Commercial Real Estate
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Transparent, Upfront Pricing On Your Legal Work
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Cincinnati is an excellent market for real estate investment.
Whether you are an out-of-state property investor or a business owner who wants to expand your presence, Linn Legal can represent you in commercial real estate deals.
At Linn Legal, we work closely with investors from across America that want to buy a piece of the Queen City. We frequently help professionals in other regions, such as southern California, that want to invest in real estate but are priced out of the million dollar “starter homes” in Palo Alto.
When you are investing in Cincinnati from outside the region, you are coming in blind. We serve as a first point of contact for investors that want to get into Cincinnati, but do not have local contacts with lenders, agents, title companies, property management, contractors, or commercial financing.
Commercial financing is much different than residential real estate financing. Most of the time, loan money is not federally backed (with the exception of SBA loans) and that means that the bank is risking its own money (instead of the government’s money) when it lends to you. Banks want to see higher down payments, more interest, shorter pay-back terms and solid cashflow before they will fund your deal. Most banks simply do not want to work with real estate investors. They do not have attractive loans and are not willing to make good deals based on the property. We know several regional investment banks that will lend on business-friendly terms to real estate investors. We know what they need to see in their due diligence search, which means that you and your lawyers are asking the sellers for the right information from the very start.
When you are buying commercial real estate, a lawyer can help you negotiate the best terms for the deal. For example, a buyer can often make use of something called a “dropdown entity transfer” to save you tens of thousands of dollars on property taxes every year. We try our best to educate commercial real estate agents and title companies about this process, but it is not well-known in the industry outside of real estate lawyers.
The consequences for skipping legal representation can be fatal to your business. One desperate investor called us after he bought a large apartment complex for $1,600,000. The county auditor was only taxing the property on a value of $450,000, so when the sale went through, this investor’s tax bill nearly quadrupled. His profitability calculations depended on paying current tax rates, and he was facing a new tax increase of over $40,000 per year. We could not do anything to help him because his transaction was the best evidence of the actual price. Had he called Linn Legal before he signed the contract, we could have deployed all of our tools to keep his property valuation lower.
What happened to that investor? He sold the property several months later at a loss.
Real estate lawyers are excellent companions for commercial real estate agents.
We can help agents research properties for their clients based on zoning, leases, valuations, and other legal considerations. We make agents look great for their clients because we can spot potential problems and propose creative solutions. For example, suppose you want to buy a field to put in a soil-sifting factory. It currently is not zoned for that use, but you believe that you can get a variance through the county’s Planning & Zoning board. That variance must be obtained by the current owner; if you buy it, you will not get the variance. You need legal work to make the property worth buying, but you do not own it yet. You certainly won’t buy it if you cannot get proper zoning. What’s a buyer to do?
One common solution is that we help the buyer write an option contract to purchase the land if our set conditions are met. For example, the terms could broadly be that you will buy the property if you can get it zoned correctly, and that you will pay the legal fees for rezoning and have the exclusive right to buy the property at a set price if your zoning goes through. This lets the seller know that they have a potential buyer and it lets you invest in the zoning variance with the security that if it fails, you can walk away.
This is exactly the kind of transaction that can turn an unmarketable piece of property into an attractive one that a commercial real estate agent can sell.
Based on our experience with tax savings on transactions, we can also propose deal structures that save taxes for one or both parties. For buyer’s agents, this means that you can help your client get a better deal and save money. For seller’s agents, a real estate attorney can propose terms of a deal that spread your seller’s tax burden out over time, or delay the tax bill through a 1031 Exchange transaction.
Buying commercial property is one of the biggest investments that a company or investor will ever make. Adding a lawyer from Linn Legal to your real estate team is cheap insurance on your deal.
