In the Neighborhood

After leaving work I went around town looking for properties. There has got to be some place out there that's suitable. We need a place that's at least 1,500 sq ft, in a location with decent amount of traffic, and be close to retail or offices. There's plenty of these kind of spaces, it's just that they're rarely vacant.

Downtown Portland can be divided into 3 distinct areas. There's the Central Business District, which consists of the financial center, tall buildings, and offices -- the typical metropolitan city scape. Then there's the east side where things are much more laid back and mellow. Lots of hippies and vegetarian-friendly restaurants on this side. And lastly there's the Pearl District, where most of the expensive condos, art galleries, and trendy restaurants are sprinkled around.

I drove in each part of downtown today. Below are two photos, the 1st is of a vacant space in NE Portland, and the 2nd one is in the Pearl district. I like these two the most so far, but I'll have to keep looking, because I've yet to see one where I can say "Yes, that's the one!".

Back in Portland

We actually got back last Saturday, I was just too distracted to post anything. We took some pictures while over there, but it's still in the camera. Need to spend some time editing them. Maybe this week I'll find some time to do that.

In any case, this week we have been focusing on finding a location for our restaurant. We walked all over downtown Portland, and also checked out the East side, especially along NE Broadway from Lloyd Mall on up.

Before we go on, I should explain a little bit about how commercial lease space are calculated. Usually, they're calculcated by the dollar amount per square feet per year. Let's say there's a space that's 1,000 square feet and the rent is $10/sq ft/year. That means that the annual rate would be calculated as such: (1000 sq ft) x ($10/sq ft/year), which would be $10,000/year. So the monthly rent would be about $833/month.

For downtown Portland, the average rate should be about $20/sq ft/year, so of course, the bigger the space, the higher the rent.

Downtown, we spotted a place that looked like the perfect location. We called the realty company up and arranged to have tour the place. Boy, the place sure was a fixer-upper, it looked terrible. The realtor said that the space was 2,500 sq ft, but I think he was counting all 3 floors (only the 1st floor was usable), and that they'd "only" charge $2,600/month. Now, if the usable space was actually 2,500 sq ft, then that would be a great deal (about $12.50/sq ft/year), but the floor that we were allowed to use looked to be about 900 sq ft, which made the lease many more times expensive than the realtor made it out to be (it would be $34.60/sq ft/year).

We'll have to keep on searching. There were another that had some promise, so we'll make arrangements to tour the other place too. Phan suggested that we also look not only at vacant properties but also existing restaurants that want to sell their business. That will certainly expand our list of properties to choose from.

For a vacant space, here's what I think we'll need to do. After we find a few places that we really like and would consider taking, we'll take a tour of the place again, except next time have an architect or general contractor accompany us so that they can help us estimate the costs for renovation. Once we have the renovation costs, we'll have a real estate lawyer help us negotiate the lease and look over the lease contract before agreeing on signup up for the lease.

That's it for now, I gotta go catch up on my homework for my MBA class.