Today’s Networking Call · Small Bay Industrial Basecamp

John Hilgers

1d • Lessons Learned

Today’s Networking Call

If you missed today’s Small Bay / Basecamp networking call, make the next one.

Not because anyone was pitching. Quite the opposite.

We had people openly sharing what is working, what is not, and where deals are breaking.

A few things I took away:

Ground-up construction is getting punished by cost. One developer walked away after the spread dropped below a point and cash-on-cash fell under 6%.
Several experienced operators are shifting toward existing value-add assets instead of trying to build everything from scratch.
Phasing matters. One operator is building only 12 units first — with LOIs already in hand — before deciding what the market wants next.
Capital structure matters as much as the real estate.
Sometimes the answer is not figuring out how to build cheaper. It is figuring out what already exists and putting it back to productive use.

And then you get the stuff that never shows up in a webinar: contractor relationships, entitlement lessons, financing problems, marketing systems, mistakes, local market intelligence and actual numbers.

That is the value of these calls.

Exposure.

You hear how other people think. You hear where they got hurt. You hear what they are testing. And every once in a while, somebody says one sentence that changes how you look at your own deal.

No presentation. No polished case study. Just operators talking to operators.

If you were not on this one, be on the next one.

The conversations after the introductions are where the value is.

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Today’s Networking Call