John McNellis: The IRR is total crap. Here's what I underwrite instead.

On this episode, Kevin chats with John McNellis, a principal of McNellis Partners, the Northern California commercial development firm he co-founded in the early 1980s. John and his two partners have completed nearly 100 deals, almost all supermarket-anchored neighborhood centers within a two-hour drive of San Francisco, and have funded every one with their own capital since 1990. They cover why he scaled the business down by a factor of ten, how he turns brokers into an off-market deal team, why he refuses to underwrite to IRR, where he still finds mispriced ground leases, how a five-person firm punches outside its weight class, and the quiet power of being able to say you have enough.