GlobeSt.com: Is there a most common scenario for when a private developer approaches you?

Oakes: They all end up being pretty unique, and even the way we source them ends up being unique. In some cases it's developers we've known and worked with in the past. In other cases it's people who have contacted us knowing that we have been involved in these sorts of deals in the past. In some cases, though, it's retailers pointing to a site where they would like to have a store open, but they know the developer they started working with had tied up the land but doesn't necessarily have the financing in place to be able to move forward with the project. For the right site, the tenant is very concerned about being able to open on the schedule on which they originally budgeted. In some cases we're seeing banks come to us where they've made a land loan and now the local developer isn't able to put together the same sort of construction financing that they were planning to take out that land loan.

From the sourcing of the deals, there's nothing standard, but in general, the sort of deals we've had the most success with in the past are developments where there's some sort of level of distress but deals that we would normally want to do. But a year or two ago, our capital was too expensive relative to the returns that some smaller private-company developers were willing to accept. So now it's an opportunity for us to find transactions that would have been priced way too aggressively.