Recently a client asked me to find an industrial building to purchase in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook or Scarborough. Using an online database shared by most commercial real estate brokers in Greater Portland, I searched for industrial buildings ranging from 5,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet.

I was astounded at the results: On September 19, only four properties met these criteria, and one was under contract.

Wondering if this was a symptom of the industrial real estate market in general, I searched for space available for lease that fit the same parameters.

Using the same cities, size range and property type, I found 33 availabilities.

Although many available spaces for lease are in larger buildings with multiple units, the vast difference between sale and lease opportunities is striking. A few factors account for this difference. (Continued on PDF)

It is widely agreed that under most circumstances, your first real estate purchase should be a permanent residence, but what about your second real estate investment? A lakeside cottage? Maybe an island home? What about a commercial property?

We often find that people don’t take the time to understand commercial investment before considering their real estate options. Buying a commercial property does not need to be a high risk venture exclusive to wealthy clients.

A buyer’s expectations and realized benefits should be very different from that of a residential real estate purchase.

In most cases, first time investors are looking for safer properties with tenants already in place.

Unlike residential tenants, lease terms for commercial tenants are usually a minimum of three to five years, so turnover is less of a concern.

In addition, most tenants provide a personal or corporate guarantee within the lease contract, which helps ensure that the tenant will uphold his or her financial responsibility. (Continued on PDF)

As prices for residential real estate throughout Maine and New England have either fallen or held steady over the past several years, commercial real estate, especially in the retail, office and development sectors continues to thrive. Those of us who sell or lease commercial/ investment real estate in Maine, are often asked the questions “How is the market?”, “Are you seeing a slowdown/softening of the market?”, “How have the interest rates affected sales?” and so on.

The truth of the matter is that commercial real estate in Maine, especially in Southern Maine, remains a good (great) investment for any and all who have chosen that route over the last 15+ years. I personally started selling commercial real estate in Portland in 1991. For the purposes of this article, I have chosen to highlight a number of different office and retail properties that have changed hands at least twice over the course of the last 10-15 years.

These particular properties involved some fitup and investment by the owners, but relatively small in comparison to the gains that they realized by leasing up their properties and then eventually putting them back on the market. Some of these properties, I am aware of personally because I was involved in the sales and/or leasing. Some of them, I am just aware of from being in the marketplace and had no broker involvement on my part whatsoever. Typically, the owners realized a significant profit, even after considering their fitup costs, brokerage commissions, capital improvements and other costs associated with owning commercial real estate. (Continued on PDF)

"Please Feel Guilty” was the statement that I put on the back of our Recycling Committee T-Shirts in college. The point then, as it is now, is to make people feel guilty or at least aware of their recycling decisions.
According to an article written by the Resource Conservation Alliance titled Paper Consumption, the world loses 30 million forested acres per year (the size of State of Pennsylvania) and 40 percent of the wood is used for paper.
Every day at the workplace we make conscious decisions to recycle or not to recycle items such as used copy paper, junk mail, or even an empty can of soda.
Mostly, we do not recycle or reuse because we are lazy and are stuck on the concept of convenience. Another reason is that the office environment is not set up properly to make recycling easy for their employees. If there is no paper recycling bin, I doubt many employees will be willing to take their recyclable paper home with them.
In preparation for this article, I set up recycling bins in each person’s office in addition to the main recycling bin that we have next to the copy machine. For the last several months, I have been weighing the amount of paper that we recycle. (Continued on PDF)

• Custom House Square: Located in the Old Port area of downtown Portland, this approximately 60,816-square-foot, six-story office condominium tower is currently under construction and offers office condos on the upper levels and retail on the first level.

• Bayside Redevelopment Land: Bayside is located off of Franklin Arterial, Somerset Street and Marginal Way in Portland. The City of Portland recently put several lots in this district on the market for redevelopment of office and mixed-use. Lots range from approximately 0.28 to 1.3 acres and are available for sale for $125,580 to $583,052 per acre.