Your parents are sure to tell these stories: "I remember when I was growing
up, there was nothing out here, nothing but a cow pasture."
You've heard it before, right? But each place we work, live or go to school
was nothing before a developer came along and built on it.
You may have heard of Miami Beach. It's a pretty populated place with thousands
of hotels, condominiums, houses, restaurants and gas stations. People walk
the concrete sidewalks. Some visit the beach.
Before developers came, Miami Beach was simply a swamp. This is the ultimate
success story of a developer, says Daren Fluke. He consults with developers
to help their projects along.
Developers who can transform a community for the good have a lot to be
proud of. But on the flip side, there are those developments that don't do
so well at all.
You might pass them every day. Maybe it's in the form of empty strip malls
or shopping centers or properties with thousands of "for sale" signs on the
front lawn. These are the risks of development.
You must know your area and sell your property. Shaun McCarthy knows selling.
He works as a real estate agent and develops a few projects on the side in
Louisiana. He knew when he saw the plans for Metairie Club Gardens, a planned
gated community in New Orleans, that the area would be hot.
Far from being vacant, though, the land where the luxury homes would be
built was occupied by cheap hotels and blighted storefronts. The area was
also next to one of the fanciest suburbs in the city and jutted a golf course.
For this project, McCarthy did not front the money himself. Investors bought
out the current hotel and store owners. The crumbling buildings were razed,
the neon was dismantled and the gates for the fancy community were erected.
At first, the selling was slow. You get scared when that happens, says
McCarthy. But then the properties started going at the rate of three a month.
One owner bought two land plots and built a magnificent mansion on both.
Though McCarthy was not the developer on this property -- he is the real
estate agent -- he has developed other city projects, turning old homes and
multi-family properties into luxury residences.
McCarthy stresses to those interested in developing that they must understand
the real estate business first. If you can't sell, you definitely can't make
your money back on projects.
Planning is another component of land development. While it takes cash
for a developer's vision to evolve, it takes planning to make the development
work.
Marnie Skobalski works as a planner. She brings the development closer
to its goal. "Before I knew anything about planning, I thought the form of
cities and towns just sort of evolved haphazardly," she says.
"Once I found out that there are actually people whose job it is to plan
the future of our communities, I knew right away it is what I wanted to do.
The idea of having a job where I could participate in determining where people
will live, work, shop and play sounded very exciting."
Skobalski works with two different clients: landowners with an interest
in developing their properties and municipal governments who need help working
on a wide variety of planning projects.
"For example, a landowner may hire a planning consultant to help them develop
their property into a residential subdivision, a commercial project, a golf
course resort, or they may have an old building they would like to rehabilitate
and turn into a new use," she says.
"A municipal government may hire a planning consultant to help them formulate
a plan for the whole community, for a neighborhood, perhaps for a waterfront
area or a historic area," she explains.
Jim Siepmann is a developer who likes to be very involved in his projects
from start to finish, including the planning and selling components. In his
case, the family business started with horses. Siepmann's grandfather had
plenty of horses.
"When you have horses, you tend to accumulate a lot of land," he says.
One day, the hobby of horses became a business. The land they held increased,
so the family decided to develop on it and sell the residential properties
developed. This was the era before zoning, says Siepmann.
Fifty years later, Siepmann carries on the business that his grandfather
and father started. The Siepmanns don't develop just anything, though. "We
do conservation development," he says.
That means that rather than breaking one piece of property into very large
plots, they divide up the land into smaller plots in order to keep the natural
landscape intact. Siepmann doesn't come in and uproot trees, drain ponds and
squash the natural scenery. The residential plots work into what's already
there, he says.
There can be a lot of conflict and tension in land development, between
negotiating money for a purchase or making the community see your vision.
But there is something to like about the job, he says.
"It fascinates me to build things...to take something from nothing and
create it, especially on parcels that are nothing. I enjoy the creativity.
I like the selling of it, too. And I love dealing with communities. They throw
up bumps in the road, but if you can work through those, it can be really
exciting," says Siepmann.