All Forum Posts by: James Dickens

Congrats @Brian Orr on the 10 unit. Always happy to network with people who are pulling in the same direction! That's really way more than I could do on my own right now. 

In my post, I really wanted to be as specific as I could and I am looking to the larger Multi-Family but if someone else needs help or is just starting out and I could be of help I would be willing to talk about how we could help each other. 

I do have family in NC so it's on my future area's list for sure. 

Thanks for the post. 

I am looking to network and or join in as a General Partner with a group that is currently doing Multi-Family Syndication in the 100+ unit space, value add in any of the following areas.

• Eastern Texas (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi)
• Louisiana
• Southern Arkansas (Memphis, Little Rock)
• Mississippi
• South Western Alabama (Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile)
• Florida Panhandle (Pensacola, Panama City)
• Any cities in this area with population of 40k or more
• This area is within about 350 miles of my home in South Central Louisiana (7-8 hour drive time at max distance)

I cannot currently bring any of my own personal money into a deal but I do bring a good credit rating with me. I have no fear when it comes to talking to others about Syndication and finding investors. I do have skills and experience that a Syndication may find useful. I would like to leverage these skills to help a team to push a Syndication through to completion and learn along the way.

List of skills and experiences:

• Created a deal analyzer/pro forma tool from scratch by reverse engineering several deal analyzer tools to customize it to my liking.
• Created Sample Deal Plan examples from this build.
• Not being satisfied that tool was the best, I completed Justin Kivel's (Break into CRE) Real Estate Pro Forma Modeling Master Class as well as the Real Estate Equity Waterfall Modeling Master Class. These teach you to build excel models from scratch for your investment deals.
• Good understanding of many of the metrics used in deal analysis.
• Better than average at using Excel and very familiar with many of the Microsoft products (SharePoint, Teams, Active Directory, Office).
• For the past 13 years I have been leading a team of up to 15 people in my current W2 position.Created processes and procedures to aviation standard for fleet asset tracking and used by my team.Created process and training documentation for my department.
• Involved with Software development as it pertains to a customized application built specifically for aviation asset tracking, auditing and management. Mostly centered around ESRI and ArcGIS Online. (I feel this so far is very underused in RE and could be a very useful data visualization tool).
• Able to speak publicly with many instances on short notice dealing with customer audits, FAA audits and investigations, and facility tours.
• Professional photographer with many assignments dealing with architecture and I had a one-year assignment with the Houston Apartment Guide doing on-site photography of Apartment Properties in the Houston Metro area (2000-2001).
• Worked 3 years for various Carpet Cleaning services in both the Corpus Christi and Dallas Metro areas. Over that time, we served numerous Apartment Properties.
• Looking forward to a point that I can replace my W2 job and become a true Investor.
• For more information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesdickens1

I have been a Pro member on BP for the last 2 years trying to learn as much as I can and find what aspect of Real Estate I wanted to focus on. I have read several books on Multi-Family and Real Estate in General.

Due to my location and my current W2 its hard (not impossible) to get to meetups and do much face to face networking especially with Syndicators who are working in the Multi-Family space. So that is why I wanted to reach out here to see if I can make better connections and hopefully join in with a team that is actively working on one or more deals that I can be a part of.

My ultimate goal is to teach my daughter how to become an investor, so she doesn’t struggle through life like her parents have.

If you think I can be of service to your team, please send me a private message and I will respond as soon as possible. Thank you in advance for your consideration.

@William Lawrence That's Awesome! I love to see old buildings come back to life with a new purpose. Sounds like to make this work you had to have the special knowledge about the situation and sometimes just knowing what to do or how to solve a problem is the value add component that others can't/don't have. Keep up the great work. 

@Brian Claar Sounds like a nice little deal you have there. Are you self managing or do you have a PM and if you have a PM do you have other units/properties with them as well?

I know sometimes I'm a bit slow but I just noticed yesterday that the 2 Udemy courses I bought were both put out by adventuresincre.com 

@Jonathan Orr thanks for that great link to adventuresincre.com, looks like some great information contained on that site.  

I would be somewhat like @Robert D. when he says Tech Adjacent, that would be me. I currently oversee a communication center which uses an ERSI based mapping platform and that is tied into a UI that allows my operators to track physical assets anywhere in the world via Iridium Sat Tracking and we are currently working to add ADS-B tracking coverage to the platform as a redundancy. So although not a programmer I work closely with them to make sure the application does what it needs to do as well as working to expand the application to help with make the operators use easier and more complete. 

While doing this I have become a power user in a few different applications to not only admin them but also to understand what makes them tick. I work a lot with ESRI applications to build Webapps and Dashboards. I have been looking for ways to leverage this platform to be better informed about real estate by mapping things like population and job growth and am using that to look at areas to invest in. 

Anyway, love that the Techies are posting

If anyone else is using ERSI or geospatial data for Real Estate or if you are interested, give me a shout. Would love to talk about what you are doing and how you are putting things together.  

@Jonathan Trimboli Great Question and other than the capital part I am in the same boat as you are. I have been learning as much as I can so I can start with larger Multi-Family but I flip-flopped back and forth for about a year on where to start but am now focused on skipping SFR's.

I hope that you find great success and are able to connect with others that can smooth your journey. Kudo's to @Chris Coleman for not only suggesting that you partner up with people with experience but also gave you someone to start with. That's the beauty of BP and it so good to see that type of interaction.  

Also glad to see @Jonathan Orr offering to chat with you. Again a great example of the BP membership. 

@Shere Clark Have you worked with any Bigger Pockets Members in the past? Is there anyone willing to sing your praises? Sounds like a good service you are providing, just want to make sure it's not too good to be true if you know what I mean. 

Also an odd mix of states you work in. Any reason those states and not others currently? 

I paid for 2 the other day (I got them for $12 per course, normally $199).  The Real Estate Pro Forma Modeling Master Class and The Real Estate Equity Waterfall Modeling Master Class both by Justin Kivel who strangely enough is not a member of BP. 

I am about 2/3rds of the way done with the Pro Forma course and it is well worth the investment I paid for it. 

My driving factor is that I built my own spreadsheets from the information I had received from a few other Muli-Family investors/guru's and wasn't 100% sure I had gotten it correct. This course so far is walking me through not only how to build it but also what information you are including and why you include it. I may go back through a second time just to add notes to my model to help me out in the future. 

So although real estate related (number crunching) it's not about selling or raising capital (per se) but it was exactly what I was looking for and at a price that was well within my reach.