Inside Third & Bond: Week 123

It’s a big day for the Third & Bond bloggers when the loan officers come for a visit…To love development is to love working in a complex world that crosses vastly different disciplines, pulling and pushing other professionals in order to get something very real built. You have to relish the opportunity to swing from a number crunching phone conference with a banker, to a tough love conversation with a contractor, to a strategic pricing session with a broker. The developer’s day is a swirly, dizzying whirl of interconnecting parts and opposing actors. On the worst days that whirl is like a tornado, tearing up the best laid plans. On the best days, it’s a strong breeze that pushes the sails of the project along toward a sparkling sunset.

Last Thursday is a great example. Within the space of a few hours and within the same 100 square feet, we met with bankers, brokers, and buyers, while keeping an eye on construction.

Several higher ups from Wells Fargo were scheduled to visit Third + Bond at midday…

…Our construction loan is coming due and we’ve asked for an extension. Nothing atypical in that. The economic climate is atypical though so the higher ups at the bank wanted to make a personal visit to kick the tires. We were there a couple of hours ahead of the bankers, turning on the lights in the model residences, cranking open windows to let in the spring air. It was a cartoon blue sky today as perfect as we could have asked for. Just as we were piling Third + Bond chocolates into a bowl, three well-dressed strangers wandered into the kitchen of the model. Hey! We shouted, hey you! Just before we tackled the intruders to protect a Pratt student’s prototype chair from being taken, one of our brokers from Corcoran appeared. The strangers were potential buyers concluding an appointment. Chocolate goes a long way to making up for near-assaults.

After plumping the pillows in the models, we did a round through the rest of the project to check on the status of construction. Hardwood floors installed, check. Approve aluminum edge for vanity, check. Insulation on pipes, send reminder—check.

Then it was time to greet our guests from Wells Fargo, at least one of whom had come from San Francisco for the debatable pleasure of touring lendees’ condo projects in New York City. We started across the street to get a view of the project as a whole. Our goal was to show Third + Bond in its best light so that they’d put Third + Bond on their list of no-brainer extensions and save the brain power for some of the hard-knocks projects we’ve all seen out there. Third + Bond pretty much speaks for itself and what it has to say is getting easier to hear every day that we get closer to the completion of construction.

To round off the tour for the bankers, we invited our brokers to join us. Leslie Marshall and Jim Cornell from Corcoran answered rapid fire questions from the bankers about the state of the market in general, where buyers are coming from, predictions for absorption, what kinds of amenities do or don’t matter in a project like this, and more. They were also able to say that despite the fact that we aren’t actively marketing, there were 2 offers on apartments earlier that morning. (Even AFTER we ambushed them!) They noted that the word on the street is open houses are busy all over the city and offers are being made. Given the inquiries and select appointments they’ve been handling, they expressed optimism about the spring opening of our sales office just a few weeks away.

For a banker who is judging the viability of a condo project, seeing its proximity to completion, getting a sense of the neighborhood and quality of the finishes, and hearing from the brokers are all data points to how they should handle the loan going forward.

We made sure to offer them some Third + Bond chocolates, too.

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Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-122 [Brownstoner]

Our legal fine print: The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.