Commercial Real Estate

The term, "Commercial Real Estate" (also called "Investment property" or "Income property") refers to structures, buildings or land intended to generate a profit, either through capital gain or rental income.

Commercial Real Estate includes strip shopping centers, office buildings, skyscrapers, industrial property, hospitals and medical centers, hotels, shopping malls, retail stores, farm land, apartment buildings, warehouse buildings, and parking garages. In many states, residential property containing more than a certain number of units qualifies as commercial property for loan and taxation purposes.


Commercial real estate is commonly divided into six categories:

1. Office Buildings – This type includes single‐tenant property, small professional office buildings, metropolitan skyscrapers, and all other variations in between.
2. Industrial Property – This category extends from smaller property, often called “Flex Property” or “R&D properties”, to larger office service or office warehouse properties to the huge “big box” industrial property types. A significant, defining characteristic of industrial property is Clear Height. Clear Height is the actual height, to the bottom of the steel girders in the interior of the building. This might be 15‐20 feet for smaller properties, and 50+ feet for larger properties. We also consider the type and number of docking bays that the property has. These can be at-Grade Level, where the parking lot and the warehouse floor are on the same ground level, to Semi‐dock height at 24 inches, which is the height of a pickup truck or delivery truck, or a Full‐dock at 48 inches which is semi‐truck height. 
3. Retail or Restaurant – This type includes pad sites on highway frontage roads, single tenant retail buildings, small-district shopping centers, larger centers with grocery anchor store tenants, high-energy “power centers” with large anchor stores such as Best Buy, PetSmart, OfficeMax, and more, even including regional and outlet malls.
4. Multifamily Property – This category includes apartments or high‐rise condo buildings. Usually, a fourplex or more is considered to be commercial real estate.
5. Undeveloped Land – This category includes investment properties on nondeveloped, virgin, rural areas in the path of potential future development. Or, it could be infill land with an urban area, open pad sites, and more.
6. Miscellaneous Category – This catch all designation would include any other nonresidential property such as hotels, hospitality organizations, medical facilities, and storage developments, as well as many more things.

Let Mike Meisenbach assist you with navigating the complexities of Commercial Real Estate and Investing.