 | The News & Observer
October 29, 2000 Roland Gammon has always liked cities - even when he couldn't afford to live in one.
When he was in college at Carolina back in the '60s, Gammon and his girlfriend would camp on the outskirts of such cities as Washington, Boston and Baltimore to save money for a night on the town. "I'd change into a coat and tie in my tent," Gammon said. "I got to thinking cities are a pretty cool thing."
Gammon eventually turned that fascination with urban life into a career. As a developer, he has spent 18 years buying land in downtown Raleigh and putting up offices, apartments and condos, often in areas others considered a risk. He was the first to realize that a new market was evolving for young professionals and empty-nesters who wanted to live near their jobs, clubs and restaurants and didn't want to mow grass. So when others wouldn't risk it, he converted an old mill building on Capital Boulevard into the Cotton Mill, with 50 condominium units. Since the project was completed four years ago, about 400 homes, condos and apartments have gone up or been announced in the downtown or its fringe. Though that is only a tiny fraction of the total number of homes built in the Triangle in four years, civic boosters and city planners consider it significant. They have long believed that getting more people to live downtown is a key to reviving it. Gammon plays down his role in downtown Raleigh's comeback. "I haven't picked up the banner of trying to revitalize downtown," Gammon says. "I'm exploring business opportunities." But George Chapman, the city planning director, said Gammon's contribution to downtown redevelopment outweighs the profits made from his projects. "Roland has been a real pioneer," Chapman said. "He's been more visionary than a lot of other developers. He's put back in more than he's taken out." Although Gammon has had significant success in recent years, that has not always been the case. Nearly two decades ago, on his first attempt to reach those same empty-nesters by building condominiums in West Raleigh, the project lost lots of money. "I was ahead of it," Gammon says, matter-of-factly, alluding to the recent interest in living near downtown. A hammer in his hand: The 6-foot- 2-inch Gammon started in construction early, helping his dad build shelters and barns on the Edgecombe County tobacco farm where he grew up. He came to the Triangle to study accounting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But he didn't seek a career in business. Prompted by his fondness for cities, he enrolled in architecture school at the N.C. State University School of Design. He paid his NCSU tuition by painting houses. After graduating in 1976, he formed a small renovation company and spent the next six years building decks, screen porches and additions onto homes. "I liked building things," Gammon says. "I always had a hammer in my hand." But Gammon wanted to dream up his own projects, and he turned to a favorite area - downtown - for his first development. Some run-down apartments and townhouses in the 100 block of Glenwood Avenue were for sale. Gammon and his partners renovated the buildings into offices and quickly leased them out. That project, Cooper Square, was one of the first successes in the area known today as Glenwood South, which has recently become a hub for night life with its restaurants and clubs. Gammon says he thought Cooper Square offices would be in demand because they offered free parking for tenants and customers and were centrally located. But he also saw opportunity in an area most developers had shunned as too risky. Since then, taking the unconventional approach has almost become a trademark. Carter Worthy, a longtime friend, said Gammon is a man of contrasts, largely private and routinely all-business. "It's not going to be a long chat if you call him," Worthy says.
But Gammon is always thinking about deeper subjects such as the long-term consequences of development, Worthy says, even if he's not talking about them. "He'll get into really long, philosophical conversations about development policy," says Worthy, a commercial real estate broker. " ... He's interested in the bigger picture of how do communities sustain themselves. He was talking about issues people now call smart growth long before that phrase was coined - how do you build something that lasts?" A costly gamble: After Cooper Square, Gammon decided to build a type of housing just being introduced to Raleigh - condominiums. He bought a small tract of land on Oberlin Road near the Hayes Barton neighborhood and built eight luxury units, hoping they would appeal to upscale residents who didn't need their big homes anymore because their children were gone. He priced the units at $225,000, waited for buyers and kept waiting. Even after he lowered the price to $175,000, below cost, it still took two years to sell the condos.
Today, those units don't look like a bad investment; one sold last year for $363,000. But the losses temporarily soured Gammon on condo projects, and he began another office project that would fare even worse. He bought a former textile mill, Pilot Mills in the Mordecai section near downtown, and secured a five-year lease from the state for most of the space. "It was like hitting a home run in the world series in the bottom of the ninth," Gammon remembers.
But the economic downturn of the late 1980s hit, and suddenly lenders wanted a 10-year lease. The state wouldn't agree to a longer lease, and the old mill was repossessed. Gammon had to borrow money to stay afloat. His luck changed in 1993 when a landowner wanted to sell a small tract on Edenburgh Road near the Carolina Country Club. "People said I ought to do more condos," Gammon recalls. "I said I'd rather have a root canal." But he reconsidered and decided the time might finally be right for a project like the one he had first tried on Oberlin Road. He agreed to buy the property for eight luxury condos contingent upon selling half of them in advance. All the units were sold before the project was finished. The formula: Gammon not only made a profit, he found a formula for success he has used ever since: All property purchases are contingent upon preselling a substantial number of units, which minimizes his financial risk. When the Cotton Mill building went up for sale for $1 million, Gammon bought it contingent upon selling 60 percent of the units in advance. "The risks were time and marketing expenses," Gammon says. "I thought it was worth the risk." He was also betting on demand for downtown housing. The Cotton Mill was sold out before it was completed. "I had a sense from the media and other areas of the country that there was a movement to urban living," Gammon says, rattling off the names of movies in which main characters were living downtown. Gammon has gone on to become one of the region's most prolific condo developers, building hundreds of units across the Triangle. He's now planning 71 row houses in Chapel Hill's Meadowmont - 3,800-square- foot monsters costing up to $750,000, perhaps the most expensive attached homes ever built in the region. Many of his projects were downtown, including 12 condos on Martin Street in the Warehouse District, the 48-unit Governors Square in Mordecai and the recently finished Park Devereux with 46 units overlooking Nash Square. All the condos were sold before the projects were finished, a sales record that did not go unnoticed by other developers. "There are many people who doubted the Cotton Mill would be a financial success, but Roland foresaw it would be and had the tenacity to make it happen," says Gregg Sandreuter, who recently bought a 1.1-acre parking lot on Dawson Street just north of Park Devereux and plans a condo project. Sandreuter continues: "And starting with the Cotton Mill and Martin Street and Park Devereux, Roland went on to demonstrate that the Cotton Mill was not an aberration but a real growing market." George Roland Gammon III: Age: 54
Born: Tarboro
Position: Owner of White Oak Properties, which has developed hundreds of condominiums across the Triangle and led the downtown housing movement in Raleigh.
Employment history: 1982 to present, owner of White Oak Properties; 1976 to 1982, owner of Gammon Design/Build, a small renovation company; 1970-1973, middle-school mathematics and science teacher in Bailey and Greensboro.
Education: Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969; Master of Architecture from the N.C. State University School of Design in 1976.
Hobbies: Golfer, avid reader. Currently reading biography of Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert; just finished two-part biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.
Family: Wife, Jill Gammon; son, Jed; daughter, Emily.
Caption:
Roland Gammon sits in front of one of his newest projects, Park Devereux overlooking Nash Square.
Staff Photo By Swayne B. Hallc photo
Copyright 2000 by The News & Observer Pub. Co. |
