Bill Glascock didn’t waste time making money a decade ago when he paid $225,000 for the old Southern Saddlery building at 3001 South Broad Street in Chattanooga.
Glascock converted the four-story brick building, which is now full of small businesses, into four condominiums. He sold three of them to other landlords for a total of $325,000, and kept the fourth for himself.
“I was ahead by $100,000,” says Glascock, the former mayor of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, who put the money into renovating the building which now has a list of tenants waiting to get in. “It took three years, but it was really a huge amount of fun. It’s been a huge success.”
Dr. Ron Coleman also got a good price in 1999, when he paid $1.25 per square foot, or $250,000, to buy the 200,000-square-foot, circa-1890, brick-and-wood Hardwick Woolen Mill in downtown Cleveland.
Coleman, a retired surgeon, was inspired to buy the historic, old mill on 7 acres with a creek flowing underneath it partly after he saw lofts in restored, old buildings in Atlanta, where his son studied art in college.