Why She Buys Half-Empty Strip Malls | Value-Add Commercial Real Estate Investing

Alexandra Haider (00:00)
And so the city was really excited for us to take over for this owner. He was based in New York, he was not taking care of it, wasn’t paying property taxes or utilities or anything like that. Well then the city reached out to us and they’re like, hey, we’re about to foreclose on him. You can probably get a really good deal there. So we ended up getting that one for less than half of what we originally had it under contract for. So that was basically a deal that originally was on the market. We negotiated, let it fall apart. And then came back to it through the city.

Dylan Silver (02:00)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Alexandra Haider, a Midwest investor and broker who has accumulated hundreds of doors as a residential investor and today focuses on strip malls. Alexandra, thanks for taking the time here today.

Alexandra Haider (02:16)
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:18)
These days what types of deals are coming across your desk?

Alexandra Haider (02:23)
For me, really what I’m finding and what I like to buy are value add strip malls. I’m not looking to acquire, you know, tons of them per year. My goal is kind of one larger asset like a strip mall per year, and that’s kind of how I want to live my life moving forward. But anything that’s really value add is what I’m looking for. And I do feel like there’s starting to be a few more good deals coming my way. So excited about that and really looking anywhere in in the Midwest and hopefully we’ll be expanding into the Florida area soon.

Dylan Silver (02:57)
We were talking about that in the green room and we’ll definitely get to that. I love Florida. I wanna ask a very basic question that I should know the answer to. But Midwest, what is Midwest? And when investors are talking about investing in the Midwest, are there any hot areas?

Alexandra Haider (03:13)
Yeah, so I mean, for me where I own properties in the Midwest is Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio. I’m pretty sure the Midwest is not technically on the west side of the country. It’s actually more on the east side. I saw like a map of that one time. But anyways, that basically like middle northern is is where I’m purchasing. I really like to buy obviously in red states. I did buy a strip mall. In Illinois and just found that it was a lot more expensive working with the city I was working with there for the turnovers than I was used to. Like Wisconsin is really easy to work with. Ohio is really easy to work with. So I probably wouldn’t personally I have two prop I had two properties there. I have one of them still and just I really prefer to buy in red states.

Dylan Silver (03:58)
Yeah, I can imagine for a lot of reasons. When we talk about strip malls in particular, how i is, you know, tenant management and leasing it up and overall property management different from some of the other asset classes?

Alexandra Haider (04:13)
Yeah, so that was a really big learning curve for me. And actually my favorite type of strip malls to acquire are from people who do primarily residential because they have their leases structured, like residential leases, which obviously like when I first got started, my first commercial buildings, I did the same thing because I just didn’t know the difference. My first strip mall, I partnered with somebody who has a bunch of other large commercial assets and he kind of taught me that that type of lease is structured really differently. It’s a triple net lease. Tenants pay for you know, all of their utilities directly, which could be same with residential. But the cool thing is, as I’m sure you’re familiar with, the common area maintenance charge. So we charge them proportionate portion of their insurance. Of the building taxes, of all of the exterior building maintenance and we have a budget there and then we do reconciliations at the end of the year. I really personally like working with commercial tenants and business owners. My favorite is mom-and-pop just getting started. I love to see them expanding in my buildings or sometimes going out and buying their own building and expanding on their own, but seeing their success there and, you know, they pour their heart and soul into it, which is kind of like what we do on the other end. And so I really like working with that type of tenant.

Dylan Silver (05:28)
Heard great things about triple net lease, and I’ve actually heard a lot recently in industrial, small-bay industrial. And in strip malls, I’m in a little bit of a fish out of water, a little bit green in this area. When we talk about triple net leasing in in a strip mall, is each lease very unique or is there some uniformity lease to lease?

Alexandra Haider (05:49)
No, I mean for the most part, unless you get a really big national tenant that has their attorneys that are saying, No, you gotta follow these guidelines, most of our leases are pretty similar and you know, you charge them by their square footage of the building. So they have, you know, if it’s a hundred thousand square foot building, they’re ten thousand square feet, they pay ten percent of our common area maintenance. So the CAM charges. As a landlord, we send it to them. They’re all really similar. They’re our leases we want to do and then obviously attorneys review and maybe some cross off some sections, change certain sections, put like a limit on the amount that you can, for example, increase the CAM charges per year. We’ve been really good at our budget. So we’ve usually had no like at the end of the year we’ve never had to say, for the most part you owe us additional funds. Sometimes we even get a small amount back to tenants. But yeah, basically mostly they’re the same. At least we start that way and then sometimes they get changed.

Dylan Silver (07:31)
Well let’s talk about value add and what that constitutes. And I wanna get granular here, not to put you on the spot. But when folks talk about value add in some other asset classes, you know, they might be talking if we look at multifamily, for instance, they might be talking about, you know, a new leasing office, you know, a pool, they might be talking about a conference area. When we look at strip malls in particular, value add can mean many things. What it Are you typically looking for for value add?

Alexandra Haider (08:02)
Yeah, so for me value add is really you can add value in a lot of ways. Typically I look for similar to residential. I’m looking for something that’s got a lot of work that needs to be put into it. Maybe the owner hasn’t replaced the roof in forever and every tenant has a leak. Maybe the owner is not taking care of the facade and it looks like crap, the parking lot has a bunch of potholes. Those most recent one I just bought, like they hadn’t had parking lot lights for years. So you you go in. You do improvements, you’re adding value there. And then typically I’m looking when I find those, those owners who aren’t taking care of them often they are more residential owners that have most of my strip malls actually that I’ve purchased have been from somebody who owns apartments and then maybe one strip mall and they’re getting rid of their strip mall. And so a lot of times those leases are gross leases that I convert to triple net and there I’m adding value as well. Those leases Are worth a lot more and usually I don’t do that until I do improvements on the building. My most recent one I purchased in February. I haven’t converted any of the leases. I just sent out the drafts. I waited until I fixed the parking lot, fixed the facade, fixed the roof. I wanted to make sure tenants knew I wasn’t just trying to hike up their rent and convert them to triple net leases, but that I was actually gonna be a good landlord as well.

Dylan Silver (09:16)
Now, when we talk about value add opportunities, one of the ways is also, you know, raising rents, and you mentioned that just now, you know, briefly. Do you come across situations where potentially investors have not raised rents in a strip mall for a long period of time, and that in and of itself is a value add opportunity?

Alexandra Haider (09:35)
Yeah, definitely some investors they’re the way that they go about this is they don’t do improvements on the building, but they don’t raise the rent. And so tenants end up staying there for a long time even though the building’s falling apart because their rent is so cheap. And so yeah, I mean a hundred percent. But those tenants are also very appreciative when you do the work and then maybe you bring them somewhere in between market rent and where they’re currently at, so they’re still getting a good deal. But suddenly they’re not having to they can do their interior improvements because they’re not having constant leaks. Their HVAC is not working. Like they’re excited as well.

Dylan Silver (10:10)
I wanna shift here and talk about tenants and occupancy and what it looks like when you’re acquiring these properties. Do you perceive a property that has, you know, maybe some degree of vacancy? I don’t know what the percentage would be there, but it if there are you know some vacancy there as an opportunity or is that a risk?

Alexandra Haider (10:29)
Definitely an opportunity. I’ve never purchased a stabilized strip mall. I’ve never purchased one that had that’s not true. My Illinois one was stabilized, but it was all gross leases. And so I converted it and I think there is it was probably about 75 to 80 percent occupied when I purchased it. So not you know, there was still some vacancies there that we worked on. But often the ones that I’m purchasing have 30, 50 percent occupancy. And so that’s actually what I’m looking for. I’m hoping to find large amounts of vacancy like that. And ideally for me, I’m looking for small spaces. The really large spaces, former like JCPenney stuff like that, that is not what I’m it’s that’s not in my buy box. I know a lot of people who do that, they cut them apart, they maybe do convert it to mini storage, that sort of thing. But for me That’s just so much money that goes into it. You know, I’m still younger. I don’t have that deep of pockets. I don’t that’s not what I’m looking to do. I’m looking to buy ideally, you know, there wouldn’t be a space bigger than five thousand square feet.

Dylan Silver (11:30)
Now when we talk about underwriting these deals, you’re in several different regional markets, right? And it’s different underwriting market to market. How do you effectively underwrite these deals, you know, and without giving away all the gold, right? But when you’re looking at, you know, one market in the in the Midwest versus another, what changes?

Alexandra Haider (11:50)
So really for me it’s like the big thing I need to understand is what will it rent for once it’s stabilized. And that’s really easy. You just look at other things that are for lease in the area. And you know, what’s renting, what’s been on the market for forever. I always want to make sure I have at least sixteen thousand vehicles per day. So I don’t want to be going into purchasing a building where like you can’t compare a building that has 20,000 vehicles per day to one nearby that maybe only has 4,000 vehicles driving by per day. So I’m trying to find comparables and similar areas and visibility. And so once I understand what it’ll rent for, then the rest of the analysis is pretty much the same.

Dylan Silver (12:30)
This is a very interesting conversation because I’ve not had this before and every time I come across something that I haven’t talked about, it’s like okay, we should dive in here. You mentioned drive-bys and I think I heard was it sixteen hundred? Was that the number?

Alexandra Haider (12:43)
Sixteen thousand vehicles per day is my minimum that I look for.

Dylan Silver (12:47)
I mean that’s a lot, right? When we talk about drive-bys, right, and where we’re able to pull this information from. I wanna get granular here, give our audience something they can take away here. Where are you able to find, how many drive-bys there are? And then and then also too, do you ever come across situations where there may be, you know, lower drive-by amount, but actually it’s a good opportunity.

Alexandra Haider (13:13)
Okay, so this has actually changed a lot where you can find that information recently because of AI. So I used to have to find it on the state website. I go to the traffic counts, have to look through every state has a different one where you can finally, you know, it’s like some old school map and you’re trying to figure out where it is and it can be really tedious. Now I plug it into AI and it pulls it directly from those sites. So it has saved me a ton of time. And then that saves me time too where I’m not, you know, wasting my time trying to figure out what the visibility is for something. So AI has been really great at s yeah, obviously you have to look at the resources it uses, but so far I haven’t been let down. And just finding those traffic counts. And then I’m sorry, what was your second question?

Dylan Silver (13:54)
When you have areas where maybe it’s, you know, right at sixteen thousand or slightly above and you’re comparing that to an area where it may be fifty percent more than than that, are there any times where you say, Okay, this is actually a great location and maybe in the urban sprawl of a city or town that’s expanding, I may bank on this versus, you know, an area that has more drive-by traffic.

Alexandra Haider (14:16)
Hmm. Yeah, so actually, so that is where you run into you know, so I don’t own any strip malls in Minnesota where I live. I would love to. That has always been something I’ve been looking for, but I just haven’t found the deals here near the Twin Cities. And so that is why I have owned strip malls in different states, just because that’s where I’ve found the deals. That being said, I have the disadvantage of not knowing, for example, my why one that I purchased in Illinois, I bought it, we were really excited about it. And then we learned after owning it for about six months that it was actually kind of in more of a dying part of town. And then all of the new builds and the new like really great restaurants, stuff like that are kind of being built on another part of town. We ended up selling that one. That’s actually my only strip mall that I’ve purchased and sold in my career that I’ve owned. And so my partner and I ended up selling that one after learning that. So that was something that was kind of a learning experience for me. And so now what I really try to do is when I go there, I talk with the contractors, I talk with the tenants, I find out, hey, how’s this area doing? Are like a lot of businesses wanting to come here. It’s really great when you see like for example, the most recent strip mall I just purchased, it was in a city I didn’t know. I had a good friend who happened to be from there. So she could tell me a little bit about that. But across the way was a former old bowling alley that somebody had just basically converted into a shopping center. So they put millions of dollars into it and it was all filled. And so people were all excited about that. That’s right across the way. Stuff like that makes me really excited because you want to be in the part of town where the money is going. And so Like that made me feel really confident about it. If you know, say for example, it was a really busy corridor already, but say for example, that one that I had just purchased was at like fourteen thousand vehicles per day, but I saw that that building just got put in and that it was fully filled. I could maybe just I I wouldn’t say I would for sure say no. To date I haven’t looked into anything with less than that sixteen thousand vehicles per day. But if it was slightly less and I knew it was in a growing area with high demand, yeah, of course I would still look at it and just have to be pretty sure about that.

Dylan Silver (16:28)
I wanna ask you about your perspective on what makes a good business for a strip mall. I’m sure you have a very unique perspective because of course you want someone that’s gonna be a good tenant, but you’re also looking at this as, hey, that’s an interesting business. What do you see a as being successful businesses in strip malls?

Alexandra Haider (16:47)
Yeah, so it’s really much less of like, you know, people say retail’s dead, Amazon is taking over everything. Yeah, maybe that’s true. I do have some really successful retail as well. But but what I really like and tenants that seem to do really well, for example, I’m just about to sign a lease with a baseball clinic. So we have baseball, we have axe throwing, you know, we have like mini golf, arcade, we’ve had like jujitsu. A lot of these ones where people have to come to do their activity are very successful. So I really love and then it’s fun too because you can go visit and do whatever activity it is. So that’s really fun. I love like coffee shops. I think it’s less retail, like people automatically think when they think strip mall and it’s more of activities or restaurants. We have a lot of really successful restaurants. It’s really nice to put in tenants that actually like help each other. You know, I don’t put in competing businesses like I would never, for example, we have a really successful gym in one of my strip malls in Eau Claire and another person just reached out yesterday wanting to put another gym in. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want to ever put my tenants out of business, you know what I mean, with another tenant that I’m placing in there that’ll be direct competition. But it’s really nice to have you know, tenants that actually help each other. Maybe they’ll go from one spot to another stop. I have some really good like thrift stores too in some of my or secondhand where people buy and sell. And so if you have a couple of those are similar, we had like a Debins in our strip mall and that was next to a secondhand store and those work really well together. So kind of finding businesses that help each other as well.

Dylan Silver (19:05)
You of course want these businesses to be wildly successful, not just so that they can be great tenants, but it also attracts great tenants as well. People will say, Okay, well, this is an area where this business is, this business has been there for so long, they’re doing well. And you mentioned even restaurants. There’s a lot of folks, investors especially, who will say, you know, it’s very difficult to run a restaurant, it’s very intense, right? But if you have a successful restaurant, that becomes like The place that everybody talks about.

Alexandra Haider (19:35)
Yes. Yep. Exactly. And so people would be like, it’s a strip mall next to like, for example, in Eau Claire, Olympic Flame. It’s like I think it’s the best Greek restaurant in Eau Claire. We grew up knowing it. So like having that restaurant there was really cool for us to know that, this restaurant that we’ve always loved is in our strip mall.

Dylan Silver (19:51)
I wanna ask you about managing tenants. And I I’m sure, the side of the business that people don’t often think about when you’re driving by is what happens when tenants are potentially late and what happens if, you know, there’s an eviction, which inevitably happens when you’re in in the real estate game. How do you approach, you know, tenant management? Are you very hands-on? Do you have a team of people that you work with? What’s that like?

Alexandra Haider (20:16)
Yeah. So currently right now, I have my own management company and we self-manage. To be honest, the strip malls, I still have a pretty substantial residential and mixed-use portfolio from you know what I purchased years ago that I s the ones that I’m still holding on to. Those are much more intensive as far as the management goes. The good thing about strip malls is typically their hours are more business hours. And so Even though there might be some issue happening at midnight, you usually don’t know at least until the next morning. So you’re not getting those like emergency, my God, this is happening to me. And you’re like waking up and you’re like, my gosh, how do I deal with this? You know, we’ve with residential, I’ve had a lot of that type of situation or Christmas Eve, you know, a pipe burst and you are scrambling because there’s nothing, nobody who’s open or answering your calls and so yeah, I mean But you still do have tenant issues. We still do have evictions. The good thing is with residential, the laws at least around so most of my residential, except for one building, is in Minnesota. Minnesota is a very tenant-friendly state, I would say, and especially the cities that I’ve invested in, Minneapolis, St. Paul, very tenant-friendly. Those evictions take a really long time. The tenants have it feels like the laws are just. Much more geared towards helping them. And so as an investor and an owner, you know, sometimes you can be paying for somebody’s mortgage for say it’s a single-family house for months. And that’s expensive and that’s difficult. What I found with commercial is it’s much more fair. It’s business and it’s business. It’s what does the lease say? Who’s breaking it? It’s really simple. And then I always get personal guarantees as well. We do. It’s not just like an LLC that you can’t go after. We always have a personal guarantee there. And we try to work with people. Like to be honest, I’ve had much more residential evictions than commercial. We really do try to work with people if their business isn’t working. We always say, hey, you advertise, you try to find somebody, we’ll do like a lease break agreement. We don’t want to have to evict people, it’s expensive anyways, like and that’s not what we want to be spending our time or energy on. But obviously occasionally it does have to happen.

Dylan Silver (22:21)
When we talk about finding deals, finding strip mall deals, are you going, you know, through brokers? Do these, you know, deals happen through direct to sell or is it a mix of both? How do you find these deals?

Alexandra Haider (22:34)
Yeah, so definitely a mix of both. You know, often so the interesting thing that I found between the difference in acquiring between commercial and residential is these deals often take years before you actually get it under contract. You know, you can like for example, one of my deals in Ohio, we had offered on, negotiated, got an accepted deal, and then we ended up walking away from it. And but we had been in touch with the city. And so the city was really excited for us to take over for this owner. He was based in New York, he was not taking care of it, wasn’t paying property taxes or utilities or anything like that. Well then the city reached out to us and they’re like, hey, we’re about to foreclose on him. You can probably get a really good deal there. So we ended up getting that one for less than half of what we originally had it under contract for. So that was basically a deal that originally was on the market. We negotiated, let it fall apart. And then came back to it through the city. I have gotten deals from being on market, definitely. Otherwise just, you know, it’s kind of fun driving around and being like, this looks like it’s not being taken care of. Who owns this? And yeah, I really it just I like off-market as well, but I definitely say at least 50% has come from an on-market deal. A lot of times they’re already under contract and I’m pretty annoying when I really like a deal following up over and over because I feel like with commercial a lot of times it falls out of contract. And if they just are like, hey, this person’s really interested. She seems really serious. I always send my bio when I put in an offer so they know that I’m not just wasting their time. Sometimes they’ll just reach out to me before they list it again as active. And so I’ve gotten some deals that way as well.

Dylan Silver (24:06)
When you were evaluating what the next asset class to get into when you were making that transition from residential to strip malls, was it a no-brainer? Were you looking at other asset classes? I like this conversation and I think we need to have more of these. I need to hear more stories about people going from single-family residential into strip malls versus let’s say, you know, multifamily or ground up construction apartments.

Alexandra Haider (24:31)
Yeah. So I guess I mean, my transition wasn’t just from single family to strip malls. You it was single family to larger apartments to mixed-use, and from mixed-use is where I found I liked the commercial. I actually remember one of my business partners and a mentor of mine had sent me a strip mall like two years before I bought my first one and was like, we should buy this. And I literally was like, like laughed him away. Like I’d never buy one of those. Are you kidding me? I I buy like apartments. It just I wasn’t ready for it yet. And I couldn’t even like wrap my head around the fact that I could potentially purchase something like that. And so probably at that time I I wasn’t ready for it, right? But then I worked my way up until to building the confidence to be able to acquire something like that. And that same partner is actually who I brought in on my first deal, because he had that experience. And so I kind of just like borrowed his confidence for that first deal. I was definitely the hands-on one. But when so that first deal is my only deal. We’ve recently purchased that or bought that partner out, but my brother and I brought in one other partner. And so the three of us owned it together for a couple of years. And then we bought out the one partner. And now my brother and I just co-own it together. And we brought him in and I’m really grateful we did. He wasn’t the hands-on one my brother and I were that, but we were able to be like, hey We got this crazy quote for this. Like, is that reasonable? He’s like, yeah, for that square footage, that’s reasonable. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know. And so I’m really grateful to have had somebody who had experience with it for at least my first one. My most recent one, I and like when I’m acquiring buildings now, I’m just usually doing it on my own unless somebody brings me a good deal that I would like to partner with. But in the beginning it was really great to have somebody like him who had the confidence as well.

Dylan Silver (26:14)
I wanna ask you about hold times. Are these, you know, buy and hold long term? Do you do you look for a five or three or seven year exit? Does it vary? What are hold times like?

Alexandra Haider (26:24)
So right now, when I bought residential, I was buying and selling much more quickly. Even apartment buildings, that sort of thing, I was kind of within a year I typically would buy it and sell it. But I really like owning strip malls and they’re not as intensive and they’re really good passive income and passive, whatever that means. But I really like my strip malls. So it with the exception of the one that I sold in Illinois, because I kind of learned it was maybe not going to be worth so much in a couple of years. I have held on to all of mine and I don’t have any plans for selling anytime soon. Obviously, anything’s up for sale if it’s the right price. But we have gotten a few unsolicited offers on a couple of our deals that were pretty good, but we haven’t taken. And we haven’t listed any of them for sale. We haven’t tried. Actively to sell anything.

Dylan Silver (27:10)
I’ve got an abstract question for you here. You know, there’s folks who have a career arc as an investor. And you know, on the one end, you might have something like real estate wholesale or brokerage, or you might start out as a you know, loan originator and you say, Well, at some point I want to have this many number of doors, or I want to get into commercial i in investing. Did you have this kind of career arc? Was this you know happening? More through natural progression or was there a defined journey that you had in your mind?

Alexandra Haider (27:42)
So I had two separate goals. One was for a number of units that I wanted to reach when I was ready to be done, and I reached that within like two years. And then the next one was for an amount that I wanted to make per month, and I reached that pretty quickly as well. Just because once I switched from residential to commercial, it’s just such bigger, bigger numbers. You know what I mean? So those things went much more quickly. It’s different for me now. I don’t have goals like that. I have a toddler at home. I’m like half baked with another baby right now. So I really want to have actual freedom. And that’s what I’m trying to get to now. I got myself into where I was so management intensive. I almost put myself at a nine to five. My employees are here, I feel like I have to be in the office. And that’s not what I want for my life. That’s not why I started getting into real estate investing. And so I’m kind of switching things up again, you know, getting rid of my management company, having third-party management companies taking over as of the beginning of September. We’re looking to move to Florida for the majority of the year, become residents there instead of here in Minnesota. And I’m I mean, my goal still is to do one large acquisition per year. Most likely that’ll be a strip mall. But as long as I still enjoy it and still have quality of life to hang out with my kids because to me that is just the most important thing now. I’ve already

Dylan Silver (29:03)
Five.

Alexandra Haider (29:04)
Done what I wanted to do. You know what I mean? Like I have already accomplished my goals, and so now it’s kind of more for fun. And as long as it’s fun, I’ll continue to do it once it stops being fun and I’m sitting there like not being able to pay attention to my kids because I’m stressed about some problem. Constantly. Obviously that’ll happen occasionally, but like that is not what I want for my life.

Dylan Silver (29:24)
Yeah, when you have more and more assets under management, it tends to be more controlled chaos. And sometimes that’s saying it lightly. I want to ask you about property management. This is something that especially commercial syndicators and fund managers at times struggle with. You can buy the deal right, you can, you know, build the property. You ground up or you can value add, but then the property management and the stickiness of those tenants and tenant communication and the expectations that are set between the investors and the property manager, these can all become clouded and challenging. As a property manager yourself and seeing the market for other property managers, where do people get this wrong? Where do things go off the rails?

Alexandra Haider (30:09)
Yeah. So the only reason why I started my management company was because I had the misfortune of hiring incorrect the wrong third-party managers before. And so we actually had a really bad situation where I learned that things weren’t being taken care of. Property management was blaming it on the owner. I had no idea about these things and we had a tenant union that formed against us. And then that’s when I realized like, my God, tenants are leaving this. Like, what’s going on? I went, I flew out to this property. I learned that there was like active leaks that they were saying the owner wouldn’t take care of. It was terrible. And so we got rid of that management company. That was the first building I took over myself with my management company. And yeah, it sucks because you can focus so much on being an investor and then you think you can pass it off and things are being taken care of. But that wasn’t always The case. And that’s why I started Northern Lights Management. And for years, I’ve managed my entire portfolio. It’s a little scary that I’m going to be you know, giving away that control again. I do still have a lot of tenants that I’m in contact with. And for my strip malls, I’m still going to be doing the leasing. And so I will be in contact with them in the beginning, and I’m going to let every single tenant know, hey, If things aren’t being taken care of for you, you reach out to me instead of management. Like I want to be still made aware of you know, if management is not doing their job. And because they’ll have my contact from the leasing, they’ll be able to let me know if things are not being taken care of, if things are falling apart. Ask me, is this really true? You really said no, you won’t give me a new HVAC because you already gave another tenant a new HVAC. Like you know what I mean. So that’s kind of my hope is that with still having some of that communication, at least initially, that they know they can always come to me if they need to and it won’t happen again. Spent a lot of time interviewing management companies and looking at reviews and, you know, months of trying to figure out the right companies. And I am just hoping that I’m making the right decision.

Dylan Silver (32:01)
I hear what you’re saying. And it sounds like you’re approaching this and I’ve heard other investors say this as well, as a partnership and less so as pure delegation. Like, hey, I’m here. I don’t want you to not come to me when there’s issues, ’cause that’s how these become bigger issues. In even going so far as to give tenants, hey, here’s our contact. If things aren’t being handled by the property manager, come to me. As opposed to like, hey, I don’t want to have any Tenant issues and this is your job, and if you can’t do it, I’ll find another property manager. You really want to partner with the people that are the face of your franchise, so to speak. Yeah.

Alexandra Haider (32:36)
Yeah, exactly. And, like I said, I kind of tried it the other way and it didn’t work out for me. So trying it this way now and hoping this is the right move.

Dylan Silver (32:45)
We are coming up on time here, Alexandra. Any new projects or activities you’re working on? And then also anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience.

Alexandra Haider (32:53)
Yeah, big things for me. We are gonna be moving to Florida. So would love to buy my first strip mall in the Florida market. We’re not sure if we’re gonna be in the Panhandle area or Tampa, but anywhere down there, looking for heavy value add, would be really excited to get something like that. I’m not as familiar with that market since I don’t live there. I don’t own anything there, but I do have a lot of friends down there. So I know that people could, you know, help me to underwrite and understand the markets a little bit. And then it’s just kind of it’s gonna be some big life changes. So I feel pretty good here in the Midwest. I would still love to acquire more strip malls here too. So if anybody has anything like that, More so like a one per year type thing and I already purchased mine this year that we’re working on stabilizing, but obviously that’s not like super strict. If there was a really good deal that came around, I’d love to buy it.

Dylan Silver (33:47)
Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for your time.