Jeffrey W. Shell This is Me

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1. 1. Crain's Detroit Business

   www.crainsdetroit.com/cgi-bin/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 1/30/2006   Last Visited: 1/30/2006

   "They've got a great platform," said Jeffrey Shell, senior director of financial services at Cushman & Wakefield of Michigan Inc. in Southfield.

2. 2. Fast Track Project

   www.bizsites.com/psl/spring200 - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/9/2002   Last Visited: 8/9/2002

   Jeffrey Shell, senior director, financial services group of Cushman & Wakefield, agrees with the buying opportunities in the market, acknowledging that economic downturns don't motivate most companies to spend more money. "When the market is soft, there's a greater possibility of acquiring an existing facility. It's cheaper than building, and there are plenty of surplus assets on the market," he says. "There are a lot of great buys out there."
   
   On the other hand, Shell, as much as he is motivated to broker real estate deals, often finds that companies haven't fully thought through their needs before showing up on his doorstep. One company was convinced it needed one million square feet of warehousing space right away. Once the company examined how much product it really had to handle when, management realized that getting 300,000 square feet within four months would be sufficient, as long as the rest of the space could be delivered later.
   
   "My recommendation is to retain the services of an advisor who knows what questions to ask and who understands both the real estate arena and company operations," says Shell.
   
   Once a real need for new facilities is established, it's usual to look at existing product and improved, properly zoned land first. But to fast track a product, the key is parallel processing. With a wide variety of expertise represented on the project team, each member should get to work so plans are being drawn up, engineers are examining buildings and sites and permits are being requested, all simultaneously.
   
   If you're lucky enough to land in an area with a cooperative economic development corporation, willing to speed permitting, along with all that parallel effort by team members, "you can compress your schedule quite a bit," says Shell.
   
   Companies should also be arranging financing in parallel with other efforts to secure a new facility. You have to start talking to capital sources, and deciding how to structure the deal. Shell, who strategizes and facilitates financing for companies investing in real estate, notes that real estate and finance departments in a company are often unfamiliar with one another and one another's needs.
   
   Shell's professional role is to ask all the questions necessary to elicit enough client information to provide the most effective type of financing. "We ask whether it should be off-balance sheet or on-balance sheet, whether a synthetic lease makes sense, or cash, or revolving credit or a construction loan," he says.
   
   Lots of other questions have to be asked, too.

3. 3. Follow the Leader

   www.sitelocators.com/EM_Archiv - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/19/2000   Last Visited: 9/30/2000

   Companies of all different kinds and types and sizes are rethinking the way they ship goods, said Jeff Shell, senior managing director of Cushman & Wakefield of Michigan. Cushman & Wakefield is the commercial real estate firm that handled the site selection process for Mazda.
   
   Mississippi's Free Port Warehouse Law affords a major benefit to companies whose entire market is outside of Mississippi, in that their inventory of finished goods can be exempted from property taxes.
   
   For Mazda's parts center -- which could house as much as $ 75 million in inventory -- the lack of an inventory tax added up to major savings, and was a significant factor in the company's decision to choose the site in Olive Branch.