Scott O'Neill

So, you get to know owners direct, you get to know the agents you need to know, and we even buy direct from funds and stuff like that.

So,

This particular owner was from overseas.

They wanted to sell because they're redeploying their funds in another country.

So an off-market opportunity came up.

This shopping center, it's a $5.18 million purchase, which is very entry level for a shopping center because obviously you can...

you know, a Westfield might be a billion dollars and a Coles or Woolworths centre could be 20, 30, 40, 50 million.

So, you know, 5 million is at base of that, which is one of the reasons I like it because people like shopping centres where you've got convenience.

This had a mix of food-related type tenants and some, you know, a good mix of tenants and lots of car spots.

And you've got to think with COVID, what did...

worse than other types of retail and cvd type assets didn't do too well because people stopped traveling there the big air-conditioned malls and that were not beneficiaries but convenience centers where they had a little supermarket and stuff like that did very well because people still needed to eat they still needed to see their dentist they still needed to effectively buy their groceries and these centers did perform quite well yeah look the property was freehold as well this is in southeast queensland as well so we do like the growth story

But the return on it was 6.1 net, which is quite good because a lot of these assets are selling sub 5% these days.

So we feel like we've got the client a good deal.

The client was a busy professional, which they would not have the time or inclination to do all the due diligence or even source an asset like this.

Interestingly, the due diligence, we were able to negotiate a further $75,000 off the price because we found some of the numbers were incorrectly stated.

So this is one of the things you've got to be very careful when buying a shopping center.

You've got to make sure all the numbers are the numbers because there's a lot of outgoings you've got to account for because everything from cleaning to rubbish removal to maintenance to air cons, all of that needs to be quantified to make sure that net return is the true net return.

And that's obviously what we do at Breathing Investing to help people.

Yeah, look, it just takes a lot of time.

Everyone can sort of work through it, but the trick is doing it within the time period you've