Help Us Buy The Building

Our building owner wants to sell the building. He has set a deadline date of July 2017, because he is purchasing property out of state. 

We need to raise at least $250,000 to buy the building. 

In May of 2015, we found a restaurant space listed on Craigslist. The deal seemed to good to pass up. We knew that this little stretch of Jefferson Blvd, flanked by Normandie to west and Raymond to the east, was sleepy, but had potential with the right community driven marketing.

We invested all our savings in opening Revolutionario North African Tacos.  Our kids, then ages 12 and 16, helped us deep clean and paint.

We continued to invest in upgrades with our sales profits. Longtime regulars know that we opened the restaurant with almost nothing. They beam with pride and joy at our success and growth.

Less than one month after we opened our restaurant, the building owner said that he wanted to sell the building. We asked for first right of refusal, which he agreed to.

But our success has placed us in a precarious position. Our success in South L.A. has received a lot of press attention, even in luxury magazines. Developers started eyeing our block, including the building that houses Revolutionario. 

When we first thought of buying the building, we were given the impression that we would have several years to earn the money to invest back. We were given a ball park figure of $1,000,000.  If you look up our building's value, including the lot, on Property Shark, it's actually valued at less than $500,000.

Now, we're being told that developers want to buy the building. 

Anyway which you cut it, we need help to keep operating beyond July 2017. Yes, we're planning ahead, so as not to surprise any of our customers.

Here are the scenarios we're looking at:

1) The best case scenario is that we buy the building. The owner will accept an offer in the range of 1.2 to 1.5 million. We raise and earn enough money to purchase the building.

2) A developer buys the building and agrees to let us stay at current rental rates and gives us a long lease. Even with this scenario, we will be displaced during demolition and the buildout phase which could take over a year. We would be without income from Revolutionario. We would need funds to relocate our business in some form.

3) We do not raise enough funds to buy our building or a higher bidder and developer buys it out from under us. We still have to find a new restaurant space.