Supporting Post · TBA Cross-Company
Most discussions of "off-market deals" in commercial real estate are vague to the point of being useless. Brokers talk about their relationships, their pocket listings, their proprietary network. The implication is that magic happens behind the scenes. Owners and buyers are left wondering whether any of it is real.
For us, the off-market pipeline isn't magic. It's structural — and it runs on a feature most CRE brokerages in Eastern NC don't have.
Khoury Connect is paired with Transworld Business Advisors of Eastern NC, the business brokerage Tony Khoury has been running since 2019. TBA of ENC handles the confidential sale and acquisition of operating businesses across the eastern half of the state — manufacturers, distributors, professional services firms, retail and hospitality operators, healthcare practices. The deals range from the low hundreds of thousands to the tens of millions.
Most of those businesses operate out of real estate the seller owns. When the business sells, the real estate decision arrives at the same time. Sometimes the buyer wants to acquire the building too. Sometimes the seller wants to keep it as an income-producing asset and lease it back. Sometimes the building is too valuable for the buyer's deal economics and a sale-leaseback to a third-party investor solves the structure. Each of those paths is a real estate transaction, and each of those transactions surfaces inside the business-sale process months before it would ever appear on a public listing platform.
That's the off-market pipeline. It's not a list. It's a process.
A typical scenario: a Greenville-area manufacturer in his sixties decides he's ready to sell his business. He engages TBA to run a confidential sale process. The business has been operating from a 40,000-square-foot industrial building the owner has held for twenty-five years, fully depreciated, with substantial appreciation in the underlying real estate.
Three things can happen. The buyer can acquire both the business and the building, and Khoury Connect can underwrite and document the real estate side of the transaction. The buyer can acquire the business and lease the building, and we can structure the lease — typically a long-term net lease with built-in escalations — that turns the building into a stabilized income asset for the seller. Or the seller can sell the building to a third-party investor at the same time the business closes, with a leaseback to the new operator, which puts cash in the seller's pocket and gives the operator stable occupancy.
Each of those paths involves a different financial structure, different tax consequences, and a different timeline. Working through them well requires both sides of the conversation — the business sale and the real estate decision — to be coordinated.
A pure-play CRE brokerage finds out about these transactions when the property hits the market — or when the new owner needs help six months after closing. By then the optionality is gone. The seller has already chosen a structure. The leaseback terms are fixed. The price has been set.
The other side of the same coin: a pure-play business brokerage handles the business sale but treats the real estate as someone else's problem. The owner gets pushed to a separate broker, often without coordinated tax planning or proceeds optimization. Outcomes suffer.
Coordinated advice across both transactions is the structural advantage. It exists because of how the two firms are configured, not because of any individual relationship.
If you're an investor or owner-operator looking for industrial, commercial, or land assets in Eastern NC, the practical implication is straightforward: a meaningful share of the supply you might want to buy never reaches the public market. It surfaces inside business sales, inside owner retirement decisions, inside the kinds of life-stage transitions that happen quietly and don't get marketed broadly.
Being on the right side of that flow requires being on someone's call list when those situations come up. We work with a small group of buyers across asset classes — industrial users looking to own rather than lease, investors looking for stabilized net-lease product, family offices looking for land in the path of growth — and route opportunities to them as they surface.
We don't run a "buyer's club" with a fee. We run a working list of buyers we know well enough to call when something fits.
If you own commercial real estate connected to an operating business — or you own a business that operates from real estate you control — the value you can extract from a coordinated exit is materially higher than what either transaction can produce in isolation. We've seen sellers leave six and seven figures on the table by selling the business first and trying to figure out the real estate afterward.
The right time to start the conversation is twelve to twenty-four months before you actually want to transact. That gives time to position both the business and the real estate, structure the transaction correctly, and run a process that produces the best outcome rather than the fastest one.
Not every business sale produces a real estate transaction, and not every real estate decision is connected to a business. Plenty of our work — listings, opinions of value, hold-vs-sell analyses, advisory engagements — has nothing to do with TBA. The two firms run as independent practices.
But the connection is real, and it explains why we see deal flow that pure-play CRE brokerages in our market don't. It's the kind of structural feature that's hard to copy and easy to underestimate, which is exactly why we built it.
If you're considering selling a business that operates from real estate you own, or you're an investor looking for off-market industrial, commercial, or land opportunities in Eastern NC, we're worth a conversation. Reach out and we'll set up a time to talk.