written by
Rocco Cortese

Intersection Diversified Value Fund sold Carlsbad office property, La Place to a local investor

Located at 5900-5950 La Place Court, Carlsbad, CA 92008, this two-building multi-tenant class ‘A’ office campus consists of 81,965 SF within the Carlsbad Research Center.

Brokers Henry Zahner, Steven Jacobson, and Steve Gildred of Intersection, quietly marketed the property for sale in the first quarter of 2022 as an unpriced off-market life science conversion opportunity. After multiple competing offers were received, the buyer Chesnut Properties (Diego I Investment Company, LLC) was selected based on their strong local reputation and future plans for the campus. Strong acquisition interest from a variety of buyers was based on the desire to invest in the future of the Carlsbad market.

La Place was originally acquired by Intersection Diversified Value Fund as a Class ‘A’ stabilized office campus in February 2020. During the holding period, conditions for the office, R&D, and industrial markets across the globe changed largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This created a decrease in demand for general office space and an increase in demand for R&D/industrial space. The La Place Court campus represents a versatile product type that continues to be attractive and functional for a variety of uses, including life science.

“There is currently a shortage of life science space in the Carlsbad market where demand and conversion of existing product is anticipated to continue”, says Henry Zahner, Senior Director with Intersection.

Senior Associate Steve Jacobson explains that the Carlsbad submarket and the area immediately surrounding the property are slated to be a premier life science hub. Surrounding properties have either sold for the purpose of life science conversion, are being marketed, or will provide supporting general office space for technology-oriented companies.

“We created a win for both the buyer and seller in this transaction”, says Steve Jacobson

The sale of La Place Court Campus represents the largest transaction for the Intersection Diversified Value Fund, led by Managing Directors Rocco Cortese and Mark Hoekstra.

“The decision to sell the property was tied to our strategy for this project and momentum in the market” shared Rocco Cortese “We have a similar project in Sorrento Mesa that we are also considering for a life science conversion”.

To learn more about this deal please reach out to Rocco Cortese at rcortese@intersectioncre.com or Henry Zahner at Hzahner@intersectioncre.com

Autumn Valencia is the Marketing Coordinator at Intersection, providing strategic marketing expertise to support business objectives across company divisions. For general and marketing inquiries, please contact Autumn at avalencia@intersectioncre.com 

written by
Rocco Cortese

Intersection Investment Management Acquires Industrial / Flex property in Gilbert, Arizona

Intersection Investment Management is pleased to announce it has acquired a 92,750 square foot multi-tenant flex industrial property in Gilbert, Arizona. Representing brokers, David Bean and Cory Sposi of Commercial Properties Inc., completed this off-market deal bringing the second acquisition in Intersection’s post-pandemic industrial investment strategy. The strategy focuses on $5-$20M projects in markets west of Denver based on post-covid market trend forecasting. The investment was syndicated to a group of Intersection’s high net worth investors. It is the company’s 8th acquisition in total and the fund now has surpassed over $100M in historical deal transaction volume. Anton Myskiw, Intersection Senior Analyst and Phoenix native who sourced the deal says,

“Given the competitive nature of the market for this kind of product, we have to recognize the great work done by our brokerage team at Commercial Properties. They have worked collaboratively with us for months in the Phoenix Metro area and helped us find a great deal off market.”

The Sellers, Golden Key Industrial Park LLC. who previously held and managed the property as private investors, focused upon occupancy rather than driving rental rates. This resulted in an opportunity to hold rents at market while completing significant improvements at the property. This will allow Intersection to focus on tenant experience and make improvements that will improve curb appeal and value-add. Planned renovations include new paint, parking lot resurfacing, landscape upgrades, and, new tenant signage to provide greater visibility. Rocco Cortese, Managing Director with Intersection confirms,

“Multi-tenant flex with a value-add component represents a very good risk profile for our investors. The Southeast Phoenix market has great fundamentals and we can see a clear path to demand for high quality product like KeyWest Plaza. Fundamentally, that is what we set out to do on every deal”

Intersection envisions and intends to create a best-in-class flex industrial asset to meet the demands of the accelerated growth in the Gilbert market. Commercial Properties LLC. will continue to manage and lease the property on behalf of Intersection. David Bean, who represented the seller as broker for Commercial Properties, Inc. notes,

“Intersection is relatively new to this market, but quickly understood where the growth opportunities could be found. We look forward to working with them as they execute the strategy on this property.”

To learn more about this deal please reach out to Rocco Cortese at rcortese@intersectioncre.com or Anton Myskiw at amyskiw@intersectioncre.com

Autumn Valencia is the Marketing Coordinator at Intersection, providing strategic marketing expertise to support business objectives across company divisions. For general and marketing inquiries, please contact Autumn at avalencia@intersectioncre.com 

written by
Rocco Cortese

Intersection is pleased to announce the sale of a fully leased and stabilized internal investment fund property managed by Intersection

Experiential Poway Retail Center Closes for $13.5 M

Senior Directors, Kyle Clark, and Dan McCarthy along with Senior Associate Alec Spencer, represented the seller in the sale of the North County retail center, Old Poway Village at 14005-14055 Midland Road, Poway CA. The 35,191 square-foot award-winning center consists of a selection of carefully curated retail tenants.

The property was sold as a fully leased and stabilized investment. After acquiring the property in 2017, Intersection established a new vision for the center that focused on building a destination lifestyle center for the Poway Community. To accomplish this, Intersection replaced several non-performing tenants with new, carefully curated businesses to create a retail experience conducive to the family neighborhood of Poway and surrounding North County residents.

Artisan Food and Beverage tenants The Hop Stop, Smokin’ J’s, and Mission Cellars anchor the center, and they are complemented with users such as the Bark and Collar, Poway Music Academy, Poway Pilates, and a lineup of other local tenants that support a unique dining and shopping experience.

“This has been a true passion play for Intersection.” Said Mark Hoekstra, Managing Director of Intersection. “I grew up in this neighborhood and always felt that this center could become something special. It has been an amazing journey seeing this property transform”.

The property was sold to a 1031 Exchange Buyer who closed within 45 days of opening escrow. “We positioned this asset to sell with clean triple net leases, good lease term on the rent roll, and have maintained the property impeccably.”, shared broker Kyle Clark “The Escrow was smooth with no surprises.”

The buyer plans to hold the asset long-term drawing upon the stabilized cash flow. “This property performed very well during the pandemic.” Stated broker Dan McCarthy. “Our tenant base was resilient, and the many outdoor areas benefited our food and beverage tenants significantly.”

To learn more about this deal please reach out to Kyle Clark at kclark@intersectioncre.com or Dan McCarthy at dmccarthy@intersectioncre.com

Autumn Valencia is the Marketing Coordinator at Intersection, providing strategic marketing expertise to support business objectives across company divisions. For general and marketing inquiries, please contact Autumn at avalencia@intersectioncre.com 

written by
Rocco Cortese

A Detailed look into general partner investing and navigating a deal through a pandemic

Throughout my years raising capital for our real estate investments, I have encountered a few investors who ask how they can be the General Partner instead of the Limited Partner in a deal. The first thing that would come to mind when I heard those questions is: Invest thousands of hours in learning a complex industry, and hundreds of thousands of dollars into people and technology, and you will be just getting started. Putting together a successful commercial real estate deal is not for the faint at heart or the inexperienced. It takes years of hard-work, talented people and you have to actually find the right deal in a very competitive market. That said, Ingenuity, Collaboration, and Stewardship are core values of our firm so we always tried to find a way to give our investors a taste of the General Partner “like” returns by targeting value add properties with higher return scenarios.

 

During the Pandemic, we were raising our second Fund and in March of this year (2020) we purchased an office property. Bad timing? Not really. We still love the deal and our basis, and in fact, feel very bullish about the long-term opportunity to generate a strong return for our investors. The structure in that deal, however, was a little different. We had a joint venture partner in that property, and our Fund was acting as the General Partner. All of the returns from the Joint Venture, including carried interests that we would be able to earn in excess of the property level returns, were set up to inure to the Fund. This structure effectively put all of the Fund investors in the role of General Partner. Normally, this scenario is structured a little differently with investors only earning a percentage of the carried interest. However, because we were using Fund equity as the General Partner capital, we felt that sending 100% of the carried interest to investors was the right thing to do. Considering the risk that the Pandemic has thrown into the market, we’re happy to have that structure in place and are optimistic that the returns will ultimately play out in a significantly positive way for our Fund.

As we approached the structure of our last deal, we started to consider the concept in a more meaningful way for future deals. Our research returned that the GP Co-Investment structure seemed very appealing for us as we continued to build our investment practice. We had just built out a new strategy for acquiring logistics based industrial in markets west of Denver and realized that we could lever our personal capital more effectively if we brought in GP-Co Investors in multiple deals. They would have the opportunity to earn a 10% piece of our carried interest effectively allowing the individual investor to earn greater returns than our institutional limited partners when measured against project-level returns.

Sometimes unexpected situations create opportunity. Not only did we develop a new and exciting investment strategy, but we were also able to create an investment structure that helped us address the requests of those who wanted to be General Partner in some of our deals. The thousands of hours, and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in people and technology, along with a little entrepreneurship, helped us put our private investors one step ahead. We’ll still do all of the heavy lifting of course and continue to focus on enriching the lives of those we serve (whether they be GP’s or LP’s)!

Autumn Valencia is the Marketing Coordinator at Intersection, providing strategic marketing expertise to support business objectives across company divisions. For general and marketing inquiries, please contact Autumn at avalencia@intersectioncre.com 

written by
Rocco Cortese

COVID-19: Redefining Our Why

At Intersection, we play dual roles as Property Manager and Asset Manager for the portfolio of properties we manage. Our funds own four properties and we have a very important role as stewards for our investors. However, we also have an equally important role as service provider to our third-party clients. Whether an owner or a manager, COVID-19 has challenged us in ways we could not have imagined.

Back in February, when COVID-19 was peaking in China, we realized that we needed to be prepared for the eventuality that it would find its way to the United States. So, we began the process of evaluating and creating an emergency plan should our people need to work from home. Fortunately, we became a paperless company three-years ago, and have been supplying each of our employees with laptop computers since their onboarding. With this, Intersection was already equipped to make the transition from working in office to working remote. Three weeks from that initial discussion with COVID-19 cases multiplying rapidly, we offered our entire work force voluntary work from home status. Another week later, on March 19th, California mandated shelter in place and only essential businesses could remain open. Other than a core team of people, our entire work force was working remotely. Things can happen fast, but usually not this fast!

It is now April 13th, and we are in a different world from where we were in February. I joke that each day feels like a dog year because so much changes in 24 hours. Our team is working almost seamlessly from home, and our owned and managed properties are operating efficiently. The effort we put into our planning, technology, and in the quality of the people in our organization allowed us to adapt this incredible change.

The story does not end there. In the past few weeks the real work has begun as we deal with several tenants whose businesses have been literally shut down. How can you pay the mortgage and operating expenses when your property depends on rent from businesses that have been forced to close? Even though we were getting our jobs done each day, we had to figure out ways to help our clients and investors maintain  the value of their investments.

We were equally concerned about our own business. Intersection is a small business and a crisis like this one would certainly impact us as well. As such, we closely monitored stimulus activities instituted by the Federal Government. The $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security act (CARES) includes $349 billion in forgivable loans for small businesses to support payroll, rent and cover certain utility expenses. This is the Payroll Protection Provision (PPP) of the act that is focused upon supporting small businesses. This program would be a key element of our company’s plan to retain people and address major corporate expenses over the next few months.

However, the process of applying for PPP was not simple.  I am so grateful that we have the systems and team to compile the information needed for our lender as we prepared our application.  Through our own application for PPP, we realized that less sophisticated tenants could find the application process challenging. We learned that it is also important to have a banking relationship that has the ability to do SBA loans in order to participate. Many of our tenants who have been shut down did not have these banking relationships nor the resources to get the help they needed. Our unique insight as a small business inspired the empathy to help. Furthermore, we knew our experience could make a difference.

Our team mobilized quickly and put together a COVID-19 Tenant Resource Guide which lists all resources available to our small business tenants (Disaster Relief Direct from the SBA in addition to CARES PPP and other local resources). The two-page package is both simple and useful, and our efforts have not ended there. We have dedicated a team to become experts on CARES PPP and have built a proprietary list of banking relationships that are ready to help.  Although April has been a tough month, we have actually collected more rent than expected. But with so many of our tenants closed for business, we know that May is going to be our most difficult month.  Our CARES team has already put a number of our tenants in touch with SBA lenders and hopefully many of them will get inexpensive, forgivable financing to keep their businesses alive while paying rent, and retaining valuable employees.

It is really difficult to understand what the world will look like when we start to get back to work and social gatherings are allowed again. We can’t control when that will happen, but we can control what we do each day to enhance the lives of those we serve. COVID-19 and the social distancing measures taken to defeat it will never be forgotten. At Intersection, we will remember this point in time when being a small business was a competitive advantage. Our passion for the small businesses that make up our portfolio runs deep and the impact of our values as we support our tenants will be a proud moment in our company’s history. When it is all over and we are in our new normal, our values won’t have changed and the measures we have taken will be remembered. Hopefully, the relationships we care so very much about will be even stronger.

Stay healthy.

written by
Rocco Cortese

There is a mystical element to the concept of a Family Office. Seen, but not heard. Looked for, but not found.  In the past few years the Family Office has become a commonly used term when it comes to raising capital. Someone you know has relationships, is targeting, or working with a large Family Office, or a group of them. When I first heard the term, I thought to myself “This is a group of investors we have to get connected with. We built our company by delivering informed strategy and highly personalized service to private investors and owners of commercial real estate. They are the ideal client profile!” So, we embarked upon a journey to build a set of relationships with high quality, high net worth family offices who were looking to get more out of commercial real estate. We soon realized that it wasn’t going to be easy.

We started our research where any astute business person would; we googled it, “Family Office Investing” and up came the results. Pages and pages of lists, referral sources, strategies and conferences that would give us access to the names, locations and in some cases investment strategies for all shapes and sizes of family offices.  We didn’t feel like buying a list of names for $4,000 was the best value proposition so we attended conferences where we might connect with a few of them (there are many to choose from). I can tell you from personal experience, few if any of these family offices or their representatives want to be solicited at a conference. Unless you have a direct referral into them, or a preexisting relationship, connecting was not easy. Soliciting really isn’t our style anyway, so we were left in a bit of a lurch as to next steps.

With little success in making connections to new family office relationships, we paused and took a long look at our own company. We needed to get a better idea of who we were and whether or not we were a fitting partner for family offices. We were just getting started with a branding project and part of that project was to interview our current clients in order to better understand their expectations of us. The process resulted in a new name, look and set of internal values that really spoke to who we were.

A significant part of the branding project was research. We interviewed internal stakeholders and fifteen clients across all categories of the service platform. These interviews gave us incredibly valuable insight as to what our clients liked and disliked about the various services we provided for them. It was then that we realized we were going about the idea of building our client base with family offices the wrong way. We knew we could do good work for them, and we knew we wanted to grow relationships with like-minded investors.  However, we didn’t understand that the value our company offered them wasn’t as important to them as our values. By clarifying our values, we took the first and most important step in building a platform that would put us in a position to broaden the set of investors for whom we worked. Today, many of them are family offices and the way we have done it has been an enlightening and fun journey.

There are many kinds of family offices and they need trusted partners with whom they can invest. We recognized this because when we analyzed our current list of clients, we found that a couple of them had portfolios with significant value. They trusted us to manage and lease multiple properties worth millions! They were our best clients and they were actually running a micro-family office.

A micro family office is characterized by the volume under management being much smaller than the normal minimum threshold to set up a family office. We were working for two micro-family offices but just didn’t think about them that way. In fact, and this is often the case with micro family offices, they did not view themselves to be in this category of family offices at all. We had built deep relationships with these clients over the years and had a successful track record of performance for them. Understanding their bigger picture objectives-legacy, transference of wealth, charity, and many other dynamics of their family office helped us put together a road map for future family office clients.

Single family and multi-family offices generally operate on a much higher scale than the micro-family office. Here is the distinction:  The single-family office only serves one single family and does not accept external management mandates. The multi-family office services more than one family and may offer a more generic solution to their clients. In fact, many of the family offices that would seek out a multi-family office partner to support them are so large that they operate much like an institution.

Remember a little earlier when I mentioned values?  An integral aspect of our branding project was establishing core values. In our company, they are Wisdom, Equality, Determination, Ingenuity, Stewardship and Collaboration. These values speak to the internal qualities that govern our conduct, and external qualities that support our clients. With that clarity, our entire organization has circled around a path that is destined to enhance the lives of those we serve. Our brand promise, “vision and guidance to help you get more out of commercial real estate”, similarly supplied us with critical direction. By defining who we were internally and how we had helped our clients over the years, we developed the correct ethos with which to engage this mystical entity called the family office.

The reality that we were already working with micro family offices helped us be more intuitive as we serviced them. Some still don’t think of themselves in the micro family office category, but they are. Our relationship with our micro-family offices blossomed with the start of our first fund. It gave us the opportunity to put our own money into investments alongside of them and elevate the trust they have in us. Fortunately, they told a few friends about what we were doing, and we built relationships with a few new families.

Today, we have grown into the proud manager of commercial real estate for six family offices that vary in size. The smallest of those is a $30M family and the largest is a family worth hundreds of millions. We learned that the key to building those relationships was creating a matching set of values, and a service profile that matched as well. That took us to new product offerings and to new relationships that allow us to do what we do best. The mystical element didn’t really exist at all…we were already doing work for them and just needed to define the alignment that had made us successful partners over the years.

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