Making, preserving history

When Doug Redford looks back on his first visit to Raleigh a couple of decades ago, he skips the scenery and focuses on the historic houses near his sister's Oakwood home.

Redford likes history. He tours the older parts of almost every town he visits. He says he likes "a sense of place, a sense of how other people lived in another time."

It's for the historic homes that Redford is coming back to Raleigh. But this time, he isn't just bringing historical curiosity. He's armed with years of development experience, the backing of a global real estate development firm and a mission: Buy 21 acres from the state and recast them with a dense mix of homes, shops and offices.

Redford will be the local face of LNR Property, which was tapped by the state to restore 25 homes, some of them historic, and develop up to 495 condominiums, townhouses and single-family homes, and 110,000 square feet of shops and offices on the six-block area fronting Blount Street, just north of the governor's mansion.

The deal, which needs approval of the governor and Council of State, would be the Miami Beach, Fla., company's first Triangle development, and probably not the last. LNR's commercial property group wants to open a Triangle office and compete for other projects.

"Raleigh has the advantage over a lot of cities in that it can remake itself into a live-work environment," Redford, a senior project manager at LNR, said during an interview last week in his top-floor office in the Briggs building on Fayetteville Street, where he works a few days each week away from his Atlanta office.

There's a momentum -- from people who want to live and work in downtown Raleigh -- that Redford thinks will lead to more redevelopment opportunities for LNR. That could include bidding to redevelop the 300-acre Dorothea Dix Hospital campus overlooking downtown, if that becomes an option to developers. And there could be other chances to build offices, shops or warehouses elsewhere in the Triangle.

"Just look around," he said. "There's a growth and there's a buzz and there's stuff going on."

LNR's move into the market doesn't worry many local developers. The area has been good to the hometown developers. They're accustomed to outsiders trying for a piece of the action.

"Our marketplace has had a history of a lot of folks coming in from out of town, thinking they could bring a new dimension of competition or sophistication," said Cary developer Gregg Sandreuter, who partnered with Cherokee Investment Partners of Raleigh, to bid on Blount. "Ultimately they find out that, actually, its a sophisticated little market and it's really hard to break in. LNR could be different."

LNR already has plans to convert a Charlotte office building to shops and homes. It made a splash in the Triangle, offering the state $20 million for the Blount property, bounded by Peace Street to the north, Lane Street to the south, Person Street to the east and Wilmington Street to the west.

The price is roughly one-third more than the bids of local development groups -- ones who know the market most intimately and who spent thousands of dollars trying to arrive at the right price.

LNR's payment structure -- in phases over four years instead of one lump sum like others -- makes the price more comparable to other bidders. Still, it was the top price.

"We were surprised," said Roland Gammon, a Raleigh developer who was a partner in a local group biding on Blount. "They had not been as visible in the due diligence process, yet they came in and blew everybody away, pricewise."