Final Descent

Today we begin our final descent into the development program. One day before the final class of presentations, and Brant and I feel as if we have exhausted all resources of information, and have little left to add to our presentation. Now we are slowly collecting the date we have gathered over our 5 week journey in order to funnel our thoughts into a collection of comprehensible ideas that maybe somewhere someone might be willing to fund.

We met at 10:00 to begin the final touches on our presentation; hopefully we are not missing anything. See you tomorrow.

Will you take a check?

While my counterpart is concentrating on the design, I was looking into numbers. Using the deal structure providing by Mr. Geesling, I infused our numbers that we have to work with: construction, acquisition, soft costs, potential rents, conservative underwriting and investor returns. I decided to do a Best Case and Worst Case cash flow.

Cash Flow Excel

Speaker Week 2

This week was the second round of speakers set up for our class. The two speakers lined up for the class were for marketing...bummer, because I really wanted to hear what the lawyer was going to say. I am not sure if that is because we attribute so much to lawyers, or that I truly wanted to hear this person speak???

One of the marketing speakers was Mrs. Mund, of the Jarod Mund clan. And having lived with a pregnant woman for 9 months, I applaud her attendance in our class on a Saturday morning. She shed some light on the marketing aspect of residential, as most of our projects will more than likely have their highest and best use as residential (at least to begin with). Her marketing program for real estate is very similar to my own (which was refreshing to hear): get as much done with FREE mediums, then pay as little as possible for the print!!! Speaking of print, she concurred with what I was thinking regarding the print venue of marketing: for this demographic, it is on its last leg. The demographic that will be most enthralled with the south-side and a project like ours, is going to be the young Maven (if you had not read Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, you should...no matter what field you are in). And the way to reach them is through Internet publicity and "social media".

The second speaker was Cody Payne, which he gave his opinion on why certain assets yield higher rents...better assets.

Mapping the Comps

Today was a day for comps...both residential and office (Brant has the retail). Because I am a visual guy, I decided to put the comps on the map with a description of each unit. Our numbers come out to be very close to what we assumed woudl be the going rate.

Most residential units are commanding a $1.10-$1.20 PSF; our best case scenario is going to include $1.15 PSF.

Residential Maps

Our office space came out to be slightly less that what we predicted, at around $.90-$1.10 PSF; this is too far off what we want to be for Best Case, therefore, as predicted, most units will not rent as office.

Office Map

Brant was in charge of retail comps, of which he also sent them to me in a map (sorry, no link).