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Cannabis Consulting Video Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Jason Piazza. I’m the Director of Real estate here at wecann. We’re a full service cannabis advisory firm offering cannabis real estate, business brokerage, licensing, and public advocacy services to the cannabis industry. We started this business in 2017 and over the last five years, We’ve done a lot of excellent work.

[00:00:26] We’ve done over 150 licenses for all of the various license types cannabis, re retail, storefronts, manufacturing, distribution, cultivation. We’ve done all the license types and we have a very high success rate near 90%. Approval rate, which includes those really competitive merit-based licensing application processes that exist for retail storefront applicants.

[00:00:58] Additionally, on the real estate side, we’ve brokered over $150 million worth of deals throughout the state of California, and that’s something I’m extremely proud of. We have a great team here. We have several agents that are working very hard to farm properties. Put listings together for real estate and business brokerage and shop buyers around to various opportunities that we’re able to secure through our work.

[00:01:30] And it takes a lot, right? Cannabis real estate really pulls on all of the different types of cannabis I’m, I’m sorry, commercial real estate negotiations that exist. And before we opened, we can, I was a generalist in the commercial real estate indu industry, which meant that I didn’t specialize in any one asset class.

[00:01:52] I was doing deals, you know, on industrial real estate, retail, real estate, office, real estate, medical, real estate, land acquisitions. And in a 10 year period between 2007 and 2017, I did all the deals representing buyers and sellers and tenants and landlords in all of those asset classes. And when we started, we can, and I was placed in charge of the real estate division.

[00:02:19] All of that experience and all of those negotiations with those various deals were tantamount to us being able to negotiate real estate deals for the cannabis industry. And the reason for that is a lot of cities embraced the industrial real estate asset class as their. You know, required location for all of the uses, including retail storefront, what, what you might know as a dispensary, but now you’re negotiating a retail use.

[00:02:50] In an industrial piece of real estate. And not only is it a a retail use, it’s a retail use that’s gonna go through a year or two, in some cases, three years of entitlement and build out with some really expensive tenant improvement. So really it’s more like negotiating a high-end restaurant lease with a national landlord, an institutional landlord, but instead you’re doing that negotiation with a smaller.

[00:03:19] Mom and pop oriented industrial landlord and some of these concepts they’ve not encountered before. So it’s, it’s really a challenge to be able to, to bridge those worlds, to locate that property that’s in the right zone and let the landlord understand how this process is gonna go, why it’s beneficial to them.

[00:03:40] And we’ve been very successful at that. And I’m very proud of the work that our team has done, securing properties and putting leases and purchase agreements together and, and closing those deals on the business brokerage side, it’s a very challenging world. There’s historically been, and historically in cannabis on the legal side is not an incredibly long amount of time, especially as it relates to business brokerage because, you know, in 2016 we passed.

[00:04:06] Legalization in 2017 properties were getting farmed and licensing had begun. By mid 2018, call it early 2019, we started seeing some, some business brokerage type deals occurring, but these weren’t often operational businesses, and there are very few industries where you can sell a business that not only isn’t generating any revenue.

[00:04:32] But isn’t even operating and isn’t even potentially built out and ready to operate. But in cannabis, because of the limited zones that exist, green zones, we call them. And because not all of the property owners in those districts or in those zones are willing to cooperate, and because the entitlement process takes so long, there’s instant value in being able to get a business to a place where it can even build out.

[00:05:01] So negotiating those deals and trying to come. To terms between buyers and sellers as to what these businesses are worth on, really what would be an asset sale was, was interesting to say the least. And now there are definitely comps that have accrued over the years. We’ve done a lot of those different deals, and now of course we’re seeing operational cannabis businesses which are being sold, traded between cannabis business operators.

[00:05:30] That was the next phase. You know, one operator would buy another operator’s business. For a while there we were using multipliers of gross revenue because there just wasn’t a lot of historical financial data. To really look at what a net profit was, and now the industry has matured yet again, and now that we have businesses that have been operational for a number of years, we can really look at what that net profit is for a particular business and really start weighing what the true value is of an operational cannabis business.

[00:06:03] So we’ve taken all of the experiences that the team has here at wecan and we’ve put together a business model to service the industry that is whole and complete. And our entitlement and licensing services also offers a compliance piece. But in conjunction with the real estate division, we’re also now doing broker price opinions, right?

[00:06:27] A BPO, as it would be called, and a BPO is it can be done for real estate and often is, I’ve heard it called different acronyms in in the past. But it’s an opinion of value. We can’t call it an appraisal because we’re not appraisers, but we have an expertise in understanding what these businesses are worth.

[00:06:46] So a client will come to us. I want to get something entitled and then they’re thinking about selling it, but they’re not sure what exactly their business is worth cuz it’s a big question mark. So they hire the real estate team to put together a broker price opinion, and we’ve done a lot of them, I think near 15 now.

[00:07:06] The most recent one I did there was several locations throughout the state, some operational, some not. It was like, 17 or 18 different licenses that were included at those various locations. And it was a lot of work. But I was very proud of that work. And in doing that broker price opinion and every broker price opinion, we gain more expertise and more knowledge.

[00:07:31] It’s kind of like when you have a knowledge base or an expertise in any one area and you go to teach somebody else. About your knowledge in that particular craft or, or, or professional work? You learn more because now you’re saying things out loud. About your knowledge and expertise and it really helps settle it in.

[00:07:55] So we’ve done a lot of work on the real estate side, on the business brokerage side. We’ve done a ton of work on the licensing side, which was the life force of this business early on, because of course it took a while to start earning commissions on the real estate side.