Here's why pot sellers are paying prime rents for warehouse and storefront space

Stephanie Smith, left, specializes in renting out cannabis-grow facilities throughout Los Angeles. One of her most prominent tenants is Cypress Hill frontman B-Real, right, on the set of his pot-centric YouTube series.

March 31, 2018 3 AM PT

Growing up in Minnesota, Stephanie Smith dreamed of being a golf pro. Instead, the mother of five who lives in Pacific Palisades has ended up in the unlikeliest of trades.

She claims to be one of the largest marijuana-industry landlords in the state in a business that is growing chaotically as cities begin to allow recreational pot sales after passage of Proposition 64 two years ago.

For the record:

11:05 a.m. March 31, 2018

An earlier version of this article said a bidding war for a 1,600-square-foot Westside storefront ended with the tenant paying $35,000 per month, or $87 per square foot. The rent actually works out to about $22 per square foot, which is high for the area but does not top Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills as the article had said. The article also said two tenants of Stephanie Smith are paying her a combined rent of $140,000. That figure was for business permitting fees.

And though it has been plenty lucrative for her, the murky legal status of the cannabis industry has led to a police search of her home and to some unflattering news coverage — including a headline that painted her as a drug lord.

“Cannabis is not illegal,” said Smith, who is not shy about what she does. “There is no such thing as a cannabis drug lord.”

But she does boast controlling nearly 2 million square feet of industrial property, mostly in Southern California. Not all of it is rented to the cannabis trade — one of her tenants is Walmart — but she found that cannabis growers can be desirable tenants willing to pay top-dollar rents.

That’s because there’s a race on among formerly underground growers and new entrepreneurs, as well as starry-eyed wannabes, angling to become rich supplying legal pot to Californians who want to get high.

Some are looking for prime storefronts to open often upscale retail shops, or in rare cases, cannabis bars where patrons can indulge on the property. Others want discreet warehouses — the kind of property Smith owns — where they can grow it, but the buildings are already in short supply.

Consider the city of Lynwood, which has lower taxes on cannabis businesses than others in the county, said Los Angeles attorney Aaron Herzberg, who helps retailers obtain cannabis sales licenses and arranges purchases of buildings for growers and manufacturers of cannabis products such as oils and edibles.

Prices for Lynwood industrial buildings were about $107 to $120 per square foot in 2016, he said. Now they are selling for more than $300 a square foot. He expects prices in the region to continue to climb as real estate speculators jump into the market.

“Prices will skyrocket,” Herzberg said. “People are land-banking.”

Smith learned about the demand in 2009 when she bought a former Los Angeles pawn shop that she decided to turn into a laundromat by upgrading the water, gas and power hookups.

Smith advertised the renovated building on Craigslist and got a quick response from a would-be tenant offering double her asking rent if he could use it for growing marijuana. Then another grower offered triple the asking rent.

For landlord Stephanie Smith, pot growers can be desirable tenants. She describes them as "low-maintenance people who just want to do their jobs without a lot of drama.”

“I set up a bidding war,” she said, and ended up settling for the bidders who came in just under three times her asking rent “because I trusted them to run a professional grow.”

Cannabis growers and processors are good tenants, she decided, describing them as “low-maintenance people who just want to do their jobs without a lot of drama.”

Still, some of her tenants got into a lot of drama in December, when San Bernardino police raided three buildings she owned and confiscated thousands of marijuana plants. They also conducted a surprise search of her Pacific Palisades home the next day and seized her cellphone, she said.

She was not arrested or charged, but got plenty of media attention: “Mom accused of running multimillion-dollar pot-growing operation,” said one headline on a local television station’s website.

She weathered the bad publicity — and then some.

The two tenants that were raided are still in business and paying her rent, she said. This week, she sued the city of San Bernardino to overturn its new law regulating marijuana commerce, which she claims is unconstitutional.

One of Smith’s most prominent tenants is rapper and marijuana entrepreneur B-Real, the stage name of Louis Freese, the frontman of South Gate hip-hop group Cypress Hill and a longtime cannabis advocate.

He recently rented an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles for his growers and is looking for more space, perhaps miles away in the Mojave Valley.

Aging industrial buildings feel like luxury to marijuana proponents who remember when plants were primarily grown in houses and apartments, he said.

“The warehouse to a cultivator is like a paradise,” said Freese, gesturing with his hands apart, a partially smoked blunt between two fingers.

“It’s hard to find a building that is available,” he said. “People in the know have already jumped on them.”

But the industry these days is up against a renewed effort by the federal government to rein it in.

In January, U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions ended an Obama-era federal policy that provided legal shelter for sales in California and five other states that have allowed recreational pot, placing at risk thousands of marijuana businesses operating legally under state laws.

“Sessions caused more confusion in the industry,” said real estate analyst Spencer Levy, head of research in the Americas for property brokerage CBRE.

The federal stance that marijuana is a dangerous drug on par with heroin and LSD discourages conventional banks from doing business with cannabis-related entrepreneurs.

That makes it more challenging to buy or rent the property these entrepreneurs need for their work and keeps big well-known landlords and developers such as publicly held real estate investment trusts out of the business.

Marijuana’s outlaw history and uncertain present also get in the way of retailers’ efforts to sell it over the counter, Levy said. In addition to government rules such as no sales near schools or churches, there are unofficial barriers imposed by owners of upscale shopping centers and other landlords who fear being tainted by association and won’t consider cannabis store tenants.

But such judgmental attitudes probably won’t last long, Levy said, if history is a guide.

“What is considered appropriate retail is a moving target. Bowling alleys and gyms were once out of favor and now are in” with image-conscious landlords, he said. “The pendulum will shift as cannabis becomes as socially acceptable as liquor.”