The three types of commercial property investor: Which type are you?

When it comes to commercial property investing, have you ever actually sat down and analysed your principal aims?

And have you then matched them against the properties you already own — or those you may now be considering?

Basically, you'll find most people purchase commercial property for one (or more) of four reasons.

• to receive a solid cashflow;
• to provide a profitable return;
• to benefit from tax savings; and
• as a hedge against inflation.

You may feel you'd like to achieve all of these. But generally, one or two will stand out as being more important for you.

As you're probably aware, the truly rich tend to generate their capacity for wealth through their business activities. But then, they turn to commercial property to preserve and grow that wealth.

And in the same way, your underlying principles should also be to protect your original equity, and then obtain a worthwhile, ongoing return on it.

With that in mind, you would need to remove anything of a highly speculative nature from among the properties you pursue. Because, what you're effectively seeking is solid growth — without unnecessary risk. And that brings us to:

Your investment profile

More often than not, you can determine your profile based upon your personality type and your past experience.

Type #1: The Risk Taker

Some people love telling stories about how they "gambled a lot" — where they would have either made a fortune or gone broke. These investors can be quite entertaining to listen to, but rather dangerous to imitate.

Type #2: The Armchair Investor

These people certainly know their stuff — because they attend lots of seminars, read many books and are probably a regular on several forums. But they never have enough conviction to actually invest for themselves.

Type #3: The Shrewd Conservatives

These are the mildly aggressive investors, who only increase the size of the portfolio when they have enough funds in reserve. They do their homework before buying and don't put the existing properties at risk.

Bottom Line: As you can appreciate, it is the Type #3 investor who is most likely to succeed. And that's the one you should strive to emulate, going forward.

Anyway if you'd like to explore all of this in more detail, I would invite you to watch a video, where I'll walk you through a case study and also outline the precise steps you need to follow.

Chris Lang is an advisor to commercial property investors and gives keynote speeches and regular seminars on the best way to invest in commercial property. He maintains a blog, his-best.biz, which he updates regularly about the best way to get the most out of your commercial property investment.