With decades of experience in commercial real estate brokerage, Yellowtail Commercial has become known as the premier broker service provider in the region. We take our client’s investments extremely seriously. With each and every project, we take an ownership-style approach. Internally we preach “act as an owner” and “act as if this transaction is your own.” This approach allows us to place ourselves in each of our client’s shoes, ensuring the highest level of service. Our goals are to exceed the expectations for each of our client’s assignments. If we do not walk away with a happy client, we do not walk away happy ourselves. Closing a transaction is not important to us, satisfying a client’s needs are, even if that means they do not choose to move forward with a transaction. The long term relationship and market reputation outweighs any quick dollar we can make. This frame of mind requires a full commitment of each assigned team member and our supporting resources internally and externally, allowing for our clients to extract the maximum value from our services.
For each of our clients, we put together a custom strategy based upon our detailed discussions of a client’s goals as well as our review of the property itself and the market for each assignment. We understand each client is different, as is each property and each prospective transaction.
By fully understanding a client’s goals, we know which transactional items to stress within each opportunity. For example, many sellers require a certain type of transaction such as a quick close while others have the benefit of being patient and capable of waiting for the ideal opportunity. Prior to each assignment, we will hold a thorough discussion with our clients to understand their objectives, constraints, partnerships, financial capabilities, timelines, and other pertinent information that will affect the transaction now or in the future. In addition, a full review and understanding of each particular property we work on is a key element to not only our success, but more importantly our client’s success. Your success is our success.
From a property perspective, we stress internally, externally, and to all parties we deal with that not all properties are created equal, for better or worse. With this thinking as foundational to each project, we put together detailed information on our properties so we have the ability to most effectively market our projects. Each property has positives and negatives – no property is perfect. Through an upfront understanding of each asset, we will know what attributes to highlight and just as importantly, prepare ourselves with educated responses and data to respond to any flaws with our marketed properties. We would rather know these issues upfront and be able to effectively respond to any prospect’s questions than to be unprepared, resulting in a potential loss of interest from a prospect. This difference is a key differentiator for us. First impressions are everything. We have seen countless transactions falter as representative brokers have been less than prepared to respond to basic questions. An example being the presence of environmental contamination on a property. An uneducated broker may simply agree with a prospect that an environmental issue exists, which opens up an endless amount of possibilities in terms of time, cost, and overall challenge for a prospect – resulting in a strong possibility the prospect becomes scared of “the unknown” and elects to walk from a transaction. In addition, a lack of education on this item would put our clients in a similarly difficult position. In this instance, we would be prepare before this conversation even arose with any prospective purchasers. We pride ourselves in not only knowing the issues exist, but also educating ourselves on any issues by taking the extra steps to know the cost, timing, and effort required to resolve any existing issues.
An example being: A recent transaction of ours saw a small soil contamination problem. We put ourselves ahead of the market by having a third party conduct a cursory review of the supposed contamination. The review concluded the contamination was a minor spill from a truck, resulting in a cost of $2,000 to remove soil in 2 weeks – an understandable and achievable item for any Buyer. By preparing ourselves for this, we salvaged many potential lost prospects while also saving time, money, and aggravation for the seller and any prospects.
Another example being a recent deferred maintenance issue we found during our initial property walk through. The subject property was in beautiful interior shape but began to show signs of water infiltration on the top floor – easily visible in the attic and beginning to show in the drywall on the ceiling of the top finished floor. We took the initiative to have the roof evaluated by three outside contractors who each provided a quote and roof condition feedback for our review. After receiving each document from all contracts, we held a call with all three so we could understand the depth of the problem, the cost of the issue, and the time associated with any necessary repairs. We quickly found out that all three parties stated we had an immediate problem that needed to be fixed or major issues would result as the water infiltration had a direct path to lower level foundational supports for the building. Our client was able to salvage this potential disastrous item through a $ 4,000 repair taking one week of work. If our team had not taken this initiative, the leak could have cost the client hundreds of thousands of dollars as well as major marketing issues as a prospective purchaser would have found the same issue but months later after damage had been done. In the case of this property, we successfully resolved the issue prior to bringing the property to market. This same property received 3 bids at asking price and closed with no inspection issues 60 days later. This example shows Yellowtail’s work ethic is second to none.
We have a background in ownership and acquisitions of properties ourselves. While many brokerages can tout the transactions they have completed for others, few can say they have done this for themselves. We can. Our team has an extensive background of acquiring both value add and stabilized investment properties for our own account. As a result, we know what to expect from third party brokers, which is hard work and a high level of service. In addition, we know the nuances and behind closed door items that drive decisions – and our clients are advised as such. There is a tendency in the brokerage community to simply “push deals” and “push price” while ignoring the whole picture. What about timing? Tax issues? Partnership disruptions? Lender items? Seller closing obligations? Title issues? Not only are these items overlooked by our competitors, few understand them, much less how to resolve them.
An example: a now client of ours recently instilled new executive leadership who pursued a national restructuring of their company, requiring change in a number of items throughout the company, notable the sale of 3 of their locations in an effort to clean up their balance sheet and raise millions of dollars to support their new company agendas. The first property they owned and placed on the market had a great story to prospective purchasers: acquire a well maintained industrial building strategically and logistically well located in a nationally sought after industrial market. Who would not want to own this building? With limited industrial inventory in the local market, the time was right to sell as it was a seller market. The seller received multiple offers immediately from capable purchasers. This process seemed all to easy for the seller. We watched as a competing broker “pushed a deal” from a well-capitalized and strong buyer. The problem with this buyer is they had a requirement to start moving into the building in 7 weeks while closing on an empty building in 6 weeks – the problem being the building was not empty, the seller was still operating their business out of there. Instead of thoroughly investigating the requirements and cost for a move out, the broker “pushed the deal” once again, touting the “great buyer” and “quick close” pluses to the transaction paired with the ease of moving out. While quick closes are often desirable, in this case it was not – as we have said, each deal is different and requires its own analysis. By not completing a thorough analysis, the Seller chose to take the deal at a price of $6 Million. Unfortunately, the seller had to rush to move out major equipment pieces, inventory, and relocate employees – all at a cost of $5.9 Million due to the immediate turnaround requirement. After taxes and transaction costs, the seller not only lost money on the transaction, they lost employees and a strategic location for less than nothing – defeating the purpose of marketing the building in the first place. The company officials who authorized the transaction lost their jobs. The competing broker made his commission but at the expense of others and a client relationship. This is not how we do business.
Our marketing is data driven. Data is gathered not only on our seller’s goals and on the property, but also on the macro and micro elements that will drive a prospect’s decision for the property. Just like each property is different, so is each asset type. For example the presence of high traffic counts and frontage is a critical element of any retail location, but not at all important for an apartment transaction. All of these elements are weighed, quantified, understood, and implemented into our marketing of each property. In addition, understanding the presence of competing inventory as well as recently sold comparable projects will be drivers for the success and pricing of a transaction. A seller can ask any price they want however if the property does not appraise for a “market value”, no buyer will obtain a loan to acquire the asset. Our analysis will put our best foot forward in the marketing of the property while also setting realistic expectations for all parties we deal with. By knowing the market sale prices, we will set reasonable expectations for our clients while also using this supporting information to assist in negotiating the highest price and most favorable transactional structure for our clients.
I n today’s modern world, Zoning can make or break any project. To effectively advise any clients, a broker must be able to articulate the property’s possibilities. Why discuss building a skyscraper on the property when zoning only allows you to build 4 stories? Too often properties are marketed incorrectly for uses that are not achievable under current zoning codes or worse, unrecognized possibilities are ignored, yielding a seller a below market price. For example, you may have a nice retail building in an area in dire need of apartment building. If zoned appropriately, you may be able to build an apartment building on site with no major municipal approvals required. We are trained to review and understand the use capabilities for each site, allowing us to provide our clients with educated advice on all items throughout a transaction, including zoning.
Yellowtail has expertise in the following niche areas of commercial real estate:
Supported by a background of acquiring properties on our own behalf, our team understands what it takes to execute on a transaction. Our market, property, and transactional evaluation program allows our clients to understand the full picture of their acquisition options for today and their long term future.