Real Estate Investment Due Diligence Checklist
Gino Barbaro is an investor, business owner, author, and entrepreneur. He shares his unique insight with us on real estate investment due diligence. As an entrepreneur, he has grown his real estate portfolio to over 1500 multifamily units and is teaching others how to do the same. Gino is the co-founder of Jake & Gino, a multifamily real estate education company that offers coaching and training in real estate founded upon their proprietary framework of Buy Right, Manage Right & Finance Right.
He is the best-selling author of three books, Wheelbarrow Profits, The Honey Bee and Family, Food and the Friars. Gino graduated from IPEC (Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching) where he earned his designation as a Certified Professional Coach. He currently resides in St. Augustine, Florida with his beautiful wife Julia and their six children.
In part 1 of this episode, we cover the first 3 steps of the Gino’s 8 step due diligence framework.
- The Sponsor – do you know your sponsor?
- The Investor – Do you know what our own investing goals are?
- The Market – Do you understand the market that you want to be in? Does the market have positive demand? How does the market you choose affect the type of returns you should expect?
To reach Gino visit him at the following websites
- Jakeandgino.com – to find multifamily education and community
- Jakeandgino.com/honeybee – for a free excerpt from his latest book!
—Subscribe to the podcast in May and Get Free Gifts from these Experts —-
- Joe Fairless – 20 Resources for Apartment Market and Economic Data
- Gino Barbaro – 8 Step Due Diligence Framework for Passive Investors
- Dan Handford – The 5 Red Flags for Passive Apartment Investing
- Hunter Thompson – Video – 7 stages of Due Diligence for Passive Investors
- John Casmon – 35 Hacks and Resources to Find the Best REal Estate Sub-markets
- Kim Lisa Taylor – Avoiding Fraud in Syndication
- Vinney (Smile) Chopra – Digital Copy of his best-seller “Apartment Syndication Made Easy”
To get the gifts send a screenshot that you subscribed to the podcast to info@ritteronrealestate.com.
Want to get more?
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—Full Transcript—
Gino Barbaro:
You need to know, as an investor, market cycles, you need to know what your risk tolerance is, you need to know what kind of strategies you want to employ with your stock portfolio, it’s the same thing.
Kent Ritter:
Welcome to Ritter on Real Estate, the show about how to passively invest like a pro. On each episode, I interview real estate experts who give their top investing advice, strategies, and tools then I break down those insights into practical steps to avoid the pitfalls, and make better investments. I want to help you passively invest like a pro. This is Ritter on Real Estate, and I’m your host, Kent Ritter.
Kent Ritter:
Hello, fellow investors, welcome to Ritter on Real Estate. I’m your host, Kent Ritter, and today we’ve got Gino Barbaro as our guest. Gino is an investor, business owner, author, and entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, he’s grown his real estate portfolio to over 1500 multi-family units, and is teaching others to do the same. Gino’s the co-founder of Jake and Gino, a multi-family real estate education company that offers coaching and training in real estate, founded upon their proprietary network of buy right, manage right, and finance right.
Kent Ritter:
He’s the bestselling author of three books, Wheelbarrow Profits, The Honey Bee, and Family, Food, and the Friars. Gino graduated from IPEC, the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching, where he earned his designation as a certified professional coach. He currently resides in St. Augustine, Florida, with his beautiful wife, Julia, and their six children.
Kent Ritter:
Thanks, Gino. I’m so excited to have you on today.
Gino Barbaro:
Ritter on Real Estate, I love the title, I love being here, thanks for having me on. We’re going to have a nice, excellent hour of giving value to people.
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, I love this. Now, this is truly full circle for me, now. For all you listeners, Gino and I have known each other for about two and a half years, maybe a little longer than that now. But, Gino has really been instrumental in, I wouldn’t say my start in real estate, but really the acceleration of my path in real estate, as I started out following that framework for buy right, manage right, and finance right. Gino did some personal coaching with me, and really set me on the right path, so I’m forever grateful here. Now, he’s on my show, so look at this.
Gino Barbaro:
Well, what was great about it was Kent has all the tools. He’s a great family man, he’s a great dude, really smart, make it happen, he has a lot of the Jake and Gino core values.
Gino Barbaro:
One of the things, I think that Kent had, that a lot of us have when we start out, is leaving beliefs, or things that we think we know that we don’t know. I think that the aha moment for Kent was syndication. When Kent joined, he didn’t know what the word syndication was, I did either when I started my real estate journey. I was only limited to the amount of money that I had. I think that’s one of the amazing things, when you go out, and you get mentorship, you get personal development, you start looking at your living beliefs and what’s holding you back and saying, “Is that really hold me back? Is that really the money? Or, is it just something I don’t know?”
Gino Barbaro:
Look at what’s going on with the current pandemic right now. There are some companies that are going to explode, and some companies that are going to go away. What are the differences between the two? That’s where, I think, with mentorship, with personal development, and growth, we’ll help you answer those questions.
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
Kent Ritter:
Well today, Gino’s here to talk to us about … we’re going to dig into something pretty special, it’s a framework that he’s put together, the eight step due diligence framework for passive investors. We’re going to walk through that, we’re going to go through each step, and understand what those are as we outline those.
Kent Ritter:
But, before we get started Gino, can you give the listeners a little bit more about your background, and why you chose real estate? Yeah, just tell us a little bit about yourself.
Gino Barbaro:
For me, real estate was always in my blood, in my family’s blood. Immigrants, both my parents from Italy, and I got into the restaurant business a long time ago, after I got out of college. There were no jobs, back in ’92, ’93, and I just bought a restaurant with my family, and I loved it. Met my wife there, my kids worked at the restaurant.
Gino Barbaro:
But, the great recession comes, and I don’t know if anybody remembers that other pandemic, because that was world changing, life shifting for me, and for a lot investors out there, and a lot of small business owners. Things dried up, and I said to myself, “I need to make more money. I just can save this one business.” I couldn’t scale the business. All of a sudden, technology comes, GrubHub, Uber Eats, everyone’s delivering food, profit margins are going down, chains are coming in. And, I see the writing on the wall, and I’m thinking to myself back then, there are people making millions of dollars in this recession, I’m not one of them. What can I do to do that?
Gino Barbaro:
I just jumped into personal development, and into mentorship, like I just mentioned, and I had to really expand and grow my mind. One of the books that really helped me out was T. Harv Eker’s book, The Secrets to the Millionaire Mind. For me, it was all about personal responsibility, about choosing to become responsible, and choosing to take that course of action, of what’s the next step. For me, it was real estate, I didn’t know what kind of real estate.
Gino Barbaro:
You know, we always preach, Kent, education times action equals results. I was taking massive action. I went in, and I bought a mobile home park deal with somebody, that crapped out because I didn’t know the space, I didn’t get educated. Same thing with a strip mall in New York, I just sold it a couple years back. Jumped into that, didn’t know that. Then ultimately I said, “You know what? I like multi-family, I own a fourplex, I understand it.” I knew even back then, intuitively, it was a basic human need, people needed a place to live. I like to rent the place out, and I like, what we like to say, passive income.
Gino Barbaro:
Nothing’s truly passive, but this was a pretty easy endeavor. A couple hours a month, managing tenants, a problem would pop up every now and again, and I liked that concept. That’s really why I got into real estate, and specifically multi-family, I liked that control aspect, I liked that it was a hard asset. I liked the fact that I can control what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to sell it, refinance it, raise the rents, and I liked the aspect where it was scalable. It’s something where you can buy it, and wow, you can scale the business, I saw that. Those are all the things that really attracted me to real estate.
Kent Ritter:
Thanks for sharing that. A couple things you said are core to what this show’s about. One is education. Education and focus are, really, the two big things.
Kent Ritter:
Education being that a lot of people … because I did the same thing. When I started investing, I invested in a lot of different stuff, all real estate tangential in some way, but I wasn’t focused so I wasn’t great at anything. I knew a little bit about a lot of things. I didn’t have that focus. Once I got the focus, and was really able to hone in on multi-family, then I was able to really focus on the education because I wasn’t doing a lot on a bunch of little things, I was doing a lot focused in one area. That was huge.
Kent Ritter:
One of the big things that I want to preach to folks is the idea of education. I mean, as a passive investor, you’ve got to educate yourself, you have to be just as smart, and just as educated as the guys that are going out and doing the deals because you’re investing not only in the deal, but in the person that’s running the deal. You’ve got to not only understand the deal, and the market, you have to understand the sponsor and who they are, and it really starts there, so I think that’s critical for people to understand.
Kent Ritter:
I mean, I had my own experience where I invested with a bad sponsor, I lost some money because of it, because it was somebody that didn’t have integrity. That was really a kick in the pants for me, to get educated, and understand why that happened, and what I didn’t see, and how do I see it next time. I know that’s not going to happen to any of our listeners, because you’ve got this eight step framework laid out for us.
Kent Ritter:
Why don’t we dig into that, and go ahead and walk through this? Yeah, let’s get started.
Gino Barbaro:
So, let me take a step back real quick, I just want to acknowledge what you said. You’ve come such a long way. Two years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to have that conversation with somebody about passive investing, and educating yourself, and talking about sponsors, and investing in a deal, and knowing what a limited partner was. It takes muscles.
Gino Barbaro:
I want everyone to realize that life is the long game, if you want to become successful on anything. Multi-family especially, it’s a lot harder than single family in one respect. The single family home, you can buy it, fix it, flip it, you’re in and out in three to six months, if you’re lucky. It’s a transaction, it’s not an equity builder. I think, choose the right vehicle that you’re trying to get from point A to point B, and I think multi-family has multiple vehicles, there’s multiple things that we can talk about.
Gino Barbaro:
Just real quick, we preach the three pillars of real estate. Know why you’re getting into a deal, I think, when you go into it. It’s the market cycle, the debt, and the exit strategy, those three components are going to show you what kind of deal it is. As a passive investor, like Kent said, it is your duty. It’s almost like investing in a mutual fund, you’re giving your money to a mutual fund. But, what do you know what’s in that mutual fund? You need to know, as an investor, market cycles, you know to know what your risk tolerance is, you need to know what kind of strategies you want to employ with your stock portfolio, it’s the same thing when you’re a passive investor, when you’re investing in real estate itself.
Gino Barbaro:
I think that you need to do some work, because you’re giving over your hard earned money to somebody. Obviously, the number one is the sponsor, that’s the very first one in the eight step due diligence framework. You need to work with a sponsor, you need to look at their track record. Have they [inaudible 00:09:21] before? If they haven’t, well, that should take pause because, do they have the credibility? If they don’t, maybe you shouldn’t be investing with them. There are a lot of sponsors out there who have done deals.
Gino Barbaro:
It’s funny, when I first started, Kent, investing, I didn’t syndicate, I did it backwards. I bought my own deals, I felt comfortable doing my own deals, and I’d built up to become a sponsor of a syndication. We all need to start somewhere, so maybe if you’re doing your first syndication, your sponsor has never done a syndication, does he own other real estate? We’re going to get into his team, his team members. But maybe, if they haven’t even gotten into real estate, and they’re trying do their first deal, and they haven’t even done the deal yet, that should give you pause.
Gino Barbaro:
Number two, ask them, do they have any case studies? Even if they’ve done them, can you show me some of your recent deals you’ve done? Can you give me a case study of a deal that you’re going to take down, that you’re looking at? Just a general case study that you have.
Gino Barbaro:
Number three, you want a list of their team members. Who are you working with? Whose your CPA, whose your syndication attorney? Obviously, your website, all their team members. Do you have a property management company? For us, we’re vertically integrated so what that means, as our team, we manage our own deals, we buy our own deals, we raise our own capital, we have our own investors, so we are vertically [inaudible 00:10:42]. We can share that with everybody, but you want, as a sponsor, to ask them, whose on your team? Have you done this before?
Gino Barbaro:
Number four, what is the sponsor’s investing strategy? Are they buying to hold, are they going to buy these assets for at least five years, and hold them for a long time? Are they just the fix and flippers? Bam, are they out there buying these in three years? There’s nothing wrong or right with either strategy, you just want to have a clear, concise idea of what they’re doing on the front end to see if it’s a great fit. Basically, what I like to tell people is, if there’s any salespeople out there, we use a tactic, finding impact together, same side selling. You want to find impact together, between the sponsor, and between yourself. You both want to grow, but if the sponsor or the partner …
Gino Barbaro:
Let’s say, for instance, Jake and Gino. Jake was a big fix and flipper, and he liked the shiny object syndrome, but I was longterm. That partnership’s not going to work, and it’s the same thing between you as the passive investor, and the sponsor. If your goals and your ideas don’t align well, then maybe you shouldn’t be investing together, you’re not going to be finding impact together. That’s okay, go out and ask the sponsor, “Hey, Mr. Sponsor, do you know any other sponsors out there that have this model that I’m looking for?” That sponsor should be like “Yeah, you know what, Kent? I do, I’ve got my friend who’s doing these deals.” Utilize the sponsor, see what they are, and see how you can align and work well together amongst yourselves.
Kent Ritter:
Gino, a question there. We talked about experience. What about their integrity, their credibility, how do you get a feel for that?
Gino Barbaro:
That’s a great question.
Kent Ritter:
As you’re going into a deal with somebody.
Gino Barbaro:
I should have probably said that’s the most important thing because I’ve always been taught, and I really believe this … I think if you go into a marginal deal with a great sponsor, I’d rather have that than a great deal with a marginal sponsor because you never know when the COVID’s going to hit. That great sponsor is going to live up to their word, they’re going to live up to their word.
Gino Barbaro:
How do you get a feeling for it? You just keep asking around, as they say, beating the bushes. Sooner or later, things will start popping up, you have to do Google searches. If you really want to be neurotic, maybe do a background check on the person, maybe you go out and you do a regular background check, you never know. Did they declare bankruptcy? Oh well, Kent, I see you declared bankruptcy five years ago. What happened? Kent can be one of two people. He can take aback, or he can say, “This is what happened,” and he’s trying to be as transparent as possible.
Gino Barbaro:
For us, we allay a lot of the transparency by saying, every quarter, we’re going to have webinars with our investors, on the deals. On those quarterly webinars, we go through the income, we go through the expenses, we go through the capex budget, we go through everything, and we give highlights on the property, that’s one thing that’s important. Now, every two weeks, we’ve also implemented Zoom Hours on Fridays, with our syndication team member, Mike Taravella, open hours. For two hours, he’s going to be on Zoom, he’s going to be answering questions from the investors. If the investor has questions, because the big question now, for the last two months, are we going to have owner draws going forward?
Gino Barbaro:
The owner draws are in the bank, we don’t know if the world’s going to end, we need that money as a reserve. As soon as things clear up, we’re going to get that out. But, it’s really the transparency, and it’s really the ability for the sponsor to communicate, and just go out there and continue to search as much as possible. Search the properties that they own, go on the Google reviews and see if there’s some good or bad reviews. Inevitably, there’s going to be more bad reviews, but ask them about those reviews, and see what they have.
Gino Barbaro:
We’re trying to work on customer service in our entire organization, entire entity, so that’s really important for us, working with that. Find out, as far as transparency goes, that’s the most important thing is the sponsor itself. Is the sponsor going to live up to his end of the bargain?
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, thanks. I think that was, for me, when I did my passive investing, that was one of the big takeaways for me. Was it was, some sponsors were very transparent, some were not at all, some you never knew what was going on. I hated that because I wanted to know what was going on, so that was the same for me, as something I took away, was I want to be very transparent.
Kent Ritter:
I think that it’s like with anything in life, it comes down to communication. I spent a lot of time as a consultant, flying, and I always used this example of people in the airports because you’d be sitting there, and a flight would be delayed. As long as the airline was communicating every 15, 20 minutes, letting you know what’s going on, letting you know they’re working on it, people were, ultimately, pretty calm. In the examples where the airline didn’t, and you have people sitting there for an hour, hour and a half without knowing what’s going on, you see the worse side of humanity in that situation. It really all came down to communication.
Kent Ritter:
I think that’s critical, as a sponsor, I’d want to invest with people that are transparent, and know what’s going on. I love that you guys are doing those office hours, I hadn’t heard of that before. I think that’s great.
Gino Barbaro:
Well, we’re trying to do different stuff, we’re creating a customer journey, a customer experience in each one of our entities. Whether it’s the education side, the property management side, and the investor side is also important. Just because you log in, and you opt in to somebody’s list, you get a phone call with one of our team members, we want to continue that journey, we want to continue that communication. It’s important to see how the sponsor does, go online and see what their customer journey, or customer experience is.
Gino Barbaro:
Because like you said, the worst thing is to give bad news. Even worse than that is to delay giving the bad news, right? Like you said, I’d rather say, “This month we came up light on draws because one of the pipes burst and we had to put in an additional $15,000 in the capex.” Telling them is not the best in the world, you have to do it, but not telling is 100% worse because they’re going to be like, “What else are they hiding from me?”
Kent Ritter:
Right.
Gino Barbaro:
You don’t want your investors thinking, what else can go wrong, so being on the front end and communicating that is really important.
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, great.
Gino Barbaro:
Number two.
Kent Ritter:
What do we have next on the list?
Gino Barbaro:
Yes, number two is the investor. I’m going to read down these questions.
Gino Barbaro:
As a passive investor, this is you. Kent, we should say, this document can be used in two ways. If you’re a sponsor, and you’re creating a deal, let’s say Kent Ritter is the sponsor, he can use these eight steps and create a presentation or a webinar, based on these questions. So, every time he gives it to a passive investor, the passive investor will have all these questions answered. Now, we’re utilizing this as the passive investor, that is asking these questions to the sponsor.
Gino Barbaro:
So, the second one, I’m the investor, I want to know myself, what is my risk tolerance? Is multi-family risky, is that too high up on my risk? Or, would I just want to deal with mutual funds, or whole life insurance? You have to gauge that for yourself, that’s really important.
Gino Barbaro:
Number two, where are your funds coming from? Kent, is your money coming from a self directed IRA, do you have IRA funds? Is it coming from cash, is it coming from whole life, where’s that money coming from? As you can see, the syndicator always needs to ask that question because if I’m getting money from a self directed IRA, that time horizon can be much longer than if I’m getting from somebody’s savings account, so that’s an important question to ask.
Gino Barbaro:
Number three, how long are your time horizons to investing the funds? That’s really important because right now, us, as sponsors we’re trying to go to a different model, we’re trying to go to a return of capital model where that’s a long, long term model. A lot of investors don’t like that model because they’re like, “Hey, I need to have my money back.” Whereas when we podcast somebody named Sam Freshman, he’s been syndicating for the last 50 years, his biggest mistake was, “I sold too soon.” If a guy whose been doing it for 50 years is telling you that …
Kent Ritter:
Interesting.
Gino Barbaro:
That sounds like a really good plan. It’s something that’s, I don’t want to say outside the box, but very few people are employing it. But, you just need the specific investor, and we have them in the Jake and Gino community, that want to give us money, want to invest with us, and want us to keep it there, and that’s truly passive, paying down the debt, holding it for generational wealth. If you can speak these words, you’ll find that right investor.
Gino Barbaro:
Number four, what real estate markets are you currently invested in? This is something that every passive investor needs to understand. If you have a sponsor whose investing in the Midwest, in the Rust Belt, ask them why. He should tell you, “Well, this is our backyard, we like this area.” I would push back and say, “Hey, you know what? I like the Southeast a little bit more because there’s more job growth, there’s more population growth, that’s where the people are moving.” Nothing wrong with the Rust Belt, I just want to understand why they’re investing in those markets.
Gino Barbaro:
Then, you should understand that, and then, obviously, when we dive into it, we’re going to talk about cap rates and all, that you can understand the risk versus return model, saying it’s a little bit riskier there, you’d better be getting higher cap rates in those markets than the Southeast and certain areas. It’s important, what markets the sponsor’s investing in.
Gino Barbaro:
Are you comfortable, number five, with trusting someone else to make invests and you picking the individual properties? You, as the passive investor, are you comfortable just giving your money to somebody else, and letting them make the decisions? That’s tough for some people to give control, and if that’s difficult for you, you may never enjoy becoming a passive investor because you’re the control freak. That’s something that you have to dive into. I think a little bit of life coaching going on there, right?
Gino Barbaro:
Number six is the same type of question. Would you prefer to have an active strategy, or have a passively managed and diversified portfolio? I think one of the great things about being a passive investor is you can invest $50,000 into one deal, $300,000 into another deal, you maybe even go into a self storage deal, go into different asset classes. Do a hotel, like we said, maybe there’s some amazing opportunities to buy some hotels right now. I mean, you see what happened at the price of oil contracts, now there’s all these storage areas for buying oil and storing oil, because you can get it at such a cheap price. So, there’s so many different types of asset classes. Are you willing to do that? I think passive investing allows you to put a little bit of money in different places, and you’re diversifying your portfolio across different asset classes.
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, I think that’s a huge benefit of passive investing, is being able to diversify. It’s like being able to split it up, spread it across the country, spread it across sponsors, spread it across different investment types, like you said.
Kent Ritter:
From an investor standpoint, these are questions that you’re actually walking through with an investor, on your first call?
Gino Barbaro:
Yeah.
Kent Ritter:
Is this what you’re doing?
Gino Barbaro:
Yeah. For us as the sponsor, I really want to know what your risk tolerance is, I want to know where your money’s coming from. If it’s coming from a self directed IRA, and we’re doing a deal right now, if time is of the essence, you’re going to need a couple weeks to roll that money over. So, I want to make sure that you’re not in the deal because I didn’t educate you on getting that money over quicker, so I’m asking these questions to the investors.
Gino Barbaro:
Like I said, the worst thing to have is an investor who doesn’t align with the sponsor, because then there’s questions, and problems. Like I said, we’ve had a couple push backs from a couple investors that we didn’t send funds out first quarter. I’m thinking to myself, are they living underneath a rock? Or, was it not proper expectations set? But, that’s just how it is so you have to, as a sponsor, you have to choose your investors also, it goes both ways.
Gino Barbaro:
As a passive investor, you want to choose a sponsor. But, the sponsors out there, you have to be able to look at the investors and say, “Do they align with me? Is it worth the grief, and the headache, and the time to deal with this investor if something comes up?” So, aligning with it, I think, is an important thing to do.
Kent Ritter:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:21:37].
Gino Barbaro:
The next one is the market. We can dive into the market, you see all the metrics in the market. Kent’s going to give you an option to download this doc, so you can go through the doc. But, you look at the market, you want to make sure you as the passive investor makes sure that the sponsor really knows the market, at a granular level. What’s the cap rate? What is the exit cap rate that he’s going to be exiting, if and when he’s going to be selling the property? Does he know the crime, does he know the median income around the properties? Asking median income around the property’s important because when we rent apartments, we basically want three times income. So, if you’re renting an apartment for $1000 a month, the median income in that area should be at least $3000 a month for the tenants. And, it will also give you an idea of the tenant base there. What are the factors you, as a sponsor, like or not like about the market? There might be some things you don’t like about the market, and there might be some things you do like. Get a feel, from the sponsor, what he thinks.
Gino Barbaro:
Then, there’s so many different metrics, we’ve listed all the metrics. There’s job growth, population growth, occupancy, proximity to jobs, really make sure that the sponsor understands that market, that’s an important fact because you once you buy the asset, real estate’s great. There’s leverage, there’s control, but there’s not as much liquidity. Once you buy an asset, you’re there. When you’re buying an asset, you’re buying a future stream of revenue, a future stream of cashflow, so you need to make sure that, for the longterm, you’ll be able to actually collect that rent. It’s important that you analyze that market, and make sure those trends are favorable to the asset.
Kent Ritter:
Gino, on the market, there’s a lot of metrics, it’s important to understand all of them. But, what’s the most important one that our investors should be asking the sponsors about?
Gino Barbaro:
That’s a tough question, a great question. I want to know that there’s jobs there. So, when you’re doing due diligence, you want to do a lease audit, one of the things that we do. Then, in the lease audit will discuss the types of jobs. So you’ll see your tenants, what kind of jobs do they have? Right now, COVID’s tough because in certain areas, if there’s blue collar jobs, some of those assets are not going to get collected. If there’s more white collar jobs, a lot of people are working from home, so understanding your tenant base.
Gino Barbaro:
I think job growth and population growth, you want some because right now, if you’re losing jobs and you’re losing population, that means there’s less demand for your asset, that means you can’t raise rents. Or, at least keep rents where they are. And that, ultimately equates to income going down, and that equates to the valuation of your property going down. I’m not going to say, blanket statement, I don’t want zero job growth, but if you’re investing in your backyard and you’re vertically integrated, you can still buy down value, you can still pay a higher cap rate and lower price, and still be okay. But, I would want to have some kind of job growth, I’d want the population growth, I want enough employers in the market so that if one or two go bankrupt, you still have other employers.
Gino Barbaro:
If you’re like Rochester, New York, where you had Kodak, and Kodak goes under. Well, who else is there? Cleveland, with the Cleveland Clinic, if they go under … They’re probably not, but I’m just saying you never know. Or, if you go into a small manufacturing town, and there is a Volkswagen, or a Harley Davidson, and all of a sudden they shudder that operation, then you’re in big trouble. So, I think understanding the employers and the market are really important.
Gino Barbaro:
Also, I’d like to see where rents have been and where they’re going for the previous three years, and the next couple years because that’s important. That’ll be able to see where our demand for our product is, and the supply going into that product.
Kent Ritter:
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Kent Ritter:
Until next time, this is Kent Ritter with Ritter on Real Estate. Now, go out and invest like a pro.