Insights

If you’ve gotten involved as a landlord or tenant with non-residential real estate, such as retail or office buildings, then you have probably encountered a phenomenon that may go by any of several names: expense recoveries, expense reimbursements, pass-throughs, or common area maintenance (CAM) charges. What exactly is this phenomenon and how does it work?

Expense recoveries (aka reimbursements or pass-throughs) serve as a customary ingredient in leases for non-residential property. In part 1 of this article, I discussed some of the typical ways such an arrangement might play out.

In Part 2 of our discussion of real estate expense recoveries, we looked at several different methods that property owners use to recover some of their operating costs from tenants:

Real estate has probably been the best vehicle for building wealth since, well, forever – and income-producing real estate (aka rental property) may be the type of real estate that offers the greatest opportunities to small and mid-size investors.

But nothing worthwhile comes without a few potential pitfalls. You can and certainly should prosper as an investor, but to do so means being mindful of some mistakes that could derail your success. Let’s consider a few of the most important:

I had a question recently about a metric called Yield on Cost, aka Return on Cost and also sometimes called Development Yield. So what is it and when and how might it be useful?

Regression – no, it’s not what your family and friends accuse you of when you want to trade in the mini-van for a two-seater stick-shift convertible (well, maybe it is, but that’s a topic for a different article). If you’re familiar with our RealData software, my online video courses, and my other blog posts here, then you know that I’m usually talking about income-producing property like multi-family, retail, office, or the like — seldom about single-family homes. And when we estimate the value of most income properties, we typically do so by looking at their income stream.

From our experience, it appears that Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is the metric of choice for many, if not most, real estate investors. However, you may be aware that there are a few issues with IRR that can cause you some vexation: If you expect a negative cash flow at some point in the future, then the IRR computation may simply fail to come up with a unique result; and with your positive cash flows, IRR may be a bit too optimistic about the rate at which you can reinvest them. For these reasons, a variation on IRR, called Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR), can be very important. When you see how it works, then you’ll also see that it gives you the opportunity to deal with IRR’s shortcomings.

We usually think of Return on Equity (ROE) as a straightforward investment measure. That’s understandable, because the traditional method of calculating ROE is pretty clear cut: Take your cash flow after taxes and divide it by your initial cash investment.