LIUNA, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said Monday that it has entered into a second agreement with the Virginia Community College System to train state residents for jobs related to a new pipeline project.
The agreement aims to put people to work on the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which will distribute natural gas through pipelines running from West Virginia to Virginia. LIUNA said in a news release that as many as 2,400 skilled workers will be needed in Virginia for the project. Work is expected to begin this year and continue for about 18 months.
“Local residents will have the opportunity to learn skills leading to good construction careers, and the region will benefit both economically and environmentally from the benefits of clean natural gas,” Dennis Martire, vice president and mid-Atlantic regional manager of LIUNA, said in a statement.
In January, the union and college system announced a partnership to train Virginia residents for similar jobs building the Atlantic Coast Pipeline energy project, a 600-mile project that will stretch from West Virginia through parts of Virginia and into eastern North Carolina.
Under the agreement between the union and the college system on the Mountain Valley pipeline, at least a fourth of workers hired will live in the vicinity of the project, which will run from the West Virginia line through Southwest Virginia. The community college system will help identify potential workers and, in a joint venture with LIUNA, will assist in training them. According to the union, the project will be built by contractors who have committed to a $20 hourly wage, a $45 per day per diem and free family health care.
Workers assigned to the project will include existing members of LIUNA Local 980, based in Roanoke, as well as new hires identified through the college system’s schools in the counties of Giles, Craig, Roanoke, Montgomery Franklin and Pittsylvania. This area also includes the cities of Radford, Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Rocky Mount, Roanoke, Salem and Danville.
LIUNA’s mid-Atlantic Region includes more than 40,000 workers predominantly in the construction industry in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, Virginia and North Carolina.
Norfolk-based S. L. Nusbaum Realty Co. has joined forces with another local company, Atlantic Dominion Distributors, on a $35 million apartment community in Virginia Beach.
Work began in December on the 282-unit Mezzo Apartment Homes, a gated community on Virginia Beach Boulevard that will offer multiple floor plans and upscale amenities.
One-, two-, and three bedroom units are planned with lake views, along with studio apartments. According to Nusbaum, rents will range from $1,075 to $1,750.
Amenities will include secured access, a clubhouse, swimming pool, fitness center, business center, outdoor grilling area, recreational activity area (bocce, corn hole, etc.) fire pits, dog park, private garages and a car wash facility.
Green building features, such as Energy Star windows and appliances and sensor lights in bathrooms and closets, are also part of the package.
The project’s location on Virginia Beach Boulevard next to Haynes Furniture and across from St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church and School is close to retail, restaurant, employment options, and the Interstate 64/264 interchange.
Hoy Construction will serve as the project's general contractor. Other members of the development team are TS3, architect; MSA PC, civil engineer; and Details Ltd., interior design services. Siska Aurand Landscape Architects Inc. provided landscape, pool and outdoor amenity design services.
The completion timetable for Mezzo is 2020, with the first units available for occupancy in the first quarter of 2019.
This is the sixth year that Virginia Business has published a list of the state’s Most Influential Virginians. We keep the list to 50 people, with new faces coming on each year and other people rotating off.
What do we look for? Entrepreneurs. Visionaries. People who build structures and communities. Our focus is on business leaders who reside in Virginia. Virginia Business does not consider elected officials or college and university presidents.
In many cases, these leaders serve on state and community boards, putting their expertise — and sometimes their money — to work far beyond the boardroom.
One of the new faces this year is Buddy Rizer, a man known as the dean of data centers in Virginia. Over the past decade, Rizer has helped position Northern Virginia as the No. 1 data center in the U.S., bringing jobs and new tax revenue to Loudoun County.
Lynne Doughtie also makes her debut. She’s the chairman and CEO of KPMG U.S. — one of the world’s leading professional services firms. Doughtie graduated from Virginia Tech where she remains active on several advisory boards. In spite of a heavy travel schedule, she continues to reside in the Richmond area with her family.
From the Southwest part of the state is Steven C. Smith, president and CEO of Food City Stores Inc., based in Abingdon. Smith’s father started the company in 1955 with a single store in Grundy, and it has grown to a chain of 132 stores.
Altogether, there are nine new leaders on this year’s list along with some familiar names. We hope you enjoy reading about the playmakers who are driving change in many sectors including economic development, banking, hospitality, health care and real estate, to name a few.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a photo gallery (at end of story).
The spirits of people gathered for Friday’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach were as high as the nor'easter winds that moved the ceremony from the lawn of the historic landmark to an area surrounding the indoor pool.
Alongside shimmering water and urns filled with lush birds of paradise plants, nearly 400 people gathered to celebrate the reopening of The Cavalier, an $81 million renovation project nearly five years in the making.
“It’s been a long time coming, and it’s been a quite a process,” said Bruce Thompson, the project’s developer and a partner in Cavalier Associates, a group of local business men whose bid to purchase and renovate the hotel was credited Friday with saving the building from the auction block. The other partners are Frank Reidy, George Metzger, Bart Frye, Ed Ruffian and John Lawson.
In 2012, a judge ordered that the property be sold to resolve a lawsuit over minority shareholder rights filed by warring factions of the property’s owners, the Disthene Group.
While some developers wanted to demolish the 85-year-old hotel and put up high-density projects, Thompson, the CEO of Gold Key| PHR, a Virginia Beach based hospitality company, said he and his partners considered it “an honor and a privilege” to save a structure that had played such an important role in the fabric of the community. The seven-story hotel at 4200 Atlantic Ave. had been a venue for weddings, meetings and vacations ever since the Cavalier opened in 1927.
By the time Cavalier Associates bought the 22-acre property in 2013 along with another hotel across the street for $35 million, The Cavalier was in a state of ruin, Thompson told the audience. Consequently, the project took more money and more time than Thompson’s group or the city of Virginia Beach had envisioned. What started out as a two-year, $40 million renovation doubled in price and took more than twice as long as originally anticipated. “It took a village to make it happen,” Thompson said, crediting the other parties who were involved.
The city stepped up with nearly $25 million in money and incentives to help finance the renovation, which also benefitted from state historic tax credits. The old hotel on the beach was demolished, and a Marriott Hotel and an Embassy Suites will be built at that location as part of a larger project that will bring more conference space to the beach resort city. Thompson’s group also developed a new residential community of homes, cottages and bungalows on the grounds surrounding the Cavalier.
May brings the reopening of the oceanfront Cavalier Beach Club, which was known for hosting some of the most popular bands of the Big Band era. All told, the Cavalier project represents an investment of more than $200 million.
Julie Langan, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, was one of the speakers during the opening ceremony. She praised the city and Cavalier Associates for stepping up to preserve The Cavalier. “This is an extremely important project for the state, because it will be a boost to heritage tourism, “ she told Virginia Business. “It will be the poster child for the historic tax credit program.”
Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms also spoke. He said he brought his 94-year-old mother to the ceremony. “She threatened to disown me, if the city didn’t save the hotel,” he joked.
“Today, the past meets the present and the future. We were proud to partner with you to save this castle on the hill,” Sessoms told Thompson. According to the mayor, the renovated 85-room Cavalier is expected to generate $41 million to $52 million in new tax revenue in the first 20 years. The property employs 200 people year-round and 330 during its busiest seasons.
“Our vision is to grow Virginia Beach into a year-round tourism destination. The Cavalier has been restored and will help us with that vision,” the mayor said.
The property, which will be operated by Gold Key | PHR, is a member of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, an exclusive group of luxury boutique hotels. Mike Frye, a vice president of lodging development for Marriot, said when he first walked through the hotel four years ago to consider it as a candidate for the collection, “It wasn’t a hotel. It was dilapidated. It was tired. The rooms were tiny. It was a remnant of a bygone era.”
Frye told the gathering at the ceremony that he and a colleague wrestled with whether the property could qualify for the collection, because so much time and money would be needed to bring the property to Marriott’s Autograph standards. While such hotels are independently owned and operated, a collection branding makes a property more distinctive. “But what we came back to every single time was that every great independent hotel has someone with passion, vision and drive, and it has a community behind it. We said, ‘That’s what is here. Let’s work as a team and make this happen. ‘”
In 2014, the Cavalier’s application for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places was approved, a development that helped set the course for the renovation. Thompson called the designation “both a blessing and curse.” While it helped win historic tax credits to defray the cost, it also meant painstaking detail to the structure’s architectural integrity.
“This was the toughest job we’ve ever done,” said Lawson, whose company, W. M. Jordan in Newport News, served as the general contractor.
One challenge was replacing or making new all of the building’s steel. Due to the need to preserve the building’s exterior, all the steel work had to be done from the inside of the building.
Overall, Thompson said the biggest challenge was “trying to find what the exact condition of the hotel was, trying to get to the end of the rehabilitation process … At the end of the third year, a year after we thought we’d be open, we were still in reconstruction and every day was a surprise.’’
As the rehabilitation stretched on, Thompson said the original interior design firm grew frustrated and stopped work on the job. Meanwhile millions of dollars in change orders kept coming.
Many of the hotel’s old bones, like the Hunt Room’s fireplace, were structurally compromised. To repair the fireplace, brick masons had to remove each brick one at a time, reinforce the fireplace with steel beams and re-lay each brick in its original order and location.
Once the rehabilitation work was done, “it only took a year for us to do the renovation,” said Thompson. “But the first three and half to four years, it didn’t seem like there was any end to the black hole that money was going into,” Thompson said.
The delays and need for more money — the Virginia Beach City Council originally committed to $18 million and later agreed to put up an additional $6.5 million in financial incentives — drew some public criticism.
Yet, Thompson noted that the community’s interest in the iconic hotel was evident during two weeks of free public tours that drew 10,000 people.
A luncheon and tours of the hotel followed Friday’s ribbon cutting. Many people took advantage of a chance to sign a barrel from the hotel’s new onsite bourbon distillery, Tarnished Truth, located next to the Hunt Room, a restaurant and lounge in the hotel’s lower level. Thompson said people who signed would be invited back 10 years later to receive a bottle of the 10-year aged liquor.
Besides the new distillery, people toured the hotel’s three restaurants, its lobby with original checkerboard terrazzo floor and a new spa. Another high point was visiting the suites of the partners of Cavalier Associates. Thompson said the partners all agreed to hire interior designers and to foot the bill for a themed suite, which created another unique element for the hotel.
The theme in each of the spacious suites is different. Thompson’s suite, complete with a victrola and a coat rack of ladies hats from the 1920s, is dedicated to the flappers and the big bands that used to play in the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom.
Lawson went with a nautical theme. His suite is decorated in hues of blue and yellow, with brass accessories and nautical paintings. The idea was to create the feel of a captain’s quarters.
Lawson, who attended the celebration, noted that his room, 602, was the place where Adolph Coors of the Coors beer fortune had stayed in June 1929 before he was found dead on the ground outside the hotel. “Obviously, I’m not a superstitious fellow. I’m sleeping there tonight,” said Lawson.
The celebration continued into Friday evening with invited guests enjoying a cocktail reception, dinner and dancing to the big band sounds of Good Shot Judy in the Crystal Ballroom.
With partygoers bedecked in tuxedos and women wearing beaded dresses and headbands that evoked the 1920s, it was easy to reimagine the grandeur of the Cavalier’s heyday when it attracted presidents and movie stars.
The hotel officially opens to the public on Wednesday, March 7. The public is invited to a grand illumination and fireworks display that will be held on the lawn at nightfall.
For Stephen Moret, 2017 was a rebuilding year. The president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) faced a daunting task: overhauling the state’s primary business recruitment agency while beginning to restore the commonwealth’s reputation as one of the best states for business.
Fourteen months into the job, Moret and others say VEDP is back on solid ground. A five-year strategic plan positions the agency to move forward with initiatives such as a more robust marketing effort and a new emphasis on customized workforce recruitment and training.
“They have made great strides to improving the situation and to improving the things that needed to be addressed,” says Hal Greer, director of Virginia’s investigative watchdog, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). “They are on the way to being an effective agency.”
That’s high praise considering the criticism VEDP faced from JLARC, Virginia’s investigative watchdog, shortly before Moret took over. JLARC released a 132-page report in November 2016 lambasting VEDP as an organization with slipshod management and an unstructured approach to incentive grants that left the state vulnerable to fraud. “In my 22 years, I’ve never seen an agency with this level of dysfunction,” Greer said at the time of JLARC’s report.
A catalyst for JLARC’s intervention was a $1.4 million incentive grant Virginia gave to Lindenburg Industry, a Chinese company that reneged on a plan to build a plant in Appomattox that was expected to create 350 jobs.
Despite ongoing legal action and a criminal investigation by State Police — which reported that VEDP relied upon a bogus company website during its vetting process — Virginia has yet to collect any money.
Not surprisingly, Moret says the central focus of his first year has been responding to 27 recommendations in the JLARC report. “Nothing was more important than addressing the major recommendations. Of the 27, we have substantially implemented 25 of them and still have a couple of things to do,” says Moret, who plans to wrap things up with a final update by June.
New incentives division
Chief among the recommendations was the creation of a separate incentives division. The Lindenburg incident, says Moret, represented “a systemic failure” in how VEDP conducted due diligence and monitored incentives.
Under the system in place before 2016, he explains, individual project managers vetted a company’s credibility and fiscal soundness before the state awarded incentive money. Frequently the grants would be given upfront, before a company had carried out plans to build a facility or create jobs. There was no comprehensive incentive reporting or monitoring after a deal was done.
Since the Lindenburg deal collapsed, two other companies, Vastly (formerly Tranlin) in Chesterfield County and a foundry in Radford have not paid back money on troubled projects. In both cases, VEDP has pursued legal action. For example, it has taken a lien on a property involved in the Vastly project.
The JLARC report criticized VEDP for not enforcing performance contract provisions, increasing the state’s exposure to financial loss. It said VEDP did not enforce clawback provisions on 23 projects that received incentive grants between 2006 and 2015 but failed to meet performance requirements on capital investment or job creation. Initially, JLARC said this lax enforcement meant that $8.7 million had slipped through VEDP’s hands.
That figure, Moret says, was later whittled down to a much smaller amount — VEDP board member Dan Clemente puts the number at $180,000. Subsequent investigation showed that some of the 23 companies had met their requirements or that VEDP had closed out the accounts, indicating to the companies that requirements had been fully met, even if they had not. “I think the board felt it would be awkward and, candidly, we would probably lose legally, if we went back and sought collection after the previous staff had closed the account out,” Moret says.
In the new division that opened in September, four full-time staff members now oversee incentives administration. The vetting process has been refined, and a risk rating is assigned to every firm and incentive. Typically, Moret says, only companies considered low risk for failure would be given grants upfront. Companies considered a higher risk would get money only after meeting certain performance goals.
If a company receives money and doesn’t perform as expected, VEDP can look for help with collections from the attorney general’s office. This power was added as part of the reform legislation that came out of the General Assembly as a result of JLARC’s study.
Heading the new incentives division is Scott Parsons, who previously was executive director of the Virginia Small Business Financing Authority. He is one of several new hires on Moret’s staff.
Del. S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, chairman of the House Appropriations committee and a JLARC member, is pleased with VEDP’s progress since Moret took the helm. “I think things are going very well.”
Jones thinks reducing VEDP’s board from 24 to 18 members — another General Assembly reform — is a big improvement. Moret and Jones both support the addition of state cabinet secretaries, including the secretary of finance, as ex-officio members of the board. The secretary of commerce and trade serves as the board’s vice chair. Since virtually all of VEDP’s funding comes from the state, “it’s critical that we develop and maintain very close relationships with at least the General Assembly leadership,” says Moret.
More funding
Those relationships should come in handy in a year when Moret is seeking millions of new dollars for the creation of a custom recruitment and workforce training incentive program that would be run in partnership with Virginia’s community college system. VEDP sought an additional $4.6 million in fiscal 2019 of the biennial budget for the program and $8.2 million in the second year, on top of VEDP’s annual operating budget of about $27 million.
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s budget proposal included a little more than half of the $12.8 million sought, with $2.5 million in the first year and $5 million in the second. “That is enough to create a solid program,” says Moret, “but it would not enable us to serve as many companies as we would like to be able to serve.”
At press time, the House had proposed an additional $5 million over the biennium, over and above McAuliffe’s recommendation, with the money earmarked for marketing and business-ready development sites.
For marketing alone, Moret had proposed an additional $9.5 million in each of the two years to rev up third-party marketing, including social media, print and online marketing materials, direct mail and sponsored events.
Compared to other states, Virginia has basically zero in its budget for economic development marketing. “If you look at states like Georgia, Florida, Ohio and Louisiana, they would almost always be in the $5 million to $10 million range,” notes Moret. “Other states are investing and telling their story, and we’re not.”
Already raising Virginia’s profile is the fact that Northern Virginia made the cut for a final pool of 20 sites that Amazon is considering for its second corporate headquarters. Moret refers to the project as the “economic prize of the century,” because it represents $5 billion in investment and 50,000 high-paying jobs over 15 to 17 years. Amazon is expected to make its decision later this year.
Besides creating a new workforce training program that Moret says would initially need a staff of at least 12 people, he has other goals in mind this year. He would like to see VEDP invest in more business-ready sites, particularly in rural areas, and expand VEDP’s international trade programs.
Joshua Lewis, the CEO and director of Virginia’s Industrial Advancement Alliance in Southwest Virginia, welcomes Moret’s embrace of prosperity for rural areas and his penchant for analytics in goal setting. To meet the state’s job growth goals, “We need 700 new jobs in our region in five years. It’s the magic number to ensure that we’re not going to continue to contract in population,” says Lewis. To get there, the plan supports many of the region’s needs, including more broadband, a trained workforce and business development sites.
At this stage in VEDP’s evolution, Lewis says the morale in rural areas among economic developers has improved, because of Moret’s approach. “He’s not shying away from what needs to be done … It all depends on the resources VEDP is given to accomplish the goals.”
Vincent Mastracco, chair of VEDP’s board, is optimistic about the agency’s future. “I feel much better about VEDP than I did earlier,” says Mastracco, who was appointed to the board in 2016. “The board today is far more engaged in VEDP activities and undertakings.”
If the General Assembly can’t find a way to provide more money, another option, which Mastracco says the board has discussed, would be to create a dedicated revenue source for VEDP. Other states have funded their economic development agencies by designating a certain portion of a tax or fee for economic development.
In the meantime, “I would give Stephen an A-plus so far on leadership, perseverance and work ethic. He motivates his staff. He leads by example, and he leads intelligently by challenging the board to advise him on their attitudes on policy issues… I’m convinced that VEDP is on the right path.“
Facebook. Amazon. Google. Those big-name technology companies are putting operations in Virginia. And everyone is buzzing about Northern Virginia making the final cut as one of 20 sites for Amazon’s $5 billion second corporate headquarters, a project that could bring 50,000 jobs during the next 15 to 17 years.
In the past year, these technology players and their data centers have led the way in terms of investments. Facebook is at the top of the list with plans to build a $1 billion data center in Henrico County. While Facebook chose the Richmond region, West Coast-based Vantage Data Centers looked to Loudoun County, Virginia’s data center hub, for another $1 billion project: a 1-million-square-foot data center campus in Ashburn.
As a sector, data centers, with their processing, hosting and related services, brought more investment to Virginia than any other industry last year. Yet its cousin, computer programming services, created the most overall jobs.
Amazon Web Services Inc. plans to hire 1,500 workers for a new East Coast corporate campus that the cloud computing services provider is locating in Fairfax County. Amazon.com also is building an e-commerce and distribution center in Frederick County that’s expected to create 1,100 jobs.
Virginia continues to draw corporate headquarters expansions. Navy Federal Credit Union is building a $100 million service and support facility in Frederick that will create 1,400 jobs, while Capital One Financial Corp. is making news with a new headquarters complex at Tysons that will include a Wegmans on the ground floor.
Overall in 2017, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership announced 237 projects, with an investment value of $4.2 billion, and a total 22,614 jobs. That’s slightly below 2016 numbers, which saw $4.6 billion in investment and 24, 116 jobs.
There’s always HQ2, the nickname for Amazon’s second headquarters. That prize would vault Virginia into job heaven. An announcement is expected later this year.
The mood in construction these days is upbeat. A growing economy and President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure plan has contractors confident about sales growth, profits and staffing levels in the near future.
Plus, some companies are planning major expansions in response to the recently enacted federal corporate tax cut — paving the way for new projects.
By all measures, a construction boom could be in the making. In December, Virginia had the fourth-lowest construction unemployment rate, 4 percent, in the country, proof of how busy the industry has become.
There are billions of dollars in new construction in the pipeline in the Old Dominion. Senior-living facilities, data centers, hotels, industrial warehouses and large mixed-use projects are going up. Mixed-use projects are particularly prominent in Northern Virginia where an extended Metro system has sparked new development.
Sometimes even a single major capital investment, like Facebook’s plans to build a $1 billion, 970,000-square-foot data center in Henrico County, can create thousands of construction jobs.
Virginia’s real estate industry, which is closely tied to construction, has come roaring back since the Great Recession. The industry generated $67 billion in economic activity in 2016, the second-largest generator of direct economic activity in the state, according to a report commissioned by Virginia Realtors, the state’s largest real estate trade group. The report looked not only at housing, but the broad sector including housing, offices, retail and other commercial buildings, and industrial projects.
Yet even with so much activity, “contractors are advised to remain wary,” ABC chief economist Anirban Basu said after the trade group released the industry’s low unemployment figures earlier this year.
“The combination of extraordinary confidence and capital can fuel excess financial leverage and spur asset-price bubbles,” he said. “The implication is that as contractors remain busy, there should be an ongoing stockpiling of defensive cash. That recommendation will be difficult for many contractors to implement, however, with labor shortages and materials costs rising more rapidly and slender profit margins in many construction segments.”
What’s new in Virginia tourism? How about the opening of more than 25 lodging properties this year and a designation for Virginia’s capital city as the No. 1 beer destination in the world?
That’s just a taste of some of the things being showcased by Virginia’s tourism industry. In 2016, domestic travelers spent $24 billion in the state, supporting 230,000 jobs while generating more than $1.7 billion in tax revenue for state and local governments.
Speaking of taste, Virginia has welcomed an onslaught of new wineries, breweries, cideries and distilleries, cementing its reputation as a hot spot for craft beverages. Still, VinePair’s announcement in February of Richmond as the best place on the planet to down a brew drew notice. On the web magazine’s Top 10 list of beer destinations, Richmond beat out places like New York and Beijing.
The March 7 reopening of the grand dame of Virginia Beach also is creating buzz. More than $80 million has been spent to renovate the 91-year-old Cavalier Hotel, which is expected to dazzle again with historic charm and an onsite distillery.
Another new boutique hotel, the 30-room Western Front, opened in February, in St. Paul in the Appalachian Mountains. Guests can dine at Milton’s, a restaurant serving farm-to-table Appalachian-style meals.
In Northern Virginia, the 40th anniversary of the five-star Inn at Little Washington is drawing national press. Proprietor and chef Patrick O’Connell has a yearlong series of events in the U.S. and Europe, including a Woodstock-like summer festival in Washington that will be open to the public.
The Eastern Shore also is gearing up for the summer with new attractions. The Cape Charles/Chesapeake Bay KOA Resort, with 316 campsites and a 71-room Sunset Beach Hotel and Beach Club, opens March 30. Visitors also can look forward to the shore’s first water park, Maui Jack’s in Chincoteague, which opens Memorial Day weekend.
John Pritzlaff has been promoted to senior vice president. He joined the commercial real estate firm in 2014 with a focus on retail sales and leasing in the Charlottesville market. Notable transactions include the sale of the historic Monticello Dairy building, the sale of 21.4 acres on Pantops to Sentara Martha Jefferson, The Quirk Hotel land acquisition and the 100 percent lease-up of the Coca-Cola Building on Preston Avenue.
Also promoted to senior vice president is Catharine Spangler with Thalhimer’s Capital Markets Group. Spangler specializes in single tenant net leased and retail investment brokerage across the corporate platform. Previously working as a team analyst and first vice president on the brokerage side, she helped orchestrate some of the region’s most significant brokered transactions.
The construction arm of Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer, MGT Construction Management Inc., filed for Chapter 7 liquidation Thursday in the U. S. Bankruptcy court in Richmond. The voluntary filing was characterized by the commercial real estate firm as one of the final steps in closing out MGT’s business.
A wholly-owned subsidiary of Thalhimer, MGT has been winding down operations for several months following financial challenges and the filing of a lawsuit last fall against top executives of the Henrico County-based commercial real estate company.
“Closing down a business is difficult for everyone involved,” Michael Kain, the chief restructuring officer of MGT Construction said in a statement. “Over the last several months, MGT has focused on winding down its operations. We have been working to complete the existing project backlog for our clients, or in some cases, transferring projects to other construction firms for completion.”
The filing includes a long list of creditors, estimated at 200 to 999 companies. They include a broad range of building suppliers from in and out of the state such as 84 Lumber and Home Depot Credit Services. Local companies listed as creditors include American Door and Glass in Ashland, 510 Architect LLC in Richmond, Advantage Plumbing and Heating, Richmond, and AFM Contracting in Midlothian. The court document listed assets of $100,001 to $500,000 and liabilities of $10 million to $50 million.
MGT has been involved in construction projects in the mid-Atlantic region for 25 years including the conversion of commercial buildings into apartments. A recent project in the Manchester area of Richmond, City View Landing, involved renovating warehouses into apartments and office space at the former South Plant site for Reynolds Metals Co.
Kain noted in a statement that while MGT had its share of success, recent struggles made it clear that the time has come to close.
“Our strength resides in our commercial real estate business,” Lee Warfield, president and CEO, Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer, said in a statement. “Thalhimer is a very successful firm that has served this region for more than 100 years. Our attention is focused exclusively on serving our clients and growing our commercial real estate brokerage, property management, acquisition and development business.”
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John Pritzlaff has been promoted to senior vice president. He joined the commercial real estate firm in 2014 with a focus on retail sales and leasing in the Charlottesville market. Notable transactions include the sale of the historic Monticello Dairy building, the sale of 21.4 acres on Pantops to Sentara Martha Jefferson, The Quirk Hotel land acquisition and the 100 percent lease-up of the Coca-Cola Building on Preston Avenue.