Relocating Your Church? Should you Buy, Build or Convert?
May 27th, 2009 by Bill Travis
This may be the strangest article you ever read about conversion. Because we are talking about converting commercial/retail building to churches.
Over the past several months we have all gotten an earful about the bad economy. There has been a constant drone about the banking crisis, home foreclosure crisis, car manufacturing crisis. If I have to listen to the details of one more crisis I might go nuts!
I think it is interesting that there are two characters in Chinese that make up the word CRISIS, those characters when taken separately translate into DANGER and OPPORTUNITY. There are plenty of people talking to us about the dangers of our times; I prefer to direct our attention today to the opportunities that are already starting to manifest themselves.
This past March our company held its annual sales meeting and as a part of that meeting we had a panel of bankers talk to us about their outlook on the economy. The bottom line was this; there is a commercial foreclosure crisis on the horizon that will make the recent residential foreclosure crisis look like a Sunday afternoon picnic; estimated time of arrival late summer or fall.
Armed with this information I began a search of retail and commercial properties that could potentially be converted to church and very quickly found a few to evaluate. We have been involved in several conversions in the past ranging from grocery stores to movie theaters and even car dealerships so the concept is not new to us.
In the mix of properties there are some that have been foreclosed, some that are owned by businesses that no longer need all the space and some that investors are unable to hold any longer. This makes a good situation for buyers.
Anyone that has worked with us knows that one of the things we always do is ask you to get prepared financially and that is more important than ever when you are looking at acquiring one of these distressed buildings to convert to church. The buyer that has their money in their pocket (or their banker in their pocket) are the ones that will be successful because usually the sellers will only deal with those they are sure can close the transaction quickly.
Next, surround yourself with a team of professionals. You need a real estate broker that understands the requirements of churches as well as zoning, parking issues etc. Hire the best you can get, it costs you nothing in the vast majority of cases.
I recommend using a construction management team. The team I use consists of an architect, interior designer, engineer, HVAC expert and contractor. With the proper teamyou can quickly determine which properties you should make offers on.
