Radius Commercial Real Estate & Investments Principal and Co-Founder Steve Golis was recently honored with the Jack Kelly Award at the annual meeting of the Santa Barbara Association of Realtors, for performing the year’s most challenging 1031 exchange. Golis earned the recognition for his exceptional management of an exchange involving a retail property located at 1711 S. Broadway in Santa Maria which closed in September.
A 1031 exchange is a common strategy employed to defer capital gains tax by selling one property and then acquiring another “like” property within a very specific timeframe. Such transactions are treated as an exchange, and they can be very involved and complicated.
Golis and teammates Brian Johnson and Jon Standring previously represented joint sellers of a 63 unit apartment complex in Isla Vista which closed in June for $14.3 million. Each owner held a 50% stake in the property, and the agents were asked to secure separate replacement properties and perform independent exchanges.
For one of the clients, they scoured the market and located a viable property in Santa Maria valued at more than $7,000,000. After skillfully helping the owner detangle an issue with an existing loan defeasance, Golis then negotiated the price to an acceptable level that met both the buyer’s and seller’s requirements.
The loan was the next hurdle. The client had only 25% to put down and finding a lender willing to finance 75% of the value was difficult despite the property’s stable history, national tenants and good rents. Still, Golis worked his extensive pool of contacts and came up with a lender.
The obstacles didn’t end there. “Our client lives in Russia. The whole transaction was handled with an 11 hour time difference,” said Golis. Additionally, correspondence between the two clients had to be handled separately and there were also multiple attorneys to deal with.
“It was a Herculean effort for me and my team, but it’s part of the excitement of this business,” said Golis. “Ultimately, both clients ended up getting out of a non cash flowing asset and into properties that deliver a double digit return on their asset.”
Golis has been a specialist in the sale of multifamily properties for more than 34 years, and his record is unrivaled in the area, achieving over $600 million in sales in just the last eight years. He is a long time participant in multiple local organizations including the Rancheros Visitadores, Santa Barbara Trail Riders and the Muscular Dystrophy Association and served as a board member on the Community Housing Council.