- Real estate
- Construction
Brent spent 25 years working for Walmart, and most of those years were spent focused in the areas of real estate and construction. Brent’s experience included the following:
- Brent spent most of 1993 auditing multiple departments in real estate and construction, including property development, property management, construction accounting, real estate receivables, construction cost plus contract audits, and construction direct purchases. Brent received the Corporate Audit of the Year award in 1993 for his audits of real estate and construction areas.
- Brent joined corporate finance in 1995 in the financial analysis and planning team, and he helped develop the first cash flow models in the company to evaluate new store investments. His work also included developing the first cash flow models for use in evaluating international store investments, analyzing the returns for various vestibule tenants, and evaluating the financial returns of fuel station returns as a real estate strategy for Sam’s Clubs.
- Through his work in corporate finance, Brent was recruited to start the real estate finance group in Walmart international, where he was responsible for real estate accounting, financial analysis and planning, and real estate systems. He was also given responsibility for finance and administration of a real estate partnership that was formed to build Walmart-anchored shopping centers in Canada.
- Brent spent 2 1/2 years working in U.S. Walmart Realty as director of accounting, where he had responsibility for financial reporting, job cost accounting, and accounts receivable. Brent and his team were responsible for the implementation of systems to manage property management and accounts receivable for the U.S. real estate business.
- In 2012 Brent accepted an assignment as Vice President Finance for Walmart Asia Realty, a wholly-owned Walmart subsidiary that was set up to develop, build, and operate Sam’s Club-anchored shopping centers in China. Brent had responsibility for accounting, finance, and systems for this start-up company. While in this role, he implemented Yardi ERP systems, designed all accounting and finance policies and procedures, and worked closely with the tax and legal departments to determine the appropriate legal entity structure to fund these investments in China.
In addition to Brent’s experience at Walmart, he spent the last 2 1/2 years in Canada working for Smartcentres Real Estate Investment Trust, one of the largest REITs in Canada, as Vice President of Financial Accounting and Business Processes. In this role, Brent’s primary role was to assist the company in revising processes and procedures to gain efficiencies through leveraging technology.
In addition to the accounting and tax services offered by the Seay Firm, Brent is also available to assist companies in all aspects of real estate development. Below is a summary of the types of services that Brent offers to clients. Even if your primary business is not in the real estate or construction fields, chances are your business will be dealing with these types of investments as you grow. Brent can help you have the confidence that you are making good investment decisions for for your business. Let’s face it, these are the largest expenditures you are likely to incur. It pays to make sure you make the smart decision when investing your hard-earned dollars!
Real Estate Strategy
Congratulations, your business is a success! And now you are ready to grow, adding another location to gain market share. How do you go about picking the right location? How far do you need to space your locations to best saturate the market, while ensuring you do not take away sales your other location is already capturing? Let us help you to analyze these complex situations by assisting you with the following:
- Existing location trade areas
- Key trade area characteristics that drive your business
- Projected revenue impacts/what-if scenarios
- Evaluation of alternatives/scenario analysis
- Tax planning, including entity structure, tax basis of investments, depreciation methods, at-risk rules, cost segregation, determining gain or loss on sale of property, like-kind exchanges, etc.
Investment Analysis
Smart investment decisions all come down to having accurate, well-thought-out financial projections. But after you gather all of your forecasts and projections, how do you make sense of it all to decide whether go forward? Sophisticated investors use cash flow models to help them make the right decision. We can help you determine the projected internal rate of return (IRR) of your proposed investment, your company’s cost of capital, and the net present value of the cash flows. We can then provide a written analysis that can be incorporated into a presentation to your board of directors or your bank’s loan committee.
Systems Implementations
If your business has outgrown your accounting system, or you have a dated system that is no longer supported by your software vendor, we can help. While we can provide assistance for accounting systems for any industry, we specialize in real estate and construction systems. We have experience and/or implementation experience with the following systems:
- Yardi
- MRI (including Cougar)
- JD Edwards
- Procore/Procore for Owners
We provide the following systems services to clients:
- Software selection – This includes working with your organization to determine system requirements, prepare a list of pain points/challenges with your current system, organize software demonstrations for all key vendors, development of criteria for ranking vendors, and preparing a formal recommendation presentation to be used in presenting recommendation to key decision-makers.
- Project management – We can manage project timelines, coordinate with software vendor and any consultants, identify key subject matter experts to be dedicated to the project, and provide updates to management/steering committee on progress.