B+E Talks With WBS Equities’ Wendy Berger on How to Build a Career in Net Lease

Wendy Berger, CEO and co-founder of WBS Equities, LLC, a Chicago-based development company servicing the food industry, jokes that she stands on the side of the road holding a saying “will do real estate for food”.

Jokes aside, she is a leading expert in carrying out ground-up construction, renovation and sale leasebacks for food manufacturers and food distributors — a business she got into “through a strange twist of very fortunate events” that began when a private-equity contact asked her to build a pizza manufacturing facility.

Berger features in a new video interview series Women in Net Lease with B+E’s Camille Renshaw and Katherine Wadleigh-White, in which she discusses the rewards of a career, albeit accidental, in net lease. 

WBS Equities’ focus is on single-tenant triple net-lease projects, what Berger calls “very traditional industrial deals”.

“In the industrial space the term net lease isn’t as common, but that is what it is. There’s no difference between net lease in retail or an industrial building, but in general in the industrial space people tend to refer to it as single-tenant or sale leasebacks,” Berger says. 

The projects she pursues tends to be enormously complicated ones that bigger competitors might shy away from, but therein lies their beauty, according to Berger.

“One of my favorite mantras in life is ‘from chaos comes opportunity’ and when you’re in the early stages of these projects it’s very chaotic and if you can see through it the opportunity is really enormous,” she says. “Plus it’s fun and you get to learn about all these different businesses.” 

The single-tenant aspect allows for getting fully under the hood and getting to know the tenant’s business well. “We become 30-second experts on everything which is truly not being an expert but it is enormously interesting to learn about these businesses and then design and build a building that both accomplishes short and long-term goals,” she says. “You’ve got to set the math up to make money on a net lease but you also want to do things like make long-term decisions that help the tenant reduce their ingoing operating costs… So the complexity in these projects is really interesting.” 

A common misperception about net lease transactions is once the building is completed the owner has little to do with it thereafter. But Berger makes a point to tour every building quarterly and to maintain a long-term relationship with the tenants.

“I love the relationships with the tenants and I don’t think people understand that you can have that even as the owner of a triple net lease,” she says. “When I’m picking and choosing what kind of companies I’m going to work with I think about companies whose values I share. That’s important if I am going to spend [years] working with them and have thet long-term relationship with.”

Also, please stay tuned for coverage that will be coming out of our annual Women of Influence conference being held July 24th through July 26th. For more information about that event please visit here.