Tenants of the Andover Richmond Apartments at 1301 Richmond Ave. near Graustark got notice today that the complex has been sold to an entity connected to investment company Behringer Harvard. One of them writes in: “I hope the Swamplot team can stay on top of this one since this 2.9 acre plot was earlier rumored to be on Trammell Crow’s Alexan radar. BH is a big REIT player but I can’t find much information about their history regarding redevelopment of acquired properties. I fear same fate will befall us here as those at Chateau on Greenbriar.”
Photo: Swamplot inbox
“Update on this corner: 
HAR’s pioneering ratings program for real-estate agents gets a bit of scrutiny from the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money magazine. Among the amazing stats: A mere 1.4 percent of all ratings on HAR come in at less than 4 stars; meanwhile, on Angie’s List 5.9 percent of real-estate-agent reviews have equivalent “mediocre to poor” scores, and on Yelp the number is 18.5 percent. Agents participating in the Houston Association of Realtors program earn an average rating of 4.94 out of 5. How do they chalk up such glowing reviews? “In reality, that 4.94 represents the average score of just 12 percent of the association’s agents. Another 7 percent participate in the rating program but don’t make their results public. The rest — some 17,000 real estate pros — don’t get rated at all, either by choice or because they haven’t completed enough transactions. The group surveys only customers who have closed deals, leaving out everyone who, satisfied or not, walked away. Those qualifications help explain why 
Residents of the Museum Gardens Apartments at 1123 Bartlett St. received notices taped to their front doors this week announcing that both the ownership and management of the 28-unit courtyard-style ensemble a couple blocks northwest of the Contemporary Arts Museum has changed. Contact info for the new owner matches that of real estate, construction and development, homebuilding, REIT, and mortgage firm Jetall Companies. A reader wants to know if Jetall might actually manage apartment complexes too — and asks “Is this lovely old complex a goner?” Photo: 
Long before he sold the land where the brand-new BBVA Compass Stadium for the Houston Dynamo soccer team now sits to the city, former council member and longtime land speculator Louis Macey had a deal ready to go that would have turned the vacant land into some sort of close-to-Downtown entertainment venue, Catie Dixon reports: “He ended up with six blocks around Bastrop and Texas, which 
Comment of the Day: Why There’ll Be No 1301 Richmond Redo at That Selling Price
“At 2.9 acres of physical land, and a purchase price of X (let’s assume priced to the dirt, likely $50/foot) they are in this deal for $6MM dollars day one.
If they wanted to be in the business of renovating (This IS income producing property, not pride of ownership single family housing) and retaining the character of the original complex, look at the math . . .
assuming a coverage ratio of 1/1, and average unit @ 1000 square feet, that gives you 120 units and 120,000 to renovate meticulously.
Assuming you would have to put $20,000 into each unit to justify buying this deal, you’ve now got $6MM + $2.4MM in renovation dollars, plus the fact you’ve got to kick everybody out of their unit to renovate it, do the work, then relet the unit. So, that puts you at 1 year of ZERO revenue, and whatever associated costs there are there.
For the sake of argument, your all-in is $10MM. THEN, after you have painfully restored a garden complex to the delight of yourself (I promise you the neighborhood won’t come out and bring you a check for your efforts to retain transient renters for another 50 years), here is your reality:
1) you would need to jump rents from $800/month to $1200 or greater, lease them all, then sell at a benchmark cap rate exit for such a non-conforming product, and that’s assuming you get your investors interested in the capital and scope in the first place, rather than buiding a 2.5:1 ratio development against $50 dirt
2) you would need to find an exit partner with just as much interest in running this model as you did creating it. institutional buyers that are willing to overlook the latest TCC Alexan product to buy a risky retrofitted low coverage ratio multi family deal in a market that has very little inventory of trailblazing like product. what i’m saying is this won’t exist, so you’re stuck with cash flow now. So . . .
you have $10MM in it, and if you are the greatest level of execution here, you are 7 years of revenue before you are whole on your initial investment, and you have a huge chunk of change parked in it, with zero recap abilities. if i run a bank, i’m not cashing you out of that mistake.” [HTX Rez, commenting on Report: Castle Court Midrise Planned for Andover Richmond Apartments Site]