Chapter 11

For several years, a nice hotel on the outskirts of Newton had been struggling. At one time, it was a Ramada Inn. It had 80 rooms, a large lobby, a cocktail lounge, and a large restaurant with an indoor pool and hot tub. In short, it was a typical Ramada hotel with full-service amenities. It didn’t perform well enough to retain the Ramada name, so a local name change occurred; however, for some reason, the hotel continued to slide into financial failure. Eventually, the owner closed the hotel and attempted to keep the cocktail lounge and restaurant open, but they, too, eventually closed. The building and nearly a city block lot went up for sale.

Many times, as Garrett and Kathy drove past the beautiful brick building (which still looked great on the outside), he would comment about the potential of the old building. One day he said, “I don’t understand why someone doesn’t buy that old building and convert it to apartments and retail space. They could put a convenience store and gas station on the corner and use the lobby for the station. I think a small, limited restaurant and bar would be a killer moneymaker, too. I mean, you have a captive audience from the apartments. Hell, you could even leave, say, 20 rooms for rent as a motel, and if they didn’t rent, you could always convert them to apartments as well. Sixty rooms out of the 80 converted to apartments, say, ten two-bedroom apartments and 20 one-bedroom apartments, would leave the 20 rooms to rent either by the week or as hotel rooms.

“Being conservative, the apartment rentals if the building were fully rented would come to about $17,000 a month. It would be difficult to determine the income you could generate from the bar, restaurant, convenience store, and fuel sales, but I am sure it would be substantial. If the owner didn’t want to operate the businesses himself, he could put a reasonable rental on the space and, say, take a percentage of the gross or profits. I really think that would be doable.”

After he stopped talking, Kathy said, “Well, it seems to me as if either you are the only one with that vision for the building, or there is something that stops others from doing it. It has been on the market much too long for some reason. I think you need to put your money where your mouth is, or at least check on the possibility.”

They were stopped at the traffic light beside the building when the conversation took place. Kathy grabbed her notebook and a pen and wrote down the agent’s phone number. As Garrett pulled away from the now green light, Kathy made the call to the listing agent. When she told him what she was calling about, you could hear the change in his voice. He almost begged her to meet him there. He said he could be there immediately if she could.

Kathy looked over at Garrett and said, “Honey, the agent says he can come meet us at the hotel right now if you want to do it. He sounds anxious here.”

Garrett sighed and said, “I suppose we could. We have all day, and our errands won’t take long. Okay, but I still think something is wrong; the building would have been sold by now. We need to be damn careful with this.”