Home-grown Bowers & Co. compiles best year
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Dan Sadowsky Contributing Writer
Be glad you work in Atlanta.
That's what Richard Bowers tells employees about his full-service real estate company's locale, where a strong economy combined with several maturing service lines produced the company's most prolific year to date.
In 1997, the 52-agent firm closed 550 deals encompassing 6 million square feet of real estate worth $400 million.
Though Atlanta's growth engine is sure to cool slightly in the coming 12 months, Bowers isn't expecting a precipitous drop in business at the city's largest independently owned commercial real estate firm.
"Right now we're envisioning '98 to be a good year," said Bowers, who established Richard Bowers & Co. in 1980. "We've got a lot of things in the pipeline."
Bowers cited the firm's integration of services and well-rounded growth in the build-to-suit, industrial and investment sectors as ingredients in the company's successful year.
"We are expanding and diversifying into more and more areas," he said, such as site selections of build-to-suits, relocation services and coordination of building plans and specifications.
The firm's biggest deal of the year was an industrial lease of 317,300 square feet on Sullivan Road to Hitachi Transportation System.
Bowers also singled out three build-to-suits: a 170,000-square-foot structure for IKON Office Solutions in Peachtree Corners; an 86,000-square-foot building for Data General in Duluth's Sugarloaf business park; and a 61,000-square-foot office for Pediatric Services of America in Westlake.
Other 1997 highlights, Bowers said, were leasing 110,000 square feet of office space in Southern Company Center (formerly 270 Peachtree), selling the 226-unit Lakeside City Homes apartment building in Buckhead and negotiating a 224-acre land deal in Paulding County.
Also, in May, Richard Bowers & Co. was selected to sell 15 acres in Midtown, part of the property holdings assembled by Swedish developer G. Lars Gullstedt in the late 1980s.
Bowers admitted he was surprised by the prodigious amount of new development in the metro area in 1997.
"It looks to me like we're going to absorb 4 million square feet of office space," he observed. "That's a little more than we had anticipated, but it's also kept the market more stable than it might have been."
In 1998, Bowers would prefer his firm be "more active" in land deals, increase its involvement in "larger and more high-profile" projects and bolster its marketing and research efforts.
He foresees "a little weakening" in the Buckhead, Interstate 285/Georgia 400 and North 400 markets, but said the loss of luster may be slight.
Downtown is primed to make "significant improvements" in its office portfolio, Bowers said, and he hopes to capitalize on that resurgence. Bowers & Co. plans to open a satellite office in the central business district in the next year.
At his company, Bowers hopes agents remain productive and operating at full capacity. "What occurs within our firm," he explained, "is that we seem to have people who have good years one year and poor years the next."
Overall, Bowers is optimistic about business prospects in 1998, but still crosses his fingers in hopes that broader economic trends remain positive.
Real estate, he said, "is a great business when the world goes well. It's not a very fun business when it doesn't."
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