|
It's been bumper to bumper traffic through a construction zone in central Omaha but no work has been done on the project for a week. The problem area is around 78th and Cass and a busy Cass Street has been reduced to two lanes. On a dry sunny day, neighbors wonder why the work is on hold. Crane Coffee manager Sheri Kaminski says, "The he inconvenience of getting off the street and coming into Crane Coffee, it's kind of hurt our business a little bit and we're hoping it's done quickly." The Metropolitan Utilities District hired a contractor to push new pipes under the Papio Creek but MUD is worried that real mud seeped into the gas lines and the project has been shut down for a safety check. MUD Vice President Ron Bucher says, "We got to clean the pipe out.
El Paso-based Hunt Building Company was ranked among the nation's top builders and owners of multifamily units by Multifamily Executive magazine and Builder Magazine. In the rankings, Hunt was listed No. 15 among multifamily builders with 2,525 starts in 2005, and No. 27 among owners of multifamily units, with 24,700 units. Hunt has many projects building housing for military families. "As the Department of Defense moves toward public-private ventures, we see continued significant opportunities for Hunt in those areas," Woody Hunt, Hunt Building chairman, stated in a press release. A Hunt project at Buckley Air Force Base, Colo., was raided by federal immigration agents Sept. 20, and 122 undocumented construction workers were arrested. .
Erik Blitvich, meet tough love, real estate style: If you're trying to move a property in a slow market, you're not only going to have to clean it, you also might have to stage it, too.
Staging is the practice of dressing up, or sometimes dressing down, a home to make it more appealing to buyers. As a business, it's a relatively young field that's gaining a foothold in the Chicago area as anxious sellers look for a way to attract that increasingly scarce commodity: a sales contract.
"When there's a ton of houses on the market, you have to set yourself apart and help the buyer's imagination kick in," said North Side real estate agent Beth Wexner, who routinely uses stagers to help make her listings look more like builders' models than places where people live.
A former Seattle police officer who resigned from the department two years ago to fight the war in Iraq died Tuesday after being in the country for just a few days. Maj. Guyton "Guy" Barattieri arrived in Iraq on Saturday for a contracting job. The 36-year-old worked as a patrol officer in the Seattle Police Department's South Precinct from March 2001 until August 2004. Barattieri was an Army Special Forces reservist who was about to be promoted, his mother said. "He was the best of the best," Barbara Barattieri said over the phone Wednesday from her home in Cincinnati. "We are just having a hard time dealing with this. He was one of these guys this could never happen to." After graduating from West Point in 1992, Barattieri served in numerous positions in the Army, his mother said.
|
