The Private Equity Real Estate Podcast – Show 22
Summary
On this week’s episode, we discuss retail leasing and best practices that lead to better returns with Beth Azor. She is the founder and owner of Azor Advisory Services, a leading commercial real estate advisory and investment firm based in Southeast Florida.
If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe, share and review the show!
If you have any topics you want to hear about, let us know! We have experts in all real estate fields and would be happy to interview one of them for you. Contact us at info@fnrealtypartners.com and let us know what you’re looking to learn about.
If you would like to invest passively with FNRP or learn more about our commercial real estate investments, you can go to www.FNRPUSA.com
Announcer:
You’re listening to the Private Equity Real Estate Podcast brought to you by First National Realty Partners, where investors learn from private equity experts and insiders. We share our own real world experiences so you know exactly what it takes to be highly successful at investing in passive commercial real estate opportunities.
Eric:
Hello, and welcome to the Private Equity Real Estate podcast, which is brought to you by First National Realty Partners. I’m your host, Eric Murphy. And as always on this program, we like to sit down with experts in commercial real estate and talk about different topics across the commercial real estate landscape.
Eric:
And this week we are going to be discussing retail leasing and best practices that lead to better returns. And frankly, we couldn’t ask for a better guest today to talk about this topic. She is Beth Azor. She’s affectionately known as the canvassing queen, and she is the founder and owner of Azor Advisory Services. It’s a leading commercial real estate advisory and investment firm based in Southeast Florida. Beth currently owns and manages six shopping centers in Florida, and she travels the country consulting with, brokering deals for and training associates in commercial real estate industry.
Eric:
Beth, thank you so much for being on the program today.
Beth:
Well, thank you for having me, Eric.
Eric:
Well, that to start, can you tell us a little bit about your background? How’d you get started in commercial real estate and how did you get this nickname, the canvassing queen?
Beth:
Sure. I know you could just picture me with the crown on my head, right? My parents were in residential real estate. I had my license when I was 18 because when your parents are in real estate, that’s what happens. And during colleges and summers, I would do residential real estate to make some extra money. When I graduated from Florida State University … go Noles … I got into special events in the nonprofit world. And as you can imagine, you don’t make a lot of money in nonprofit world.
Beth:
On the weekends, I would continue to do the real estate gig. And one thing led to another and I eventually got into commercial real estate, which I started in office leasing, so leasing vacancies and office buildings, and I had an opportunity to join the retail team, which has shopping centers, and the rest is history. I spent 18 years with the company that hired me in the rookie leasing agent training program. The last six years I was there, I was the president. In ’04, I left. I was a single mom of a four-year-old and I was working crazy hours. I had helped that company growth from 11 people to 150 and I just wanted to be a better mom. I didn’t have a son at the age of 40 to not be a good mom.
Beth:
I somewhat semi retired and left that company and thought my main priorities will be to be the T-ball coach, the room mom, buy some properties on my own account, as I had been doing so with my partner in that firm, and the phone started ringing and people started calling me saying, “Hey, you’ve just spent 18 years leasing space. Come train our people and coach our people on how to lease vacancies.” 70% of my world today is running my six deals and the other 20, 25% is coaching and training.
Beth:
How I feel vacancies is knocking on doors. I mean, there’s a lot of other ways. There’s cold calling and there’s social media prospecting, but I’m a huge proponent of just getting in your car, driving to some shopping centers and going and talking to the mom and pops, the small businesses, the entrepreneurs and saying, “Hey, you’ve got two locations. Do you want a third? I own shopping centers or I rep shopping centers. Do you want to come lease space in a different market?” I continually for 34 years have preached that way of selling in our industry and therefore got my nickname as the canvassing queen.
Eric:
Well, Beth, you’re an expert in retail leasing. Can you tell our listeners, how does retail leasing fit into the investor mold and what part does it play in contributing to better returns?
Beth:
Absolutely. Leasing is the number one thing. If you are buying a property, the way to improve the NOI, the net operating income, is to increase your leasing rates, increase the creditworthiness of the tenants, possibly redevelop and add more GLA, gross leaseable area, upgrade tenancy. For example, I bought a 70,000 square foot non-grocery anchored center at an eight and three fourths cap rate and back-filled a vacant anchor with a grocer and now I could sell that property at a six cap.
Beth:
Upgrading tenancy, that’s all about leasing, so increasing rates, understanding your markets, creating a better tenant mix, taking an old church space or a consignment store or a flea market and turning it into a Dollar Tree, that would trade at a five and a half cap rate. Leasing really is the driver, in my opinion, of increasing the NOI and increasing investment value and the asset value.
Eric:
How do you assess a tenant? What are some traits that you look for in a potential tenant?
Beth:
There’s two kinds of tenants. There are the national tenants, the public companies like Starbucks, AAA, Dollar Tree, Sephora, those types of … Marshall’s, Ross Dress for Less. Those types of tenants are public companies, national retailers, and they have investment grades assigned to them by companies like Moody’s. You can look up, “What is the credit rating of an AutoZone?” And you will get the credit rating and then there will be corresponding lists as to what those retailers would be traded for in the investment sales arena. If let’s say you had a freestanding AutoZone, what could I sell that for? What would be the value of the rental stream? What would be the cap rate associated with it? That’s the national tenant side of things.
Beth:
The mom and pop side of things brings an element of uniqueness to your shopping center so that you’re not … I’m sure, Eric, you’ve been in a mall around the country somewhere and you’re thinking, “This mall could be in any of the other 52 states in the US,” right, because they’re the same old tenants, nothing unique, nothing creative, same old, same old. That’s why I like canvassing is I go out and find unique tenants that are driving huge traffic because they’re destination, they’ve got good product, good service, good following, they’re number one on Yelp in their category.
Beth:
You want to mix those up. They don’t have the credit ratings like the nationals do because there’s more risk associated with them because they might be a mom and pop or a small business, but frankly, they’re the ones that bring character to your properties and again, a unique customer. You want to have a good mix of both. How do you lessen the risk of the mom and pops is you find out that they have other locations. They’ve been in business for 70 years and have eight locations. That would lessen the risk. Frankly, sometimes those mom and pops stay longer in your shopping center than some nationals who don’t do well and then file bankruptcy and it’s a real estate play because they can close the stores that are performing not as well as the stronger ones and then later on, come out of bankruptcy. That’s a whole real estate play.
Eric:
I’ve heard you tell some great stories about going that extra mile and forging a good relationship in order to get the deal done. How important of a role do you think communication plays in your business and what advice would you have for someone who maybe struggles with that aspect?
Beth:
Absolutely. I think if someone struggles with communication, it’s just because they haven’t done it enough, right? I would be a big believer … My advice would be that they role play, they role play with their friends, their families, their peers, their team members. When I teach leasing to junior and mid-level leasing agents, they’re afraid to go knock on the doors. They have fear. And I understand. Everyone’s afraid of rejection. No one wants to get rejected, but the more they do it, the easier it gets and you realize it’s not personal.
Beth:
I just think consistency and repetition is how you overcome the fear of that communication inexperience. And the more you do it, the better you get. You walk out of a store and go, “Wow, that was a great interaction. What happened? What did I do? What questions did I ask? Let me make some notes.” I do that the next time I go into the next store, right? And for us in retail, leasing and in canvassing, Eric, it is truly the best kind of communication when you’re doing that are asking questions.
Beth:
I don’t go in and start saying, “You’ve got to come to my shopping center.” I go in and ask them 35 questions because I don’t want to talk to them about my property if it’s not a good match. We are matchmakers. I always say you want to be kind of like the private investigator. You want to be the journalist. Go in and say, “Hey, are you looking to expand? How’s your business since COVID? Why did you pick this location? How did you come up with the name?” Be curious and then let the prospect, let the store owner answer those questions and you’ll say, “Wow, I think that our property might be a good match for you. I’d love for you to come see it and let me know what you think.”
Eric:
You mentioned being a matchmaker in some ways. Speaking of that, what are some ways that you can market your property that may differentiate it from others? Are there attributes that you think are particularly attractive to tenants, which would make it more likely for a match?
Beth:
Yes. I think that all tenants want visibility and exposure. That’s very, very, very important to them. The more signage that you can have available to the tenant, the better. For example, we do something in an area where I have properties where I rent bus benches on the main thoroughfare so that I can add additional signage for those people because they need it. Tenants all want signage. That’s one thing.
Beth:
The other thing that separates properties from the rest are phenomenal lighting. At night you want the customers to feel safe and especially women, which is the majority of a lot of times our customers. We want to have the best lit centers in the area. So signage and lighting, and then of course, cleanliness, fresh flowers, annuals and impatiens at the entranceway are also things that catch people’s eyes as they’re driving down the street. You want them to go in, and I’ve recently added two things.
Beth:
Before the pandemic, there was a new trend. The longer you can get the customer to stay at the property, there was a statistic that they would spend more. What I did is I added benches and my centers are not these fancy properties that have 75, 100 stores. I have small little strip centers in communities where there might be four stores or 10 stores, but I added benches and I piped in music. And if you can get the customer to spend a little more time and a little extra time where maybe they go in and get a Starbucks coffee and then they come outside and then they sit in the bench and they stay longer and they say, “Oh, there’s an AT&T cell phone store. Let me go get a battery,” so the longer that you can get them to stay on your property, the better .now during pandemic, that’s kind of changed things up a little bit, but I believe we’ll come back around and people will be socializing more and hanging out at stores more and there won’t be this rush to get out of the community and back home.
Eric:
Right. We are speaking with Beth Azor. She’s the founder of Azor Services, and today we’re discussing retail leasing and best practices that lead to better returns. Beth, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see landlords making in the leasing process?
Beth:
I see landlords making short-term decisions, signing leases with people or with businesses and uses like undesirable uses, and it’s a personal thing, but for me, I’m not going to sign leases with vape stores. Someone called me the other day and they had a funeral parlor. Churches call looking for space. One of my clients called and said, “What do you think? Should I do a church?” And I’m like, “I don’t think you should do a church.”
Beth:
First of all, if they don’t pay the rent … And by the way, anytime there’s a church at a property, you’re kind of saying to the world that you’ve donated most of the rent. They don’t pay a lot of rent. And when they do pay rent, if for some reason they’re past due, how do you evict a church? You’re on the front page of the newspaper if you do that. I think churches and vape stores and cannabis, you’re just not going to recruit other tenants that you may want in those properties.
Beth:
I think people … The whole cannabis industry, I have a situation where they wanted to be in one of my shopping centers. They offered me double the asking rental rate that I was asking. Many, many landlords would have done that deal, because it was a short … In my mind, it would have been shortsighted because once you add that use to properties, there are issues that come along with that and I’m just more of a long-term thinker as far as that’s concerned.
Eric:
Well, you mentioned shortsighted thinking. What are your thoughts on pop-up retail? That seems to be something that’s pretty popular now.
Beth:
Eric, my favorite topic. I love pop-ups. Again, it seems like a pop-up isn’t a long-term thinking idea, but it is because … I’ve done in the pandemic eight pop-ups in the last three months, seven of which are doing so well that I’m negotiating long-term leases with them. One I haven’t heard from yet. Pop-ups is, “Hey, there’s a great concept. You have another location. Why don’t you try this concept in my location? You will pay either low or no rent and let’s just try it out for 90 days. If it works and you do great sales, great. Here’s going to be the market rent that you’ll sign a new longer term lease for.” If you don’t do well, I don’t want them to stay anyway, right?
Beth:
I’ve done pop-ups during the pandemic with gym equipment. We’d backfilled a former Pier 1 with a gym equipment operator who bought out three 24 Hour Fitnesses. He has five locations of gym equipment and he backfilled my Pier 1 and he opened in October. Perfect timing where people were buying for Christmas gym equipment for their family members for their home gyms and now going into January where everyone’s got the new year’s resolutions. He’s the one I haven’t heard from yet if he’s going to renew or not.
Beth:
I signed a blinds and drapery guy for … because home improvement’s through the roof. They’ve been in one location for 30 years. We got them to open their second. He has a son in the business, coming into the business, so the next generation. They opened. They’re doing gangbusters and just called after four months and said, “We want to renew and stay.”
Beth:
I did a PG Kitchen and Bath where they invested over $40,000 in this space. Right away when they did that, I knew that they were going to stay and it wasn’t going to be a true pop-up, so they’re staying. I did Billiards and Pinball, 6,000 square foot. They took an old Visionworks. We did a pop-up from Labor Day until February 28th with them and their sales are telling me that they also will stay.
Beth:
I did a hobby store. I thought that Christmas would be great for toys and hobbies and things like that. I found a hobby store with two locations. They sell remote control cars for like 3 and 400 bucks. I felt that the parental guilt of no vacations, no birthday parties, no graduation parties during the pandemic would show its true colors during Christmas and people would overspend on their kids. They’re printing money. They’ve called and said, “We want to stay.”
Beth:
I love pop-ups but a lot of landlords won’t do it. They look at me like I’m crazy. “What do you mean don’t give him any rent for three months?” But those landlords three months later are still sitting with the same vacancy. I’m flexible and I like to try fun things like that. Now, you can’t really do pop-ups with restaurants unless you have a former restaurant space, but it’s got to be something that the tenant can move in and move out without a lot of infrastructure. The kitchen and bath guy ended up spending the money so right away, we knew that really wasn’t a pop-up.
Eric:
Why do you think so many landlords are opposed to it? What are some of the challenges that can come up when you’re dealing with a pop-up?
Beth:
No, they just want the money. They want the money from day one and it’s probably a little bit of a … You don’t want a tenant to come in and out often, right, because that sends a wrong message to the community, so you really have to curate the right tenant, but it depends on the size of the center. When I brought in the hobby store, it’s in a center of 30 other tenants. If they came in and went out, it wouldn’t have been a big splash. Now I probably wouldn’t have done that in a center where I had four people, four tenants because then someone going in and out would have been a problem.
Eric:
I think we all realize that if you don’t have a tenant, obviously you don’t have income coming in. But what are some other costs of vacancy that may be lesser known now? What is the real cost of vacancy?
Beth:
The cost of vacancy is when you run a shopping center, you have maintenance costs, insurance costs and real estate taxes. And the tenants in a multi-tenanted shopping center share those three costs across the board. If you’re Starbucks, you’re paying a portion of those three costs that the landlord has on the shopping center. When you have 10 vacancies, let’s say a thousand square feet each, 10,000 square feet, and you’re in 100,000 square foot center, 10% of those costs aren’t getting covered by the tenants, right? The landlord’s eating that. That is a cost.
Beth:
Another cost is in some municipalities, you’re required to keep the electric and water running in a vacancy. Well, if you have a former Michael’s like I do and it’s 20,000 square feet, that electrical bill, even with all the lights and air conditioning turned off can be pretty sizeable. Those are pretty much the costs of vacancies, and then just the cost of opportunity, like in anything else.
Eric:
Keeping tenants can be important. What suggestions would you have if someone is looking to ensure tenant retention?
Beth:
Well, so tenant retention is all about tenant sales. I’m a huge, huge believer in all landlords need to collect sales from the tenants. Now some tenants like Starbucks won’t give you sales, but most of your local tenants will give you sales. You want to be monitoring those sales monthly. For example, right now, post pandemic, I collect … I don’t know … I probably collect 75% of my tenant sales. We’re at 92% of where we were pre-pandemic, so I know that my tenants are all pretty healthy. I know immediately if sales are not doing well, that I’m going to have a vacancy on my hands. If you have a tenant doing great sales and their occupancy costs rent versus their sales is less than 10% … 10% is kind of the rule of thumb … if their occupancy costs, which is rent compared to their sales is less than 10, they’re pretty much going to stay.
Beth:
Retailers are not like office building tenants. Office building tenants will move across the street for a $2 a square foot difference in rent. Retailers, because their location and the signage and the ingress and egress off of the main thoroughfare, there’s way more things to take into consideration as far as finding, keeping and being happy with the location. They’re not going to move unless they’re doing pretty poorly or they think that they can really significantly increase their sales by moving across the street or down the street.
Eric:
You’re listening to the Private Equity Real Estate Podcast, which is brought to you by First National Realty Partners. Beth, if you’re working with a third party broker, what are some questions that you would ask a broker before you partnered with them and what are some things that a property owner can do to put that broker in the best position to succeed?
Beth:
If I buy a property in a market that say I don’t live in and I’m want to hire a third-party broker and leasing agent and manager, I want to make sure that they really have a pulse on the market. I would probably go to the market and drive around with them and ask them questions as we’re driving around. That’s first and foremost. I’m not looking for a broker for me to hire and they slap up a leasing sign and then they’re not proactive in looking for tenants.
Beth:
Obviously being the canvassing queen, I want to know who on their team canvases or prospects or cold calls or does Facebook prospecting. I want to make sure that they are actively prospecting to fill my shopping center. I want to make sure that they have relationships with the nationals. If I have an out parcel with a drive-through opportunity, they need to have relationships with the fast food industry. If I have a big box that’s empty, I want to hire the group or the brokerage firm that has relationships with the big box tenants. I may hire one team for one asset in a market and another team for another asset in the market, because you want to match expertise to the needs of your properties.
Eric:
A little bit about property management. How important of a role do you think property management plays in retail leasing and how do you go about finding a good partnership with one?
Beth:
I would probably ask them for testimonials from other clients. What goes into property management is collecting the rent, doing the budgets and keeping the properties clean and bidding out the vendors and doing the monthly reports and bidding out the insurance. How many other people do they work for like me? How long have they been doing it? What are their rent collections stats in their other properties that they manage and lease? If they tell me that, “Oh yeah, we get the rent by the 10th every month pretty consistently,” I have a problem with that because I want the rent by the second. My rents are due on the first. I want my rents on the second.
Beth:
For me, it’s all about rent collection, rent collection, and then, oh, by the way, rent collection. I want a team that’s focused on that and that pays their property managers to go get the rents and it’s not just lock boxes or, “Oh yeah, the check’s in the mail.” I’m pretty active and hands-on, and my tenants know they’re getting a call from me on the second if I don’t have that rent check. Now some tenants, some shopping centers I buy and acquire and some leases have grace periods, which I hate. I have to abide by the grace periods and if I can’t call them until the 10th, by gosh, we’ll be calling them on the 10th.
Eric:
Exactly. I remember hearing you on your podcast and you mentioned that what you were doing nine years ago is now what you’re doing today. How have you adapted your approach going into 2021?
Beth:
Well, nine years ago, I did not have social media. I thought social media was stupid.
Eric:
And now you could probably be known as the content queen. You’ve got a podcast, YouTube videos, blogs. You’re everywhere.
Beth:
Exactly. Well, how that happened is one of my leasing agents came to me one day and said, “I think we should prospect on Facebook.” And I said, “Well, I think that’s the most stupidest idea ever,” but then I heard myself as a teacher say that to her and I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Yeah, you go ahead and try that and see what happens.” Well, she signed the lease four days later, so shame on me and I got on Facebook.
Beth:
And since then, the ability to prospect for tenants on Facebook, because you’re getting directly through to the owner of the business is amazing. I still canvas. I was canvassing yesterday. We went to 30 different businesses, but every day for my own portfolio, I’m probably Facebook prospecting 10 people directly on Facebook or Instagram and then I’m also doing content on LinkedIn for the national retailers. I would say that the biggest change in my business in the last nine years has been my personal adoption and then promoting of Facebook to our community, our commercial real estate industry.
Eric:
Do you think technology and innovation are pretty essential in retail leasing?
Beth:
Well, I think you can get crazy with it. I have clients who every time a new prop tech, property technology tool is introduced, they buy it and try to adopt it and all their sales people are saying, “No more, no more.” I think you can go overboard like in anything. But I think that Facebook and Instagram prospecting is a necessity. And I think everybody that’s a leasing agent should be doing it to help fill their shopping centers. But there’s a lot of other tools out there that may not be a necessity and we continue to get more and more every day.
Beth:
But the new mobile data … The other thing nine years ago, we all relied on demographics that were based on ten-year-old census tracks, census records. And now there are three or four companies that produce demographics based on mobile data, right? How many people were in your shopping center two days ago? And how old are they and where do they live and where did they come from and where did they go to that? We didn’t have that nine years ago and that is fabulous, so that’s helpful.
Beth:
And there’s just time efficiency, CRM, customer relationship management platforms and tools. It definitely helps, but it doesn’t take away, Eric, from good old-fashioned door knocking, which is why I’m called the canvassing queen. I’m always going to go back to that. I mean, here I am. I own six shopping centers. I have a whole training business. I’m a single mom of two boys and I canvassed yesterday for my vacancies.
Eric:
Yeah. I guess a combination of new and old school. It’s the best of both worlds. This is a very different time with the pandemic and coronavirus. Because of that, are you seeing more creative lease terms?
Beth:
Certainly with the pop-ups and that’s probably another reason that some landlords don’t do pop-ups is they’re worried about their other tenants, right? They’re worried their other tenants going to call them and say, “How could you give this guy three months free?” Right? And they just don’t want to have that conflict or that conversation. I’m happy to have the conversation with my existing tenants. Hey, if I can bring three pop-up tenants and they stay, you probably got three months free when you first started 20 years ago, too.
Beth:
There are creative deals happening, but it’s really market-specific, geographic-specific. I can imagine right now with New York being shut down for all of the months that it’s been shut down, there are huge deals happening up there. There aren’t that many deals happening down in South Florida. We’ve been open since May 28th, and we’ve had a huge influx of population from New York and California. There aren’t a lot of good deals or creative deals happening down here.
Eric:
Beth, before I let you go, you’ve given us so much great information and we definitely appreciate it. When it comes to retail leasing, the best practices and getting better returns, what advice would you have or some parting words of wisdom, suggestions that you might have for our listeners that maybe we haven’t covered?
Beth:
Well, I buy shopping centers and my rules are the following. It’s supply and demand, supply and demand, supply and demand. I had someone call me yesterday and they said, “Look, you can buy this shopping center. It’s only $25 a square foot,” and I looked at it and there were 40 other shopping centers up and down the street that over supply and under demand. And when that happens, rental rates go down. You can never drive rental rates, which is the key to investment appreciation is driving the rental rates.
Beth:
It doesn’t matter you can get the property at 25 bucks a square foot if you can’t lease it. Rent then becomes a commodity because of the comparison between the competition of the 40 other centers in the area. I’m always looking when I’m looking at properties to buy, I want there to be my center and maybe three more and then no other centers, a bunch of residential, not a lot of available vacant land where they can come in and build shopping centers.
Beth:
That’s my first rule. I like centers that don’t have elbow spaces, Eric. Those are the spaces in the corner that are very hard to lease. I like buying shopping centers that are parallel to the street, lots of visibility and exposure for the tenants. I like centers that are in really high income neighborhoods or very low income neighborhoods. I don’t mind centers in low-income neighborhoods because I’m usually the only center in the neighborhood, back to supply and demand. I like centers that are near daytime drivers, hospitals, colleges, major corporations. I look for that. Those are the things that I look for when I’m buying and that I would recommend to others.
Eric:
I mentioned before you have a podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Beth:
Sure. I wrote two books in the last two years. The first one was Don’t Say No for the Prospect and that basically is get that limiting belief out of your head. Most of us will say, “Oh, maybe I should call that bike store.” No, won’t want to lease in my center. We talk ourselves out of deals. That’s just a bunch of stories on overcoming limiting beliefs.
Beth:
Book number two is The Retail Leasing Playbook. And that is A to Z on how to lease retail space. My podcast is where I go over two chapters a week from the book and I just jam on it, right? I just talk about, “Okay, today’s chapters 13 and 14. This is what they’re about,” and I kind of maybe give a little story that might not be in the book to kind of send the lesson home. That’s what my podcast is. I don’t interview guests. I just talk about the chapters in the book. It’s kind of like if you don’t want to buy the book, just listen to me talking about my chapters.
Eric:
And if someone wants to get in touch with you, Beth, how do they do so?
Beth:
BethAzor.com or LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn and that’s Beth Azor as well.
Eric:
Fantastic. Beth Azor, founder and owner of Azor Advisory Services. Thank you so much for being on the program today.
Beth:
Thank you, Eric. Thanks for having me.
Eric:
My thanks again to our guest today, Beth Azor, and thank you for listening to the Private Equity Real Estate Podcast, which is brought to you by First National Realty Partners. As always, remember, if you haven’t already please rate, review and subscribe to the podcast. I’m your host, Eric Murphy. And we’ll talk to you again next week.