Rough Road To Easy Street
An area developer is looking to dust off plans for the $90M, luxury Easy Street condo unit in Carefree. But the path to getting a construction loan will be anything but. (Irony is not just a way to describe tainted water.) Butte Development's Ed Lewis tells it will be an uphill battle to get construction financing for the mothballed project by year's end. But the plans are grand: Ed hopes to lure the Phoenix Art Museum for a 10k SF satellite location (part of its 50k SF of retail), with the city's support. He'll clearly need presales, but the percentage will depend on how much equity he's willing to put up.
Not that he's worried about the target audience for the 2,500 SF condo units, which will cost an average of $1M each. “Our client prospects for this are from North Scottsdale and Cape Creek, where there are more than 20 private country clubs,” Ed says, and the project will focus on empty nesters or residents looking to downsize. Overall, he says the timing is right to restart Easy Street, because if he waits until the market is really strong and booming, he may miss the peak by the time the units are ready for sale.
