It's often said you learn your most valuable lessons from the most difficult times. That would be the case for Marshall Tycher, principal of Roseland Property Co. in Short Hills, N.J. As a regional partner for the Northeast Lincoln Property Co. in the early 1990s, he experienced the real estate recession firsthand. "That recession taught me about urban infill," Tycher says. "I saw that the closer-in locations did better than the more suburban locations" when the economy is suffering.
Knowing how your compensation and benefits packages compare to others in the business not only helps you compete for the most in-demand employees and reduce turnover in your corporate office and on-site, but it can also be of assistance in budgeting and goal-setting.
Cost overruns. Construction defects. Con-versions gone bad. While there are tremendous profits to be made in the center ring of the condo circus, the dangers lurk everywhere.
Need to know how to price your apartments? Forget instinct. Think data.
Susan Booker wanted to live in a place that would allow her to be active in her neighborhood as she grew older. As she did her research, she found herself immediately attracted to Wild Sage Village, a senior cohousing development in Boulder, Colo., where residents help design the project and create a community.
Going to the principal's office in Atlanta's Bass High School isn't what it used to be. In the same place where students would sit in anticipation and dread, a lucky renter now enjoys a one-of-a-kind Bass Lofts apartment suite, complete with the original bank vault that once held valuables for the school. "The people who choose to live here relish it. It's still an old school. We left up several chalkboards and teachers' bookcases," says Dennis Hertlein, principal of Surber, Barber, Choate, Hertlein Architects of Atlanta.
ZOM Development in Orlando is right at home under the Big Top. Since its start in 1977, ZOM has built approximately 15,000 apartments, along with office, residential, condominium, and retail spaces. Yet, ZOM has stopped building condos in the frenzied Miami market, the same city where it has constructed numerous apartments and The Hotel Victor.
Soon, if a resident at Miami's Grovenor House on the Biscayne Bay needs his car, he'll only have to press a single button on a "wireless concierge" device to call up his automobile. The same goes for residents of Paramount's Royal Palm Communities, Paramount Beach, and Bay projects, where restaurant reservations and restricted social club access are just a button away, thanks to a wireless touchpad panel.
Housing demand for aging baby boomers is thriving, and active adult communities designed around golf or tennis are popping up everywhere. But not everyone wants to spend his or her golden years exclusively on the greens. Many retirees want to keep their minds engaged, too, prompting developers to embark on innovative senior housing projects near or on college campuses.
Cost fluctuation for raw materials is nothing new—it's a reality of our business," says Glenn Ferguson, president of Clark Realty Builders in Bethesda, Md. "Price increases simply make it more challenging to predict costs, particularly for longer-term projects. It seems like every year it's a different material's turn to shoot up in price."
Open up the real estate section of any daily paper and you'll see the ads. They feature an attractive woman doing yoga with a promise of "Tranquility in the City," three twenty-somethings enjoying a gorgeous day outside, or a young couple relaxing in their modern living room.
This is no fake-out: Multifamily leaders expect 2006 to be a year of recovery for the industry. Are you thinking, I've taken that bet before and lost big? Weren't '04 and '05 supposed to be years of recovery? Well, huddle up: With the national vacancy rate falling, rents rising, and concessions hovering at a minimum, there's a whole new game plan for the multifamily industry.
What's your company's greatest strength? If you answered "people," you're not alone; it's a popular response among executives today, particularly in the apartment industry, where the talent you need can be hard to find and even more difficult to keep.
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As you walk through the archway and on the white carpet to the entrance of this condo sales party, you feel like you're entering the circus. Men in referee shirts are jumping on a trampoline, which gives them the power and lift to bounce off a wall at a 90-degree angle. Another man walks with stilts–he too is bouncing up and down. When a waiter offers you a fruity orange concoction, you feel like you have no choice but to accept after watching this surreal, acrobatic scene.
It's been two years since City Lights at Town Center opened its doors high in the hills of Aliso Viejo, Calif. And in ever-trendy, ever-changing Orange County, two years might as well be an eternity. But this luxury apartment property, which still catches the eye of discerning developers across the country, is far from yesterday's news. All for good reason: The project revolutionized the prototypical apartment property in southern Orange County.
For anyone interested in the next big opportunity for multifamily firms, the statistics provided by demographers are staggering. Generation Y, also known as the echo boomers, accounts for only 7 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of spending. Latinos will possess a trillion dollars of buying power by 2010. And the baby boomers, who are just beginning to retire, add up to 76 million people.
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Few tidbits are as interesting to people as how much money other people make. Whether it's the Wall Street Journal's annual list of the highest-paid CEOs or Parade magazine's "What People Earn" report, we're all curious about everyone else's compensation.
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The photographs have been as haunting as the stories. For days, newspapers and cable television channels have covered little but the growing tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which struck Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in late August. The storm– and the resulting floods– destroyed apartments, houses, businesses, and most of all, people's lives. The damage: $125 billion and counting, as of mid-September.
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Within days of starting this job, I started becoming very familiar with the name Laurie Baker. I saw Baker, then vice president of property services for Camden Property Trust, listed as a speaker at industry events. I read her comments in the stories I edited. I even traded a few e-mails with her. (Obviously, I'm not the only one: At the NMHC technology conference in Houston last fall, Camden CEO Ric Campo mentioned Baker from the stage during a panel discussion and alluded to her BlackBerrying ways.)
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I both loved and hated my apartment in Allentown, Pa. Surrounded by World War I-era homes and leafy streets, the location was a charming and gracious one in a city that often struggles with the realities of urban economics. My front windows featured leaded glass, an inlaid design outlined my glossy hardwood floors, and I could read on my front or back porches.
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Programming a conference is a lot like publishing an issue of a magazine. You want to offer a diverse mix of topics, provide the chance to hear from industry leaders, and include a few provocative comments that will get people talking. And I think we've done all of that with this year's Multifamily Executive Conference.
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Earlier this year, Ron Terwilliger and his senior management team at Trammell Crow Residential in Atlanta had an experience that the multifamily leader never wants to repeat again. "We were on a two-hour conference call about a class action lawsuit in Florida over some bizarre judge's ruling about not being able to charge late fees or penalties," the chairman and CEO of Trammell Crow recalls. "We thought, 'Life is too short for our senior management to be spending all of this time fighting class action suits.'"
Larry Kraemer's job just keeps getting more and more difficult. Kraemer, the vice president of estimating for Harkins Builders in Marriottsville, Md., felt the pricing pain in 2004 and 2005 as construction prices went up by double digits. So when Hurricane Katrina recently devastated more than 200,000 housing units in the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, Kraemer feared more than just rising prices.
By now, everyone has seen the photographs and the television footage. People being airlifted from roofs as water encroaches upon the top story of their home. New Orleans residents leaving the Big Easy by foot with all of their belongings–or the ones they could grab–in knapsacks. Newly homeless people desperate for food, water, and shelter. Yet these people were the lucky ones: They survived Hurricane Katrina, a storm that may go down as the deadliest and costliest natural disaster in American history.
Property management goes to school, plus other industry news.
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Merging a supermarket with residential is one of the most challenging development combinations, but developers can't get enough of the latest mixed-use trend: anchoring communities with massive grocery stores.
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High home prices in hot markets like Southern California and Washington, D.C., are destroying the dreams of many wannabe homebuyers. But some apartment owners are reveling in these sky-high price tags, which help fuel business for the rental market.
With occupancy on the rise, concessions shrinking and supply tightening, multifamily owners finally began to breathe a little easier in 2005. Even better news is that these improvements are expected to continue through 2006. While all markets will benefit from this slow recovery, some U.S. cities are particularly well-positioned to reap the rewards.
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Boston, home to the Super Bowl and–finally!–World Series champions, is on the road to economic recovery, which means good news for its multifamily market. Business demand and production growth are benefiting local employment, with job growth expected to have increased by 2 percent by the end of the year. Roughly one-third of the 62,000 new jobs will be well-paid positions in the professional and business services sector. And, the unemployment rate is expected to ease, to 5.2 percent.
Evacuees from New Orleans and nearby Gulf Coast cities poured into Texas after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29. Houston, located 350 miles west of New Orleans, suddenly no longer ruled as the country's apartment vacancy king. The negative impact of three years of overbuilding was erased virtually overnight.
With improving employment figures, steady rental demand, and ever-increasing investor interest, the Seattle market is percolating its way to a very strong brew.
After the wild ride of recent years, it may be hard to remember exactly what "normal" is in the San Francisco Bay area housing market. Let's take a refresher course. Before the dot-com bubble, the mature Bay area economy typically produced additional jobs at a fairly modest pace. Total housing production was limited, too, constrained not just by the relatively slow household growth rate but also by some of the nation's most extreme barriers to new building in terms of land availability and especially development costs. From that perspective, the region certainly appears to be entering a period when the housing market performance is returning to the long-term patterns seen historically.
If you're looking for a vital, growing community, Jacksonville is a great bet. If you're looking for an active economy, it's Jacksonville again. If you're looking for a relatively low cost of living and quality of life among beaches and oceans, rivers, and estuaries, Jacksonville has these as well.
Defense attorney Ben Brafman estimates that the television show "Law and Order" has based its "ripped from the headlines" episodes on about 20 of his high-profile cases. So, when the show decided to loosely model an episode on New Jersey multifamily magnate Charles Kushner, the lawyer knew what to expect.
Her voice suggests a perky 15-year-old, and she stands barely five feet tall. But those who have seen Debra Cafaro in action know that she is anything but a pushover.
ING/Clarion and Gables. Colonial Properties Trust and Cornerstone. Camden and Summit Properties. With the smallest of these transactions valued at a cool $1.1 billion, these three easily qualify as the biggest multifamily deals completed this year. But "bigger" doesn't translate into "better" in a merger or acquisition unless company executives pay attention to all the particulars in the transition process. "In any kind of merger, the integration is complex and detailed, and where people go astray is when they don't get down and reconcile the details," warns Richard J. Campo, Camden's chairman and CEO.
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Nordstrom. Diners Club. The Ritz-Carlton. When you're paying top dollar, you expect excellent service–and these companies know how to deliver it. No wonder apartment executives such as Julie Smith, president of Bozzuto Management Co., and Todd Pope, president of Simpson Property Group, found the luxury hotel chain a source of inspiration for customer service programs at their own companies.
Revitalizing a neighborhood takes more than money– it takes patience and time. Just ask Marilyn Melkonian of Telesis Corp. When Telesis was featured on the cover of Multifamily Executive magazine in 1999, the company was still recovering from completing a 10-year effort to revitalize the Kenilworth Parkside neighborhood, a former public housing project in northeast Washington, D.C. Six years later, the company is just now laying the groundwork for phase two of the ambitious project.
There can be little doubt that Ritz-Carlton hotels provide exceptional customer service. From the gracious courtesy of the front-desk staff to the comforts of a room with an expertly made bed covered with a cloud of down pillows, a visit to the Ritz always seems special, no matter how long (or short) the stay.
Most executives would be in desperate need of a break after transforming a mom-and-pop business into a multibillion-dollar REIT. But not John McCann, who retired from United Dominion Realty Trust four years after appearing on the March 1997 cover of Multifamily Executive.
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So much for the indignities of dorm life. While alums remember how they had to scramble for showers in the hall bathroom, fight for possession of their floor's two public telephones, and struggle to stay cool in 90-degree heat with no air conditioning, today's students enjoy privacy and perks. "We have computer labs, nice clubhouses, state-of-the-art fitness centers, basketball courts, tanning beds, and extremely nice pools that are every bit as nice as our luxury multifamily pools," says Greg Bates, managing director at Stamford, Conn.-based GE Commercial Finance's real estate division, which works with JPI Cos. on their student projects. That's become the standard, as both multifamily firms and universities compete for the country's 16 million students and their college dollars. In this edition of Conference Call, you'll hear how apartment firms are doing just that from three executives: David Adelman, president and CEO of Campus Apartments in Philadelphia; Miles Orth, vice president of operations and business development for College Park Communities in Newtown, Pa., and GE's Greg Bates.
In January 1998, Gregory T. Mutz posed for the cover of Multifamily Executive holding a globe in his hand. And at the time, the world might have indeed been in the enthusiastic Mutz's hands. Mutz, then the CEO of AMLI Residential in Chicago, had just been named Builder of the Year and was building a company poised to dominate seven Midwestern markets.
Leaf through The Lanexchange, a Lane Co. publication, and you feel like you're reading a magazine, not an employee newsletter. There's a table of contents, lots of pictures, columns, departments, and small articles. And, it's all in a four-color package. In the past, the Lane publication had a newspaper feel, but the company set out to change this a few months ago.
Harbor Group International means business. The value-added real estate investor finalized its renovation plan for Lynnfield Place Apartments just 60 days after purchasing the property. "The sooner we put a plan in motion, the sooner we can see results that bear out on our investment objectives," says Alan Dworetzky, the company's director of construction and development.
Amid the whirring of treadmills and clanking of weight machines in the health club at The Metropolitan at Pentagon Row is a quiet room whose creamy beige walls, soft lighting, and flickering candles invite a single resident at a time to relax and forget the day's workout–and work.
The old saying goes, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and that's exactly what apartment firms are doing. After losing resident after resident to the lure of low interest rates, apartment companies are paying new attention to home-buying incentive programs.
Andy Padian is a busy man. Padian, one of the country's most experienced multifamily energy auditors, runs the multifamily program for Steven Winter Associates, a nationally known architecture and engineering consulting firm. During 25 years in the business, Padian has seen interest in his services wax and wane, but with rising energy costs, his phone has been ringing a lot these days. "People have been screaming for help," he says.
Patio furniture, a trip to the Caribbean, a flat screen TV. Wedding presents? Housewarming? Hardly. Welcome to apartment leasing 2005. These are marketing tactics offered by multifamily owners and management companies whose applicant pool is no longer persuaded by "free" rent. It represents a new turn for apartment firms as they learn to become better marketers and observers of local demographics. Concessions have historically been a lure, but in a market environment where even four months' "free" rent still produces only a negligible number of leases, multifamily owners and operators must better understand the demands of their prospective residents.
Just five years ago, wailing sirens and flashing police lights marked the scene of a massive drug bust at a dilapidated and crime-ridden apartment complex in Anderson, Calif. But that frightening scene is now just a distant memory, thanks to a dramatic turnaround initiated by the city. Today the site is home to SEASONS at Los Robles, a thriving 59-unit affordable senior housing community.
Never underestimate the power of a facelift. Just look at Gramax Towers Apartment Homes in Silver Spring, Md. The former office building sat vacant for 15 years, a blighted eyesore that cast a shadow on the entire neighborhood. But as soon as the building was refurbished, the entire landscape and character of the surrounding area dramatically improved.
Daunting. That was the word John Seymour, director of acquisitions and forward planning for nonprofit developer Southern California Housing Development Corp. (SoCal Housing), used to describe the Shadow Hill apartment complex in Santee, Calif., when he first saw it in 1998.
Maybe parents don't always know best. Robert Montagne's dad was skeptical when he saw his developer son's newest purchase—an auto body shop in downtown Washington, D.C., that he envisioned as authentic loft-style condos.
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Her title might bring to mind images of a theater company or a Broadway musical, but Sara Jo Light, United Dominion Realty Trust's new executive vice president and director of talent management, is all about real estate. Light comes to UDRT from The Taubman Co., where she was senior vice president of human resources.
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If you've ever met Randy Ell, you'll remember him. Tall and outgoing, he is committed to the multifamily industry and the property management people who keep those apartments running. Now he's dedicating that energy to Fifteen Group, a Miami-based firm that Ell joined in July as president. Previously he served as president of Summit Properties' management company and as an executive vice president at the public REIT, which recently merged with Camden. Ell has a bachelor's in economics from UCLA.
To Curtis Walker, there's no better place to work than the multifamily industry. "We provide housing for all types of families, and along the way, we create jobs that range from landscaping to regional management," says the new Post Properties executive. "What could be more satisfying than creating houses and jobs?" Walker joined the Atlanta-based apartment powerhouse in July, accepting a position as executive vice president and Southeast regional investment director at Post. Formerly a senior vice president at Fairfield Residential, Walker has a bachelor's from the University of North Texas, where he also pursued graduate studies.
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When people say that real estate is a local business, they could be talking about LISC. Officially known as the Local Initiatives Support Corp., the nationally thinking, locally acting nonprofit provides help and money to community development organizations across the country. That's where Mark Edwards comes in. As program director for the Philadelphia LISC, he leads one of LISC's largest groups, overseeing affordable housing, commercial development, recreational opportunities, and more. Edwards, who started his new job in May, holds a bachelor's in political science from Morehouse College in Atlanta.
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For some, work is a calling. "I believe energy-efficient, healthy, durable, easy-to-maintain, low-operating-cost, people-friendly, and sustainable buildings that are designed, built, and marketed in such a manner can be a win-win situation for everybody involved in the project and the community at large?forever," says Jeffrey G. Ross-Bain, who in April became the associate in charge for high-performance building systems at Smith Dalia Architects in Atlanta.
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It's very hip these days to talk about affordable housing. But the words of Alan Greenwald, the new president and CEO of A.F. Evans Co., carry a different weight than the average person. Perhaps that's because of his background. Greenwald holds a bachelor's, a J.D., and a master's of city and regional planning, all from the University of California at Berkeley. He's worked for Fannie Mae, serving as its director of multifamily structured finance. And he now will be taking the spot of Art Evans, honored has Executive of the Year in 2001 by Multifamily Executive for his work at A.F. Evans Co., a real estate development and property management company based in Oakland, Calif. But Greenwald, who's worked on different sides of the industry, brings both thoughtfulness and a multifaceted multifamily experience to his new role, as his answers below show.
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Western National Realty Advisors, a member of Western National Group, has named Aleksandra Lyons as director, land acquisitions, for the company's development division. Western National, which manages more than 23,000 multifamily units, is in the middle of an expansion plan that would double the size of its current owned portfolio to 26,000 units.
It was a strange request for landowners of 42 acres in Palm Beach County, Fla.–the country's 10th-priciest housing market. The owners weren't interested in making money. Instead, they wanted to sell the land for cheap to two Florida developers: Coconut Grove-based Housing Trust Group and Boca Raton-based Goray Communities.
Las Vegas-based developer H.U.E. Lofts is out to prove that there's an art to developing high-rise condominiums–iterally. The developer paid $1.8 million for a half-acre of land that will become a 38-story, 278-condominium project in Las Vegas' redeveloping Art Central area.
Throughout Pennsylvania, developer O'Neill Properties of King of Prussia, Pa., is taking the old and making it older. Case in point: Malvern, Pa., where an abandoned steel factory will become a 600-unit project called Worthington. It will include 500,000 square feet of retail and entertainment and 700,000 square feet of office space.
It may not look it from the metal and glass façade, but The Helena apartments, completed in August, is quite green.
How do you make four acres of land provide affordable housing for 2,200 students and faculty in not-too-tall buildings on an existing college campus? That was San Jose State University's request of Niles Bolton Associates, an Atlanta-based architecture firm.
Once upon a time, the Biltmore Hotel catered to famous Hollywood actors such as the Rat Pack—and a hotel napkin with Frank Sinatra's autograph now sells for upwards of $600. Today, developers of the Biltmore Colony in Palm Springs, Calif., say the mix of single-family and multifamily housing will preserve the legendary hotel's look and luxury.
Bigger is not always better. If you don't believe that, just ask some REITs. While they have large caches of money to spend, they've had difficulty competing with private buyers over the past couple of years. So, a couple of these public apartment firms–Essex Property Trust in Palo Alto, Calif., and AvalonBay in Alexandria, Va.–have created funds that allow them to act as private players.
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Ray Kingsbury knew one of his organization's affordable senior properties needed help–badly. At The Meadows, a 150-unit senior property in Springdale, Ohio, mortar was crumbling away between the bricks near the building's roofline. There was also no air-conditioning in some of the hallways, and the backup generator needed a new fuel tank.
When GE Commercial Real Estate and Greystar Real Estate Partners announced a new joint venture in June targeting $500 million in multifamily acquisitions and developments nationwide, it was the culmination of months of work for the two firms. Of course, the lawyers had worked hard to ensure the two partners' interests were aligned. But beyond codified agreements and triplicate contracts, GE managing director Greg Bates and Greystar CEO Bob Faith racked up plenty of frequent flyer miles, noshed lots of late-night meals, and hit more than a few golf balls making sure they were a good fit for each other.
Public-private partnerships are fueling a multibillion-dollar affordable housing renaissance in Philadelphia. The initiative, led by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, is restoring declining neighborhoods and spurring private development in areas where few builders saw opportunity before.
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At first glance, Archstone-Smith's purchase of Oak Creek Apartments in Agoura Hills, Calif., was just another $99.6 million deal. Sure it was a lot of money, but the 24-building, 336-unit luxury multifamily community seemed a clear winner. Agoura Hills' median income of $85,000 and median age of 32 years old made it "a strong market for luxury multifamily product offering high-end amenities and the latest technology," according to Curtis Palmer of Colliers Seeley International, who represented Archstone-Smith in the transaction. What was groundbreaking about this particular deal was its timing. Archstone agreed to buy the property when it was less than half-leased, something unheard of at the time.
When Congress created the low-income housing tax credit program in 1986, initial response from developers was less than overwhelming. "If you were a multifamily player from 1987 to about 1993, a lot of states would be calling you to see if you could utilize the credits," says Michael Costa, president of Simpson Housing Solutions in Long Beach, Calif., which has developed 22,000 units of affordable housing nationwide. "They were having a hard time allocating them all."
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Developers hurdled many obstacles before they reached the February 2005 opening of the 57-unit Oak Creek Senior Villas on nearly two acres of once-blighted property in Thousand Oaks, Calif. The development team endured approval and construction setbacks and had trouble securing the money needed to bring affordable senior housing to the site. But when the doors finally opened after five years of dreaming, three years of planning, and 18 months of building, everyone from the county to local housing and financial officials said it was worth the decade-long headache to at last bring lower-cost apartments to an area handcuffed by slow-growth laws and filled with senior citizens on fixed incomes.
Vacations can lead to the most unexpected business decisions. Several years ago, while researching Hawaiian vacations online, Scott Taylor found a site with a feature that the others didn't have: an interactive map. This map not only showed where each cabana was located, but it also detailed availability and nearby amenities in a convenient, at-a-glance package. Taylor, a founder of Mark-Taylor Residential in Scottsdale, Ariz., booked his tropical getaway confident that, before his plane even touched down, he had a clear picture of what he would get for his vacation dollar.
Let's say you purchased software to help building staff streamline rent-check processing or let residents sign up online for cable. Perhaps you contracted with a service to handle the screening of prospective tenants. You may have had to struggle to incorporate these little islands of technology into existing paper-based systems for collecting rent, maintaining units, and marketing your building. In fact, you may be pushing still to realize the promise of the Internet to make your processes run more smoothly. Maybe you've even wondered whether it is worth the hassle.
It's really quite simple: Come the first of the month, rent checks are slid under the building manager's door, then neatly entered into the books. Right? Yeah, maybe if it was still 1956.
Hardly a week passes without a scary news story from a major credit card company, bank, or online shopping site that the security of critical consumer data has been compromised. If these data-heavy, security-oriented companies can't adequately protect their sensitive customer information, then how will apartment companies and their business partners be able to accomplish such a task?
When voice-over-Internet protocol debuted more than a decade ago, the buzz over its potential to transform business–especially real estate–was deafening. The appeal of the technology, also known as VoIP, was obvious: If real estate companies and tenants sent their telephone calls over the Internet rather than an aging telephone network, they'd see dramatic cost reductions.
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Talk about pressure. Many multifamily companies have barely completed their switch to Web-based property management software, and they're being faced with a new technology challenge: fiber.
Imagine being able to gauge exactly when an apartment's refrigerator is about to fail or when a property's flowerbeds need watering. Maybe you'd like to control the thermostats in different units, running the heat or air conditioning only when residents are home. For those willing to dedicate the time and dollars, building sensors and controls that handle such on-site operations have long been available. Until recently, though, they were too costly and complicated for most multifamily companies to consider.
Need to upgrade kitchens in your apartment complex but don't want to fork over thousands of dollars for brand-new cabinets? You're in luck. Simple, decorative elements offer an easy way to spruce up a plain-Jane cabinet without breaking the bank.
With its natural blond color and sleek look, a bamboo floor looks much like traditional hardwood floors made from trees. But there is a crucial difference: Trees take 100-plus years to harvest, while bamboo can be harvested in as little as six years.
Today's HVAC systems can do much more than maintain consistent temperatures. They can clean the air, generate electricity, and produce water, depending on the unit.
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It's all too easy to get caught up in the buzz of the latest high-tech security gadgets and gizmos. But it's often the cheap, simple strategies that have the greatest impact on a property's safety.
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On many apartment tours, prospects hastily glance into the fitness center to assess the offerings. But at KSI's Metropolitan Fairfax in Virginia, prospects stop short at the site of the gym's coolest gear: a rock-climbing wall. "Imagine walking into the standard fitness room, and there's this large imposing wall with the handholds and footholds on a rotating piece that is 7 or 8 feet high," says Bob Murray, president of Centreville, Va.-based KSI Management Corp. "It adds an area of excitement to the old drum fitness room."
Structural panels now come in almost as many flavors as ice cream. In fact, there seems to be a specialty panel system for nearly any situation a multifamily builder might confront. Depending on your location, investing a little more in one of these can save time and money, reduce liability, and even turn down the volume on resident complaints.
At 32 stories tall, the Drake Tower was once the tallest building to grace the city of Brotherly Love. Elegant and regal, the building's architecture reveals a mix of Spanish Baroque and Art Deco influences.
As you walk toward the Villa Riviera, you get a sense of its majestic Tudor Gothic and French Renaissance influence. Nine menacing gargoyles and one eagle-like statue are perched atop the 16-story landmark. And given the Villa Riviera's pointy steeple and pitched, green copper roof, it's easy to see why the building is the most recognized structure in Long Beach, Calif.
For more than 150 years, the Pontalba Buildings have occupied the heart of the French Quarter on Jackson Square, intriguing passers-by and residents alike with their unique blend of Creole, Parisian, and Greek Revival architecture. The combination speaks to the melting-pot feel of New Orleans' oldest neighborhood, which saw the merging of colonial French, Spanish, and British empires so long ago.
When the Kennedy-Warren marks its 75th birthday next year, it will do so as the building it was intended to be–but only recently became.
Lauderdale Courts is the only place that offers you the chance to live like a king. Not just any royal–but The King. Lauderdale Courts, located in downtown Memphis, was the home of Elvis Presley from 1949 to 1953–The King's impressionable teenage years. Vernon Presley, his wife Gladys, and their young son Elvis moved into 185 Winchester, Apt. 328, a 689-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and living room. Today, guests can stay overnight in the very same unit, which features vintage furniture and bathroom fixtures, reproductions of Presley family photos, and memorabilia.
At first glance, the Maple Terrace apartments look pristine, regal, and steeped in rich history. It's easy to see why.
The 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, twin 26-story towers located in Chicago, are seen as legendary fixtures in the world of high-rise residential living and of modern architecture. Built in 1951 and designed by revolutionary architect Mies van der Rohe, the Lake Shore Apartments set a high standard for skyscraper construction.