Buy the building on coverage and funded reserves — not on the spread between the asking price and a cap-rate valuation.

A banker-grade business plan built on the legal and contractual spine this business actually runs on, with the real rules named: nonresidential improvements depreciated straight-line over 39 years (26 U.S.C. §168 — and land is never depreciable); the 1031 like-kind clock, now real-property-only, that identifies replacement property within 45 days and closes by the earlier of 180 days or the return's due date with extensions (26 U.S.C. §1031(a)(3)); the ADA duty to remove architectural barriers in existing facilities where readily achievable (42 U.S.C. §12182(b)(2)(A)(iv)); the Phase I ESA to ASTM E1527-21 under EPA's All Appropriate Inquiries rule, 40 CFR Part 312 — the edition and rule that actually carry the CERCLA innocent-landowner defence you are paying a consultant for; and the SBA 504 line at 51% owner occupancy for an existing building, 60% for new construction (13 CFR 120.131), which is what separates an owner-user financing from a lessor financing. Plus the lease economics underneath all of it: NNN versus modified-gross versus full-service-gross, CAM recovery, gross-up, expense caps, and escalations.

An editable Excel financial model — real assumptions you change, not a static PDF. Purchase price, loan amount, rate, amortization, effective gross income, owner-borne operating-cost load, corporate overhead, and the owner's draw are all inputs, and the 36-month P&L, amortization schedule, cash curve and annual coverage recompute as you move them. It does two things most small-landlord spreadsheets get wrong: it keeps property-level NOI and income-after-overhead as two separate lines and coverage-tests the lower one, and it shows coverage flat across the horizon on a level-payment mortgage, because amortization builds equity — it does not improve DSCR. On the shipped base case that is USD 192,000 of effective gross income, USD 124,800 of property-level NOI, USD 108,480 after overhead and leasing, USD 6,650 a month of principal and interest on a USD 900,000 25-year loan, and roughly 1.36x coverage. Cash break-even is published both ways — about USD 12,300 of monthly income before the owner's draw and about USD 15,400 including it — so the reserve contribution and the draw are the residual the model shows you, not a number you guess.

Up to 17 operations playbooks written for a building, not a generic small business: CAM reconciliation and the annual true-up, lease abstracting and a critical-date calendar that catches an option or an escalation before it lapses, the re-leasing pipeline run from the expiration schedule rather than from a surprise, tenant screening and LOI-to-lease intake, a capital reserve sized to the property-condition assessment's replacement schedule rather than to a round number, collections and coverage monitoring, bookkeeping with a chart of accounts that separates base rent from recovery income, and a valuation playbook that connects NOI, cap rate and refinance capacity to what the asset is actually worth.