Your Cart is Empty
I am so excited to finally share that we have closed on our first commercial building! We bought a building for Simple & Sentimental, the online business I started in my dorm room. It was quite the endeavor. Buying a commercial building is completely different than buying a home or condo. Commercial real estate is often a much longer and sometimes more complicated process, but we're finally closed and ready to get rolling with our new space.
This will be Simple & Sentimental's 3rd move in 3 years. Each time we move and think we have found a place that will hold us for a while, we outgrow it. Discussions on buying the building began in the summer of 2020. We knew we wanted to try to find a space that was big enough to accommodate us for at least years. For us, that meant finding a space with around 8,000-10,000 square feet. As we started to look for space to lease, we realized how expensive it would be to lease a space that size, especially compared to the lease we have right now.
We started looking for a building to buy, and at first we found next to nothing. The market in our area was pretty hot and there wasn't a lot available. Kind of surprising considering the pandemic, but either way we couldn't find anything. So then we considering buying a piece of land and building our own place. We met with builders and toured buildings similar to what we would want. We soon realized a brand new building was far beyond what we were looking to spend, so we went back to searching for an existing property.
Our real estate agent called us and let us know about a 7,000 square foot building that was about 10 minutes from our current office space. He warned us that it needed work, but that we could get it for a good price. We toured it and were really skeptical. After some inspections and consideration, we put an offer on that building and it's now ours!
The short answer: we bought a building because the loan payment was cheaper than rent payments for similar buildings, we wanted to be able to fully customize a space to fit our business, and my husband and I have always wanted to invest in commercial real estate to diversify our income.
The building needs a TON of work. Renovations started almost as soon as we closed and we're going to move in once they are complete. For now, we are sharing updates on the renovation process and before/afters of the space on the Simple & Sentimental Instagram, Facebook Page, and YouTube Channel. I also share updates regularly on my Taylor Walden Instagram account.
I release new blog posts and content at taylorwalden.com designed for entrepreneurs like yourself!
Comments will be approved before showing up.
