Jamison Manwaring is the co-founder and CEO of Neighborhood Ventures, a remarkable Arizona-based real estate crowdfunding company, focused on value-add multi-family properties.
It’s a real estate company, for sure – they buy, hold and sell property. But the capital plan is innovative, with a growing pool of state residents who are permitted to invest through Arizona intrastate securities law. Nine successful projects later, Jamison is now taking his plan to the national stage with their latest project, a short-stay hotel he wants to repurpose into affordable housing. And he’s raising funds on SmallChange.co, not just once, but a second time now.
Jamison attended business school at the University of Utah where he graduated with a BS in Finance. He was always interested in finance. He loved it enough to become president of the finance club. Even at a young age Jamison’s determination shone through. He wanted to work in New York, at a top finance firm. But those companies have their pick of Ivy league school graduates, which he was not. So, every Thursday night he flew the red eye to New York to network.
You’ll have to listen in to hear the rest of the story.
Read the podcast transcript here
Eve Picker: [00:00:06] Eve Picker: Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.
Eve: [00:01:39] Today I’m talking with Jamison Manwaring, for a second time. Jamison is enjoying success as the co-founder and CEO of Neighborhood Ventures, an Arizona based real estate crowdfunding company focused on value-add multifamily properties. Always interested in finance, Jamison went to business school and studied finance. He loved it enough to become president of the finance club. Even at a young age, Jamison’s determination shone through. He wanted to work in New York at a top finance firm, but those companies have their pick of Ivy League school graduates, which he was not. So, every Thursday night he flew the redeye to New York to network. But wait, if I tell you what happened next, I’d be a spoiler. So, listen in to hear the rest of the story.
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Eve: [00:03:02] Hi, Jamison. It’s great to have you back on my show.
Jamison Manwaring: [00:03:05] Hey, Eve. Good to be back. As I was mentioning in the intro, I’d much rather be in Pittsburgh right now. You’re 80 degrees. We’re supposed to get 99 degrees and it’s still mid-September. So, we’re ready for the cooler weather here in Phoenix. But real estate is hot as well.
Eve: [00:03:23] As hot as the weather. That’s right. So, I want to go back to your background, which is solidly in finance, all the way back to college when you majored in finance. And I’m wondering what led you to launch Neighborhood Ventures and focus on real estate?
Jamison: [00:03:39] I didn’t know what I was going to study when I got to college, not unlike many people. And started in accounting, did some accounting classes, ended up landing with finance because what I knew I wanted to learn was how to analyze a business. And I kind of look at finance as the language of business. You know, if you are a good entrepreneur and you can start a business at some point, you’re going to need to understand what’s happening in the business. And I had actually started a small business right out of high school that was like a for sale by owner service. At one point we had a couple hundred listings and we charged people a flat fee, like $1,000 fee to list their home and would market it for them. And the business was great at times and then at times it wasn’t great, and I really didn’t understand why, what was driving that, what was beneath the results.
Jamison: [00:04:40] So, I ended up knowing that I wanted to go to college to be able to learn how to analyze a business and ended up in finance, which is where trying to understand a business for either investment purposes, if you’re from the, looking at the company kind of outside in or if you’re inside the company learning how to manage the business properly, where to spend money, where to pull back capital, where to reinvest more capital. And so, that was a very useful skill that I’m really happy I ended up sticking with that major.
Eve: [00:05:14] That’s where you started with finance. So, take me on the journey from there to Neighborhood Ventures.
Jamison: [00:05:20] Out of college, well, my junior year of college, I decided I wanted to go to Wall Street and I don’t know if I had seen a movie. I’m trying to think back at the time it was after the great financial crisis. So, some of those movies were out, the Big Short was out. And I was definitely intrigued by everything that was done by the investment banks, the importance of that in our economy and the importance of the work they do. And so, I determined that I wanted to go get to Wall Street. And I was from University of Utah, which is not a school that the investment banks recruit at. They don’t really consider.
Eve: [00:06:02] Not Ivy League, right?
Jamison: [00:06:04] Yeah, they really focus on those Ivy League schools. So, I had to go in what I call the side door and I started flying out on a Thursday night redeye after class, I didn’t have class on Friday. I’d fly out to New York Thursday night, redeye. I would arrive at about 6:30 a.m. in JFK, JetBlue flight. And I would start reaching out to folks. I would try to have a few meetings, set up an advance, just an info session. So, I would ask, I would tell folks, hey, if I can have 15 minutes of your time, I’m just trying to, I’m a college student. Which kind of opens people, opens doors. And these were alumni from either University of Utah or BYU, which there’s a lot of close ties there. And I’m here in New York for the day, I would love to be able to come by and meet. What I also found is Friday afternoons, a lot of people on Wall Street, it’s a little bit of downtime. They kind of have to be in the office, but they don’t mind having, spending some time with somebody to get off of their desk. And so, I did that for a couple of months. I probably did a half a dozen trips.
Eve: [00:07:19] That’s exhausting!
Jamison: [00:07:19] It was, and I spent the night at the beginning in a hostel with eight other people. And that was a new experience for me. I was like, I got to get out of here.
Eve: [00:07:32] At least it wasn’t a park bench, right?
Jamison: [00:07:34] Yeah, it was close. It was about, I think it was 25 bucks a night. And then even the cheapest hotel was like 125, which I couldn’t afford. So, I ended up meeting a lot of great people who even to this day are I’m connected with and view them as mentors through that process. So, it was kind of one of my experiences that was really hard. But you look back and you’re like, I’m very glad I did that, and I don’t know if I could do it again.
Eve: [00:08:05] It’s pretty gutsy. I don’t know how many people would take that on. You know, that’s.
Jamison: [00:08:10] Well, and being from Utah, the people who know say you have to do it that way if you want to get there.
Eve: [00:08:16] Interesting.
Jamison: [00:08:18] You got to go hustle. I ended up meeting an alumni who, I didn’t ask him for an internship, but we connected a few times and he said, Hey, would you be interested in doing an internship with us? He was at Barclays Capital, which had bought Lehman Brothers. He was a senior person there. And I said, Yeah, I’d love an internship. And now that you ask, I would love one. And he got me an interview, phone interview. And then when I passed that, they flew me out and did a super day. I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t have any other options for that, that internship. But they ended up giving me an offer. And I think they paid pretty decent, enough that I could move to there for the summer, live in New York.
Eve: [00:09:08] Not have to stay in the hostel, right?
Jamison: [00:09:10] Not have to stay in a hostel, which was very exciting. And I worked on a sales and trading floor there. Selling equities and talking about equities that. Basically, what we did was we would promote the research of the firm. Hey, this is a stock that we like. This is stock we don’t like. Talk to clients about their thoughts on it. And it was a great experience. I ended up moving from the sales floor to the actual research floor, which I’m very happy I did. That’s where you can really do deep dive financial analysis on companies. And I worked on a few IPOs and ended up moving to Goldman Sachs in their technology team and working with software stocks.
Eve: [00:09:53] That’s pretty impressive from Utah.
Jamison: [00:09:56] Yeah, and it’s, kind of, back to your question. One of the things that I learned through this time was I loved investing, but I didn’t like equities in particular, tech equities. They’re very volatile. They have big swings, daily swings, sometimes especially software stocks up 15, 20% after earnings down 15 to 20% after earnings if they miss. And it did not suit me when it came to my kind of temperament.
Eve: [00:10:33] Yeah, I get that. It doesn’t suit me either. Maybe it’s a control thing. You kind of got to understand what’s making those swings happen, right? And it’s pretty hard to get that.
Jamison: [00:10:46] And there’s a lot of factors in public equities that are outside of our knowledge and our control. There’s a lot of quant funds that are just trading on the algorithm, and they don’t make sense, but they move the market. I was certainly turned off by any impact I could have. Right. You’re just one person in such a large pool of people. So, I learned a lot there, but I began looking for my next option and knew that I wouldn’t be there forever. One of the companies I worked on their IPO was LifeLock. They’re based in Tempe, Arizona, and had grown a business to several million subscribers around identity protection. I worked on their IPO, and I got to know the CEO and the CFO, and through that process I kind of let them know, Hey, if anything comes up, I would be interested in getting out of New York and getting back west and ended up moving out here in 2015. When I joined the company, our stock was $8 a share. And I knew it had a long way to go, and that’s why I wanted to join. I saw it as a real opportunity. We ended up selling to another company 18 months later for $24 a share, 3x.
Eve: [00:12:02] That’s pretty good. Yeah.
Jamison: [00:12:04] So, that was great. At that point, I didn’t have a job because we got acquired by a bigger company, but I had bought a property when I was in New York, a ten-unit building, in my home, near my hometown of Idaho. And just kind of going back to what we were talking about before, Eve, how much I didn’t like software stocks and equities, public equities. I really liked, for about a year and a half, that I had had this little ten unit building on the side. I don’t know, there was just something about that it was physical that I could see it, that we could improve the operations, we could enhance what the property looked like from the street, all those little things. And then we would see big improvements in our revenue. And I really love that experience. And I was kind of just doing it for investment. I didn’t expect that I would go into that now, looking back. But I could clearly see that I like that a lot better. And I think you have to enjoy what you do. And so, that was one thing that, it was pretty clear to me. I wanted to do more of that and less of public equities.
Eve: [00:13:16] So then, tell us about Neighborhood Ventures, because that’s what grew out of that love, right?
Jamison: [00:13:22] Yeah. So, I had actually followed you and some other folks in the industry in the mid 2000, 2014, 2015, 2016. My company got, Lifelock got bought out in 2017, and a lot was happening in the crowdfunding space. And I wanted to figure out how could I raise more capital to do more projects. I had done this one project of my own on the side, and I really saw crowdfunding as a unique way to do that. I didn’t want to do the old-fashioned country club route where you go out and get a few wealthy people to raise, to write checks. That didn’t seem very interesting to me. And I wanted to do something new and different and creative and kind of a new challenge. And I was looking at a building to potentially buy and try to crowdfund. And my broker, I told him what I was looking to do, and my broker said, well, you know, my boss talks about real estate crowdfunding all the time. And I said, well, what’s his name? He said, John Kobierowski.
Jamison: [00:14:27] And I ended up emailing him and he had been an apartment veteran for 30 years in Phoenix and was very interested in launching a real estate crowdfunding company as well. And he brought a lot of industry knowledge and over 30 years in the Phoenix market. It was kind of an instant match where I said, well, let me focus on the capital raising, the crowdfunding, the technology side, and you could really focus on the real estate side. So, we realized that we had a good match. We’re very different in the skills that we bring and what we like to do, but that’s when we launched the company. And the name Neighborhood Ventures, he had already bought and already had the domain name. And so, we, I love the name and we launched in, basically 2018 was our first offering.
Eve: [00:15:22] So, let’s talk about that a little bit. Like, what are you trying to accomplish with Neighborhood Ventures? What is it? What does it look like? What’s the business?
Jamison: [00:15:30] I was talking about this yesterday in a team meeting with our team at work, at Neighborhood Ventures. And I think it’s important to go to your why. Why you do what you do? Your motivation. I think that’s very, it’s important to me to understand why am I doing what I’m doing? And I also look at that in other people. If somebody is being very friendly to me because they’re trying to sell me a pair of shoes at the mall, I kind of question that. I’m like, well, they’re just being, you know, they’re just buttering me up so they can sell me something. So, I think motivation matters a lot. And I don’t like it when, in that situation I can see real quick, okay, they’re just trying, they have an angle here, right? So what Neighborhood Ventures are, it’s very simple.
Jamison: [00:16:22] With John and I, we want to get more people involved in the opportunity to invest in commercial real estate. That is, has been our mission from day one. It’s always been a really good asset to own. That’s what drew me to it. It’s very stable relative to other assets. It goes up in value, it produces cash flow. There’s all these things about it that are really appealing, but it’s only been available to a small group of people. So, what our mission is and our reason why we started this is we want to get a lot more people involved. And we have big ambitions, we think we can grow that to a lot of folks nationally, there’s a big pool, about 40 million people nationally who have funds they want to invest, but they don’t reach that accredited status, which most people have to reach to invest in most projects on on crowdfunding platforms.
Eve: [00:17:20] So that’s 97% of the population, right? Approximately, yeah.
Jamison: [00:17:24] Yeah, yeah. And young folks right now who want to start putting money away. I think commercial real estate is very appealing, if they can invest in smaller increments. For us, it’s $1,000 minimum, and then they can start putting even $100 increments after that or whatever it might be. But you can start with small amounts and start to build that nest egg. And then we do have larger investors who like to do more than that, too. But our goal is to broaden that group, to allow a lot of people to own this asset. And I think we’re in the second inning so far and we think the next few years are going to be really interesting for us.
Eve: [00:18:08] So the buildings you focus on, what are they like?
Jamison: [00:18:13] John’s an expert in multifamily, so we’ve largely focused on multifamily projects in the Arizona market, both in Phoenix and then Flagstaff, which if you’re not from Arizona, Flagstaff is about 2 hours north of Phoenix. And when it’s 110 in Phoenix, it’s 90 or 85 in Flagstaff.
Eve: [00:18:36] Balmy.
Jamison: [00:18:38] And it’s 2 hours away. So, it’s pretty amazing. The elevation is pretty, is a big factor in that. But if you’re in Phoenix and you can get up to Flagstaff, it’s an amazing place. It’s kind of almost like a a Jackson Hole or an Aspen or a Park City. One of these cities, it’s mountain town, but it’s great for Phoenix. So, we have two projects in Flagstaff. It’s an area that’s landlocked. So, there’s not much development going to happen there, and if you can get a piece of property, it’s a good property to hold on to. And so, we largely focus on finding properties that are in these core areas that have good trends happening there, but they need to be repositioned. The assets are underperforming for some reason. A lot of times it’s because the amenities aren’t up to date. There’s been deferred maintenance, there’s poor property management, and we can look at the other properties in the neighborhood and see that the rents are much higher in those properties than in this property. And that’s when we act. We say, look, we know we can go purchase that property.
Eve: [00:19:46] So really, value add.
Jamison: [00:19:48] Yeah.
Eve: [00:19:49] And that’s smart because you can probably offer a return much earlier because the building continues to cash flow or starts to cash flow pretty quickly, right?
Jamison: [00:20:00] That’s right, yeah. We typically don’t pay distributions for the first year, but it cash flows earlier. Sometimes it’s been four or five months. We’re paying distributions to investors.
Eve: [00:20:12] That’s pretty amazing. So, you know, you actually did an offering, it was a three-way offering, and one part of it was on my funding portal Small Change. And that was a pretty big repositioning of a rather worn-out looking hotel. Do you want to talk about how that went?
Jamison: [00:20:34] Yeah, we still, we own the asset. It’s performing well. This was a, as I think the way you put it, worn out hotel in a neighborhood in Mesa, which is a bedroom community to Phoenix. Originally a very good property, well built, beautiful pool courtyard all of the units were suite, so they all had kitchens. But the manager who had owned it for ten years really ran it into the ground and there was illegal activity going on at the property. The Mesa police were, and the fire department were locked out of the property. The owner was very antagonistic to them for a lot of interesting reasons. And it was the blight of the neighborhood.
Eve: [00:21:21] How many units was it? It was pretty big.
Jamison: [00:21:23] 120.
Eve: [00:21:24] Right right. It’s a big blight.
Jamison: [00:21:27] And here it sits in a really, an up-and-coming neighborhood. But it was pulling the neighborhood back. There had been a Starbucks that popped up 100 yards from the property. There’s a Costco a quarter of a mile away. It was on the up and coming, but this place just continued to drag it down. And it was the place that bad people came to do bad things, frankly. And I’m sure there was other people there that were just looking for a cheap place and that’s where they stayed. So, when we saw it, we saw the potential. And ultimately, we are planning to get it rezoned to multifamily. We’ve been working with the city of Mesa on that, and that does take some time. But until then we operate it as a vacation rental and it’s doing very well. And ultimately.
Eve: [00:22:20] I gather you made improvements to it, right?
Jamison: [00:22:23] Yeah, that’s right. So, we went in and new carpet, new flooring, new fixtures, new cabinetry, new paint. And you know what? This didn’t take a lot. It wasn’t a gut. It was kind of a they call it lipstick and eyeshadow. You know, the bones were good, right? So, we just went in and made it look good, made it look like it’s a place that you’d want to stay, freshen it up, make it contemporary. And people love staying there. And we do want to add it as a multifamily, as an apartment building, because there’s a shortage of affordable housing across the board and definitely in Phoenix. And these units, I think the city will be able to get this rezoning and folks will, for example, a normal two-bedroom, one bath in Phoenix is about 1800. And I think ours is going to be more like 1500. So, to be able to add 120 units onto that will help.
Eve: [00:23:23] How many buildings have you raised funds for now through Neighborhood Ventures?
Jamison: [00:23:27] We’ve done 13 projects so far. 12 of them have been multifamily, and then we did do one retail project. We brought on a retail expert. And that’s a project in Tempe that’s three buildings. One’s a fast-food restaurant, one’s a Dunkin Donuts, which we’re in the process of building right now. And then we have a third vacant that we’re going to start leasing up soon, once the Dunkin Donuts comes in and their sign goes up, then we’re going to lease that out. So, that’s been a really fun reposition, very similar idea. This was before a cannabis shop, kind of a rundown mattress shop. And, you know, not a place that, not well maintained. There hadn’t been a capital investment. The parking was weird. The dumpster was right in the middle of the property, that kind of thing.
Eve: [00:24:19] Now you have your retail legs, right?
Jamison: [00:24:22] Yeah, yeah. And the city was very excited. We were going to come in and help revamp that part of town. But we believe you need to have deep expertise in whatever you’re doing. So, we took that on once we brought out a retail expert. Chris My mind is blanking his last name, but.
Eve: [00:24:47] He’ll forgive you.
Jamison: [00:24:48] Yeah, maybe we’ll see. He’s a retail expert, so he’s led that for us. And it’s been a great project.
Eve: [00:24:57] Great. So, your current project, full disclosure, is also raising funds on Small Change, which we’re delighted about. And you want to tell us about that? Where is it? What is it?
Jamison: [00:25:08] Yeah. So, this is in again one of these up-and-coming areas. This one is in central Phoenix. It’s near my home where I live in central Phoenix. I live right off the light rail and love this area. But this area has seen a lot of revitalization in the last decade. Downtown kind of used to be a place in Phoenix where you didn’t want to go. And this is uptown, which means it’s about two, two and a half miles north of downtown. It’s a highly desirable area because you’re in the middle of everything. You don’t have to commute to work if you’re working downtown. We’ve seen more of the young folks who are moving to the area want to live in these areas that have a bit more culture, they have more activities they don’t want, they’re not going out to the suburbs. And so that’s really exciting. And so, this area, this project fits right into that. It’s 30 units and as we went and did the tour, it was very clear that they haven’t done anything on this property for probably 25 years, except the minimum amount. But it’s sitting right here around all of these new build projects that are six, seven stories, and they’re great, two-bedroom, one bath townhouses and stacked apartments. And so, we saw the opportunity immediately to go in and bring this up to the standard of today’s renter, and we’ll see a really good return on that.
Eve: [00:26:39] What are your plans for the project? I think it’s actually six little buildings, right?
Jamison: [00:26:43] It’s six separate buildings. But one of the things that you don’t know when you do value add, sometimes you dig in there and you open a wall, so to speak, and you realize you’re going to have to do more plumbing, you’re going to have to do some electrical work. The part of the flooring needs to be repaired, you know, those are the sorts of things you don’t know going in. So, we always build a contingency around that. But the plan here is, the units were laid out really nicely, so we don’t have, we don’t have to get permits to build anything different or to move walls. We avoid moving walls, but we’re going to go in and update it. New flooring, new paint, new fixtures, new cabinetry. We’re going to rethink the outside area. The outside area is kind of weird, kind of felt like a prison yard for whatever reason. It’s all blocked off and the pool has a really weird, big fence around it that you can’t see. So, that’s actually going to be one of the big value-adds is kind of rethinking how the outside space is used, which is really important in Arizona, especially in the winter when people just want to spend time outside. So, rethinking the outside, updating the inside and then the location, because of where it’s at, people will be really excited to live in that area in a brand new newly renovated unit.
Eve: [00:28:05] So, then what’s the total development cost, including the building? And tell us about how you’re financing it.
Jamison: [00:28:13] Yeah, so it’s 30 units. The purchase price is 222 per unit. And so, I like to look at it on a per unit basis, but 222 per units what we’re buying it at and then we’re going to end up spending about 35,000 to renovate it. So, our cost basis is 260, 265,000 and some of that includes contingencies. So, if we can shave some of that off, might be closer to 260 on the high side 265, that’s our cost basis. And then when we look at what the value of that building is going to be, it will depend on what the rents are going to be. And we’re expecting the rents will be around the average of that neighborhood, which is about 1800 for two bed, one bath. And that would put the value of that unit around three 325 to 340.
Eve: [00:29:11] What are the rents now for that unit?
Jamison: [00:29:16] They’re in rough shape so they’re renting for under 1000.
Eve: [00:29:19] So, it’s a pretty big shift.
Jamison: [00:29:21] It’s a big jump. They’re all over the place. There’s one that’s 100 and there’s one that’s 800, which is kind of strange that, and they’re the exact same unit. But the neighborhood comps are real right now, are 18 to 1900.
Eve: [00:29:40] That sounds like a great project. So, just generally, what are some of the challenges that you’ve been confronted with this business? Because it’s different. I mean, the product is pretty normal, but the way you’re tackling it is different.
Jamison: [00:29:53] Yeah. I think one of the, our goals is to make it a frictionless experience for our investors. But we know how difficult this is to get from purchasing a property, getting, securing debt and capital to buy it, do the renovations. All of those steps perform the renovations, which we have a crew in house that does all our renovations, which helps us a lot. Then leasing up the property to qualified tenants who are going to pay the rent. That’s a big process in and of itself and then continue to collect the rent and manage that. And for our investors, we want it to feel like they’re involved, that they get to see what’s happening, but they don’t have to worry about all of that stress. For them, it’s easy. It’s almost like when you’re on Amazon and you just three clicks, you get some you order something, and it shows up at your doorstep a few hours later. That type of experience is what we really aim for our investors, even though there’s a lot of complications to get there. So, I think the biggest thing that is a challenge is ensuring that you don’t go over budget in the renovation. It’s really easy to do.
Eve: [00:31:05] That’s for sure.
Jamison: [00:31:06] When you get into one, a project, you say, oh, let’s do that, let’s do that, let’s do that. And then you kind of realize, look, you have to have an ROI at the end of this, so you can’t do everything you want to do. You have to be strategic about that and you have to hit deadlines. If one thing gets pushed back, then it pushes everything back. So, that’s the biggest challenge.
Eve: [00:31:30] And that must have been super big the last couple of years because the construction industry got really weird there.
Jamison: [00:31:38] Yeah, yeah, prices went up. It was harder to get materials. So, we were, we tried to be ahead of that. We tried to order stuff well in advance, so that helped us. Still, there were some things that we just couldn’t get for a long time, right? But we think about that. We try to get ahead of the game. You know, and then the other big challenge is finding good deals. And we are very picky about the deals that we do because we don’t have to do deals, meaning we’re going to only do deals that we really believe we can achieve, and we have a high level of confidence. Some of the ones on the fence we’ll look at and we’ll pass on. Other people might move on it because they need to deploy capital, or they need to keep their investors happy or whatever. For us, we’re not going to do deal unless we really have a high level of confidence. We believe in it, and that means we pass on a lot of deals, we see a lot of them, and we just say, look, we’ll let somebody else take that. We’re going to go after something that we think has a better opportunity. Which, we want to keep the risk as low as we can.
Jamison: [00:32:48] So, finding deals is hard in this market. And my co-founder, John, he runs day to day. He’s the CEO of ABI Multifamily, they’re the largest broker in Arizona that sells apartments. They sold 125 apartments so far this year. And that’s where we get our deal flow. A lot of times old clients call him and say, hey, look at this. Here’s a project that I’m looking at selling, and we buy it off market. So, figuring out where those deals are going to come from, especially in a market where it’s tight, has been really important for us and we have a big advantage there. But it can be really challenging to find those deals and, that really have a good amount of juice left in them.
Eve: [00:33:36] So, are you thinking about expanding operations beyond Flagstaff and Phoenix and maybe even beyond Arizona?
Jamison: [00:33:45] Yeah, yeah. So, working with Small Change is kind of our first step into that, where we can now raise capital from investors nationally. Prior to that, we’ve only raised capital from Arizona investors through the Arizona crowdfunding laws. So, we’re excited to begin to raise capital and to begin building in our investor base nationally and over the next 18 months, I think they’ll be, actually sooner than that, probably six months, I think we’ll have some exciting announcements, more things we’re doing nationally to meet our mission. We want to, we have about 5000 investors in Arizona so far, and we’re just in Arizona. So, we want to go nationally and offer what we are doing to the whole country. And we’re really excited about that. And so, I think it’s going to be an exciting time for us. We’ve been building towards this. Our momentum just kind of keeps carrying us through to this next step.
Eve: [00:34:41] Well, thank you very much for joining me. I’m really looking forward to seeing the next exciting announcements.
Jamison: [00:34:47] Yes.
Eve: [00:34:48] Thanks, Jamison.
Jamison: [00:34:49] We’re excited, thanks again for having us. We love everything Small Change is doing and love to partner with you guys and you guys are great to work with. So, thanks for having us on.
Eve: [00:35:00] Appreciate that. I appreciate that.
Eve: [00:35:10] That was Jamison Manwaring, CEO of Neighborhood Ventures. Jamison is putting his determination to work building his innovative company in Arizona. It’s a real estate company for sure. They buy, hold and sell property, but the capital plan is innovative, with the growing pool of Arizona residents permitted to invest through Arizona intrastate securities law. He’s seen early success, and he’s taken his plan to the national stage, raising funds, for a second time now, on my crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co. We can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Eve: [00:36:00] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange, where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.
Image courtesy of Jamison Manwaring
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Counting on Crowdfunding. – Rethink Real Estate. For Good.