News
REVERSE FINANCIAL PANIC
August 7, 2012
| No, our headline isn't the latest gymnastics move from Gabby Douglas. We stopped by Real Estate Investment Services's Chad Anderson's South Lake Union office on a recent breezy summer day to get his take on the current CRE climate. |
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| A vegan bar, a Castle Megastore, a burned down house—you name it. Chad has sold it. He's worked in real estate in one way or another since he was a kid and says the feeling right now is everyone-into-the-pool: Beginning late last year, owners have been paying cash for unfinished buildings, and now developers are beginning to do the same thing with prime land. "It's a financial panic in reverse," he tells us on the right assists. "One investor jumps and people think this is it and jump, too." |
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| Above, the Broadway Center on Capitol Hill, one of the properties being sold by the Chad Anderson Group. If selling real estate wasn't in Chad's blood to begin with, it was certainly in his home. "I grew up remodeling properties," the former Lakewood High linebacker notes. "If you spent the night at my house, the next morning you were working on a rental." The drywall-hanging days are over, but Chad has never conceived of doing anything else. Baby-faced, he initially sold houses "because I looked like I was 14," he tells us. "My plan was always to talk to people on the phone to get them convinced of my skills." |
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| He eventually branched out with John L. Scott, but the focus for the past several years has been creating and protecting real estate wealth for his investors through his multiple companies. Chad's mom Debbi Anderson was a longtime John L. Scott broker, and he rode through the crisis by focusing on the property management. What did he learn? "Too much leverage can be dangerous." He's taken the same approach to growing REIS, which he likens to a McDonald's. "The platform for expansion franchising is there," he says. That leads to another thing he learned from the past several years: "Steady, graduated growth is the only way to be successful." |
