a partial income part income, because that means that the non-income producing part is probably going to be heavily discounted.

00:28:19 And that's your opportunity to add value. So without knowing that local market well and studying what all the competitors are doing, it's really difficult to actually know what's a good deal and what isn't. So first of all, work out what you all are trying to not be completely controlled by your conditioning of what you think is possible. Try and trying to take the hat off and actually think dream a bit bigger.

00:28:43 And then secondly, really study our particular market. It doesn't have to be the one where you are ideally it would be, but just concentrate on a geographical area and learn as much as you can. That those would be the two things I would say, wait, I would add three based on what you just described, which is be willing to solve some problems because that's where the value is created.

00:29:03 Right. If you're willing to go in and say, well, that looks kind of messy, but it's, you know, to your point, that's when you're getting the discount. Right. And you can, yeah. So is, is your investing all office or is it other types of Commercials if we were out of residential altogether, now that's not to say we wouldn't do any more.

00:29:24 We just haven't, we we've got planning permission for residential, but commercial always seems to make more money, especially cashflow. So we have some industrial, we have self storage. The main majority though is, is comer is sorry, office space, generally on a license. But we do have a few leased spaces that are maybe five five-year leases, that sort of thing.

00:29:51 I really want to continue increasing the size that we buy so we can do more mix developments. So we can have restaurant space, gym space, all, all this, everything in there, all that lovely stickiness Ecosystem, which is really compelling to all the users. Yeah. Yeah. And they just want to stay, I mean, at the moment,

00:30:11 we're trying to work out a system where, for instance, our tenants, where we have the restaurant can, those that are actually in our building that can come into the restaurant and just add things to their tab. So rather than having to pay, get the, get the receipt, claim it back. Why not just give them an invoice at the end of the month with all their coffees and entertaining and everything else,

00:30:32 like a club, right? Yeah. You go in exactly. Yeah. Another membership. Yeah. I remember coming over to a thing that Ray was running in New York. I think we might've met there. And there was a chat though. Forgive me. I'm poor names. He was, I think he was talking about putting bill cohorts in staples. Oh,

00:30:56 bill. That would have been bill Jacobson from work. They Did some partnerships with staples and staples I think is often running on their own model, but he was it in a couple locations outside of Boston. Right. So he was talking about membership, right? So this is new to me, how I, you know, rather than renting an office,

00:31:17 let's treat you all as members. Another time. I kind of thought, well, really, you know, I'm on the east coast of Fife in Scotland. I don't think they really care or know I'm ambitious, but actually I've totally been sold on it. And we're trying to roll that out to all our ability to everybody feels first and foremost, they are a member of our community.

00:31:36 Now some of them don't give a stuff. Right. Some of them really buy into that. And if you can add food and Bev and some of those other ammenities, it just becomes really sticky. Yeah. That's, that's the objective there and Services. I'm still voting. Somebody needs to start one with travel planning. Although I was visiting the, the post in Tucson and they had a travel,

00:32:01 I think it was the post. One of them in Tucson. They, I suppose they had a travel agent who I think has taken some time out for family purposes, but I was like, that's perfect. I need somebody to, to plan my, my trips, anything that makes right. That makes it easier because, because the people in shared spaces are busy professionals.

00:32:20 Right. So yeah. Anything you can do to reduce friction and help them. Yeah. Similar lives, better businesses. I mean, we, and we get the, you know, the new remote will your spaces. Do you think sort of what does remote work and that's whole back to the office, not back the office. What is that like in,

00:32:40 in, So, so our, our first minister just said today, we're going beyond level zero, which means we're going to kind of open economy. You can do lots of things now, but could you maybe not go back to the office for a bit? Do you know our market where we are, most of our tenants have under maybe 10 employees.

00:33:09 So they're in the office because they haven't got a choice. They got to work. And you know, I've heard lots and had conversations now, maybe every now and then on social media popping a little incendiary because people are like, some people are convinced everybody's going to be working from home. Well, yeah, if you middle-class, you've got a decent sized garden and an office in the building,

00:33:31 maybe you will be, but not if you've got three kids living in an apartment and you've got new space and new sanity left, you want to go to the office or if you're young and you need to learn from peers and all that lovely stuff. So I know in the day though, five And working at home, no. Yeah. At the end of the day though,

00:33:50 it's not really what matters. It doesn't matter what I think on the ground, nearly all our buildings are up, are up to about 90% occupants. You know, most of them, apart from interestingly, the larger businesses, almost all of them, they're back full-time though. And I think that the thing that we are noticing this difference is people want to work near home.

00:34:15 Not at home now there'll be some work in the home, of course. And we are definitely having more members in our flex spaces who are joining us. They don't pay the bill, their employer pays the bank because they've just, they've decided, you know, we need to, they need to be working close to home, et cetera. And somebody else is paying the bill.

00:34:38 Whereas before that was maybe 20% now it's about 50%. Wow. That's super interesting. We love to hear that, right. Because that's, that's a new segment of people who never would have joined and now someone else is paying because they want them to be in the right work environment. Which to me is also a super responsible employer and for a small company,

00:34:59 well, maybe those are larger companies, but I think even smaller companies, that's an added expense. Right. Or maybe they were, I think when you're going from, I mean, if yes, or if they had, if you had an office and now, so did those folks have an office and now they're just not going, No, they,

00:35:16 they would have been going to a head office somewhere else. You have to remember. I mean, it depends on, it depends on who we're talking to. Right. But if you, if you're talking about downtown Manhattan, the chances of buying a 50 story building to put in some cool work and all the lovely stuff we've been talking about is pretty close to zero,

00:35:33 unless you have very deep pockets. Right. So it's irrelevant there, but if you're out in some of the suburbs and stuff, and you've got an opportunity to buy a building and put flex basin, this stuff really, really matters. And, and I think those, those corporates are definitely pulling out some of those bigger locations and that is going to hurt for some I'm not in that market.

00:35:56 So for me, it's all, you know, all opportunity right now. But I think if you're looking for more passive investing and in bigger buildings, I can see why you might be slightly more worried. Yep. Right. But for you kind of right, right place, right time, which is, I mean, another right argument for, so Jerry,

00:36:17 we have to wrap up, we're going to flip over and flip to your podcasts. But so I feel like we've just sort of scratched the surface on your, your deep knowledge in both flex, because you've been doing this for a long time and seven locations, w we might have to do this to get, cause I'd love to talk about what your team looks like and you know,

00:36:36 kind of how you manage, you know, the investment side versus the operating side and how that kind of is interwoven. And you know, what's next. But in the meantime, if someone is interested in following you, I just want to make sure we reiterate where to find you commercial property investor podcast on all the podcasts platforms. I'll link to you in on LinkedIn.

00:37:00 And I have your website linked up in the show notes as well. Anything else you want to add in terms of I've got an Instagram account? I think it's Jerry Alexander dot commercial. And in there we just put up obviously images of just buildings. All the images are all our buildings, but just try and keep it authentic and just put up stuff that we're doing and developments we're doing and all that stuff.

00:37:22 Yes. I look forward to part two, Jamie. Yeah, No, let's, let's do it. I would love that. Well, we'll dive in and I do think we don't talk. So roughly half of my, I run a program called the coworking startup school. So I help folks start co-working spaces. And, and I would say roughly half of my students own a building,

00:37:40 they got into it, I think, to own the commercial property. And then we're thinking what's the best use for this. And somehow stumbled across, go work. Yeah. But the other half, definitely not. And I think have, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's an unknown, it's a big, wide unknown. And I would love to do some more education for folks who,

00:38:02 because it's a value, you building shorter term operating income and longer term wealth, right. And as entrepreneurs, business owners, like those two can be hard to focus on at the same time. But, but we've got such a great position where those two can be really intertwined, been on my list. So I live in the bay area. So I may fall in the,

00:38:26 into the not deep enough pockets building. So it would have to be a long distance investment for me, but it's, it's on the list. I don't have a space right now, but I would love to buy a building and do a space. That's kind of the next thing on the checklist. So anyway, okay. We'll do this again. Definitely follow Jerry,

00:38:46 check out his podcast, find me to be listening more and Jerry until next time. Thanks to me. It's been brilliant.

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