Guest Speaker Day! We better get the classroom ready...

So the classroom was NOT ready! How bad could it be? Well, the A/C was out and so was the Electricity.

How does that scenario as setting for high ranking professionals to come speak to us? ha!
Don't be duped! Dr. Forgey to the rescue! Unsurprisingly, we made our way over to the bar across the street to have our class at one of their private dining rooms (pretty shnazzy if ya ask me!). Dr. Forgey, in his altruistic nature bought us all breakfast and lunch to got us settled into our temporary nest. Thanks again!

To get our guest speaker line-up sparked off, we Had Owen Hanney of Slingshot (Ad agency) come in and give us his very unique insight into real estate development. Owen was sourced by John, and was an architect by trade, who fell into the ad business and had a passion for adaptive re-use. Well rounded enough?? Owen retrofitted the Await Building in Downtown Dallas a few years back, and utilized tax credits and tax abatements, and experienced a stringent period of being turned down by 25 conventional lenders for his projects. One lesson to take away is that if you have the vision and the passion to create a project, perseverance is an integral component of the formula to push your dream through. Nonetheless, he put in two new elevators with the preservationist giving him hell, avoided bankruptcy, and got all of this done on a 40,000+ sq ft building in 10 months! Also, learn about Tax Credits and your partners in those deals before your enter into the deal!

As Owen was presenting, Jason's speaker joined us. Leslie Houston is with Wells Fargo's Community Lending & Investment department, and was able to tag team with Owen on parts of the conversation, before she took the floor solo and gave us a breakdown of what types of programs students like us could enter into and have better success with relative to conventional financing. Generally speaking, the bank is requiring a 50% LTV, 1.3+ DSCR, personal guarantees, and financial statements backed up with tax returns from the principals in the deal. Ouch! She did mention a website and institution that might be of interest to us, a division of the US Treasury called the CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution). We will be doing our due diligence into this...

As lunch came rolling in, I thought I should head over to the main campus to guide my speaker over to where the class was. Fashionably ahead of schedule, Dana Burghdoff of the City of Ft. Worth was waiting for me. Ms. Burghdoff is the Deputy Director of Planning at Ft. Worth, and had a wealth of information for our class. Specifically for our project, we learned that the handful of houses behind our tract were zoned A-5, triggering the technicality that forces us to meet the minimum parking requirements for our project, Ouch again! She was also helpful in providing us contacts in at the city such as the Developer's Aide department (not the actual name) which provides guidance to developers through their process. Also, we will be setting up a meeting with Randy Hutchison of the Planning & Development Dept. to discuss pre-development plans for our specific tract, which he supposedly knows better than anyone else other than James. Nice!

Off into the afternoon we go, GO TEAM USA Soccer!!!!

Cheers.

Progress is great, WITHOUT PLANS STILL!!!

?????

So it has been a few days now since we last spoke to James Noriyan about receiving the plans, and we haven't been able to get in touch with him still. Our hunch is that he is backpacking in Europe like mentioned, and we may have to start with plan B sooner than later....

John is in Canada and we have been utilizing Skype to make things work around here, not a bad idea at all. We discussed possible outlets and contacts for conceptual renderings, and the Great Brandt Mullen came to mind....Brandt, if you're out there, were here thinking about you man!!! Hopefully you get where were trying to go with this.....

Adios Com padres.

Misinterpretation? Mark Gunderson email...No James?

John called me today and revealed that Mark Gunderson took our approach the wrong way. Knowing the dramaqueen John is, I calmed him down and we emailed Mark back to clarify our respect for his services and the art of development itself.

Near Southside Development Guidelines..wow

So at 89 pages in length, the difficulty of developing is presented in a formal manner by the Southside, Inc. Thanks! =) After reading through as much as I could of the manual, I think I extrapulated enought to figure what was relevant to us.

I just called John and he getting ready to head to Canada, and says he pulled just about the same information out of it. We got great insight into what type of parking ratios would be needed with our projected use, height requirements, setbacks, and many other technical details needed to ensure a smooth sailing into development.

Whats the progress guys? Second class meeting

The progress is rolling along, and we are excited to share some interesting revelations with the class.

Today we met briefly to discuss any issues and questions we had with the class and Dr. Forgey, and to also set up guest speakers. We all took up the responsibility to take on a specific type of speaker/professional.

I took up the responsibility of the Regulatory person, and was lucky to get in touch with the Director of Planning at Ft. Worth. Dana Burghdoff offered to meet with us next week at 1pm to discuss with us.

We all headed over to the Yucatan Taco Stand on Magnolia for a quick lunch thereafter, and John and I spent the rest of the day taking out time to do more research and planning.

More and more info, being a Developer is COOL

Today we took on more meetings to center our vision on what type of financing we could secure, how the Southside, Inc. could help, and wha tour neighbors thought. In that, we met with Abel Sachez at Wells Fargo down the street and basically were told that witout a personal guarantee from all principals we couldnt get the thing done with them. Hypothetically even if we did, the LTV asking was 50% with approx. 6% interest rate.

We also visited with Mike Brennan at Southside, Inc. and received a lot of insight into what we would be dealing with if we developed in the Fairmount District. He scared the socks off of us when he told us how Comerica Bank tore down a older corner to build their trendy design bank down the street from our property, they got chased out of town by the folks on the Fairmount board. They h ad to incur the costs of redesigning their whole building in order to receive any business from their primary target market, OUCH?

All of the busy work require a cool down method right? So John and I headed over to the Cat City Grill across the street from our subject and met with the owner to pick his brain on what he felt about the potential in our land. He was very receptive and mentioned that his restaurant business is very steady and feels like any streetside retail would not do well. After realizing the dying trend for retail on Magnolia, in the back of our head we decided that Office space (medical?) would yield the highest returns to investors. Hmmm? We have not received the plans from James yet, but we are going full speed ahead still.

Good day folks!

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings...!

Our extensive list of contacts finally came through as John whipped up a meeting with a gentleman by the name of Mark Gunderson. Mark is an Architect that has worked in the Ft Worth area for 25 years, and essentially has every spec of knowledge about design standards and contacts at the City. He was gracious enough to spend over an hour with us discussing his involvement and departure from the Oleander Walk mixed-use project (just 2 blocks North of our subject property). Ultimately, he gave us a great breakdown of what we should expect in regards to % breakdowns for his services (our poor college kids pro bono push didn't work).
1. Schematic Design 15%;
2. Design/Development 20%;
3. Construction documents 40%;
4. Construction/Bid 5% and
5. Construction 20%.
Overall, these make up the 8-10% of construction cost in Architectural fees.
Mark also was so kind to give us a recommendation to a City Council Member that deals closely with the Fairmount Historic District (the code-stern neighborhood we lay in)

As I had to jet off to Dr. Forgey's Trends & Issues class, John had the opportunity to meet with James Noriyan, our subject property's owner. The meeting apparently went well enough that John convinced James that he should JV the land into our deal if it looked feasible to him. The caveat was that James has already got plans from Beck Construction to do a deal and is willing to share them with us. We can't wait to see them now.

Thinking Caps go on!--

Leading into our second meeting, M&M was contacted by Gary (broker) from Coldwell Banker regarding the tract on Magnolia. He bluntly stated a asking prie of $30, with no intention of a JV deal o npart of the owner of the tract. We have decided to go forward with the other tract down closer to the hospital on Magnolia.

We spent the day reaching out to potential investors, archtiects, city officials, bankers, and folks over at the Near Southside/Southside, Inc. We put our idea to paper, and came up with a rough site plan that details our initial land use/project design.

Day 1--June 12, 2010!

We are on yet another mission to change the world, now with the Project Studio clan. Dr. Forgey gave a run through of what the class would entail, and had us split into groups. Martini and I opted to create Makan Martini Management, and warnred the rest of the Ft Worth developers to watch out!



The objective of each of our projects is to create or recreate a building that can be used for multiple (flexible) uses in the future.

The real fun began when Dr. Forgey took us out to look at some proeprties in the Near Southside area across I-30, extending deep into the hospital district. After a broad tour of the area and basic questions and answers, it was just about that time to eat again! We visited the super-busy Paris Coffee Shop for a Saturday brunch, which was just phenomenal. After stuffing ourselves, we gathered the troops and headed back on to the Campus.

John and I departed on our mission to find a empty tract of land, as the other two groups presented interest in doing the adaptive reuse concept for their project.

We didnt have to go far into the Near Southside negiborhood (also a TIF) to find our ideal tract of land on Magnolia. It was like LOVE at first sight. We contacted the broker, James Noriyan, and got a $22/psf price for the sale of the 217'x104' tract. Sitting 2 blocks east of Baylor All Saints on Magnolia Ave, there isn't a more ideal tract of developable land in miles. We contacted Coldwell Banker for interest in a tract of land just east of the aforementioned property, and hopefully we hear back from him soon.