Avoid These Four Common Commercial Real Estate Investing Mistakes

Buying and managing investment property — be it houses, multifamily units or commercial real estate — is hard work. Owners must choose between paying to outsource and handling everything themselves. The latter can range from finding financing and performing maintenance to resolving emergencies and legal problems. All these tasks extract a price in terms of time, aggravation and mistakes for owners who lack expertise in all of these areas.

Complicating matters further, finding properties with potential is a big challenge facing investors today. High property prices in top markets are driving investors into secondary markets and new types of properties, notes National Real Estate Investor. But these are assets that require deep industry knowledge and experience and challenges I faced as an active individual real estate investor that inspired me to co-found Origin Investments to help individual investors address these obstacles.

Many of our investing clients have gone the direct route, only to realize how complex and difficult it is to succeed in real estate. For example, one doctor pooled his resources with four other Chicago physicians to build a real estate portfolio. Initially, they hired a realtor to help them find, manage and renovate their assets. But once they transitioned from single-family homes to multifamily buildings, they found it harder to find and manage properties. For years, a client in California bought multifamily buildings and commercial real estate in several cities and only realized he needed the kind of deeper market knowledge that comes with “boots on the ground" when one of his major investments — a retail property — went south.

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