May 20th Day 4-San Antonio

Texas Real Estate Tour-Day 4
For Day 4 we had a fun filled day planned of real estate. The projects we visited were the Friedrich Lofts, Alamo Architects, met with Marty Wender, and met with the San Antonio River Authority about some things going on the second half of the River Walk.
Our first stop on Thursday was the Friedrich Lofts where we met with Patrick Sheer the real estate broker for the project. The Friedrich Lofts is a project that started about 10 years ago and like most projects that started in within the last decade lost funding during the economic downturn. The Friedrich Project is on the eastside of San Antonio built off of the old Friedrich Refrigeration building. This project is meant to be a new development into one of the cities more troubled urban areas. The property is currently for sale for 8 million, since the start of the project the only thing they have done is place couple of nicely finished out offices in the project. There are no lofts or any other retail in the project, so far.. The city has started some revitalization of the surrounding area with TIF’s. The project has a great location, but some of the challenges I see are in the building itself. There will have to be a lot of major reconstruction to make the property conducive for condos and for retail spaces. I can see this project becoming very expensive.
Our second stop was the Alamo Architects building. This was a great design in how to reconstruct and reuse building materials for LEED certification. This project was LEED Silver. One thing that stood out about this project was that they used a lot of the reused old materials and parts from the warehouse that was acquired before they constructed their building.
For lunch we met with Marty Wender who is a large scale land developer in San Antonio area. He is responsible for such projects as Crown Ridge, Western Hills, bringing a highway through west San Antonio, getting Sea World on the west of San Antonio, bring Microsoft and several other companies to San Antonio. He told us the three things that lead to the expansion to Northwest San Antonio were the Medical Center, USAA, and UTSA. Marty spoke to us about his projects, but we learned much more from him. What I learned is needed to survive in real estate are experience, sell, politics, and vision.
Our last visit of the day was to San Antonio River Authority project of the extension of the Riverwalk. This was a perfect example of a joint project between different entities city, county, and private money coming together to what is now a great addition to the San Antonio Riverwalk. This had many aspects and really showed off the beauty of San Antonio. The good thing about this project is the fact that it sprawled more development around river which adds to the appeal of the area and San Antonio. One goal of development should be increase development around the initial project. This has happened with the case of the river project. We had a great day in San Antonio seeing some great projects. We learned that San Antonio is a city that is still growing and I believe it can be a hot spot for development for years to come.