Why Commercial Real Estate is the Hottest Retirement Asset

For small business owners, commercial real estate investment is the hottest new retirement asset. If your mind has already jumped to "REITs" - or shares in Real Estate Investment Trusts - think again. I'm referring to the ownership of the commercial facilities small business owners currently lease, or new commercial facilities they can buy or develop.

Small business owners can thank the U.S. Small Business Administration for this rather substantial opportunity.

The SBA sponsors a specialty lending program designed to assist successful small business owners who want to acquire or develop their own facilities. The SBA did not design the program as a vehicle for creating superior retirement assets, but it doesn't take a financial genius to connect the dots - and the business owners who have done so already are profiting enormously from their decision.

It's called the SBA 504 program and it's been around, though not well promoted, for nearly twenty years. If a banker failed to mention it as an alternative, don't be too dismayed. Traditional lending institutions prefer conventional financial instruments because they offer traditional lending institutions greater profit margins. The SBA 504 program is clearly intended to benefit small business owners, not necessarily the financial community.

Here's what SBA 504 loans offer qualified small business owners: below market fixed interest rates, longer terms and with a cash investment as low as 10 percent of the total project cost. Typically, small business owners can reduce real estate expenses by up to 40 percent while building an asset that benefits them long after they've sold or shuttered their business. As an investment, this type of financing offers the highest cash-on-cash return available for commercial real estate, which means not only does their capital work harder for them, but they keep more of it to grow their business too. You can't find a traditional lending product that can beat this.

Next to home ownership, being your own boss is the number one American Dream. That's why most small business owners started (or acquired) their own business. And their success is almost entirely dependent on their drive, ambition, innovation and attention to detail. Eventually, however, they'll sell their business or pass it along to their children or shut it down (very few small businesses go public). With SBA 504 financing, they can turn that drive and ambition into another long-term asset that offers immediate and significant tax advantages, as well as makes great sense for long-term financial planning.

It's important to take an innovative approach to commercial real estate ownership. For most clients, it is beneficial to establish a separate real estate holding company to own the real estate asset - it separates their operating company - the one they may eventually sell or pass on to their children - from this new and important real estate asset.

The result is that, in 10 years or 25, when a small business owner sells their business or gift it to their children or shutters it, the real estate asset will retain important appreciated value in a separate holding company.

They will also have been paying themselves rent instead of some faceless landlord, effectively growing their real estate asset, building their equity and benefiting from the tax advantages all at the same time.

And once they sell their business, they'll still have an income-generating asset that is one of the soundest long-term investments anyone can make.

Small business owners can continue to be landlords in their retirement, or they can sell the asset - typically at a rather significantly appreciated value.

Even if they gift the business to their children, the new owners will have to continue paying rent. Who would make a better landlord their children than themselves?

The value of the SBA 504 lending program is clear. Most business owners that are educated about this financial planning strategy adopt it.

For successful small business owners, this is almost a no-brainer. If they haven't already done so, it's time to stop paying rent to someone else and consider owning for all the right reasons.

* * *

By Christopher Hurn

(Ed. Note? Hurn is president and chief executive officer at Mercantile Commercial Capital based in Altamonte Springs. His company handles commercial loans and specializes in 90% financing for small business owners who want to acquire or develop their own facilities. The company, in business for 19 months, has closed some $30 million in loans already and opened offices in Miami, Tampa and Chicago.)

There is something emotionally charged about the buying and selling of New York high-end real estate. How else to explain the juggernaut of reality TV shows about high-end brokers?

After 30 years of marriage, Sharon and Michael Newman decided it was finally time to move from the Catskills to New York City.

On blocks near Kissena Park streets are quiet, houses are small, and the electricity that charges the atmosphere in downtown Flushing is nowhere to be found.

A five-story, seven-bedroom house in Brooklyn Heights has sweeping views of New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

Demand is so intense that there are waiting lists in some buildings, and a few landlords report that eager renters are even bidding up rents.

Sales at the very high end of the market barely missed a beat in the recession. But that prosperity hasn’t yet trickled down.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

For a century, Roosevelt Island housed a grim penitentiary. It was demolished in the 1930s.

More borrowers are opting for fixed-rate loans with terms other than the standard 30 or 15 years, especially when it comes to refinancings.

Two more glass skyscrapers are added to a group of towers on the waterfront of Long Island City.

Insurance coverage for a co-op unit; when a tenant is ‘blacklisted’; a co-op is smaller than estimated.

The market for $500,000-to-$600,000 houses in Westchester has become especially active.

A shaky real estate market means more sellers are providing buyer concessions, from gift cards to help with paying property taxes.

Houses of worship are adaptable to residential and other uses as congregations dwindle.

Nearly two million Americans could benefit from mortgage relief from the nation’s biggest banks, as part of a broad government settlement to be announced on Thursday.

A cold war-era satellite relay station is for sale in California after a Silicon Valley mogul gave up on plans to turn it into a weekend home.

How can I make my front porch more appealing to buyers?

Court hearings meant to protect New York homeowners from foreclosure are hopelessly slowed by endless paperwork and requests for additional information.

The Bay Area and Silicon Valley expect the windfall from the Facebook stock offering to make their in-demand region even hotter.

The house, designed by the architect Eric Fisher, looms over the street like a big industrial arm.

A town house in Dallas, a midcentury modern in Rhode Island and a Tudor in Denver.

Prices in some parts of the country are still off by as much as 25 percent from their 2007 peak.

Trinity Church is the largest landlord in Hudson Square and is part of the effort to rezone the area to residential from manufacturing.

Rising oil prices and a boom in shale exploration are leading companies to add office space in the Houston area, most notably Exxon Mobil.

Ms. de França is the president and chief executive of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, which focuses on new residential developments.

Meet the real estate broker’s interns: an ambitious group willing to do anything, earn nothing and wake up early on a Sunday to fluff the couch cushions at open houses.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

Homes in Dallas, Rhode Island and Denver.

Compare the cost of renting and buying equivalent homes.

For recently divorced men, a new breed of decorators offers help navigating a strange new world.

Plants that light up the winter garden can be found at Broken Arrow Nursery in Connecticut, which has long been a favorite of gardening geeks.

A sister in need drew the painter Beverly McIver back home to North Carolina, unaware that a new beginning was in store for both of them.

A jewelry designer finds striking new objects for storage.

Timothy Sakamoto and Jochen Repolust are part of the small but growing niche making mobile apps focused on specific works of architecture.

To promote an auction of 20th- and 21st-century design, the interior designer Stephen Sills has created a preview exhibition in an apartment at the Apthorp.

Fishs Eddy now sells plates acquired from the archives of the now-defunct Syracuse China Corporation, many more than 100 years old.

The designer Russell Greenberg creates custom baby rattles with ends shaped like profiles of mom and dad.