“A true professional, different than other brokers with which we’ve dealt.” | “It is rare to find an organized and professional person such as James.” | “We greatly appreciate the time and effort dedicated to the sale of our building.”
This page is designed for prospective customers to get know me. I’ve worked to make this as organized as possible, with links to sub-pages for more information in different areas, understanding it is longer than most will be interested in reading completely. I’d invite you to point out any interests or experiences you notice you have in common with me. In reading this, I believe you’ll come to appreciate that I’m not like others in my profession. I may or may not be for you, but I’m most certainly not just another broker.
Please forgive any tone of immodesty on this page. Although internally confident, I’m generally externally modest, truly more interested in the opinions of others than my own, and generally inquisitive by nature. However, an “about me” page for prospective customers to get to know me does not seem like the place for “aw shucks” modesty.
I actively work with businesses and investors to sell and acquire commercial real estate properties typically from two million dollars, and to a lesser extent with tenants and landlords securing commercial leases. I am very good at it. It is what it is.
I’ve had a diverse career in business and financial services. Each step along the way added to an accumulated body of knowledge and experience related to commercial property, finance, sales and marketing, and business in general. My commercial real estate clients today benefit from abilities I have honed and skills I have developed along the way.
I’ve engaged in commercial real estate transactions as a principal, buying, developing, leasing, and selling, as part of varied entrepreneurial endeavors. In this principal role, I negotiated on over a hundred properties, coming to an agreement and closing on a couple of dozen deals. More…
I spent over a decade with Morgan Stanley, making it into their most elite “Chairman’s Club” recognition tier and earning the titles of Senior Vice President – Investments and Senior Portfolio Manager. I’ve found that commercial real estate sales involves a similar skill set. Like with financial services, commercial real estate sales is about crafting solutions, and about helping people make important financial decisions.
My Wall Street experience also provided me with early exposure to commercial real estate fundamentals as I evaluated REITs as inflation hedging holdings for client portfolios. This experience ingrained in me the math of commercial real estate, an intuitive sense of the variables that contribute to the internal rate of return for commercial property. In my practice today, I regularly tap into this intuitive understanding of this math as variables like rent, rental growth rates, vacancy, and cap rates are considered at varying levels.
As a commercial broker, I have come to appreciate the competence, confidence, and generally entrepreneurial nature of commercial property owners, and their well-considered views of property values and trends. It became evident to me that while an investor that buys a stock at $120 derives comfort in that he he/she can most likely sell at any moment, most likely very near the same price in the near term, an investor that buys a commercial property based on the business fundamentals as he/she believes them to be, knowing it will take time and money to sell the property at any given point, is operating on another level. These investors I find to be almost cocky with their decisions, but in a generally understated manner that is becoming in that they tend to be some of the more outwardly modest people you’ll meet. Instead of “all hat, no cattle” – tapping into an old Midwestern expression – I have found them to be “plenty of cattle, not so much hat.” Good people.
In my experiences, I made my share of mistakes. A big one, which fortunately worked out in the end, was purchasing property with an unknown environmental condition. As mistakes go, that one was a doozy…
If you’ve had much exposure to me, you’ve likely realized that I’m more technologically inclined than most, and certainly more so than others involved in commercial real estate. I’ve long made every effort to use technology as a tool, and technical capabilities, including developed proficiency with MS Excel, PhP, MySQL, HTML5, and more, come into play every day in my commercial real estate sales practice.
On a Personal Note
Yep, that’s me as a little guy practicing just in case I’m needed to sub in for KC Chiefs then quarterback Len Dawson.
Today I live in the bustling Brickell area, which I quite like. I lived there years ago before it became so cool, then moved to Coconut Grove for a couple of decades where I raised two children. Today those kids are thriving adults that make me proud every day.
I grew up in the Midwestern United States, with my earliest years spent in Kansas City, Missouri, then later the Wichita, Kansas area. I spend my free time playing tennis, reading non-fiction, playing chess, and watching a bit of television, generally documentaries in line with my likewise curiosity driven non-fiction reading preferences. More…