10300 N Scottsdale Rd: From Doggy Daycare to 24/7 Golf Club

Represented: Tenant | Lease Signed: August 2024 | Term: 5 Years and 4 Months

The best deals in commercial leasing happen when a tenant walks into a space nobody else wanted and sees something nobody else could see.

This one is exactly that.

The space

3,262 square feet at the Total Wine Center on North Scottsdale Road, two suites combined, sitting in a high-visibility retail center off the Scottsdale Road corridor. Good location, good traffic, good demographics. And it had been sitting on the market for a while.

Why? Because the previous tenant had been a doggy daycare. And after that tenant left, the space looked like exactly what you'd expect a former doggy daycare to look like. The carpets were a mess. The bathroom was rough. There was a drop ceiling that made the whole place feel cramped and dark. Most retail tenants who toured it took one walk-through and moved on.

My client did not.

The vision

My client walked in with a concept that was completely different from what the previous tenant had been doing. He was building a 24/7 membership golf simulator. Members would have round-the-clock access, leagues, community events, the kind of place people would actually want to hang out in. The kind of place where the space itself becomes part of the experience, not just a container for it.

Which meant the space needed real work. The drop ceiling had to come out so we could raise the height and make the room feel open. The carpets had to go. The bathroom needed help. The whole feel of the place had to shift from "industrial pet space" to "premium membership lounge." That is a lot to take on as a tenant, especially when you are also building out simulator bays, AV, lighting, and a brand-new business.

So we negotiated for the landlord to share the cost.

The deal we structured

Here is what we got the landlord to agree to in the executed lease.

Four months of free rent. Months 1 through 4 of the lease were $0 in base rent. That gave my client the runway to spend the first four months of his lease tearing the space apart and rebuilding it without a rent payment compounding the construction budget. Four months of abated base rent on a space at this rate is real money.

A Tenant Improvement Allowance of $37,513. The landlord agreed to reimburse my client up to that amount for hard and soft costs of the build-out, paid out after he opened for business, completed the work, provided lien waivers, and obtained a certificate of occupancy from the City of Scottsdale. That is meaningful capital coming back to the tenant after he proves the space is operational.

An HVAC cost cap. Any HVAC repair or replacement exceeding $1,000 per occurrence becomes the landlord's responsibility. On a 3,262 square foot retail space in Phoenix, that is a clause that protects the tenant from the kind of out-of-nowhere mechanical bills that can sink a small business in its first two years.

Five years plus a four-month build-out period, with a 5-year option to renew. Long enough for my client to build a real business in the space and have a clear path to extend if it works. Annual rent escalations were modest (the rent steps up gradually from $6,252 per month to $7,339 per month over the initial term), which kept the early years affordable while the business was ramping.

What he did with it

Once we closed the lease, my client got to work. He pulled the drop ceiling out and raised the visible height of the entire space. He ripped the old carpet up. He fixed the bathroom. He built out the simulator bays, the membership area, the lounge space. He turned a space that looked like nobody wanted it into a place people pay to spend time in, on their own time, around the clock.

It is a 24/7 membership golf club now. League nights. Community involvement. The exact concept he pitched, brought to life inside walls that used to belong to a daycare for dogs.

Why this deal matters to me

Tenant representation in commercial real estate is not just about finding space. It is about finding the right kind of space for the right kind of tenant, and then negotiating the deal so the tenant has a real shot at making it work. Anybody can put a tenant in a turnkey space at full asking rent. The actual job is harder than that.

The actual job is finding a space that is rough on the surface but right in the bones, walking it with a tenant who can see what it could become, and then sitting down with the landlord and negotiating the concessions that turn "this is a project" into "this is a project we can afford to take on." Free rent. TIA. HVAC protection. Long term with options. Every one of those is a lever, and a good tenant rep knows when to pull which one.

My client took a space nobody else wanted, paid less than he would have for a clean space, got the landlord to fund a meaningful chunk of the transformation, and is now operating a one-of-a-kind business out of it. That is the trade I want to make on every deal: take the rough spot, see the upside, structure the terms to make it real.

That is what I do.

2222 E Highland Ave: A Biltmore Medical Sublease, Closed Clean

Represented: Sublessor | Closed: September 16, 2025 | Term: 5 Years at $32 PSF

Not every closed deal is a war story. Some of them are clean. The reason they're clean is usually that the property is in the right location, the price is right, the space is right, and the broker did the work to get it in front of the right tenant. That is exactly what happened on this one.

The space

2222 E Highland Ave is the Biltmore Medical Mall, sitting in the heart of Phoenix's Camelback Corridor, minutes from SR-51, Biltmore Fashion Park, and the kind of dining and amenities that make medical professionals want to set up shop nearby. It is the only Class A medical office building of its kind in Biltmore proper. It is owned by Welltower, one of the largest medical office REITs in the country. The tenant roster reads like a who's who of Phoenix healthcare: Biltmore Surgical Center, Banner Imaging, SMIL, Arizona Digestive Health, AZ Gynecology, Arizona Cancer Care, the Eye Surgery Center. It is, in plain English, the address every medical practice in the East Valley would love to put on their letterhead.

The suite my client was subleasing was already fully built out for medical use, with a dedicated surgery room. That last detail matters more than people realize. A built-out medical suite with a surgery room is rare inventory. The cost of building one of those out from scratch can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the permitting alone can take months. When a fully equipped one comes available on a sublease, the right tenant moves fast.

The tenant

We placed it with a research clinic. Five-year sublease at $32 per square foot. Term locked in, terms clean.

A research clinic is exactly the kind of tenant who benefits from this specific space. They needed turnkey medical infrastructure, they needed it in a credible address that would reassure their study sponsors and their participants, and they needed it on a timeline that did not allow for a 12-month build-out. The Biltmore Medical Mall checked every box. The surgery room checked the box they didn't even know they needed until they walked it. We got them in.

The work behind a "clean" deal

People sometimes assume a clean deal means an easy deal. They are not the same thing. A clean deal means the friction was managed before it became a problem.

On this one, the main piece of work was getting the master lessor to approve the new tenant. In a sublease, the original lease almost always requires landlord consent before you can bring in a sub. That consent is not automatic. The landlord is going to look at the proposed tenant's financials, their use of the space, their reputation, their fit with the rest of the building, and any number of other factors before they sign off. On a Welltower-owned Class A medical building with a tenant roster that careful, you can imagine the due diligence is real.

We worked with the master lessor through the approval process, presented the research clinic in the strongest possible light, answered every question that came back, and got the green light. Once that was done, the rest of the deal moved fast. Five-year term, $32 per square foot, fully built-out medical with a surgery room, signed and closed September 16, 2025.

Why this deal matters to me

Here is the thing about medical office subleases. They are some of the most underrated transactions in commercial real estate. A residential investor or a generalist broker is never going to touch one. A research clinic looking for space is not going to know how to find a fully built-out medical suite with a surgery room sitting on a sublease in a Welltower building. The match between supply and demand only happens when somebody is actively working both sides of the market.

That is the work. That is what a good commercial broker does. We connect the inventory with the user, we manage the master lease consent process, we keep both sides moving, and we close the deal in a way that leaves everybody better off than they started. My sublessor got out from under a space they no longer needed, the research clinic got a turnkey home for their work, the master lessor got a quality tenant in their building, and the Biltmore Medical Mall stayed full.

Clean deals are not boring deals. Clean deals are the deals where the broker did the work upfront so the closing felt easy. And that is exactly how I want every transaction to feel for my clients.

4045 E Union Hills, A109: How Seller Financing Actually Works

Represented: Seller | Closed: Jan 2026

Most people in commercial real estate talk about creative financing the way most people talk about dieting. In theory. Aspirationally. "Yeah we should structure something creative on this one" and then they go right back to writing offers contingent on a 60-day bank approval and wondering why the deal feels slow.

Real creative financing is different. It is paperwork. It is math. It is two parties willing to do the work to build something that is not a standard bank loan. And when it actually closes, it is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a broker, because you watched a deal happen that would not have happened any other way.

4045 E Union Hills Rd, Suite A109, was one of those deals.

What we sold

The property was a 2,027 square foot built-out office condo in north Phoenix, off Union Hills Road in 85050. Clean, functional, ready for an owner-user to move in and start running a business out of the day they got the keys. The kind of asset that should sell, but in a 7%+ interest rate environment with banks dragging their feet on small commercial loans, "should sell" and "actually closes" are not the same sentence.

I represented the seller, an entity that owned the condo and was ready to move it. The buyer was an owner-user who needed the space. Both sides wanted the deal. The question was how to get it across the line in a market where conventional financing on a sub-million-dollar office condo is genuinely difficult.

The structure: traditional seller wrap

We closed it through a traditional seller wrap. For anyone reading this who has not done one of these before, here is what that actually means in plain English.

In a seller wrap (also called a wrap-around mortgage), the seller continues to hold the underlying loan on the property and creates a new "wrap" loan to the buyer that wraps around the existing debt. The buyer makes payments to a third-party servicer, who then pays the underlying loan first and forwards the rest to the seller. The seller becomes the lender. The buyer gets to acquire the property without going through a traditional bank approval process. Both sides win, but the structure has to be built carefully because there are real legal, tax, and risk considerations on both sides.

In our deal, we structured the wrap with a meaningful down payment, a market interest rate, a long amortization to keep the monthly payment manageable, and a balloon at the end of the term so neither side was locked in forever. We brought in a third-party servicer to handle the payment processing, and the cost of that service was split equally between buyer and seller. The buyer was responsible for all property taxes, insurance, and association fees on top of the wrap payment, exactly the way they would have been with a bank loan.

The first year of payments was structured as interest only, which gave the new owner room to get into the space, get their business operating, and stabilize their cash flow before stepping up to fully amortizing payments. That is the kind of small structural choice that makes the difference between a buyer who closes and a buyer who walks because the math feels too tight in year one.

Why this works for sellers

A lot of sellers are afraid of carrying paper. They hear "seller financing" and they think "I am giving up control" or "what if the buyer doesn't pay." Both of those concerns are real, and both of them have answers.

You give up immediate liquidity, yes. In exchange you get a return on your money that is significantly higher than what you would get parking it in a CD or a money market account. You get monthly cash flow secured by the property you used to own, with the property itself as collateral. If the buyer defaults, you get the property back and you keep the down payment. The downside scenario is not nothing, but it is not catastrophic, and the upside is a long runway of monthly income at a yield that beats most passive investments in this market.

For the right seller, especially one who does not need the cash immediately and is willing to play the long game, a wrap can be a better outcome than a clean cash sale. My seller on this deal understood that, and we structured it accordingly.

Why this works for buyers

For a buyer, a seller wrap is sometimes the only way to acquire a property in the current rate environment. Banks are tight. Underwriting takes forever. Small commercial loans under a million dollars are hard to get done unless the buyer has a long banking relationship and pristine financials. A wrap lets a qualified buyer move quickly, close cleanly, and start using the property without spending three months in loan committee.

The buyer on this deal knew exactly what they wanted. They came to the table prepared, worked with their broker on the structure, and we got it done.

Why this deal matters to me

I am building a brand around the idea that commercial real estate is creative work. That a good broker is not just an order taker, they are a problem solver. Deals like this one are the proof. Anyone can write a standard offer. Not everyone can sit at a table with two parties and structure a custom financing arrangement that protects both sides, gets the deal closed, and creates value for everyone involved.

Creative financing is not a gimmick. It is a tool. And in a market where conventional financing is harder than it has been in 15 years, knowing how to use that tool is the difference between selling a property and watching it sit.

If you are a seller wondering whether you should consider carrying paper on your next deal, or a buyer trying to acquire a property in a tight credit environment and wondering whether a wrap could work for you, this is exactly the conversation I want to have. Reach out. There is more than one way to close a deal, and I have done enough of these now to know which structures work and which ones fall apart in escrow.

9271 E Rockwood Dr: The Hawaii-to-Scottsdale Move (and the Single Pane Problem)

Represented: Buyer | Closed: 2025

Some deals are complicated because the property is complicated. Some deals are complicated because the people are complicated. This one was the second kind, and it was all on the seller side.

My clients were family friends relocating from Hawaii. He flies Cirrus jets for a living, and work was bringing the whole family to Scottsdale. When you are moving from Hawaii to the desert, you do not have the luxury of shopping for a year and flying back and forth to tour houses. You need a broker who knows your taste, knows the market, and can get you under contract fast on the right one.

These are the best kind of buyers. They came in knowing exactly what they wanted. We toured a handful of houses on the very first day and by the end of that day, they had found it. 9271 E Rockwood Dr in the Foothills at Ironwood Village, North Scottsdale. Four bed, three bath, 2,813 square feet on a third-of-an-acre lot in one of the prettiest pockets of 85255. Built in 1989, on a desert lot with the kind of views that make people move to Scottsdale in the first place.

They said yes. We wrote the offer. That was the easy part.

Hiccup one: the single pane windows

Here is a fun fact about houses built in the 1980s that nobody updates. A lot of them still have the original single pane windows. All of them. Throughout the entire house. Which is fine in a temperate climate and absolutely not fine in Phoenix, where summer afternoons cook you through the glass and your cooling bills turn into a second mortgage.

We flagged it in inspection. My clients did not want to move into a house where the windows were going to cost them a thousand dollars a month to fight the Arizona sun, and they did not want to live through a full window replacement after they had already relocated an entire family from Hawaii. So we negotiated the window replacement as part of the deal. Not a concession, not a credit, the actual replacement. It needed to happen before they moved in, and we made sure it did.

Hiccup two: the HOA plant

The HOA had asked the sellers to put in a new plant in the front landscaping, and the sellers had not done it. This is the kind of small thing that should be a 30-minute problem to solve and somehow it wasn't, because the seller side had bigger things going on than their landscaping. Instead of forcing the sellers to pick a plant my clients might hate, we got them to put the money on the table so my clients could pick whatever plant they wanted after closing. Clean solve. Everybody won.

Hiccup three: the refrigerator, the divorce, and the husband who wouldn't pay

Here is where the story gets real.

The sellers were in the middle of a messy divorce. That is part of the job in residential real estate, you meet people in transition, and sometimes that transition is the reason the house is on the market at all. But divorces affect deals in ways most people do not see from the outside, and this one showed up in the refrigerator.

The fridge didn't work. Broken. Needed to be repaired before close. And the husband, who was still technically a co-owner on the deed, refused to pay to fix it. Did not want to put another dollar into a house he was trying to walk away from. Did not want to negotiate, did not want to split it, did not want to do anything except sign the paperwork and be done with the whole thing.

That is a frustrating situation when you are a buyer's agent. You cannot force somebody to care about a broken appliance on a house they hate. What you can do is find the workaround, keep your clients calm, and get the deal across the line without burning the relationship down. Which is what we did. We solved it. I am not going to get into the specific mechanics here because some of that is between me and my clients and the sellers, but we got everyone to the closing table and my buyers got their house.

What matters

They are living happily in it now. The single pane windows got replaced before they moved in. The plant situation got sorted. The fridge got handled. And the house in the foothills is full of family, the way it was always supposed to be. They are waiting for the next new baby to arrive, and when that baby gets here, she will come home to a house that her parents found on their very first day of touring with me, a house their broker fought a small war over so they could walk in clean on move-in day.

Why this deal matters to me

This is what you pay a good buyer's agent for. Not for finding you the house, honestly, because if you know what you want, the house finds you. You pay a good buyer's agent for what happens after you find the house. For the negotiation, for the inspection list, for the conversations with a listing agent whose clients are in the middle of the hardest thing in their life and cannot agree on a refrigerator. You pay a good agent for the calm. For the "I've got this, you focus on packing your life up in Hawaii, I'll handle the rest."

My clients trusted me with one of the biggest moves of their life. They flew in, toured a handful of houses, picked one, and then trusted me to get them through escrow while they sold their Hawaii home and packed up their family for the desert. And I got to watch a friend move into the house where his next baby will grow up.

That is a good day at work. Those are the days you do this job for.

6038 E Tally Ho Dr: The House My Second Parents Built a Home Inside

Represented: Buyer | Closed: May 2025 | Sale Price: $830,000

I will tell you up front: I do not love residential real estate. Commercial is my world. Commercial is where I get to do the problem-solving, the financing structures, the creative value plays, the deals with a dozen moving pieces that have to land at exactly the same time. Residential is not usually where my heart is.

Except when it is these clients.

These clients are my favorite people. They are clients in the professional sense, but the truth is they feel like my second parents. They are people with hearts after God, the kind of humans you want in your corner, the kind of couple that makes you a better person just by being around them. We have done a lot of residential deals together over the years, and every single one of them is a privilege. When they call, I show up. That is just how it works.

So when they told me their current home did not have enough space for the grandkids and the family gatherings they wanted to host, but that they loved being on the mountain and wanted to stay on the mountain, I knew what we were looking for. Something with room. Something with views. Something that could hold a family and everything a family brings with it.

We found it at 6038 E Tally Ho Dr.

The house nobody else wanted

Let me describe what we walked into.

The house was 3,105 square feet on a hillside lot in Cave Creek, with a 3-car garage, a walk-out basement, and a separate guest suite with its own kitchenette and garage access. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, a pool, and views for days. On paper, promising.

In person? It had not been updated in the last 30 years.

There were plans on file for an addition that had been drawn up and then never built. There was unpermitted work scattered throughout the house from various projects over the decades. The pool, which the listing called a "heated infinity edge pool" in its best marketing voice, was in rough shape. And the ceilings in certain parts of the house were so low that anyone over 5 feet tall would bonk their head walking down the stairs. I am not kidding. You had to duck. The house was a project wrapped in a project wrapped in a view.

Most buyers would have taken one tour and left. A few might have put in a lowball offer hoping to flip it. But my clients are different, and that is why they got it.

The vision

My clients walked through that house and they did not see the 30-year-old finishes or the pool that needed work or the low ceilings or the half-finished plans on the counter. They saw a home for the grandkids. They saw Thanksgiving dinner at a long table with everybody pulled in close. They saw birthday parties and summer afternoons and quiet mornings on the mountain with coffee and the sunrise. They saw what this house could be, which is the only way anybody ever ends up owning a house worth owning.

And here is the best part of this whole story. He is a contractor.

The husband, one half of the couple I love most in my client roster, is a contractor who can actually do the work himself. So when we walked that house and saw everything that was wrong with it, he was not seeing a mountain of invoices from other people. He was seeing his own project. He was seeing the parts he would tear out, the walls he would raise, the pool he would bring back to life, the addition he would finally build out from those dusty old plans. He had the skills and the patience and the love for his family to pour into this house what it needed.

We closed May 2025 at $830,000. They got it for $44,000 under the asking price, which is exactly what you should be able to negotiate on a project house that scares most buyers.

What happened next

They got to work. He did a huge amount of the renovation himself, exactly like we knew he would. They brought the house back to life, and today they are living in it happily, grandkids and all, on the mountain they love with the space they needed.

This is what real estate is supposed to do. It is supposed to get the right people into the right house at the right moment in their life, and then get out of the way and let them build something meaningful inside those walls.

Why this deal matters to me

I work hard for every client I take on. Commercial, residential, big deals, small deals, it all gets my full effort. But there is a different kind of fuel that shows up when you get to serve the people you love. When your clients feel like family, when you know the house you are helping them buy is going to become the gathering place for the people they care about most, you are not just brokering a transaction. You are participating in something holy.

I am so grateful I get to do this for them. I am so grateful they trust me with their real estate, which is really them trusting me with their family's future. And I am so grateful God keeps putting people in my path who remind me why this work matters, even on the days it feels hard.

These are the deals I will remember forever. Not because they were the biggest or the trickiest. Because they were for people I love. And because on the mountain at 6038 E Tally Ho Drive, my second parents are sitting down to dinner tonight with the grandkids running around, in a home they built with their own hands out of a house nobody else believed in.

That is the whole point of what I do.

615 W Ray Rd: The Dirt Next Door

Represented: Seller | Closed: May 2025 | Sale Price: $525,000

Some deals are about creativity. Some are about patience. This one was about patience.

My seller had picked up two small dirt parcels on Ray Road as part of a bigger play. When he bought the car wash next door at 647 W Ray Rd, these two lots came along with it. They were not the reason he made the purchase. They were the bonus. Small strips of dirt tucked between his new car wash and the tire shop to the west, visible from Ray Road, with all the fundamentals of a decent infill commercial site but none of the urgency of a must-sell situation.

So he held them. Then when he was ready, we listed them.

The part nobody talks about in broker marketing

Here is the truth about a lot of commercial listings. They do not sell in the first 30 days. They do not sell in the first 60 days. Small, unique, slightly awkward parcels like these do not attract the flood of buyers a shiny turnkey building does. They attract a very specific type of buyer, and you have to wait for that buyer to show up.

For a while, it was quiet. We had the listing out there. We took the calls that came in. We fielded the tire-kickers and the "what would you take for it" emails and the occasional creative offer from somebody trying to lock it up for pennies. None of them were the right fit. My seller was not in a rush, and neither was I.

Then the right buyer walked in.

The easy part, once it started

The minute the right buyer showed up, everything clicked. An owner-user who wanted to put a business on the parcel, who understood what the site was, who did not need to be talked into it. Offer came in, terms were clean, we moved quickly, and we closed in May 2025 for $525,000.

From the outside, it looked like an easy deal. And in the sense that escrow moved smoothly and nothing blew up, it was. But that ease was earned. It was earned in the months of keeping the listing alive, keeping the seller updated without making him feel stuck, and staying ready for the moment the right phone call came in.

Why this deal matters to me

Not every closed transaction is a cliffhanger. Some of them are quiet wins. My job as a listing agent is not just to find the buyer. It is to hold the line on price and terms while we wait for that buyer to arrive, and to stay sharp so that when they do show up, we move. Patience without urgency is just waiting. Patience with urgency when it matters is brokerage.

My seller got his number. His new neighbor got a site to build on. Both parties walked away happy, and the Ray Road corridor got one more small business putting down roots.

Sometimes the best deals are the ones that close quietly. Those are mine too.

8220 E Minnezona: The House with Koi Under the Floor

Represented: Buyer | Closed: February 2025 | Sale Price: $1,550,000

Every once in a while, a house comes along that is impossible to forget. 8220 E Minnezona is one of them.

Tucked into Scottsdale Country Acres, walking distance to Old Town and Fashion Square, this 4 bed, 4 bath zen retreat was the first Scottsdale home ever featured on Zillow Gone Wild and one of the most viewed listings in the platform's history. The reason why is the kind of thing you have to see in person to believe. The seller, a Scottsdale designer and developer with a track record of doing things nobody else would attempt, built a 1,200 gallon in-ground aquarium into the living space. Tempered glass floors. Koi fish swimming right beneath your feet. You walk through your own home and pass over an underwater world.

And that is before you get to the dual primary suites, the six foot wine gallery, the vaulted ceilings with exposed silver wooden beams, the black porcelain floor-to-ceiling fireplace, the signature designer kitchen with the 10 foot island and Italian black hood vent, the pool, the spa, and the rooftop deck accessed by a wrought iron spiral staircase where you can watch the Scottsdale sunset with a glass of wine in your hand.

It is, without exaggeration, a once-in-a-lifetime property.

What this deal really was

I can tell you about the square footage and the finishes all day. That is not what this deal was actually about.

This deal was about a woman who had worked unbelievably hard to get to the point where a home like this was even possible for her and her family. This was her second home. A milestone. The kind of purchase that is not really about the pool or the rooftop deck or even the fish. It is about what it represents. Years of discipline. Years of saying no to things so she could one day say yes to this. The moment when the thing you have been working toward for a long time is finally sitting on the other side of a signature.

Those deals are the ones you remember forever as a broker. Not because they were complicated (this one actually was not, relatively speaking) but because you were standing next to someone on one of the biggest days of their life, and your job was to make sure nothing got in the way of it.

The usual suspects showed up

Even a beautifully renovated home throws you a few curveballs in inspection. The seller had done a complete renovation, but a handful of items still came up in the report, and he went back in and fixed every one of them. Which is exactly how it should go when a seller has put that much love into a property and a buyer is bringing the kind of energy this buyer was bringing. Everyone wanted this deal to happen. Everyone protected it.

30 days, and done

We closed in 30 days on a $1,550,000 home with dual primary suites, a rooftop deck, a pool, a spa, and koi fish swimming under the floorboards. Fast, clean, and exactly what my client deserved.

Why this deal matters to me

I work in commercial real estate for a living. I love the strategy, the problem-solving, the creative financing, the hunt for hidden value in a parcel everyone else overlooked. That is my world.

But then every now and then, you get to stand beside a friend on her second-home closing day. You get to watch her walk through a house that represents everything she has been building toward. And you remember that all the strategy and structure and contract work is really just a means to one thing, which is helping the people you love land somewhere they belong.

Some homes are investments. This one was a homecoming. And I will remember it forever.

37250 N 29th Dr: Four Acres, One Well, and a Lot of Walkaways

Represented: Seller | Closed: November 2024 | Sale Price: $560,000

Raw land sounds like the simplest asset class in commercial real estate. No tenants, no HVAC, no roof. Just dirt.

Anyone who has actually sold raw land knows it is one of the hardest things to move, because every single issue that a finished building quietly solves, raw land leaves wide open for the buyer to figure out. Water. Power. Access. Zoning. Soil. Financing. The list is long, and most buyers get about three items in before they say "this is too much work" and walk.

37250 N 29th Drive was four acres of residential land sitting in far north Phoenix, up in the stretch of desert north of the 101 where custom home lots give way to bigger parcels and real quiet. Beautiful piece of ground. On paper, an easy sell.

In practice, we had two problems.

Problem one: the water

There is no municipal water out there. Any buyer who wanted to build a home on this land was going to have to drill their own well, and in that pocket of the valley, the recent wells in the area were coming in around 500 feet deep. That is a real number. We had estimates from a local well drilling company for an air rotary drilled well with PVC casing down to 500 feet, plus a separate pump system sized to whatever the eventual buyer planned to do on the property (home size, animals, landscape, whether it would be shared with a neighbor, all of it).

Every serious buyer wanted to know the same things. How deep, how much, how long, and is the water any good when you get there? So I had the information ready before they asked. I had the well estimate, I had the map of recently drilled wells in the area with their depths, and I had the drilling company's contact info so a buyer could call directly and get their own bid in an afternoon instead of spending three weeks figuring out where to even start.

Problem two: the access

The driveway situation was the other sticking point. The natural access into the buildable area of the parcel involved crossing onto adjacent lots, which meant any buyer had to get comfortable with the access rights before they could get comfortable with the purchase. Access issues on raw land are the kind of thing that kill deals quietly, because buyers don't want to fight about it. They just disappear.

I had a lot of buyers disappear on this one.

What actually closed it

What finally got this property across the line was not a magic buyer or a market shift. It was refusing to let the deal die every time someone brought up the well or the access, and having answers ready the next time someone called. Every objection, we had a document for it. Every concern, we had a contact for it. Every buyer who walked, we learned something from, and the next buyer who walked in got a smoother conversation.

We closed in November 2024 at $560,000. Full list of what the seller wanted. On a parcel that had made several other buyers disappear without so much as a counter offer.

Why this deal matters to me

Selling raw land is not glamorous work. It is phone calls to drilling companies, screenshots of well maps, follow up emails that feel like they're going nowhere, and a seller who (rightfully) wants to know why it is taking so long.

But the moment you find the right buyer, and you hand them a folder that says "here is the well estimate, here is the access situation, here is everything you need to know before you ask," the deal changes. They stop seeing a problem. They start seeing a project they can actually finish. That is the work. That is what gets paid for.

Dirt is never just dirt. And patience is a brokerage skill.

4729 E Union Hills: The Hidden $500K on the Back of the Parcel

Represented: Buyer | Closed: October 2024 | Sale Price: $2,650,000

My client was a doctor. He was shopping for a building to move his practice into, and he found this one. Two buildings sitting on a single parcel off Union Hills, office and medical, one that he'd occupy himself and another he could lease out to fund the whole thing. A solid owner-user play with built-in cash flow. On paper, clean.

Except every deal has its complications, and this one had a few stacked on top of each other. Here's how it actually went down.

The seller side was fragile

The property was owned by a group of partners, and two of them were not speaking to each other the way business partners are supposed to speak to each other. Every counter, every request, every small contingency had to move through a minefield of personalities before it could come back to us. Huge credit to the listing agent on this one. The amount of work it took to get that side to agree on anything was a full time job in itself. When a deal has that kind of friction on one side, it can die over details that don't actually matter. It didn't, because the other agent kept it alive.

The HVAC was a mess

Inspection came back and the HVAC on both buildings was in rough shape. Not the kind of thing you just eat as a buyer and hope for the best. Real money, real risk. We pushed, the sellers repaired, and that got handled before close. One problem down.

And then we noticed the cell tower

There was a cell tower on the property. Not unusual in Phoenix, and most buyers (and most brokers) would look at it and think "okay, small monthly rent check, nice little bonus." I looked at it and wondered if there was something bigger sitting there.

So I started making calls. We got connected with a cell tower aggregator, one of those companies that specializes in placing new carriers on existing towers and then buying out the ground lease rights from property owners for a lump sum. Here's what we worked out with them.

They would bring in a new tenant for the tower, increasing its income and therefore its value. Then they'd purchase the lease rights from my client for over $500,000 in a lump sum payment. And we'd close the tower rights purchase simultaneously with the real estate acquisition in a double closing, so that the moment my client took title to the property, that $500K hit his side of the table.

He used it to pay down a huge chunk of his acquisition loan on day one.

Think about what that actually means. My client walked into escrow with a loan on a $2.65M building, and walked out of escrow with a dramatically smaller loan on the exact same building. The tower rights buyout didn't come out of his pocket. It came from a hidden asset on the parcel that most people would have left on the table.

What came after

Post-close, my client built out the second building and leased it up to an autism services group. Cash flow, locked in. Then he moved his medical practice into the first building and became his own best tenant. Owner-user on one side, passive income on the other, and a significantly reduced loan balance funding the whole structure.

Why this deal matters to me

Commercial real estate is a game of finding value that isn't obvious. Anyone can run comps and tell you what a building is worth on the surface. The brokers worth hiring are the ones who walk the property and ask "what else is here?"

A cell tower in the back corner of a medical office parcel looks like nothing. Until you make the right three phone calls, and suddenly it's half a million dollars knocking on the door at closing.

That's the work. That's what I love. And that's why my clients keep calling me back.

640 E Purdue: The One Where We Built the COO Mid-Escrow

Represented: Seller | Closed: November 2024 | Sale Price: $1,300,000

Here's the thing about commercial real estate nobody tells you until you're in it: the deal you sign up for is almost never the deal you close. The good brokers aren't the ones who find perfect transactions. They're the ones who know how to save the messy ones.

640 E Purdue was a 6,271 SF office building just north of 7th Street and Dunlap, sitting in the North Mountain submarket with gated parking, a recent renovation, and a layout flexible enough for an owner-user or a full lease-up. On paper, it was a beautiful listing. In reality, it came with a plot twist.

The build-out problem

My seller, a private owner, had done a build-out on the property himself. Beautiful work. Except he never pulled a Certificate of Occupancy for it. And you can't close a commercial sale on a building the city doesn't officially recognize as occupiable. We found this out the way you always find these things out: mid-escrow, with a buyer who was ready to close and a clock that was already ticking.

This is the moment where a lot of deals die. The buyer gets spooked, the seller gets defensive, and everyone walks.

What we came up with

Instead of killing it, the buyer's agent and I sat down and got creative. Here's what we structured:

Sale price held at $1.3M. We weren't going to let the permitting issue become a price negotiation. The value of the building hadn't changed; we just needed to get the paperwork caught up.

Financing split 1M + 300K seller carry. The buyer got a one million dollar loan from his lender, and my seller carried back the remaining three hundred thousand as seller financing. This kept the deal alive when a traditional full-bank financing path would have stalled on the COO issue.

COO holdback from the seller-financed portion. We brought an architect in to pull a fresh Certificate of Occupancy and legitimize the existing build-out. The cost of that process was held back from the seller-financed amount, which protected the buyer, kept the seller whole on the real sale price, and gave everyone a clean path to close.

45-day escrow. For a commercial transaction with this much moving underneath it, 45 days is fast. Really fast. We had to coordinate the lender, the architect, the city, the title company, and two sets of attorneys, and keep every one of them moving in the same direction at the same time.

Why it mattered

The seller got his full price. The buyer got a building with a clean COO, a financing structure that actually worked for his situation, and a closing that happened on time. And a deal that looked dead at the 20 day mark closed at day 45.

This is what I mean when I say commercial real estate is problem-solving. You're not selling a building. You're assembling a small miracle, piece by piece, and holding the whole thing together with your bare hands until the escrow officer says "recorded."

That's the part I love. And that's the part my clients pay me for.