Developer Burt turns focus on his hometown

ALBANY — One of the tenets Albany developer Pace Burt has built his reputation on is the concept of timing.

“You anticipate, you do your work and you prepare,” Burt said. “But everything’s about timing, about being in the right place at the right time.”

Burt, now the go-to developer across the Southeast — in cities like Greenville, Mobile, Spartanburg, Columbus, Asheville — when it comes to turning once-historic but long forgotten landmarks into residential gems that have sparked redevelopment renaissances in the cities he’s chosen to work his magic, has decided the time is right to turn his attention toward his hometown.

Pending approval by the Albany City Commission, Burt has an option to purchase the downtown Albany Heights building. If city leaders OK his plan, he has a unique concept that will bring the long-elusive residential element to Albany’s downtown. He has his eye on a legacy-building project that he says will bring millions of dollars in development money to a city whose redevelopment efforts have languished now for decades.

And, as fate would have it, it was Burt’s rare attendance of a civic club meeting that planted a seed that could bear the fruit of a new downtown Albany.

Timing.

“I usually am able to make only one Rotary Club meeting a month because I’m out of town on business at least three days a week,” Burt said. “I happened to be at a meeting when a gentleman (Hayes Cook) was talking about development of the Paul Eames Sports Complex. It’s been my experience that real development in a community starts with its downtown, so I asked this gentleman some questions, some hard questions.

“Now (developer) William Hancock was also at that Rotary meeting, and he later told me doesn’t get to go as often as he’d like either. But we were both there, and after the meeting William called me. He said he saw how passionate I was about downtown, and then he said something that caught me by surprise. He said, ‘You need to do something in downtown Albany. You live here, I live here, it’s time we both did something downtown.”

Burt was initially caught off guard, but he quickly turned the conversation on Hancock.

“I asked him, ‘What’s out there?’” Burt said. “He told me that the old Albany Hotel was available, and I told him that I’d read in the paper that a group (Novin Construction) out of Atlanta had bought the property,” Burt said. “William mentioned that that deal had fallen through. He told me I should call (Downtown Albany Manager) Latoya Cutts.

“I called Latoya, and the first thing she said to me was, ‘I was hoping you’d call.’”

Cutts acknowledged that the call from Burt was exactly what downtown needed.

“A downtown district like ours will never be redeveloped depending solely on money from the public sector,” Cutts said. “That’s why getting involvement from people like Dr. (Tripp) Morgan (who is building a craft brewery downtown) and from Pace Burt is so important. When your hometown people see the value of redevelopment, then you’ll see growth.”

Burt talked with Cutts about the Pine Avenue property, and the more he talked, the more intrigued he became. With the help of his regional manager Tiffany Paulson, he’s put together an RFP that he presented to city officials mid-week. Cutts, City Manager Sharon Subadan and others on the city’s management team are evaluating the proposal in advance of presenting it to the Albany City Commission.

The proposal is an interesting one, no doubt unlike any officials have seen before.

“This is not a project whose success will be gauged on income, on profit,” Burt said. “It’s a project whose success will be measured on the impact it has on this community. This is my opportunity to pay back a community that I love, a community that has been good to me and my family.”

Among the concepts Burt has for development of the former Albany Heights building:

— Rent-free space for (as of now) three retailers that have agreed to be a part of the project. One will be a restaurant, two others “health-related” companies;

— Ownership by a diverse group (“It will be representative of our community, black and white”) who will not be asked to invest money in the project but will instead be asked to promote the concept;

— Free residency to a sworn law enforcement officer, whose presence on the premises will increase security;

— Larger, loft-style apartment units (reducing the existing 74 units to 64), each of which will be equipped with amenities such as 55-inch flat-screen televisions and new appliances;

— Rent in the $400 to $450 range (“for units that would typically rent for $800 or more”);

— An immediate turnaround in construction (“We’ll start construction within 30 days of the city’s approval”).

“Most people who do this kind of work want a significant up-front investment,” Burt said. “Our proposal asks for a 20 percent (of construction cost), 0 (percent) interest loan that we wouldn’t ask for until the city sees our work. We’re proposing that the loan not exceed $500,000, and we’d pay the loan back in six years.”

As city officials consider Burt’s proposal, they no doubt will check out his track record. They most likely will come away impressed. His projects include:

— Construction of a complex in Greenville that had seen only 47 apartments completed in the previous 20 years that sparked more than a billion dollars worth of development in the next 10 years;

— More than $30 million in new apartments in Spartanburg after Burt and his team built the Church Street Lofts;

— Construction of the Biltmore Village in Asheville, after which more than $400 million in projects are either completed or under construction;

— The Swift Mill development in Columbus that preceded $40 million in new development.

“I’m not saying that I’m the Pied Piper or that the projects I did were what started all of this new construction,” Burt said. “But it is a fact that a rising tide lifts ships. In any successful development, somebody’s got to be first. We’ve had a knack for anticipating market trends and then creating a buzz in these areas.

“Again, it’s all about timing.”

Albany Mayor Dorothy Hubbard is one city official who thinks the timing is right for Burt’s plan.

“We can talk about redevelopment all we want, but what it takes is private citizens — like Mr. Burt and Dr. Morgan — to show the kind of confidence that their projects generate,” Hubbard said. “When you have the people who live in a community with enough confidence to invest their own money, that’s the kind of thing that sparks real investment.”

There will be those, Burt knows, who’ll question his decision to get involved with redevelopment in Albany. That’s nothing new.

“There are always naysayers,” the developer said. “When we started working on our first project in Greenville, there was a little restaurant that I’d go to every morning to eat breakfast. Since I was the new guy, some of the locals came over and asked me what I do. I told them I was renovating the apartments downtown.

“These folks laughed and said, ‘Boy, ain’t nobody going to live down here.’ That’s the same thing I heard at Marsh Landing when we did Phase 1 here in town. We started on Phase 3 a little while ago.

“What I’ve learned over the years is that you can create a market by anticipating where things are going and getting in there at the right time. I guarantee you this: If the city approves our project and we move forward with our plans, within the next three years you’ll see at least $4 million in new properties being developed downtown.”

It’s all in the timing.