Hey there,
I work in tech. I build go-to-market tools, spend most of my day in Salesforce and the systems around it, and like most of you, I've been trying to figure out what to do with the money I save beyond putting it in index funds.
A few years ago I started buying industrial real estate. Small warehouses in smaller California cities. Nothing glamorous. Concrete buildings with rollup doors and half bathrooms.
Those properties now generate meaningful monthly income without taking much of my time. And I'm planning to keep buying them until the income from the portfolio can replace my salary.
This newsletter is where I share what I've learned.
Why industrial?
When most tech people think about real estate investing they think about buying a condo, or maybe a single-family house. That was my first instinct too. But the more I looked at it, the more I kept running into the same problems: overpriced markets, lots of competition, tenants who call at midnight about a leaking faucet.
Industrial real estate solved all of those.
The buildings are simple: open concrete space, a rollup door, maybe a small office. There's not much to break. The tenants are small business owners (contractors, mechanics, e-commerce sellers) who are practical, pay on time, and generally fix things themselves. The leases run 3 to 5 years with annual rent increases built in. And the market below $5 million in deal size is almost entirely owned by individuals and families, with very little institutional competition.
The math is also cleaner than residential. Commercial real estate is valued based on income. If you increase the income, you increase the value. There are no comparable sales to argue about, no emotion-driven pricing. It's a spreadsheet problem.
What I'll cover here
Every issue of Concrete Returns is going to be practical and specific. Deal math, how I find properties, what the financing process looks like, what I've gotten wrong, and what I'd do differently. If you work in tech and you've been curious about this side of real estate, this is written for you.
I've also put together a full playbook that walks through my entire strategy step by step, including the two spreadsheet templates I use to analyze every deal. If you want to go deeper, you can find it here.
More soon.
- Javi