Practice Real Estate: Your Quick Guide to Making the Major Purchase

Brandy Keck, is a brokerage liaison at Carr Healthcare Realty, a firm that specializes in selling and buying real estate for medical professionals. Keck sat down with Dentist’s Money Digest® at the Yankee Dental Congress to give dentists advice on the practice real estate purchasing process. Assembling the right team of experts, she says, is critical to making the process work.

· Hire representation. Do not talk to the seller directly. The dentist will want representation in the form of a team of experts. “Dentists are really great about bringing in their team,” Keck says, including contractors, dental-specific CPAs and attorneys. A real estate broker, Keck says, is essential to deal with the confrontational aspect of the transaction. Which leads us to …

· Let the experts do the talking. “Something that can be challenging for dentists can be the confrontational piece of what it’s like to work with a landlord or a seller directly,” Keck says. This can be especially difficult in lease-renewal situations where the dentist knows and may have a good working relationship with the landlord.

· See as many properties as you can. Even if you love it, don’t buy the first practice that you see, Keck says. Look at multiple properties in the same market. Have all the information about the advantages and disadvantages of each at your fingertips. “There really needs to be a posture and an education on multiple properties at one time, separating the dentist from the transaction.”

· Know the demographics. Keck recommends working with a demographics firm to determine the demand for dentistry in each area. Dentists need to know if a given market is growing. “If there’s a market that’s booming right now and a lot of population moving into an area, there’s going to be a need for dentists coming up.”

· It’s not always better to buy. When weighing their options, Keck says dentists should consider the stage of their career. Straight out of school, a dentist’s debt load might be too large to take on added real estate costs. Additionally, buying gets complicated if a dentist is considering relocating in the future.

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