VOL. 129 | NO. 199 | Monday, October 13, 2014

Indianapolis-based developer Milhaus Ventures is preparing to move forward with the long-stalled Highland Row project near the University of Memphis.

The company has applied for a $20 million building permit through the city-county Office of Construction Code Enforcement for construction of a four-story apartment building at 387 S. Highland St., the first piece in the $61 million Highland Row project. Wakefield Beasley & Associates is the architect and Jordan & Skala Engineers is listed as the engineering firm.

The mixed-use Highland Row development will include 354 apartments, 35 townhomes, a parking garage and 26,000 square feet of retail space. Memphis-based Poag Shopping Centers originally planned to develop Highland Row, but those plans were shelved following the recession.

Source: The Daily News Online & Chandler Reports

Amos Maki

Michael Lightman Realty Co. is moving forward with an expansion of the Fieldstone Apartments.

Lightman applied for six building permits totaling $6.4 million through the city-county Office of Construction Code Enforcement for 66 new apartments in the 901-unit complex at 3333 Hacks Cross Road. Patton & Taylor Construction Co. is the general contractor.

Earlier this year, Lightman acquired 24 acres near Tournament Drive and Hacks Cross for the expansion, which will take place in phases and include a total of over 300 units.

Amos Maki

Link:
Highland Row Developer Applies for Building Permit

Constructing a house, rather than buying an apartment, is a dream for many. A house with a garden can be within your reach if you invest in a plot ahead of time.

Plotting the dream

Once you own a plot, building a home is not very expensive. Construction costs vary depending upon the location and the material used, but it averages 1,500 to 2,500 per sq ft for mid-range houses. So you can construct a 1,000 sq ft home with a car park for under 30 lakh.

You must, however, invest in a plot early in your career by taking a land loan. And, based on how infrastructure develops in the area, you can decide on a suitable time to build.

It typically takes two years for you to build a house, including the time spent in getting the required approvals for building and the actual construction.

During the intervening years, you can fence the plot and plant trees, which will help secure your land. By building a home, rather than selling off the plot to buy a flat, you can retain the land value over a long term.

Buying to build

There may be a few differences between buying the land as an investment and buying with an intention of building a home. For one, if you plan to construct in a few years, a prudent choice may be to buy a plot where the social infrastructure, such as hospitals and shopping, are well developed.

This may be more expensive than buying in a far away place, but it may be safer and make every day living easier.

Also, plots close to the main road appreciate more compared to those that are a little far away. However, this may not be the best choice if you prefer peace and quiet. Instead, it may be better to buy in a street that is slightly away from the main road.

See the original post:
Buy, hold and build your own home

If you go

What: Boulder City Council joint study session with Planning Board to discuss development issues and the upcoming update to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Boulder Municipal Building, 1777 Broadway

Info: To read the memo introducing the study session, go to bit.ly/1svp8hu.

The hotel and apartment buildings, the new streets and bustling construction at 30th Street and Pearl Parkway are the result of a plan that has been on the books since 2007, and yet they seemed to take the public completely by surprise.

Solana Apartments resident Carrie Kroutil walks her dog Kona, who checks out a wood chip along the Pearl Parkway side of the complex. The Solana Apartments, 319 market-rate apartments in four buildings and more than 8,000 square feet of retail, are part of the Boulder Junction development. (David R. Jennings / Daily Camera)

Boulder Junction, with its three- and four-story facades where parking lots and low-slung warehouses once sat, became, for better or for worse, the face of a building boom that has caused excitement and angst in Boulder.

Fans of a more urban Boulder bike and transit advocates, supporters of affordable housing, city officials and planners, even many residents laud the projects as the fulfillment of a vision for combining workforce housing and dynamic public spaces with local and regional transit connections.

Advocates of slower growth see a plan that was misguided from the beginning because the curving stretch of railroad track was incompatible with a train station, because commuter rail to Denver looks ever more unlikely, because it would draw more people to live in a community that is already at its carrying capacity, because it would not address the jobs-population imbalance that causes some 60,000 people to come into Boulder to work every day and now is marring the city's eastern gateway with unappealing contemporary architecture.

More here:
Boulder Junction symbolic of divide over building boom

Every once in a while a piece of architecture comes along that is emblematic of a moment in a city's architectural and urban development. One Santa Fe, a 438-unit apartment complex in the arts district by Michael Maltzan Architecture, is that kind of building.

It is a fractal of contemporary Los Angeles architecture, the fragment that both contains and helps explain the whole.

One Santa Fe is not a flashy or gymnastic piece of architecture. It doesn't suggest a new design vocabulary for the 55-year-old Maltzan, who founded his firm in 1995.

What gives the $165-million project its unusual symbolic power is that it takes the generic stuff of a typical L.A. apartment building a wood frame slathered in white stucco and lifted above a concrete parking deck and expands it dramatically to urban scale.

One Santa Fe is just six stories tall, around the same height as the vast majority of new apartment buildings in Los Angeles, since by code going any higher requires trading wood for a more expensive steel or concrete frame. But it is a quarter-mile long wider than the Empire State Building is high and holds 510,000 square feet of interior space.

It is this combination that makes One Santa Fe's significance impossible to miss. The design takes banality and stretches it like taffy in the direction of monumentality.

It uses those 438 apartments to fill a pair of long train-like wings, which is fitting given that along its eastern flank the complex backs up to a rail yard and the concrete banks of the L.A. River. It makes the famously linear campus of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, directly across the street to the west, look stubby.

As they say in Silicon Valley, it scales.

One Santa Fe, with 20% of its units earmarked as affordable housing, has been a controversial building in the arts district since its construction began. Some have criticized it as wildly oversized or seen it as a kind of gentrification ocean liner, slowly drifting toward dock as an unmistakable symbol of the money pouring into this corner of downtown, which used to feel busy only when somebody was shooting a car commercial.

In fact the meaning of the project and its appeal, if you're willing to look at it a certain way springs directly from its practically Seussian width.

Read more here:
Maltzan's One Santa Fe apartment complex plays with notion of density

Developers looking for profitable apartment building sites are ranging out from Uptown and downtown Dallas.

One of the emerging construction markets is Dallas near east side, close to the central business district and Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas.

Trammell Crow Residential and Greystar Real Estate have two large apartment projects in the works on Ross Avenue and Live Oak Street.

Now another major apartment builder, Encore Multi-Family, has locked up a construction site in the same area.

Encore Multi-Family is working on plans for a five-story, 253-unit rental community at Swiss Avenue and North Peak Street.

The property is now occupied by a Bank of Texas building that will soon be replaced by one on Live Oak, said Brad Miller, president of Dallas Encore Multi-Family.

We like East Dallas, Miller said. I dont know if it will be the next Uptown, but it certainly has some promise.

Encore Multi-Family is just finishing construction on a 288-unit apartment community near UT Southwestern Medical Center on Maple Avenue.

The Maple Avenue corridor, like East Dallas, has been a growing market for apartment development.

We are really good in D-FW at expanding the definition of what is the core market and going into fringe areas, said Greg Willett, vice president with Carrollton-based apartment market analyst MPF Research. A much bigger share of the renters can actually afford the price point in these locations.

Original post:
Apartment developers head to East Dallas for new building sites

Video will begin in 5 seconds.

Stephen Goddard from the Owners Corporation Network explains why the court ruling shows government intervention is desperately needed.

A High Court ruling over building defects in a multimillion-dollar apartment complex in Chatswood will make it harder for owners to seek legal redress for shoddy apartments, warn experts.

In the final chapter of a two-year court battle, the High Court ruled on Wednesday that the owners corporation of serviced apartments in a 22-storey building in Railway Street could not sue the builder, Brookfield Multiplex, to recover the cost of fixing alleged defects in common areas.

The ruling comes beforenew building laws are due to take effect in NSWon December 1 that will also limit the rights of apartment ownersto seek redress for faults.

Owners Corporation Network chairman Stephen Goddard: There is a "gaping hole in consumer protection" for residential apartment owners. Photo: Supplied

Owners Corporation Network chairman Stephen Goddard, a strata lawyer, said the State Parliament needed to step in to address a "gaping hole in consumer protection" for residential apartment owners.

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He said "about 85 per cent" of new buildings contained defects. The court's reasoning, while sound, "underlined in red" the need for additional statutory protections for consumers.

The High Court found that contracts relating to the construction and sale of the apartments set out the circumstances in which the builder or developer was liable for defects in building work.

See original here:
High Court decision bad news for apartment owners

Work started this week on The Hadley, a luxury apartment project on the site that used to be occupied by True Value Hardware and The Islander Restaurant. The average size of the 219 units is 729 square feet.

image credit: Contributed Rendering

Island-owned Legacy Partners Residential, Inc., in a joint venture with The Resmark Companies Resmark Apartment Living division, announced the start of construction of The Hadley Apartments, a new apartment building community located within Mercer Islands Town Center.

The project is located on the corner of S.E. 27th Street and 76th Avenue S.E. The Hadley will be the only significant apartment project to start construction on Mercer Island in either 2014 or 2015, the developer said.

The Hadley will feature four stories of wood frame construction over a two-story concrete podium. The project includes 209 luxury open one and two-bedroom apartments, averaging 729 square feet. Some units will feature dramatic views of the Cascade Mountains, nearby Lake Washington and the downtown Bellevue cityscape.

Underground parking for 244 cars will be provided in addition to four commercial spaces totaling 9,200 square feet at ground level.

Working with the city, the developer agreed to set aside 13 units that will be affordable to residents making 70 percent of King County area median income. For example, a single person making $40,140 would qualify under this program for an affordable unit. Rents for these units range from $1,081 for a studio to $1,389 for a two-bedroom. Fifty-six parking spaces were set aside for walk off parking which would allow drivers to park their car for a time while they shop or run errands at nearby businesses.

The site sat vacant and fenced for the past year after The Islander Restaurant and True Value Hardware moved into new locations within the Town Center.

But plans for the project have been underway for four years or more.

According to the King County Assessors office, the former Hudesman property, a 32,000-square-foot parcel, sold on Nov. 8, 2011 for $8 million, about 10 percent over its assessed value.

Read the original post:
Construction begins on Legacy apartment project

A five-year effort to build a hotel, apartment building and parking deck on the North Side got a boost Monday from a $3 million state grant.

The $20 million development at East Ohio Street and Madison Avenue also will convert the former site of the Arc House alcohol treatment facility into a restaurant and banquet hall. The adjacent hotel would be a 120-room Comfort Inn. The apartment would have 36 units and the parking deck 300 spaces .

Construction could begin by spring or summer of 2015 and finish by summer 2016, said John Elash III, co-owner of October Development.

A second phase could include a second apartment building with from 36 to 48 units, and a row of single-family townhomes, Elash said.

The Northside Community Development Fund is helping finance the project. The two-acre site has been vacant since the Arc House closed about eight years ago.

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Read more from the original source:
Hotel, apartments planned for North Side

Twenty one cranes loom over the south bank of the River Thames from Battersea Power Station to the St. George Wharf tower. Here, in the biggest concentration of residential projects in London, developers are steaming ahead just as prices are starting to fall.

Homebuilding in central London doubled in two years as record-low interest rates and demand from overseas buyers drove up values at a pace not seen since 1987. Developers such as Chinas Dalian Wanda Group and U.K.-based Berkeley Group Holdings Plc were drawn to the Nine Elms district, where Malaysias Sime Darby Bhd. (SIME) is redeveloping the Battersea station as part of a plan to turn the neighborhood into a prime address.

As the apartment towers rise, the price increases that underpinned the construction boom have come to a halt. London home values fell month-on-month for the first time in two years in September, according to Hometrack, and developers such as Killian Hurley, chief executive officer of London-based Mount Anvil Group Ltd., dont see a return to red-hot growth soon.

Over the summer months, the champagne fizz went out of the market, said Hurley, whose company plans to develop London homes worth 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) by 2018. The madness has gone out of it, so its a lot more sustainable. People are becoming more discerning.

Expectations for home price growth in the capital are falling at the fastest pace since before the financial crisis, a survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors showed. Values rose in 1 percent of London postcodes in September, compared with 87 percent in February, Hometrack said Sept. 26. Further modest declines are likely, the research firm said.

Though prices climbed for most of this year, the pillars supporting the London market -- a cheap pound, record-low interest rates and the citys reputation as a haven for foreign buyers -- have been eroding for months.

U.K. financial officials damped domestic demand for homes by tightening affordability checks and restricting the number of high loan-to-income mortgages. Speculation about when the Bank of England will raise the benchmark interest rate from a record low of 0.5 percent is also causing uncertainty in the market. BOE policymakers, meeting this week, have been split over whether to keep the rate at that level.

Overseas buyers have seen prices rise because of a strengthening pound, as well as new levies such as a capital-gains tax on homes sold by people living abroad. Theyre also wary of the opposition Labour Partys plan to raise 1.2 billion pounds from a mansion tax if it gets into power after next years national election.

The Bloomberg U.K. Homebuilders Index is little changed this year, compared with a 37 percent gain in the same 10 months of 2013. Berkeley, which focuses on London and southeast England, was the worst performer in the 10-stock index, with a 15.7 percent decline. Sime Darby fell 4.6 percent this year in Kuala Lumpur, where its based.

Other homebuilders with projects in London include Taylor Wimpey Plc, which gained 3.7 percent this year. Barratt Developments Plc, the U.K.s second-largest homebuilder by market value, leads the homebuilders index with a 14 percent increase in 2014.

View post:
Champagne Fizz Goes Flat for London Homes: Real Estate

Kim Stephens

Detective Senior Sergeant Armitt briefs the media.

Police reportedly discovered a woman's dismembered body parts boiling in chemicals when they were called to a Queensland apartment on Saturday night.

A murder-suicide is believed to be behind the woman's grisly death, as well as that of a man whose body was found in a wheelie bin in nearby Dath Street, in the Brisbane suburb of Teneriffe.

Detectives were yet to confirm details revealed in a Channel Nine news report on Sunday night that alleged the woman's severed body parts were found in garbage bags and boiling in chemicals at the recently-constructed Commercial Road apartment complex.

Kim Stephens

Police at the murder scene.

Police made the grim discovery when they responded to requests for a welfare check about 9pm on Saturday.

A man who lived in the apartment with the woman fled the scene when they arrived.

Officers gave chase but discovered his bloodied body in a wheelie bin in a laneway beside the apartment complex a short time later.

See the original post:
Brisbane boiled body parts horror