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.
Contact Us For Commercial Real Estate Help