From the Daily Record:
Chatham homebuilder trims costs to weather chilly sales
As the large, publicly owned homebuilders accumulated increasing market muscle in the 1990s, Brian M. Stolar decided to diversify and ferret out niches they ignored to keep his mid-sized Pinnacle Companies competitive.
While he pushes ahead with new ventures along these lines, and swings away from the long-time mainstay of subdivisions in suburban towns such as Montville, he has had to adjust to the cyclical swings that have governed the housing market for decades.
As sales cooled in the past year, Stolar and top company executives “certainly have trimmed everything we can, cut all the costs that we can. Some of our projects have lead times of several years, but we are only building projects right now where there is significant demand.”
He does not disclose financial results of Pinnacle, the privately owned umbrella for three major subsidiaries that focus mainly on upper-end homes, except to say that annual revenues run above $100 million. But even as the number of unsold homes climbs higher along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, the site of many of Pinnacle’s current projects, Stolar has continued to poke in new directions.
This guy is in trouble, he asks astronomical prices which leads me to believe he has overpaid for property and is unrealistic about his budget for any given project.
This lunatic is trying to sell condos in a converted Avalon apartment in Newport for over $600 psf. It is a pretty crappy building too, compared to the new construction going up. The Siena is nuts, why would I pay $650,000 for a 1100 sqft 2 bedroom apartment. Hell I could buy a house with land in Montclair for close to that, I think there is not a huge market for overpriced small condos squeezed into a retail district, his site is small. Maybe I am missing something but your typical person moves to suburbia because they want a little land, if they wanted city type living and had this kind of money to spend they could live in Hoboken, which coincidentally has both a small town urbanity itself and tremendous convience to NYC. For these dollars you could get a condo anywhere in NJ. These people are dreaming and when it fails, this guy and his partners will be on the recieving end of a beating from the creditors just like Kara.
Funny that when you go to the siena website and go to the about the builder page there is a picture of Avalon Tower, nee Mandalay?. As if they have actually build a tower, even Maxwell Place is being built by Toll. These clowns have no experience in urban development and need to stop pretending they do. I wonder who will buy Pinacle’s assets when they try to avoid insolvency?