Kevin Pepe
Title: Managing Director, Commercial Realty Advisors
Age: 42
Experience: 15 years
Ed Miles
Title: Vice President, Commercial Realty Advisors
Age: 55
Experience: 25 years
Cape Cod, lovely bastion of great white sharks and seasonal jobs, has an active commercial real estate market, one that has been buoyed through the recession by demands for medical office space, elderly care facilities and other health care-related uses. But commercial uses of buildings run the gamut on the Cape, from restaurants to charter fishing locations. And Hyannis-based Commercial Realty Advisors, formed in 1999 as a spinoff from another company that founder Kevin Pepe operated, is ready to sell anything from real estate to entire businesses.
Q: Can you give readers an idea of your backgrounds and what you focus on?
Pepe: We focus more on the consulting and advising piece of the puzzle, whether it is deal-specific, or strategy over a series of deals, or development and permitting and financing, while also doing transactions – we bring some great strengths and abilities. Barnstable, Plymouth and Bristol counties are where we operate. An hour radius from Hyannis is our sweet spot. We focus our attention on projects and properties that are $5 million and below. Somewhere in the $500,000 to $1 million is where we spend most of our time on the real estate or the business side. We also have a business brokerage practice. Something like the sale of a restaurant can be a straight business deal, whether or not there is real estate attached to it.
Q: You mentioned that health care has really been driving the CRE market here. Can you elaborate on that point?
Pepe: The health care market has been particularly strong over the last four years. It’s the one consistent segment of our market. Demand is still high and supply is reasonable here on the Cape … for surgery centers, medical office buildings, assisted living and nursing homes, especially considering the aging population we have. There are communities that are still completely underserved for health care needs on the Cape, so there’s plenty of opportunity there. The office market has been soft for the last four years. The good news is that it seems to be healing.
Activity has picked up in the last 10 months. The service side of the equation, the landscapers and painters and carpenters, which is a big part of the Cape and Barnstable County puzzle, also continues to heal. Again, it’s just in the last 10 months that there’s been a pretty strong increase.
Miles: The Cape depends on the tourist season. This past summer, everyone in the hospitality industry was pretty excited about the numbers that came down overall. But there’s still the old 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the restaurants struggled, but a good 20 percent, the “name” restaurants, did extremely well. But a lot of people did do better overall this year. For the actual sales of restaurants themselves, the Lower Cape has a lot of restaurants for sale since it’s such a more seasonal opportunity for people. The Mid-Cape and Upper Cape are just plugging along, the established ones.
Q: What’s the current retail atmosphere like?
Pepe: We did an auto deal in Yarmouth recently that hasn’t come out of the ground yet. It’s an example of a tear down/rebuild of a very dated, inefficient, basically unusable building that will now be a clean, new retail facility in an area that’s already been developed for retail. Cape Cod has some challenges as it relates to perspectives of folks desiring, or lack of desire for, retail development. So we see a lot of opportunities for retail taking place where the retail already exists. It provides a nice comfortable feeling for the folks who really don’t want to see more retail business here on the Cape. People don’t want to see more retail because they don’t like the traffic side of the equation or they don’t like the development aspect of it.
Miles: The Cape is a great place to live. We have a lot of businesses here, but it’s hard to sustain some of them for all 12 months of the year. People that live here, the local government, we all realize that many of our industries are largely tourist-driven. But we don’t want to overdevelop the Cape. It’s home for a lot of us. We try to keep it like quaint, old Cape Cod.
Five Best Local Lunch Places:
- The Daily Paper
- Palio Pizzeria
- Wimpy’s Seafood Cafe
- Beech Tree Cantina
- B2 Burrito Bistro
