How Relationships Win Commercial Real Estate Deals with Adam Robbins

Adam Robbins (00:00)
Well, I think most businesses are relationship driven, but real estate especially. ⁓ Real estate is an ultra competitive business, right? There’s a lot of brokers out there. Some of them do really, really well. mean,

some of them are huge, but there’s a lot of them that barely get by, that either they barely get by or they end up getting out of business. And even if you’re fortunate to work for a company or you own a company, mean, trying to even buy a piece of real estate is competitive, right?

Quentin (02:17)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. And I’m excited to be here today. I’m super excited. Got a fantastic guest here. And you know what I love is when we learn from other people’s experience. And so this gentleman is going to take us into his world. We’re going to peek through his lens. I’m excited. I’m excited to get to learn from him, knowledgeable, know what he’s talking about. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Mr. Adam.

Robbins, Mr. Adam, how are you doing today,

Adam Robbins (02:46)
I’m doing very well and thank you for having me.

Quentin (02:49)
absolutely, my friend. Thank you for being here, sir. And listen, Mr. Adam, I am the type I like to dive right in. So I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got into the space that you’re in. We love origin stories. And then tell them what part of the world you’re in. People love to know where people are geographically, especially if they can partner up or…

come and collaborate. so again, what you’re up to, your origin story and where you are. Mr. Adam, sir, you got the floor.

Adam Robbins (03:20)
All right, so I run a single family office. So ⁓ I work ⁓ for a high network family that invests in real estate. ⁓ we, or this particular office, focuses on retail office and industrial property. So we own a little over million square feet.

⁓ Most of our properties are located in ⁓ South and Central Florida, and we also have some properties up in New Jersey. ⁓ So ⁓ that’s the kind of the asset class I work in. without going into expanding a lot, obviously, office buildings, different kinds of tenants, medical tenants, law tenants, insurance. ⁓

Quentin (03:58)
Yeah.

Adam Robbins (04:09)
general office, that type of thing, shopping centers, retail, things like grocery stores and Chinese food and pizza places and dry cleaners and that type of thing. And then industrial would be small bay industrial where people do things like fix car engines and fix boats and maybe do work.

do work for hotels like on cleaning tablecloths and big machines that do big volumes of dry cleaning and things like that. And a couple of single tenant industrial properties where some big companies operate out of, they do food.

You know one of our buildings has a company that makes Greek yogurt. So just to give you an idea that type of thing so It’s income producing property and really what the business is It’s all about leasing right so the commercial real estate income producing real estate It’s about getting someone to sign a lease We get someone to sign a lease

Quentin (05:20)
Yeah.

Adam Robbins (05:21)
They pay the rent every month and we all hope that our expenses to run the building are going to be a lot less than the amount of rent we collect every month. So we have a nice profit. can pay our bank, we pay all our bills, and then we can distribute the excess cash to the owners of the property. So that’s what we do.

I think I talked about our geographic location, Southeast US primarily, and…

You want to know about my background? My background started in banking. I started as a lender.

Quentin (06:34)
I understand. Okay.

Adam Robbins (06:40)
go into too much detail, but I got out of college. I worked in my family business, has nothing to do with real estate. Did it for a couple of years, wasn’t really happy. Went back to graduate school for business at night. I got recruited by a bank ⁓ and I started out as a bank auditor. Wasn’t doing that because I got an accounting degree, graduate accounting degree.

didn’t love being a bank auditor and they moved me into the credit department. So I was now working with making loans on real estate. I did that for about 10 years. And I got offered a position working for a landlord.

And that’s ultimately what got me down to the South. I was working on a big deal for them. I had to come down here. It was a big acquisition, some retail properties, public company that was being taken private. And I was working on all the properties down in the Southeast, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and was based at that time out of Fort Lauderdale.

and kind just never left. So that led to a position with the publicly traded real estate investment trust. You know, that was the progression and ultimately ended up with these folks about 10 years ago. So what else can I tell you about me? I think at this point, I’ve had just about every job in commercial real estate. So I’ve been a lender.

Quentin (07:50)
Yeah.

Mmm. Yeah.

Adam Robbins (08:16)
I’ve done leasing, I’ve acquisitions, I’ve done property management, I’ve done asset management, investor relations. I think I’ve done just a little bit about everything at this point.

And my job essentially is to run this business on a day-to-day basis. So I’m responsible for pretty much the life cycle of every property at this point. And I don’t specifically work. We have some people that handle certain pieces of it, but I’m kind of like the end stage where everything either gets approved or doesn’t get approved.

Quentin (08:33)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Robbins (08:53)
So I’m looking at all the new leasing deals and if we have a property manager that’s not working out, we’ll have to make a change. If we have vendors that aren’t working out. So I spend a lot of time making sure that the workflow moves smoothly and also at new opportunities to buy.

Quentin (09:14)
Love it. I love it, Mr. Edderman. Thank you, sir. Thank you for taking me on a journey, man. I appreciate it. Telling us your origin story, how you got started, where you are now. I love it, man. And listen, I’m going to get a little philosophical on you. What I do, as people talk and I’m actively listening and I’m writing things down. So just want to maybe get a brief summary, then I want to make a statement and ask you a question. And so you started in banking as a lender.

Adam Robbins (09:33)
Mm-hmm.

Quentin (09:41)
You worked for your family business. It wasn’t really in real estate, but you worked for them. Really wasn’t happy, so you went back to school. And then, you know, for 10 years, you worked in loans. That’s kind of, you know, led you to working with a landlord that kind of got you to the South. And then now, you know, you’re with a company, you run a single-family office, and they focus on retail and industrial. They have, you know, a array of tenants, you know, medical law.

retail, laundry, ⁓ car parts. And you run it day to day, kind of like the bucks kind of stops with you, in a sense. And so is that a pretty good summary, Mr. Adam? All right. Yeah, yeah. And so I always do the summary because I make this statement. I say destiny has no wasted moments. Meaning as we journey through life, we’re building momentum to the people that we are now.

Adam Robbins (10:18)
Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty fair.

Mm-hmm.

Quentin (10:32)
And we’re borrowing from every leg of the journey. We’re borrowing from success. We’re borrowing from failures. We’re borrowing from different ⁓ seasons of our life, different kind of business occupations and positions. And so I would just love to know, Mr. Adam, on your journey to where you are now, what have you learned through the journey? What has the journey taught you about yourself?

Has it taught you like discipline, resilience? Has it changed like your mindset, the way you think? Like what is the journey? What is the moments throughout your life and business in transition taught you about yourself?

Adam Robbins (11:37)
taught me about myself. mean, I think you learn as you go along to focus on the things to, you know, delay. ⁓

Be careful about the decisions you make. Don’t go after… ⁓

Don’t go after immediate gratification. ⁓ Those are the mistakes most people at the beginning of their career make. Somebody may offer you a job for what at the time is substantially more money, ⁓ but that may not be the best move for you. Because what you’re

Quentin (12:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Adam Robbins (12:19)
that immediate gratification then you’re getting may cost you a lot more in the long term. So you have to be really careful. I understand everybody’s situation is different, those are the things that really on a long term basis will impact your career. For instance, I didn’t get my CPA.

because in order to get my CPA, I would have had to give up, this is going back quite some time, so I’m not gonna date myself, but quite a while ago. At the time, kind of like right when I got out of graduate school, I would have had to give up.

Quentin (12:49)
Yeah, yeah.

Adam Robbins (12:57)
like a $45,000 job a year at the time and would have had to take a $28,000 a year because you can’t get your CPA without a certain amount of public accounting experience. But I’m not sure that was a great decision on my part. I think I probably would have benefited by actually making the sacrifice at the time because that’s a very good

good credential to have. And that I think ultimately will get you a lot more in the long run. So that’s just a personal example of mine. But I think those kind of decisions are the, if you’re talking about career-wise, whether you’re in this business or any business, whatever your career path is, be careful about going after that

immediate gratification, what may seem like is, you know, a big ⁓ opportunity, really think about it, whether it is an opportunity and where it’s going to put you. ⁓ Is that decision going to move you much further ahead or may it bring you to kind of like a roadblock at some point? What’s going to? What?

Quentin (14:11)
Yeah.

Adam Robbins (14:12)
What decision in your career path is going to keep you steady on an uphill kind of trajectory through your career? That’s, you know, I don’t know if I answered your question, but.

Quentin (14:21)
Yeah, yeah.

absolutely answered my question for sure. It actually remind me of some advice I got back in high school where I used to play basketball. You know, one of my coaches, said to me, said, don’t listen, he was telling us, don’t forfeit what you want most for what you want in the moment. Don’t forfeit what you want most for what you want in the moment. Pretty much like you were saying, just be cautious of the decisions that you’re making.

Adam Robbins (14:42)
Mm-hmm.

Quentin (14:49)
You know, ⁓ and so I appreciate that thoughtful, reflective answer. One of my mentors always, you he told me when you know who you are, you know what to do. And so, you know, really take an inventory of my why who I am. What do I want most? What’s my why? Why am I doing this? Really kind of got my decision. And so I think that was some really, really good feedback that you gave, Mr. Adam, for sure. Absolutely.

Adam Robbins (15:11)
No,

I mean, and I think you’ll see that a lot in, you know, people who are, you know, very talented individuals. mean, individuals that are, you know, running corporations or running, you know, big hedge funds or typically the people that

are not the people who get their first job and decide to take half their paycheck and put it towards some fancy car. They’re the people who delay gratification and delay and delay and delay and save and eat a hot ⁓ dog as far as and not go to a fancy restaurant. Those are the people that end up really achieving some great things.

I don’t think, I think you’ve probably heard that before from a lot of people, but, and, you know, that kind of ties into what I said. ⁓

Quentin (15:58)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely,

then I think it’s great advice. Absolutely. So, Mr. Adam, let me ask you on a business tip. What’s next for you in the business? What’s next for you personally? What are your next real goals? What are you looking to solve at Scale Next?

Adam Robbins (16:54)
Well, we’re always looking for properties, obviously. But I think what I personally would like to do when I talk to the owners of the company, not necessarily something they need to be involved in, would be putting together some kind of fund in order to leverage a larger amount of capital and deploy that into real estate.

But I think the challenge is, what kind of real estate is it going to be? And really, what’s going to be the demand in income producing real estate going forward? What seems to be really hot now, and what I’ve had some interest in, is learning about data centers. ⁓ It’s really an asset class I don’t know a whole lot about. ⁓ What scares me about it is, I’m wondering if it’s going to all end up in space, like in next decade.

Quentin (17:50)
Yeah.

Adam Robbins (17:51)
You know, it’s going to

be, you know, everybody’s talking about building data centers and, you know, in the middle of the desert and, you know, you’re building like a solar energy plant next to it. But if everything’s cloud-based, maybe they’re just going to launch it into, you know,

on Artemis or something and have it orbiting the Earth and then you don’t need air conditioners to cool it because space is really cold and there’s no clouds so the sun can power the solar panels. I don’t even know, they may not even need data centers on Earth in 10 years. So it’s scary. But what I feel is we’re always going to need shopping centers as long as there’s humans because

Quentin (18:13)
Right, right.

Adam Robbins (18:27)
You know, you need to buy bread and eggs and cheese and things like that and pizza and Chinese food. You’re always going to need that. So for me, that’s always going to be safe. And I think if you’re studying the real estate business a little bit, those are those are pretty pricey trying to get into like any kind of decent, you know, grocery and good shopping. that held up really well. ⁓ And I think in a lot of markets, office is really challenged.

In Florida here so far it’s pretty good, but there are parts of the country like San Francisco where office buildings have just been slammed. Even Manhattan. You have office buildings that are 45 % occupied. You’re talking about big properties, half a million square feet. You got like 15 floors of vacancy.

that type of thing. then it becomes, know, what are you going to do with that real estate? Convert it to residential. It’s not that easy to do in a city like New York. mean, it’s. ⁓ So. That’s the challenge. mean, that’s the challenge in this business. Industrial. Yeah, I think it’s.

You know, people still need to store things. They still need to store big pieces of equipment and things like that. What’s it to be like 10 years from now? I mean, I imagine that even if things are automated, like I don’t know if you, know, like Waymo, like these cars that drive around now, or the driverless cars that are starting to come around.

I don’t know if they’re going to do that with bulldozers, know, for clearing land and things like that. But imagine even if it’s computerized, they’re going to need a place to store the equipment. So that’s probably an OK bet. If you’re buying like, you know, big warehouses or, you know, what they call these like high clear height industrial properties where the ceiling is like 32 feet above and you’re just rolling these big, you know, even if they’re driverless trucks, you’re still going to need to park them somewhere. So

Quentin (19:55)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Robbins (20:20)
Outdoor storage could be a good bet. I think industrial is still going to be a good bet. I would say small retail centers will be a good bet. that’s in this business. I think that’s the challenge of where to put your next dollar.

Quentin (20:33)
Yeah. Yeah. man, we didn’t talk about storage. We talked a little bit about, you know, bots and things running on automation. But I love to give people’s unique perspective when it comes to this word. And that word is relationship. When you hear the word relationship, what is your unique perspective on that word, Mr. Adam?

Adam Robbins (20:54)
Well, I think most businesses are relationship driven, but real estate especially. ⁓ Real estate is an ultra competitive business, right? There’s a lot of brokers out there. Some of them do really, really well. mean,

some of them are huge, but there’s a lot of them that barely get by, that either they barely get by or they end up getting out of business. And even if you’re fortunate to work for a company or you own a company, mean, trying to even buy a piece of real estate is competitive, right?

Because

When a deal comes out, any of the big brokerage houses put a deal out, ⁓ they’re putting it out to really all over the globe. mean, even if I get a package on ⁓ an industrial property here in the Miami area, mean, somebody in Germany is looking at that. Somebody in Finland is looking at that.

So it’s competitive, you know, and even if you get picked for an interview, when you buy a piece of real estate, the seller interviews you, especially at this level, right? They wanna know, sometimes they make you fill out a whole sheet. Where’s your money coming from? How many deals have you done?

Quentin (22:18)
Amoy? Yes, sir.

Adam Robbins (22:27)
You know, how did you underwrite my deal? Like what did you use for expenses? Like a lot of it is starts to get almost offensive like none of your business I got money You know And but they interview you and then they say You’ve been selected for the opportunity so it’s They’re selecting you to take your money right? That’s the

Quentin (22:49)
Yeah.

Adam Robbins (22:51)
It’s hard to believe. It’s competitive. So the relationships often are what give you the edge because when you get off the Zoom with that seller, you better believe they’re making calls. Do you know this guy? Have you done business with him? Has he ever signed the contract and then not closed? mean, so it’s…

If somebody knows you and gives you a good idea, they’re good guys. If what you’re telling them is the truth, they’re going to perform. Okay? So that’s how relationships work in this business anyway. I assume they work the same way in most companies, but not all businesses are as competitive.

But certainly I spend a lot of time with relationships. do networking in the morning. I go to networking events. I talk to people. I have lunch with people. Because you never know when you’re going to need somebody. You never know, like, hey, do you know this guy? I spoke with him. Is he a good guy? Is he real? Sometimes people say, you don’t want to do business with him.

It’s important, really, really important in the real estate business. So if you’re especially if you’re starting out of the business, you’re a student. You know, if you’re a student and you get invited to some kind of industry event and don’t sit next to somebody in your class, you know, sit next to somebody you don’t know, because the guy in your class not going to give you a job. So start at the beginning, start making those right choices.

Quentin (24:26)
Such good nugget, Mr. Adam, such a good nugget, man. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for, again, just what a thoughtful answer. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, Mr. Adam?

Adam Robbins (24:41)
Okay, so you can always look me up on LinkedIn. It’s Adam D. Robbins, MBA, R-O-B-B-I-N-S. So I’ll come up on LinkedIn and you can direct message me. Feel free to check out my website, which is my, cause I also do consulting work for other investors. The name of my comp, it’s ARC Equities LLC, but my website is

⁓ ARC, A-R-C, realty, diligence.com. And my contact information is on there. If you go into contact us, you’ll get my email address, my office phone. How else? That’s, mean, those are pretty good ways to get in touch with me.

Quentin (25:27)
Well, listen, sir, I appreciate it, man. Let me say three things to you, Mr. Adam. First, thank you for your time. I believe time is our most precious commodity, so thank you for your time. Secondly, thank you for your story, for your narrative. I believe our stories, they plant seeds. And we don’t know when it’s going to grow, but the seed is there, and it can grow at any given time. So thank you for planting seeds today. And definitely, thank you for your mindset, the way you think, and bringing your mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today,

Adam Robbins (25:54)
No,

thank you for having me.

Quentin (25:55)
Absolutely. listen, you heard Mr. Adam. His information is in the show notes. So go look there, get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you subscribe here, because I promise you, we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Adam. So sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, you have a fantastic day. Same here, my friend. You too. Thank you so much. All right, my

Adam Robbins (26:11)
I enjoyed speaking with you. Have a great day.