Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!
Brent Peterson (00:03.094)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Patrick Corbett from Caspian Group. Patrick, go ahead, give me an introduction. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Patrick Corbett (00:17.132)
Sure, well thanks for having me. You know, a little bit about myself is my background's electrical engineering, but maybe about 15, 10 years ago, I decided it might be time to get in business for myself and I had a real estate agent's salesperson license, so I decided to get my broker's license and open up a real estate brokerage business. And that was maybe seven years ago now, and since then I've partnered.
at another brokerage as well as having my own original brokerage. And so I'm very invested in real estate in general and my roles in the cover of quite a wide range. But primarily I'm a broker of record, which means I'm responsible for the operations of the business and running the business.
Brent Peterson (01:06.902)
Awesome, and passions in life?
Patrick Corbett (01:09.64)
Oh yeah, passions in life. You know, I guess right now I'm trying to revisit some of my older passions as I have a little more time to. I like music a lot, so I recently put together sort of a crude recording studio in my basement and I'm playing around recording some new tracks. And you know, my kids and my family are my other passions, so I just...
like being present for them at their activities and supporting them however I can.
Brent Peterson (01:40.674)
That's awesome, thank you for that. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about commercial real estate, the role of Caspian as a strategic partner for EO Minnesota, and maybe a little bit about entrepreneurship, and then maybe we'll close it off with some music talk. I used to have a guitar behind me, I don't play guitar, I play piano, but I always said it's hard to get a grand piano up on the wall to show off behind you. But before we do that, I know that you had
Patrick Corbett (01:57.42)
Sure.
Patrick Corbett (02:04.734)
with you.
Brent Peterson (02:10.33)
graciously volunteered to be part of the free joke project. So all I'm going to do is tell you a great joke and all you have to do is say, should this joke be free or do you think at some point we can charge for it? So here we go. My 12-year-old son tried coffee for the first time today. It tastes like dirt. I told him it was just ground this morning.
Patrick Corbett (02:14.761)
Absolutely.
Patrick Corbett (02:23.968)
I'll do that.
Patrick Corbett (02:37.026)
I very much appreciate that. I think you could charge for that. I would be. Yeah.
Brent Peterson (02:40.062)
All right, excellent. Well, thanks for that. Good, all right, so tell us a little bit about Caspian and kind of what you do here in the Twin Cities and some of the scope of your services.
Patrick Corbett (02:54.444)
Sure, yeah, thanks. So Caspian Group is a investment-oriented commercial real estate brokerage business. And so I'll dissect that a little bit. The investment-oriented portion means that this brokerage was born out of my partner's personal acquisitions in commercial real estate. And when those acquisitions became large enough, volume-wise, needing help to broker and fill them. So...
We're very in tune with investment oriented buying and acquisition. The commercial real estate brokerage, meaning, you know, we do all the typical services that a brokerage would do. So we work with buyers and sellers. We work with tenants and landlords, repping them all to find them spaces, to find tenants for their spaces, you know, investors of properties that are looking for a return, we're very in tune with that.
as well as owner operator users looking for a building for their business. So that's where we tie in a lot with entrepreneurs. We have a lot of relationships with starting and infant businesses that are looking to grow and we try to service them on the real estate side. Yeah, so that's what we do. We're located in Edina. We operate all over the state. We're licensed in the state as well as we have relationships.
outside of Minnesota where we co-broker and look for deals and help our clients outside of Minnesota.
Brent Peterson (04:24.614)
So myself, let's say as a business owner, I'll break it down into three sections. The business owner that wants to own, operate, their own building as a commercial business. The business owner that just wants to own a commercial building and lease it to an entrepreneur. And the one that sort of has that mixture where either they're gonna lease it back or they're gonna do another scenario. What are some of the strategies you see behind that?
Patrick Corbett (04:53.224)
You know, one of the main things that it boils down to if you are a new or growing business and you're looking for space, you know, I get off, I'm often asked, you know, should I be buying a building and I'm a huge advocate for investing in commercial real estate. But when you're talking to a business owner and owner operator, you need to really understand what their cost of capital and their margins are on their products such that it
you know, buying a commercial building can tie up a lot of working capital on a down payment. So yes, well, buildings traditionally appreciate or you want to invest and make some money back. Does that outweigh, you know, you could put that money into your product and make twice as much. So sometimes it makes more sense to lease space than buy a building. But that's probably one of the most common questions I get about, you know, I'm curious, I'm leasing right now. Should I buy a building or not?
It's different for every business owner into what you asked and breaking it down into three different ways. Those factors play into the decision-making as well, such that if you, maybe you want to buy a building for appreciation and you can fill 51% of it, you might be able to get an SBA loan as an owner operator, but you could lease out the other 49%.
and dabble in being a landlord and a building owner in that sense. So there's ways that there's a it's a spectrum of I don't know um you know how much you're involved in the property both is like a building owner um you're going to be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the building so there are landlord tasks that come with that um even if it's just for your own building you've got to pay attention to the building's needs and understand that.
Especially more so if you are going to only occupy some of the building and lease it out, then you better be on top of your game because you're going to be expected to be, just like every other landlord, experienced, considerate, attentive to the needs of the other tenants. But there's a mix of options as a business owner that you could see yourself being involved in an acquisition or in commercial real estate.
Brent Peterson (07:13.994)
Is there a difference, I mean, I know there's a difference, but between being a commercial landlord and a residential landlord, is there a huge difference in that?
Patrick Corbett (07:24.728)
Legally speaking, no, not really. I mean, experience wise, you know, I guess I've heard it best said, like if you're a residential landlord, you expect calls at nights and weekends. And if you're a commercial landlord, expect the calls eight to five during the weekday. And so it kind of does break down to that. But no, I mean, you've got to be on top of deferred maintenance. You've got to be top on operations, trash, water, sewer. There might be some caveat, some unique scenarios to each.
residential versus commercial, like what is the voltage and is it a three phase power supply and conditioning of power for industrial users. You know a home you just maybe worry about how many amps the box has in it or something like that so some differences in those approaches or those products I guess. But a lot of it's the same otherwise, you know just being there for your tenants and understanding them and
just being proactive and being a good steward of the property or a good landlord.
Brent Peterson (08:27.566)
Do you have some questions that you would ask, or you have some advice that you would give to potential landlords when they're working with you to make sure they're asking the right, but working with you or another broker to make sure they're asking the right questions when they're going to look at purchase a building.
Patrick Corbett (08:46.468)
Yeah, I mean, there's, I guess, ultimately what the goal of the acquisition is at a really high level. If it's an investment, which it sounds like the scenario would be, you know, what their experience is, making sure that you've communicated any pitfalls that you've learned from past transactions or deals that you can make sure you're proactively helping your client avoid. There's nuances with, you know,
how to structure debt and that you can make sure they're achieving what they want financially, operationally. You know, those, I guess I would, any broker should be really just trying to understand what the main goal is and then making sure they set the expectations correctly and can deliver on them.
Brent Peterson (09:37.91)
How about you mentioned structuring the debt. Is it a different route you would take for a commercial mortgage? And the banks will look at you differently for a commercial mortgage compared to your residential mortgage?
Patrick Corbett (09:53.012)
Absolutely. Banks are typically have better terms for a primary residential mortgage. Now if you're talking you're buying apartments as a commercial investor, those equate to if you're buying an industrial warehouse or a retail strip mall. The terms there are pretty similar. You know most people are pretty aware the rates have gone up pretty significantly recently and with that has come...
high sensitivity to commercial loans for most lenders right now, where they're very, the down payment might be higher now, the amortization schedule might be tighter. Basically the bar has been raised or the barriers have been made greater to get your typical financing. But in that, I guess where that vacuum or that void's been created, there's now private lenders who are beholden to deposit rules.
ratios that some larger banks are. They're just more willing to, or more flexible, in some of these commercial loans. So I think they're doing pretty well right now and there's a need for them because funding, if you don't have cash right now, it's not very easy to get a loan. And so there are other places now you can get loans. We do what's called a contract for deed financing with clients sometimes where we'll align.
buyers who can finance it and we'll sell it back on a contract for deed and more or less carry the note. You know basically be the bank. So there's a lot of that going on as well right now in commercial.
Brent Peterson (11:34.562)
How much as you as a broker, how deep do you get into the weeds with the potential client on their finances and are they going to be able to make the payments and do you help them understand that there's a benefit and there's a pitfall, right? And if you're just an owner and you're going to lease to a tenant, it could be feast or famine especially in commercial. It may take longer to rent a commercial space, but somebody might be in there longer.
Do you give them some help and advice, especially for new ones, new buyers?
Patrick Corbett (12:07.116)
Absolutely. You know, buying, you're definitely going to need to, especially if you're, if you're buying with a lender, you know, similar to like a house purchase scenario for people that have been through that, you're going to need to be pre-qualified.
So there's a lot of discussions that happen with the bank and proof that you have the capabilities to get the mortgage or get lending, however, and perform on that. Where it's a little more gray, I guess, is with landlords and tenants. And every landlord might have a different qualification procedure, background check for a tenant.
And so really getting to understand that with your client is important such that you are on the same page with the tenants and there's no misunderstanding or you don't want to bring an unqualified tenant. So setting those expectations with your client is really important on the front side from a landlord standpoint, as well as on, if you're representing a tenant, it's good to prepare them to, uh, so they anticipate being asked for their finances, especially in today's environment.
most landlords and especially professional landlords are going to want to see two or three years tax returns, a few months of bank statements showing cashflow and income, which is making sure that the tenant can service the debt against the lease. And so it's always wise to know your tenant, your landlord's situations, but yeah, from the tenant side, it's a little more delicate at times because they might be businesses that...
are new and they don't have any financing. You don't want to alienate a potential client. So you've got to be smart in how you communicate and tell them, hey, this is going to be a requirement. I'm not asking this just to ask it and throw a barrier up, but we need to come prepared. If you can't do this, it's going to put a wrench in the gears of a lot of transactions. So we actually have that. I've discussed that with a couple brokers this week where...
Patrick Corbett (14:11.328)
The deals, they were taking a client on showings and they all stalled out at the point of getting finances because the tenant doesn't have them prepared. And so they're sort of scrambling to put it together, but it's much better to put it, to be proactive and be ready from the start.
Brent Peterson (14:27.574)
Yeah, and I'm sure the buyer wants to move quick a lot of times and they want if it's a cash deal they want to have a guarantee of payment on at some quick date right. I know that there's different types of commercial property and recently I somebody talked about the condo the commercial business or commercial condo type of situation where you're renting an office condo.
Patrick Corbett (14:37.365)
Yep.
Brent Peterson (14:52.75)
How is that for an investment standpoint? How do you see those working, especially here in Minnesota?
Patrick Corbett (14:59.412)
You know, there's definitely, they're definitely an investment product. Typically because they're smaller in size and price, you see them more, you don't see them as an investment product as much, meaning like it might be a business that buys the candle for themselves and operates out of it. So it's consumable.
I guess is maybe the best word by smaller businesses where they can acquire it and own it and operate it themselves. You know, as I guess analogous to that as an investor, it's a smaller purchase price. So it's easier to get into those types of properties. You know, typically they're in retail commercial areas. So they're not hard to lease out because they're smaller sizes as well. There are...
Typically association fees and monthly operating expenses that are part of an association when you're in a condo or a common interest community like that. So that's the one thing to be aware of is there's typically extra fees in the operations. And although they go towards like snow plowing or lawn mowing or whatever common area stuff, it's just another fee that would have to be passed onto a potential tenant or worked into the lease terms somehow.
if you are an investor in those properties.
Brent Peterson (16:23.498)
If I'm a potential tenant and I'm coming to you to help me find a space to lease, what are the best places that you've seen to negotiate with the building owner landlord? You've mentioned CAM, you mentioned other types of situations. Is there places that are good to negotiate with and there's some places that landlords just stay away from?
Patrick Corbett (16:47.28)
Yeah, no, there's different areas or factors that are negotiable and they're also very dependent on the product type and the demand for those specific products, so meaning if you're looking to get into a warehouse, if you're getting into any lease you can talk about term length of the lease. Typically the longer the lease, the.
the better it is for a landlord. So you can ask for more as a tenant, especially if you're asking them to say, do a build out of office and cover some of the costs. They want to know that they'll recoup those costs over a period of time. And the longer where you can amortize those costs, the longer terms it's more digestible for a tenant. Pricing obviously is an obvious one. You can negotiate on that. I guess I would just say any good broker on either side or...
A tenant who's doing this for themselves should be looking at what market rates are for comparable spaces in that area. And that will really set some guidelines for what's reasonable and what's not with respect to pricing. I mentioned and maybe you did as well, the tenant improvements. So like anything you want as a tenant, you're going to ask, hey, we need an extra bathroom put in. We need plumbing to all the, you know, hairstyling stations if you're opening a barber shop. So there can be an upfront cost asked to.
tailor the space to your use. But again, the landlord may want longer terms for that. On the flip side, sometimes if there's a very volatile price in a product where over the past few years, a warehouse industrial pricing was rising 10, 20% a year, you may not as a landlord want to get into a long-term lease. So I can kind of flip-flop like that where, no, let's take it year by year because I want to reset the pricing every year. So you might see that scenario.
You know, other negotiations or other opportunities for negotiation, you know, there's differences for every tenant and what they need and every landlord and what their strategy is looking for. So really understanding those two and making sure there's some overlap is good. Some landlords won't do any tenant improvements and it's good to know that before you take them tenant on free showings and then ask for tenant improvements.
Patrick Corbett (19:11.956)
So just things you can do proactively to really make sure that everything's level set and the two ends meet up.
Brent Peterson (19:19.962)
I know that there's a bunch of different terms and maybe for a newer business owner and we have this program called EO Accelerator, so they're startups. There's this idea of your net rent or your net leasing, net rent per square foot. Explain the net, the gross, the cam, how that all works together and like somebody says, hey, my net is $30 or whatever that price is. You're like, what does that even mean?
whatever, 2,000 square feet and it's $30. What is, how does all the, if you have a way to dumb that down for people to understand that all that lingo.
Patrick Corbett (19:56.988)
Yeah, I'll do my best. There's some gray in the understanding and use of these words, but I think I can help define that a little bit. So on two ends of the spectrum, we'll call it, you have a triple net rent scenario, or you have a gross rent scenario. The triple net rent is basically where the tenant pay, and this is maybe from a landlord perspective, like a building owner perspective, a triple net is the
The tenant pays for everything. The gross rent is they'll pay one amount to the landlord and the landlord essentially covers everything. So it's in sort of the ownership of the payments. If you're a tenant, on the tenant side, if you're getting into a lease with the landlord, you want to know essentially what the base rent or net rent might be, as in the term you're using it. I call it base rent. And then...
base rent plus CAM and taxes. CAM and taxes is another charge taxes obviously other property taxes. CAM is common area maintenance so it's anything that goes into the operation of the building that's reallocated back to all the tenants so snow plowing, lawn mowing, cleaning of common spaces those are very common area charges. So if you start with a base rent or your net rent say it's $10 per square foot per year you might add
$3 on top of that for the tax portion per year based on how much square footage you're in. And then there might be another couple, a few dollars for cam charges, maybe even more. Maybe it's five. It depends on where you are, taxes, how nice the building is, what the upkeep is, but it can be broken down into those components. And so basically, if you look at it from a landlord standpoint, again, the base rent up to the base rent is essentially what the landlord's profiting or a net profit.
Everything above that is an expense that's just delineated for the sake of transparency to a tenant on where their money's going. The CAM and tax portion, a good landlord, if they have CAM and taxes, will be reconciling CAM every year and taxes because things change. So you'd often tell your tenant, here's the expected CAM and tax charges for the year and we'll bill out on that. And then when we get billed at the end of the year and reconcile, we might owe you money or you might owe us a little money. You want to be obviously as close as possible.
Patrick Corbett (22:24.584)
but that's often written into good leases and good managed landlords will have that such that, you know, they don't want to be blindsided necessarily the landlord by a 20% property raise and, you know, property tax increase. Now that said, they also don't want to blindside their tenants with it, but in that scenario, that increase in taxes will be reallocated to the tenants. And so...
It's not any additional cost to the building ownership structure in terms of the income. The income will always be the base rent and it's defined at that.
Brent Peterson (23:02.614)
You talked about $10 net. So there's definitely a C, a B, and an A class of property. And then, of course, warehouse. Give us just an overview of what you expect in a C class office space compared to whatever A is or something like that.
Patrick Corbett (23:21.536)
Sure. The pricing varies greatly by area, by class of property, like you just said, by type of product, industrial, retail, office. They all have different spectrums. Office, let's go there. So, a C-class office in the suburbs, let's say, or even just wherever, let's say, maybe.
Patrick Corbett (23:51.128)
I don't know, 10 to $15 per square foot base rent, plus probably like another five in cam and taxes, somewhere between there. So I'd say on the low end, maybe $15 total, not including like the tenants heat, the tenants will, even in those rent scenarios we discussed before, if you're in a triple net base with cam and taxes on top of it, your operating expenses are still on top of there.
In a gross lease, the landlord's paying for electricity and for gas, so there'd be extra expenses there. But in a triple net type scenario, $10 to $15 base rent would be really affordable, plus another $5 plus dollars in cabin taxes. So we're talking maybe $20, maybe a little around there. Now, if you want to go to the A-class properties that are just being built, and there's a lot of chase the top in the office space where they're trying to add more amenities and
be most attractive so there's a lot of building owners that are doing some nice things. That might be $50 base rent plus cam and taxes on those could be $10, $20 in that range. You could probably pay upwards of $60 a square foot for some of the best class office space right now. They might have a shared free coffee on tap and free...
arcade area and stuff like that, often those things get rolled into your cam charges so you end up paying for that stuff. So that's why it gets expensive with some of those amenities.
Brent Peterson (25:28.926)
You mentioned free coffee, so I wanted to bring up the co-working spaces and you know, we work and it seems like we work is always in a complete tumble financially and how I don't know how they stay in business, but at some point you have at scale It doesn't make sense to do a shared office, but maybe with one or two people it does it Do you have any sort of? insight around when does it make sense to get your own office compared to
Patrick Corbett (25:42.636)
Sure.
Brent Peterson (25:57.238)
getting a shared office space.
Patrick Corbett (26:01.26)
Um, you know, I guess it just depends on the, the use of the office, the privacy that's desired versus some community feeling, you know, you can still, you can get your own office space. If you've got 10 to 20 people in five, I've had small offices leased out to one or two people, right, for just private 500 square foot offices that they want. It just, it's really dependent on.
I guess what the need is and who's making that decision. There's a lot of small mom and pop business owners that have been working from home that, um, you know, they don't need a big office space, but they want somewhere where everyone isn't when they're doing work. So they look for a three, 400 square foot office. That's maybe four or 500 a month or something like that. Um, just so they can go somewhere, right? It's almost like a sanity office. Let's call it. Um,
I've seen big companies that like to be in a shared workspace for the flexibility, where they might be per head that's going into a Regis or WeWork or however they're negotiating contracts for a shared space. Maybe they need the flexibility because they're going to grow and they don't want to get in any long-term leases. So there isn't any specific measure of when you need your own office versus a flexible space.
Patrick Corbett (27:22.692)
Kind of analogous to being a building owner or a tenant You know like you're gonna have to do certain things if you own your own office versus if you Subcontract space out from a we work where they're answering your phone. They're directing traffic to you. They're stocking fridges You know you just there's amount of overhead that That you would have to expect if you're your own You you take on your own space as a tenant?
Brent Peterson (27:50.25)
Yeah, I just say from experience, we expanded. The last company had we expanded into Mexico and we did we work and we had a private office there. And it was something like seven, 800 bucks for, it was really small. Like we basically barely got two desks in. They gave you the desk too, but we barely got two desks into it. And I was just thinking at scale, like, man, this doesn't make any sense if you're gonna go to four people and suddenly, or five people, whatever, and you're paying.
Anyway, so.
Patrick Corbett (28:20.368)
Yeah, yeah, there's a it's pricey and I think those companies are struggling a little bit, especially because a lot were, you know, they're the basis for their businesses, they'll go lease a lot of space for a long period of time and get a good price and they think they can sublease it and shorter, more digestible amounts at a slight premium based on the square footage and time. But unfortunately, there's just there's not a lot of demand right now for office space. And so that's
That's the product these businesses primarily operate in. And so they were left in these long-term leases that they're committed to with to their building owners, but their tenants are on month to month leases. So there's no long-term commitment and there's not a huge gap in that, in those contracts.
Brent Peterson (29:06.438)
So we have a few minutes left, Patrick. I wanted to just kind of close things out with what you think we're going to see in now 2024. I've heard the Fed is talking about some rate decreases next year and it seems like commercial, from the warehousing space, that market is still kind of hot. Is there things that you see that are going to happen next year that people should be in tune with, especially as a business owner?
Patrick Corbett (29:36.208)
Yeah, I guess I'm hopeful based on like the talking heads and what I've heard from, you know, what happened with the Fed recently that rates at least stay the same or come down. I mean, today I was reading new data about how inflation has dropped and caught like the indices that are pretty low in terms of price increase. So it was like 0.9%. So I think if we see a lot of stuff like that, coupled with Fed direction or taking action and similar in that
towards that lowering rates or keeping them. I think, you know, we should see an increase, I guess, in transactions right now from a brokerage standpoint in commercial real estate, in real estate in general. Things are pretty stagnant. It's hard to get money to buy things. Sellers don't wanna sell a home or property and then have to go buy one at 8% if they have it under a loan at 3% right now. So there's just been a lot of stagnation.
I'm anticipating there's going to be, and there already are, some difficult times for loans that are maturing in commercial real estate right now. You might have been cash flowing at 3.5%, but at 7.5%, you're losing money, and the bank won't re-up your loan. And so what do you do then? You might have to go to a private lender. So there's gonna be a lot of creativity in kind of getting the financing gap bridged.
Still, I think no matter what happens as we roll into this year, it takes a while to undo momentum that's already been going in the other direction. So there's a lot of people with cash that are in great position to buy commercial real estate. They put it into CDs for six months, 12 months. So they're committed to having their cash in a great return, 5.5%, but it's locked up. So until these rates, they show a longer term trend towards lower rates.
the cost of capital being cheaper. You know, it's going to take a little bit of time to get out of this. Now, I'm optimistic maybe by the end of the year things are closer to what they were the last year or two, but honestly speaking the last five years have been really good. Money was free essentially, you know, and so it allowed people to make a lot of transactions for low cost and it's just not the case right now.
Patrick Corbett (31:57.608)
I don't see the Fed dropping the rate to 3% in the next month or two or anytime probably ever in the next five years. I don't know. Maybe we get back to five and a half or something like that. But I think it's trending in the right direction. But I think this year it's definitely if you're a building owner, give your property manager a hug and that's where a lot of the things will be done is at the bottom line like in terms of operations, management, sufficiencies.
because your rates aren't probably going up as a landlord anymore. If you're a tenant, you might have some more leverage because of the lack of deals getting done. But for tenants, it's, I mean, do you want to take out a 40% credit card and put stuff on that? It's not as easy as it was when it was 15 or 20 percent when you're starting a business. So, we're seeing, I'm seeing it stagnating across all transaction types.
buyer sellers because the rates are high, but even now tenants, you know, they're just, it's harder to start a business. So we're seeing less and less entrepreneurs and tenants needing space because they're just going to bootstrap and do it out of their garage until it's critical. Right. Um, but I'm, I am optimistic, um, going forward that it will get better. I just don't know if we're ever going to return to 2021 with respect to how transactions were being done and low rates. Um, so.
Brent Peterson (33:23.946)
Yes, so speaking subjectively, the mood I get when speaking to my entrepreneurial friends is that they can't be on the fence anymore and they're still getting the same amount of business and they got to either start hiring or make some changes. It feels like we're coming to a hump maybe. The feeling is there and I think you kind of said maybe some of the optimism is coming back in the market.
Patrick Corbett (33:51.196)
Yeah, I think so. And I, you know, I hate to have us predict, like make our own future based on sentiment. I do think there's a lot of that. So, you know, I try not to get caught up and the end is near everything's collapsing. You know, we're, uh, I don't know, I feel like everyone can adapt and that's part of life is changing and sometimes they're more volatile changes. Um, but I'm optimistic. Um,
Yeah, I'm optimistic that things are getting better.
Brent Peterson (34:23.407)
So if people want to get in touch with you, Patrick, how would they do that?
Patrick Corbett (34:27.496)
You know, they can reach out to me via email, phone. They can call our main line here. CaspianRealt.com is our website domain. Our company's Caspian Group LLC. Unfortunately, the Caspian Group domain was taken. They can call me personally, and I'm happy to throw my phone number out if that's okay. My phone number personally is 651-334-98.
Patrick Corbett (34:56.825)
My email address is patrick at caspianrealt.com and we love talking commercial real estate. No expectations, any way we can help, we try.
Brent Peterson (35:07.606)
And that's awesome. I'll make sure I put all those into the show notes. And I'll just add as a strategic partner for EO Minnesota, first I thank you very much for helping out our organization and being part of it. But you're always there as well to help educate our group. And we have about 150, 160 people that are involved in specifically including yourself in EO Minnesota. And I think that
You're a great resource to help out people in terms of property management or leasing or any type of those brokerage decisions.
Patrick Corbett (35:46.304)
Yeah, well, thank you. No, I very much love EO and a huge advocate of the group. I mean, I get so much out of it. And so I'm happy to contribute to be there for whoever as part of the group, whenever is needed when it comes to commercial real estate, because it's, it's tough getting asked after the fact and seeing an issue that came up after the fact and trying to fix it with respect to at least they just got into, or something where there's some conditions they might've missed where.
It would have been beneficial to have a five minute talk about it or something. So I'm always not selfishly saying like, get an expert involved a little bit, but you don't know what you don't know. I'm not going to go do my own taxes. I think I could, but I definitely know there's things in there I would miss. Right. And so we appreciate just, just even getting asked questions, giving advice. No, no business expectations, just trying to help people.
Brent Peterson (36:40.994)
That's awesome. Patrick Corbett with the Caspian Group, thank you so much for being here today.
Patrick Corbett (36:45.716)
Yeah, thank you, Brent.