The End IS In Sight, At Long Last

The last time I posted about Project Wilmington I was largely lamenting the difficulties we were encountering with that city's badged inspectors and how they were dogging us. We're now about seven weeks over schedule almost exclusively because of bureaucratic delays but the home stretch is finally upon us. The GC says they will be finished by this coming Wednesday with the plumber, electrician, and painters all due to complete their finish work by then. The cleaning people are tentatively scheduled for Friday after the bedroom carpets go in on Thursday. Hopefully, we'll officially get the property on the market by Friday (and sell it by Monday....).

This was a productive week as the new hardwood was virtually completed, I worked out some stress doing some landscaping there myself (yea, I know...) and made some local friends as the female populace kept coming by to congratulate us on a beautiful project in their midst (hopefully one of them knows someone who wants to move into their neighborhood!). Lot's of "oh, my Gods" all around... Music to my ears!

As this project comes to a close and we ponder where it's taken us we are planning a project wrap-up dinner meeting to review the lessons learned and how we'll apply those lessons to future projects. For example, we WILL announce at the intimate event that this was our LAST Wilmington project. That's for sure. We also will come away with a deep appreciation and understanding for our new GC, and the lesson learned with them that we certainly can feel comfortable doing projects with far more distressed properties than we were comfortable with before. We've also learned that it's critically important to manage ALL minute details, both financial and logistical, regardless of outside interference (like L&I delays).

But the best part of this project drawing to a close is the renewed optimism in the Wilmington market for getting it relatively quickly sold and at the number that is rattling around in my head. (I will recap all the numbers AFTER the deal is completed for all to conjure, but not until then.) While the real estate market in Chester County is not nearly as depressed as many of the widely publicized disaster areas like California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, I was becoming increasingly concerned about the state of the Wilmington market as I saw a slowdown affecting Philadelphia. It's a natural assumption that as a recession picks up steam (guess that's an oxymoron) the hardest hit will be those in urban areas and Philly's economy appears to be drawing to a halt in many regards. Wilmington though, lately, very lately, appears to not be getting hit as hard in the real estate market is the perception I had for Philly. But we'll see VERY, VERY soon. Stay tuned.