Joseph T. Sinclair Biography
At the beginning of his career, Mr. Sinclair served as a naval officer with two tours of duty in Vietnam. He earned BA and JD degrees from the University of Michigan and then practiced law in Detroit, Michigan, and Grand Junction, Colorado, before making a career change to commercial investment real estate. He earned a Certificate of Achievement in Real Estate from the University of Colorado, and the CCIM Institute awarded him the Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) designation.
In Grand Junction, Mr. Sinclair under the firm name Sinclair & Associates was active in commercial investment real estate brokerage, real estate development, real estate securities offerings, and was the city's largest real estate property management company.
He left Colorado to work for First International Equities of Houston, Inc. and subsequently Cal Fed Syndications (a subsidiary of California Federal Bank, Los Angeles, the third largest Savings & Loan in the US at that time) covering an acquisitions territory of ten metropolitan areas and acquiring $100 million of income property.
Thereafter he was a commercial real estate consultant in Denver and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mr. Sinclair has written numerous journal articles on investment real estate topics for such periodicals as Real Estate Today, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board Journal, and the Commercial Investment Real Estate Journal. He has taught numerous real estate seminars on such topics as discounted cash flow analysis, loan packaging, feasibility studies, real estate investment analysis, real estate financial structuring is a former member of the national faculty of the CCIM Institute. As an adjunct faculty member, Mr. Sinclair also taught graduate courses in real estate investment in the School of Finance at Golden Gate University in San Francisco and undergraduate courses at San Jose State University.
He served as a senior consultant and a member of the board of directors for Financial International Corporation in Denver, a firm which contracted with the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to provide real estate services nationwide on real estate assets in excess of $600 million.
Business One Irwin published Mr. Sinclair's book on real estate investment analysis Real Numbers in 1993. The entire book covers only investment real estate analysis and covers it more completely than any other book in print.
After publishing his first book on a real estate topic, Mr. Sinclair turned his interest to digital technology topics and wrote over 20 books about Internet and Web technology published by such national publishers as IDG, AP Professional, American Management Assoociation, and Hayden. His seven-title Smart Way series about eBay was a pioneer in a genre now heavily populated with titles. While writing books about the Internet, Mr. Sinclair was active in the digital community (San Francisco Bay Area) teaching seminars and doing organizational work for the North Bay Multimedia Association, the College of Marin, and the Digital Village.
Mr. Sinclair created and operated Timeshare.com for four years, a website that provided an aftermarket for resort timeshares with over 11,000 timeshare listings. He sold the website in 2004.
In 1998 Mr. Sinclair and 14 others founded the Mare Island Technology Academy, a California charter middle-high school. He served as chairman of the school's Technology Committee managing the school's digital technology development. He provided pro bono legal, journalism, real estate, financial, management, and digital technology services to the school. The school now has over 700 students in grades 6 through 12, a state-of-the-art computer network connecting about 700 PCs, a California Distinguished School award, an Exemplary Career Technical Education Program award, and its permanent accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.
Currently, Mr. Sinclair writes part-time and invests in real estate part-time. He lives in California and owns property in several states. His latest publishing projects are a website for real estate investors, Real Estate Investment Center dot Com, and a New Edition of Real Numbers now available. He will be the host of Real Estate Investment Topics, an Internet radio show (podcast), and the editor of Real Estate Investment Sense, a newsletter (blog), soon to be available.