New member living in San Francisco

[Christian Vanderwall]

Hi BP,

I recently graduated from the University of Southern California with a double major in Business Administration and Computer Science. My goal is to become a real estate developer so I am trying to learn everything I can about the industry. 

I currently work as an analyst at Kingsley Associates, a real estate market research and consulting company. Our clients include the majority of large commercial real estate firms which provides me an interesting perspective on the industry.

[J. Martin]

How's it going @Christian Vanderwall ,

And welcome to the Bay, and the Bay Area investors from BP! I live across the bridge in Oakland on Lake Merritt. Good for you to get a job analyzing RE since that's what you want to do (instead of becoming a $billionaire off your comp science degree! jk ;)

I sort of stumbled in to RE working for the past 6 years in bank regulation. A lot of our job is looking at real estate loans, financial performance, etc, so it was eye-opening to see what people were doing in the Bay.. Be sure to keep your investor hat on when you're doing your job, so you can absorb both the content of the work you are doing, along with the information that's valuable as a RE investor. Be an RE data junkie. Might make you rich ;)

I majored in Econ w/ a minor in Business, and after pulling the trigger on my first property in 2012, built a $mil portfolio by 30 yrs old in less than 2 years basically from NOTHING. I got lucky on being knowledgeable when prices were still cheap. But now is the time to get ready for the next crisis ;)

We meet up at least once a month in SF, so come out and say hi to the rest of the Bay Area investing crew (next on March 19th). And if you're really motivated, come down to San Jose on Saturday for @Johnson H. 's meetup at @Nhi Nguyen 's new construction to say hi!