Chapter 20: To the Future

We started presales in April. All the infrastructure was completed and the build-out of the commercial village on the ground floor was underway. The first level of condos was framed and our showpiece was ready to be decorated. I hired and trained an entire office staff for sales and management. We weren’t going to be able to count on the services of Loring Properties in the office in South Minneapolis for this. Gordon shared part of the office to focus on listing the property that people needed to get rid of in order to move to the Mill. This was quickly looking like it could become the most prestigious address in Minneapolis.

The covenants were firm in the complex. The exterior of the condos, facing the ‘streets’ were controlled by The Mill. Owners could not alter them beyond a restricted set of door and window decorations. Windows. That was another innovation. Apartments, condos, and hotels did not have windows facing the hallways. The Mill did. In designing the units as a community, we determined that social life would be just as important as private life. If you closed the door of your condo and left the world behind, you were no longer a part of the community. But with a window that you could look out of or draw the curtains on, you could maintain a feeling of oneness with your neighbors.

I was called in on a customer meeting to resolve an issue regarding unit size. The male part of the couple was a little older than I expected our target market to be, certainly in his early forties. He had black hair with just a few threads of gray, and a bushy mustache. He was introduced as Greg Forest and when he stood to greet me, I realized he was about the same height as I was. His partner, Chris, carefully not introduced as his wife, was a statuesque blonde at least six inches taller than him. Chris was almost hyper in her excitement about the condos and I guessed she was at least fifteen years younger than Greg.

“I want to be able to have parties,” Chris said. “I don’t mean noisy, raucous, loud parties, but like a Christmas party for friends. Everything is perfect, except the units are too small. I need a bigger kitchen and a much bigger living room. Greg needs a home office where he can handle his investments on days I keep him in bed too long to go to the office.” Greg moaned.

I picked up the vibe pretty quickly. Chris was the trophy wife for a guy who was pretty well off. Well, maybe she wasn’t actually the wife. She might just be the mistress. Either way, it was obvious that Greg was whipped. Anything she wanted, he was going to give her.

We had to look at a floor that was not completely framed. Of course, Chris wanted to move in tomorrow, but we were talking about a customization that went far beyond what was normal. I ended up selling them two units next door to each other. From the outside, they would continue to look like two units, but inside, they would be joined together. There would be only one large gourmet kitchen. The unit would have three baths. There would be two bedrooms on one side and Greg’s home office would be on the other side. Between would be the open living room/dining room area. The cost included the base cost of two full units plus the customization, bringing the sale to about four times a normal sale. I sure never expected a unit in this complex to sell for three-quarters of a million.

And it opened up another market for us.

The architects did a number of drawings that would be expandable for people like Chris and Greg who wanted all the maintenance-free living of a condo with the space of a single family home in the suburbs. We were all surprised at how many people fit that description. I just hoped they all had enough money stashed away to pay for the condos once the market started to tank around Y2K. Some of the units were even two stories high on the inside, even though they looked like normal units with facades on two different floors of the complex.

We were already beginning to see the artificial inflation of tech stocks, even in Minneapolis. Control Data had made no secret that they were looking for a white knight. 3M was redefining its product line to get out of magnetics as quickly as possible. Other tech companies with branches in the Twin Cities were expanding, contracting, and redefining themselves as desktop computing became the standard and the Internet started to really become accessible to all. It took people about ten minutes to set up an online business with the promise of limitless wealth.

My stockbroker was pretty pissed with me.

“Why don’t you just buy a seat on the exchange and do your own trading?” he demanded. “You are making ridiculous requests. Microsoft is dominating the market. Apple is in chaos. It makes no sense for you to be moving funds from Microsoft to Apple. And who is this company? I’ve never heard of them.”

“Adobe is going to be around for a long-long time. Just get me out of these short-term stocks. AOL is going no place fast. Cisco is on its way. I want everything transferred from AOL to Cisco. And get me out of MCI! I never authorized a buy for them.”

“Here!” my broker said. “Write down your instructions for buy and sell. And understand that I am advising you against such a heavy investment in technology stocks. You should have a strong balance. Energy stocks are the way to go. You should be moving money into Enron.”

I snorted.

“No, thanks. That business is dirty. If anyone ever examined their books, it would fall apart. And for your information, you should be focusing some of your corporate energy on developing an Internet presence. Before long, people will be buying and selling their stock over the Internet and brokers will be a backend necessity that get a flat rate rather than a commission.”

“You must be kidding. You are a real estate broker. Are you going to put everything online?”

“Hmm. That’s a good idea. Not right now. But you have to know that we’ve developed an entire sales system for condos that doesn’t include real estate brokers. We’re going to see a big uptick in FSBOs when real estate commissions hit 7%. I can well imagine some flat rate, non-commissioned agents entering the market when it crashes,” I said.

“Housing never crashes. The only safe investment is real estate. The key word is ‘real’. All this computing stock, none of it is real.”

“You don’t know how true that is,” I said as I finished writing my instructions. “Everything will change in the new millennium.”

“You are twenty-two years old,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone your age talk about a future so far ahead.”

“The future is as real to me as yesterday,” I sighed. “I think about it all the time.”

I was thinking about the future a lot lately. I’d been back in time for four years. I’d long since given up hoping I’d wake up back in my own body in a hotel room in California. Nor would I want to go back. I had love, home, and a purpose in this life. And I was going to make damned sure my family was taken care of.

Emily was almost four years old. And she had no friends.

That wasn’t completely accurate. I’d joined a new place called Gymboree and we went there for playdates twice a week. We’d met a few other young mothers and arranged to get our kids together to play as well.

But when I was growing up, all I had to do was step outside the door and I could see kids my age out playing and calling me to join them. Willa grew up in the same house and the neighborhood had begun to turn over about the same time my parents died. There just wasn’t that much difference in Fargo, North Dakota in twenty years. She had playmates and friends a minute away. Outside Emily’s front door there was a quiet, carpeted hallway. And I was concerned about school as well. I didn’t see a future staying in a condo in South Minneapolis.