All Forum Posts by: John Hickman

Also, need to define some terms, in the larger multi-family industry:

Face rents, the number before any concessions is often called market rents.  This is shown on the income statement as scheduled rent. 

Rents less concessions is the effective rent - which is what the "market" is commanding - which by common definition is the market rent. This shows up as a separate line on the income statement along with other income, vacancy, and concessions. Concessions can be up-front or prorated.

Are Networth Realty and New Western the two big dogs in DFW in terms of volume?   Are there any others?

Is there a rule of thumb for how narrow or wide an area to send yellow letters out to?  Or put another way, how many letters should be sent out per square mile to be most effective?  Are there any problems with concentrating on too large or too small an area?

FYI, I'm looking at the DFW area.

Well, that is unanimous. 

How much should I expect to pay an engineer?

And thanks!

A few questions:

• How do you scope bids from different foundation contractors when they don't agree to how many piers, etc are needed?   One may say you need only a dozen piers, another recommends 24. Just the cost per pier?
• Then aside from the free advice (estimates), how do you know how many piers are really needed?  And convince the foundation contractor to warranty only what's needed.
• Any recommendations for foundation contractors in DFW?

My name is John from the Dallas area. Interested in buy & hold of SF homes to create some passive income. Putting together a business plan, but I'm leaning towards class C properties for the cash flow, any appreciation in the long run will be gravy. Exploring financing with little money down.

Here's the interesting part. My full time job is real estate development. Really. I started out of school working for a commercial GC, developed about 1,000 class A apartment for a merchant builder, currently working on one phase that has retail/office plus some more apartments. And, no I'm not an partner on any of my deals.

That being said, real estate is all the same, but it's all different. I would never go out and develop class A industrial in my regular job cause I'm not an industrial guy - it's a different business plan, underwriting, tenant base, and relationships. Same thing applies to SF rentals. Some of my experience translates, some of it doesn't. That's why i'm here.