Читать книгу Commercial Real Estate Investing For Dummies - Peter Harris - Страница 60

The first and easiest method in commercial property evaluation is called the comparable sales approach. If you've bought a house before, you may remember the bank had an appraiser go out and give the property a value that you hoped at least equaled your purchase price. Well, the same applies here for commercial property. The commercial appraiser goes out and compares prices of recently sold local properties that are similar in form and function to the property he’s appraising. The comparison will produce an average price, and that price is what your property will be valued at. But in commercial comparables, instead of looking at just overall sales price, the sales price per square foot of the building is also considered one of the main factors.

Here’s a quick example:

 Property A, a 10,000-square-foot building, sold last spring for $65 per square foot. Doing the simple math to compute the sales price, you calculate 10,000 square feet × $65 per square foot = $650,000.

 Property B, a 9,000-square-foot building, sold three months ago for $68 per square foot. Again, doing the math, 9,000 square feet × $68 per square foot = $712,000.

 Property C, the property you want to figure a price for, is similar to Property A and Property B and is 11,000 square feet in size. If you average out the price per square foot on both Property A and Property B, the average comes out to $66.50 per square foot. Use that price per square foot as your number to evaluate Property C. Doing the math, you get 11,000 square feet × $66.50 = $731,500 as the value for Property C.

When attempting to value apartment complexes, price per unit or price per door is used more often than price per square foot. Much like the preceding example, price per unit is calculated from previous apartment sales. When you have an average of price per unit for several complexes, you can estimate a value of another complex.

Even though the comparable sales approach is the easiest method for figuring out a value for a commercial property, it can be flawed. We’ve run into a couple of problems when using this approach.

When a market isn’t stabilized, or values go up or down, this can nullify the use of the comparable sales approach. In some small-town markets, there are no comparable sales because of the lack of overall sales.