Redeveloping Dying Malls with Brait Capital Founder Rafik Moore
Guest: Rafik is a seasoned commercial real estate operator with extensive experience in retail & industrial property. His company, Brait Capital is now focused on very large retail & industrial assets. Recently, he has closed on 3 shopping mall properties with large vacancy and is in the process of repositioning those assets.
Big Idea: Commercial real estate success is found in 3 components. First, finding an asset at a favorable cost basis. Second, assembling the capital to buy & redevelop that asset. Finally, and perhaps most important, operating the business of leasing at a high level to quickly fill the asset with paying tenants – tenants who draw the missing traffic back and bring that asset back to life.
Dan: Yes, smart. I like that. Why don’t we start with a little bit of a back story, right? How did you get in real estate? How did your real estate career developed to the point where we’re taking down and running 200,000 plus square-foot dead boxes and bringing them back to life?
Rafik: I started with a job as a credit analyst at a bank. So, my approach into this industry came from the finance or ability to borrow money to buy real estate. As an underwriter, I worked for two years, learned a lot about credit analysis and what banks to look at when they want to borrow your money. It was a very critical experience in my understanding of how to get banks to lend me money later. After being a credit analyst, I became a sales guy. At first, I was an account executive, sales guy for the mortgages, and then ultimately, became a mortgage broker in 2003. From 2003 until 2008, I was a mortgage broker. We had about four shops and over 100 people, and that basically was my full-time job.
But my part-time job was flipping houses and starting from one house duplex after that and that flopped on a couple of first houses. It’s so hard to believe that starting with that and to sort of fast forward to what we’re doing today, which is four and a half million square-feet of real estate all over the country it’s just mind-boggling and very, very exciting and I guess, humbling. I have been very blessed to have met a lot of friends along the way. I’m all about building long-term relationships with long-term people. But yes, after flipping houses… Oh, by the way, when things collapsed, I started flipping houses professionally. We do 50 to 60 houses a year for about seven to 10 years and in 2012 and parallel, I bought my first commercial warehouse building which was a life-changing event. On that first deal, we made a million dollars, me and my investors. And we continued flipping houses, but commercial real estate became a thing for me, first thing. So, my partner continued running flipping business while I got into commercial full time.
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Rafik & I Discuss Redeveloping Dying Malls:
- The Evolution from Flipping Houses to Buying Malls
- The System for Creating Astonishing Leasing Velocity
- Creating a “product”, as opposed to doing a “deal”
- Managing 700 Commercial Tenants
Relevant Episodes: (200+ Content Packed Interviews in Total)
- Saul Z on Leveling Up in Real Estate
- Mark Ainley on Pulling Back the Curtain of a High Volume Turn Key Rental Business
- Kirby Atwell on Founding a Luxury Home Investment Company
- Johnny Wolff on how to Unlock Passive Wealth with Real Estate and Innovation
- Nashville Tennessee Real Estate Development with HBG Capital Founder Brandon Cobb
The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
