That’s the title of a post I did 15 years ago on a old Type Pad blog that I found is still active. Here’s the crazy part, everything in that post is still relevant (I never went or go for fads in business). The post references an article in the Wall Street Journal about the overbuilding of warehouses in Phoenix. Ummmm…..there’s a massive commercial real estate bubble happening right now. Take a look at the post below and see that the same opportunities in 2009 for creative sales people…
How would you like to get a check for a million dollars? Maybe 2 million or 3 million dollars. You could, just use your sales skills. Making millions normally requires great risk. Today it just means finding someone who already took the risks and have struck out.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal there was an article on the overbuilding of warehouses in the Phoenix area. Over 8 million square feet of space is sitting empty. Billions of dollars spent on a storage boom that never came. So how you can cash in? Figure out how to help the owners fill that space.
You say you don’t know anything about commercial real estate? Do you think the person who is writing a mortgage check on an empty building cares? If you figured out a way to help fill a 700,000 square foot warehouse that has NEVER had a tenant don’t you think there would be a reward? Duh!
Here’s the thing…the professionals have been thinking about what to do with that empty space and have come up snake eyes so far. Who’s to say that someone from Waterloo, Iowa couldn’t come up with a plan. Selling the warehouse on a tenant is the easy part…finding them is what will get you your million dollars.
The point of this post is simple. Even in bad times there are great opportunities. People with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake are game for solutions from people they may have never given the time of day to in better days. If you spent $170 million dollars on a project that has yet to pay off, wouldn’t you gladly pay someone a couple million bucks to bail you out? The banks that are really on the hook sure as hell would!
Find someone who is in trouble…with millions of dollars at stake and figure out a way to help them. Maybe it’s a big real estate project like the warehouses in Phoenix. Maybe it’s a company whose largest customer just filed bankruptcy. Thinking big today doesn’t require taking risks…it’s helping someone who already took the risk and reaping the rewards finishing the job.
Happy Selling!