Underwater by Ryan Dezember

Author:Ryan Dezember
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

At what was to become Alabama’s biggest residential building, construction ground nearly to a stop.

The rise of Brett/Robinson’s 1.9-million-square-foot Phoenix West II was stalled. Only about half of the condo tower’s 358 units had sold. Gene Brett, one of the company’s principals, went to the Orange Beach City Council to ask a favor.

The building was five stories short of its targeted thirty-one. Brett/Robinson didn’t finance its towers. Instead of accepting letters of credit, the firm required preconstruction buyers to pay in installments, a fifth of the sales price at a time. The flow of cash, instead of borrowed money, funded construction of the seventeen towers the company had erected along Alabama’s beaches. The building wasn’t in danger of being repossessed, but the top floors couldn’t be built until more condos were sold. “The only thing we can do to finish that building is to sell it,” Brett said.

Brett/Robinson was doing all it could, he said. Open houses were hosted seven days a week. The firm started a video blog for publicity. A camera would follow the seventy-three-year-old as he ambled around the construction site in a hard hat, joshing with workers and coaxing compliments out of buyers. Prices were slashed. Instead of pumping concrete up the tower, the firm switched to the cheaper but more cumbersome method of hoisting it up by the bucketful.

The massive project had gotten off to a rough start when Hurricane Katrina knocked out the facility in Mississippi that had been forming the tower’s twenty-two hundred concrete pilings. Each concrete stick was seventy-five feet long and it took a while to line up another place from which to procure them. Delay caused Brett/Robinson to miss the market on its biggest building yet. “We’re fighting for our lives on the building there,” Brett told the council members. His request was simple yet extraordinary, and also a little weird. He wanted permission to hang a three-hundred-square-foot banner from the unfinished skyscraper to advertise that there were units for sale.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.