Commercial Real Estate Tips for Investors and Brokers | Joe Killinger Interview

Joe Killinger (00:00)
we don’t want to work that hard and we think we’re going to work smart and this industry, commercial real estate, you know, we think we’re going to post content and people are going to come in droves to us. It’s a people business. You need to be shaking hands. You need to be talking to people. You need to be the human that everybody else wants to talk about with real estate about. So how do you do that? And we just think that, you know, it’s going to be.

Kristen Knapp (00:23)
Great.

Joe Killinger (00:27)
easy to get started by just doing some marketing and it’s going to fall in. It’s not. People, you’ve got to build trust and you’re going to do that by face to face, actual conversations, talking to people.

Kristen Knapp (02:12)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Joe Killinger, is an investor, author, and entrepreneur. Thank you for being here today, Joe.

Joe Killinger (02:20)
and thank you for having me on.

Kristen Knapp (02:22)
You have so much going on. You have this great platform for people to get into real estate. How did you enter the industry to be in one?

Joe Killinger (02:24)
you

Well, was, I’m from Nebraska, farm community, town of 281 people, so as you can imagine, Dating Pool is pretty small. But it was a great place to grow up. You learn responsibility. But my father was an auctioneer and he was auctioning off. He started off doing livestock and then farm equipment. Then he eventually got into real estate. And for some reason, real estate just really, as a kid, I got addicted to it.

And I was just absolutely fell in love with it. So then when I got old enough was going off to college, I decided to get my real estate license. And I started for some reason this company in Lincoln, Nebraska, Wood Brothers Realty brought on this kid that was 18 years old, looked like he was about 12 and said, here, we’ll hire you. Start calling. And I put a phone book in front of me. Right. And so that didn’t go too well, as you can imagine.

But this guy took me under his wing and he really showed me the market and I ended up in farm sales. But ⁓ family ended up losing our farm and so didn’t have a place to go back to. And so I got into the University of Nebraska, was there for about a year and a half and then we ran out of money. So I ended up just getting in my car, driving to California, got to San Clemente and that’s where I ran out of gas. So that’s where I started living. And I started doing stride right shoes during the day.

Kristen Knapp (03:46)
So yeah, easy.

Joe Killinger (03:52)
I was sales in Laguna Hills Mall and I did telemarketing at night, which by the way, I’m the worst telemarketer in the world, which then I ended up doing cold call. I a career starter, right? But real estate was always in the back of my mind and I wanted to get back into real estate. So I got my real estate license here in California. And then I started working as an assistant to a residential real estate agent. Quickly learned residential wasn’t really for me.

and couldn’t figure out what to do. Ended up up to LA, got back into real estate, did a little development, started working with people that would buy houses and fix them up. And I’d throw a little money in. ⁓

But I had to live in the property which you know, I’d seal a room off and I’d live in there I don’t recommend anybody do that. But when you’re in your 20s, anything goes, right? So I would do that and then we were just kind of flipping those houses and we end up losing the economy tanks and we ended up we ended up losing the not losing but we ended up breaking even on the properties

I ended up at a company, a real estate auction company here in Los Angeles and started doing marketing there. I was on site. They ended up pulling me into the office and my business partner now, ⁓ George Pino runs our, he’s the CEO of our commercial real estate company, actually laid me off from that company.

And so that’s how we really got to know each other. And he laid me off, so we sat and talked that morning about what we doing. And I was going over to another company that was launching a startup auction company. And I went over there got started with that. George called me a couple weeks later and said, hey, I got laid off. And I said, well, you can come and work with me. And so we started the SANS group here in Los Angeles.

And we took that to be the number two real estate auction company in the Western region within the first 18 months. that was, was, Preston, I’m telling you, it was different time. There was no internet, right? So it was all cold calling. We get in the office at 7, 7.30 in the morning, start calling New York, all calling on banks and developers.

We ended up, end of the day, well I say end of the day, about 3 o’clock, we’d be calling on Hawaii banks and all that. Then we’d stop, and then we had to manually fold letters to the people that we had to talk to that day. So they would go out in the mail that night. And then that company, it ended up closing down after seven years, because the auction market was just going away. And then we ended up.

the company that we are partners with ended up selling and then we ended up in another commercial or residential real estate firm and we started their commercial division for them. And then they got sold and they gave us, they called me when I was up in MAMA skiing and they said, Joe, we need to close the commercial real estate division down. And I said, okay, how long do I have? And this was December 9th, they gave me till January 1.

Kristen Knapp (07:27)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Killinger (07:27)
And

so I’m like, okay, so this is kind of immediate. And so then we started Commercial Brokers International. And that’s how Commercial Brokers International started. So we just decided to take my broker’s license and launch it. And we’re at 20 agents right now, a full service company, doing deals all around the country through our affiliate network that we own, Commercial Real Estate Affiliate Network. And then we also have ICON Capital Advisors, it’s a commercial mortgage company.

Kristen Knapp (07:34)
No.

Joe Killinger (07:53)
Real estate’s always been my thing. I I love it. I love doing deals. I love sitting with our agents every day talking about structuring deals, helping people really find the right investment for them. And I love it. I love it. And I will do it till the day I die, I think.

Kristen Knapp (07:56)
Yeah.

That’s amazing. You have a very interesting ⁓ entrance into the market. I was interested in… Your tank ran out of gas in a great area, by the way. That was not a bad place.

Joe Killinger (08:17)
Yeah, but did you notice none of it was calculated? It was all reaction to everything.

You know, that’s for damn sure. It just seems like every

time I turn around, I’m like, well, I got to go start over again. And so finally, we just decided to start our own and create our own future.

Kristen Knapp (08:32)
You

In the beginning when you were kind of figuring out what you wanted to do in real estate, what didn’t you like about residential and what did you love about commercial?

Joe Killinger (08:47)
It’s not that I didn’t like residential, just wasn’t, I don’t know if I wasn’t around the right people or just the environment wasn’t for me.

I like structuring deals and you know and then you’re always with residential you know you do the deal you sell the house or lease the house or and then you move on to the next deal because that client’s done. In commercial real estate you can actually build a business because if I find the right investor I can do multiple deals with them in a year or if I do a lease then that lease is going to be up in three five you know whatever the number is.

Kristen Knapp (09:16)
Right?

Joe Killinger (09:22)
that you negotiate so they’re going to be a repeat client. So you can really build a business in commercial real estate is the way I looked at it. And that’s really what was the attraction for me.

Kristen Knapp (09:31)
Yeah, that’s a really good point. mean, commercial has so much opportunity there. And what would you say about the market right now in general? ⁓

Joe Killinger (09:39)
It’s, you know, we got to keep in mind that real estate is very local. So if you, I’m in a high rise in Britwood right now.

and you take this high rise and you move it a mile south. It’s completely different tenant base, completely different price point. And so you’ve got to really, there’s some spots they’re good. I was just talking to an agent that handles Orange County ⁓ in Paris, know, an Empire industrial, and it’s 20 % vacancy. I had no idea the vacancy was that hard. So it’s really important that you as an investor or even as a broker know that area that you’re investing in or you’re going to be working in.

And but overall is a market. There’s so much capital sitting on the sideline right now, Kristen. I was just talking about the other day. So there’s 350 billion of dry powder sitting on the side waiting to invest. of fact, Blackstone alone has 177 billion globally. And they’re looking at warehousing, they’re looking at student housing, they’re looking at data centers, of course, everybody’s looking at data centers.

So I think maybe when interest rates come down, we’re going to see more people doing investing. But my thing is, are there going to be sellers and what’s the competition going to look like? And, know, I was on a podcast the other day and she asked me and I said, you I don’t know. It’s tough to say because if you look at what’s what’s going on in the marketplace right now and look at the stock market, you know, there’s so much activity there that it doesn’t really make sense to me.

And I was talking to the guy that handles my accounts last night and goes, yeah, it’s a little scary. And I said, are we thinking about getting out? goes, no, not yet.

And so, but he laid down all the things that he’s watching every day. That gave me a migraine because I’m just a real estate guy, but he was, there’s just so much, you just want to be watching out for the opportunity. You know, there’s just a lot of ifs right now. And so you want to stay on top of it. Make sure you’re reading your real estate publications every day, you know, watching the shows that are talking about it, ⁓ because there’s a lot of great information.

Kristen Knapp (12:04)
again.

Right. And what I like about the business you’re building and what you’ve built is I think education is a huge component of it. Maybe you feel like people don’t necessarily get the proper education they need to be successful in this industry. I would love for you to talk more about that.

Joe Killinger (12:33)
Yeah, you I love commercial real estate brokerage. think I that, you know, and I just think that, you know, when George and I started out, there was back then they didn’t really do any mentoring. They just felt that you were you were going to be competition in the future. Right. And so it just didn’t bother to do it. But then as we got going, we owned our own brokerage. We saw the need for training, because if you look at the commercial real estate brokerage industry overall.

average turnover is between 87 to 92 percent, somewhere in there. So people get into this business, almost all of them are out within a couple years. Why? Because they haven’t been, there’s no training. so, you know, now there’s there’s great coaches. There’s a coach out there, Rod Santomasimo, if anybody’s thinking about coaching, give them a call. Or if you want me to connect you, I’m happy to. But it’s expensive and a lot of new people can’t afford it. So that’s why I created this jillkillinger.co and it’s a YouTube channel. It’s a website

Kristen Knapp (13:08)
Wow.

Joe Killinger (13:30)
that has a bunch of tools on it. There’s books for reading. I post blogs every week to really try and help people out. And honestly, I’ve pivoted. got kind of a this is more of a confession than anything, Kristen, is I was running my YouTube channel. I was introducing authors on a weekly basis. You know, I got the interview Chris Voss, you know, don’t split the difference. Cody Sanchez, all phenomenal. But in the end, I got thinking about actually my sister said something to me. She goes, you really got away

from the why you started your YouTube channel. And that kind of hit me, I’m like, you know what?

You’re right. So we’re pivoting right now. were growing like crazy. We were 45,000 subscribers. And so now we’re pivoting and we’re really focused on just it. it’s just me. As a matter of fact, I got to shoot one right after this. Me talking about how to grow your business. And it’s painful. The views are way down because that’s not why everybody’s subscribed to the channel. But I’m doing everything I can to really help everybody in our industry grow their business. Because, you know, where a lot of companies just

don’t educate, which is amazing to me because I don’t know why you’d bring somebody on into your company. Put them on the phones without any real formal education and expect them to make money because they’re not going to make money because they don’t know they’re talking about. So you’re spending money on them as a company owner.

Kristen Knapp (14:50)
Right.

Joe Killinger (14:53)
and I don’t get that investment so we do we do it completely different at Commercial Brokers International you won’t touch the phones until I sit down with you and I can go through your market with you and you can tell me if it’s multifamily in Culver City if you can’t tell me how many properties are on the market right now what the average sale price what the average list price was what average days on market all of it then there’s no need to get on the phones because

If you’re just going to call somebody and are you thinking about buying or selling real estate? What’s your hit rate? It’s terrible. Now, if you call somebody up and say, hey, I see you own property XYZ. Did you see that the property right down the street just sold or just came on the market? You can have a real conversation with somebody. Now you’re going to make more money. Now there’s a chance that you’re going to survive in this industry. So until we can have them do that, we don’t put them on the phones.

Kristen Knapp (15:25)
Yeah.

Joe Killinger (16:28)
But we do training every morning at 8.30 in the morning and then at 5 o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays we sit down with them and go, what’s working for you? What’s not working? How can we help you get better? And those are 15 minutes and those little 15 minutes of a half hour a week, what a huge investment that’s turned out to be. It’s just giving people the opportunity to educate themselves. That’s really what this joekillinger.co is all about.

Kristen Knapp (16:52)
⁓ And it’s all for free.

Joe Killinger (16:55)
Yeah,

yeah, I don’t charge for it. It was I do a lot. You know what? I think I learned more from the people I talked to and it gives me more ammo to go out to the marketplace with and say, hey, if this happens to you, then you should do this. so plus, I just love doing it. When I was going to college, it was really, really ⁓ focusing on becoming a teacher. was an ag teacher because I was such a farm community. I’m a horrible farmer, by the way. I don’t know what made me think ag farming was going to be education was going to be good for me. But.

Kristen Knapp (17:08)
Yeah.

Joe Killinger (17:24)
⁓ Here I am. I’m doing teaching, but I’m also doing real estate every day with people. I just enjoy being around every day. So I’m very fortunate.

Kristen Knapp (17:35)
Amazing.

So what are some very common mistakes you see people make early on? I’m sure you see the same stuff popping up a lot of times.

Joe Killinger (17:46)
Oh yeah, not doing

enough. mean, it’s, you know, there’s times that I’ll take a call, Kristen, and you can see that they’re taking the call with me and taking my time and they’re counting this as look what I’m doing for my career. I’m taking the time to talk to somebody about it, but I have no intention of implementing any of this. You know, it’s, it’s really, I always tell people, don’t talk to people or don’t take advice from people that are where you’re at right now.

Kristen Knapp (18:14)
Great.

Joe Killinger (18:14)
get advice from people that

are where you want to be. That’s where the real advice is. They’re going to tell you it’s going to take time. It’s going to take work. And I see a lot of people getting it thinking there’s something new that nobody else is trying right now. Trust me, in our industry, we’ve all tried it. Otherwise, it would be more popular. It’s tough to get away from the hard work.

Kristen Knapp (18:30)
Yeah.

Joe Killinger (18:39)
You know,

we don’t want to work that hard and we think we’re going to work smart and this industry, commercial real estate, you know, we think we’re going to post content and people are going to come in droves to us. It’s a people business. You need to be shaking hands. You need to be talking to people. You need to be the human that everybody else wants to talk about with real estate about. So how do you do that? And we just think that, you know, it’s going to be.

Kristen Knapp (19:03)
Great.

Joe Killinger (19:07)
easy to get started by just doing some marketing and it’s going to fall in. It’s not. People, you’ve got to build trust and you’re going to do that by face to face, actual conversations, talking to people.

you know, and I think I was, big in ⁓ digital marketing, but matter of fact, there’s the commercial real estate influencer summit that’s coming up and that is all people. There’s 150 brokers from around the country that are all into digital marketing. They’re doing their business that way.

So I think early on I got involved as I’m on my fifth year right now, actually I’m one of the heads of marketing for it. I really thought this is gonna be a game changer. It’s gonna change the way we all do commercial real estate and I was wrong. It has changed it, but cold calling is still one of the number one things. Networking is right there, getting out talking to people, your sphere of influence.

You know, the digital marketing is a great way to stand in front of people though and become an expert in a market. I still think a young person can go into a marketplace and take over a market ⁓ by implementing all of it. You got to do the cold calling. You got to do the networking. You’ve got to do the content creation, write blogs, get reviews. And when you can, you do proof stacking to show that you’ve done deals in the marketplace in a certain asset class. And that lives there.

forever. And so I just I love this industry. I think for a young person, what a time to get started.

Kristen Knapp (20:36)
Right. Yeah, and I mean, you’re really only as good as your network, especially in the, particularly in the commercial aspect of it. Yeah, mean, building it is huge. And what would be some of your tips for people to get out there and network who may be afraid to?

Joe Killinger (20:57)
yeah, it’s you’ve got to go. As a of fact, it’s funny you ask that, Chris, because I’m getting ready to do a video on it right now. Here’s the script. It’s so, some of the number one complaints we get in our industry is, hey, this broker reached out to me and then I had a question for him. I called him back. didn’t get a response. Responding. Responding is a good place to start.

Kristen Knapp (21:04)
Fabulous. Topical.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Joe Killinger (21:22)
You know,

that’s making sure you’re getting out. But when you actually go to a networking event, and this is something that you see, because we as salespeople think if we just talk, people are going to want to call us back.

when it’s actually the opposite. And my dad told me once, goes, Joe, you’ve got one mouth and two ears. He goes, just shut up and listen. And, you know, it’s amazing how the older I get, the smarter he gets. ⁓ But he’s right on. You know, the more that you just listen when you’re out networking, if you actually take the time to listen instead of talk, you’re going to hear what pain points this potential client is going through. You’re going to hear what their needs are. And so, you know, that’s that’s probably

Kristen Knapp (21:40)
Yeah.

Right.

Joe Killinger (22:03)
one of the biggest things is don’t go out there and just be talk, talk, talk. Don’t go out there just to hand business cards out. And my pet peeve, don’t just go on LinkedIn, connect with them and then send them a message afterward. Everybody’s doing that right now. ⁓ But just go out there and be the real you and listen to people and bring them value. It’s about bringing value. If you meet somebody and they have a property.

Kristen Knapp (22:14)
Right?

Joe Killinger (22:28)
go ahead just do a broker price opinion, it depends on what you call it, broker price opinion, broker opinion of value, BOV, send it to them. The numbers are going to be rough because you don’t have the rental rates but now you’ve got a reason to reach out to them and hey if you want me to update this with the real numbers I’d be happy to do it for you. Just let me know what the real rental rates are. Do it for free.

You know, just do it to do it. Connect them with somebody if they need a good podcaster. Say, listen, I know this lady, Kristen, I can connect you with her. Maybe you should be on her podcast. Do it with don’t expect anything in return, but just do it to do it and know that down the road, not with everybody, but down the road, you’re going to get business coming in from it. And I think that’s the biggest part of networking.

Kristen Knapp (23:12)
Yeah, absolutely. particularly when you’re in those first maybe few years, particularly your first year, things are slow and you got to be patient and making that one good connection can really start your career. It could really be a make or break.

Joe Killinger (23:19)
Yeah.

yeah, because we

always think that, I need to have 20,000 subscribers on Instagram or LinkedIn. And it’s not true. If you have 100 people that are actually listening to what you’re saying and you’re bringing that 100 people value, much more valuable than all those other subscribers.

Kristen Knapp (23:47)
Absolutely. And to kind of wrap this up, what would be some advice that you wish you learned earlier in your career?

Joe Killinger (23:54)
Well, I think my father kind of laid it out there, but patience is probably, you I’m an A type person now that is a Leo. And, ⁓ you know, I think patience is something that we all need to have if it’s going to be an investing or in brokerage. And, you know, when I first started young and just go, go, go. ⁓

I think I could have had more success if I had stepped back occasionally and taken a look at some things. mean, think having the aggressiveness was really positive for a lot of reasons, but I think I probably would have been further if I would have had a little more patience.

Kristen Knapp (24:30)
think that’s very good advice. mean, yeah, patience is huge. mean, commercial can take a long time to make those deals. So you’ve got to be patient.

Joe Killinger (24:38)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, it’s our industry gets a lot of people think they’re going to get into commercial real estate and make money right away. And, you know, maybe you could get a deal together in your first few months, but you may not get paid for a while. You know, it could take a while to go through the whole process. So you’ve got to be you got to be realistic. And if you’re thinking about getting into commercial real estate, I was.

Kristen Knapp (24:45)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Killinger (25:00)
I can give one piece of advice is when you’re going out to interview, and they’re interviewing you, you need to interview that brokerage firm just as much as they’re interviewing you because this is your career. It’s very important that you understand what you’re getting yourself into.

I get agents that come to me saying, this firm has offered me this. I’m like, well, you can probably, yeah, okay. If that works, if it’s real. But have you looked at reviews on the company? Have you talked to other agents in the company? I suggest you do that before you jump ship.

Kristen Knapp (25:33)
Yeah, that’s great advice. So where can people find you and learn more information?

Joe Killinger (25:39)
You’ve got

jokillinger.co, it’s right here behind me. You can check it out or you can email me at joajokillinger.co and check out the YouTube channel at joakillinger. keep everything Joe Killinger, so if you just Google Joe Killinger, you’re going to find me no matter what,

Kristen Knapp (25:54)
Easy. Simple.

Well that’s awesome you have so many subscribers on your YouTube.

Joe Killinger (26:01)
Yeah,

it’s going through a phase right now where it’s really disheartening when you, you know, we’re getting thousands of views on every video and now we’re just getting, it’s pretty small. We just started redoing it. And so the subscribers had signed up that those numbers aren’t, this isn’t the content they want, but it’s the passion that I really have and where I can really bring my value to our industry. And I got a little bit.

Kristen Knapp (26:13)
Yeah.

Joe Killinger (26:29)
sidetracked with all the subscribes and the likes and the comments and then leave it to family to bring you back down to earth, right? They’ll do that. Yeah, yeah, I should listen to them more.

Kristen Knapp (26:37)
Hey, there you go. Your family has a lot of good advice, it seems. ⁓ But I think it’s important.

think as you’re building a social platform, think authenticity is the most important thing. So if it’s what you’re authentically passionate about, your people will find you. So thank you so much for being here, And thank you everybody for listening. We will see you back next time.

Joe Killinger (26:57)
Thank you, Kristen.