Doug Borror is the CEO of Borror Properties, a company that Columbus Underground readers have undoubtedly become familiar with over the course of the last year as they have aggressively jumped into the Short North real estate market – Prescott and Pearl, 42 West Third Avenue, the Jerome, Truberry on Second, Truberry on Summit, a new mixed-use project replacing the Short North White Castle, a six-story Pearl Street condo building, and a recently-announced downtown development are all Borror projects, and all of them have been proposed within the last twelve months.
Those who have been following development in Columbus for the past few decades, though, will know Borror for his work with Dominion Homes, the dominant suburban home builder in the region for many years.
With so many potentially transformative projects on the board in urban Columbus, and with his background as a successful suburban builder, Borror offers a unique perspective on the many development trends shaping the city and region.
We recently sat down with Borror for a wide-ranging conversation, touching not only on those larger trends, but also on his personal move from Dublin to the Short North, the challenges of building in an urban environment, the different tastes of millennials and empty nesters, and the story of a fallen-in roof visible from his balcony that convinced him to start building in the Short North.
This is the latest in our series of interviews with developers and others who are shaping the Short North; previous editions featured Mark Wood, Michael Schiff and Joe Armeni.
Q: Can you talk a little about your background, and how you got started in the development business?
A: Sure, well I’ve been in the real estate business since I was a young man. My dad was in the real estate business, and as a boy my dad used to drive subdivisions with me and take me to zoning meetings. So as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in development. As you may know, we were Dominion Homes – we grew it from nothing into a half-billion dollar, public company. During the downturn, we brought in investors, took it private, and then I sold my remaining interest to the investors in 2009.
Then me and my partner – Lori Steiner – we had apartments that we owned, and we started managing those. We’ve grown the property management to the point that we’re now the 13th-largest property management company in Columbus, and manage over five-and-a-half million square feet of properties, both residential (condominiums and apartments), and commercial.
We bought and updated and re-sold eleven projects that were under water from 2008 or so. We’re still actually selling off some condominiums and things that we bought in the down years. One of the things we bought was the assets of Truberry Custom Homes – that’s a business that had fallen on hard times and we came in and resuscitated it. So we operate it now, and build luxury homes and condominiums throughout the suburbs.
In 2010, my daughter had recently graduated and had moved back to Columbus after spending a year working in New York. She was going back to OSU to get her MBA, so we came down to the Short North looking for places to buy for her while she was in school, and we found the Dakota Condominiums. The market was in a terrible state, so we bought a nice unit for her at a fairly affordable price After we moved her in in July, I was looking on the web and saw that the penthouse in the Dakota – the top floor, the largest unit – was for sale, and had been for sale for a while. It had sold in 2007 for a high price, and it had been listed, and the price had steadily gone down – so I made a ridiculously low offer and bought it.
I owned a home in Dublin, had no intention of moving down here, and next thing you know I bought it and owned it! So my wife and I spent some time moving in, starting in the fall of 2010, and then remodeled and moved in permanently in October of 2011. So we’ve lived here now full-time for three years, and we absolutely love it – we go here (Arch City), Rossi, Melt, Hubbard Grill, Bakersfield, Union, Pint House, we go to all of them, we’re going to go to Haiku for dinner tonight, we absolutely love it. You know, we’re empty nesters – we sold the big house in Dublin, and came down here.
So it was a beautiful April night in 2013, and I was sitting on my patio over here, and I looked out and saw that there was a warehouse at the corner of Prescott and Pearl. The roof had caved in – and you couldn’t see the roof had caved in from the street, but from my balcony, you could see that. Jeff (Baur, Executive Vice President) and I were here, and I took him out and said ‘Jeff, let’s see if we can’t buy this.’ So he called the guy – it was just one of those calls that came at the right time, and we ended up buying it.
Q: And up to that point, you only had suburban projects?
A: Everything was suburban – I think we had maybe six properties that were actively developing suburban, and we managed by then probably 60 multi-family residential communities. Our specialty is condos and home owners associations – we work with builders helping them manage their projects and then, when ultimately they stop being in control, we continue to manage things for the homeowners. So we used my previous existing relationships as a builder to leverage that into getting some property management.
But for the Prescott property, we bought it, and it turned out the building was under condemnation, and the owner didn’t tell us but he had a contempt of court and was getting fined $100 a day. It had been over 600 days, so he owned $61,000. Long story short – we bought it without having it zoned, and jumped into the mix down here, and that was the start of it!
We didn’t know what we were going to do with it, but we’re in the apartment business and we thought that’d be a cool place to build apartments. We worked with the Italian Village Commission (IVC) – which was a learning experience, but we have a great respect for them – to get a project and a concept that we’re extremely proud of.
Along the way, we found another property on 40 West Third, and bought that.
Q: So as you were going through the commission process for Prescott and Pearl, you were buying other properties?
A: You know, I used to be a distance runner, but now I’m a walker. So walking through the neighborhoods, I would see different things. I think the next property we bought actually was Summit and First. We watched another developer try to develop that corner, and he was trying to do a very dense commercial, mixed-use project, and we saw that that didn’t go well with the IVC, so when he walked away from that project, we went ahead and took a risk on it, and made it much lower density.
We’re doing six super-high quality, high-end townhouses. Again, working with the IVC, that was a process where everybody was really engaged, and we had a lot of different concepts. The final concept we were really pleased with, and that’s also now under construction.
Then we went and bought that ugly building behind Yoga on High – 40 and 42 West Third – a Victorian that had a terrible-looking addition to it, with a mansard roof that was built in the 60’s. So we went, this time to the Victorian Village Commission (VVC), and got an apartment complex approved there, and now we’re in the process of restoring the Victorian which will be a great office building for someone.
So it was all from my balcony, and from my balcony today, you can see four projects that we’re doing!
And then we bought the Dennison project, and then the warehouse on Pearl, and 60 East Hubbard, which is an old Victorian house with ugly apartments behind it – we’re going to tear the apartments down and build a little warehouse-condo thing with three units, and restore the Victorian. That sits right next to the big Hubbard garage, so it will be transitional. And of course we recently announced the White Castle project – we’re really excited about that, and we’re working to try and accommodate some public parking into it.
Q: With your background in the suburbs, what’s been the biggest learning curve coming down here and working in the Short North?
A: Well, separate working and building, because working is remarkably similar – you have city councils and development commissions in every municipality, and the village commissions here operate much in the same way. So understanding that we have to be attentive, we have to be responsive, we have to fit in, and all of those things are things we did with over 250 developments with Dominion. It’s not different a bit…you have to work your way through the process.
Q: Do you find that the process is longer?
A: The process is longer here because the commission process doesn’t run simultaneously along side the city process – you have to get the certificate of appropriateness (from the commission) before you can get your engineering and your building permits looked at – you can’t overlap that. So that would be the difference, but as far as the six to nine month development commission process, it may be a little longer down here, but it’s not uncomfortable. It’s challenging, but in a weird way, it’s actually kind of fun. Because you’re trying to work with them at the same time that you have certain financial goals and objectives you have to meet.
We’re really in a new age. Urban development is not even classified in the city codes – right now, one-and-a-half parking spaces per unit is the City of Columbus code. There’s not a project that gets built down here that has that, so everything is a variance – all the building codes are designed for suburban development. So you’re basically crafting your own development from scratch, so everything you’re trying to do is something that isn’t in the ‘text book.’ You’re really left to yourself and the commission to craft that, and then you still have to go through the city departments to see if they agree with what you got crafted. It’s actually really neat.
Q: Now that you’ve been through the process, have you had to go back and redesign stuff after getting the certificate of appropriateness from the commission?
A: On our First and Summit project, we had planter boxes that were approved, and the parks department was worried about the planters protruding too far toward the street, so we had to move those back, which required us to go back to IVC, so that’s so far the only one, and I think that was unusual.
Q: And what about on the building side of the equation?
A: With the building side of things, this is a very historical area, and that includes not only the existing buildings that you see, but there were a lot of buildings that were built that aren’t there anymore…except that they are! There are a lot of buildings that are in the ground and a lot of things in the ground – you look at a parking lot or an existing building, and you don’t know what’s underneath it, whether it’s old foundations, or rubble that’s in the ground, or cisterns, or wells.
Q: Were there gas tanks on the Summit and First site?
A: The tanks had already been removed, and we had to deal with environmental regulations, but that was actually the easiest one, because it was a gas station, the tanks had been removed…we knew what was going on.
As we’ve gotten into these projects, what we’ve figure out – and what we really didn’t understand – is the cost of all the site remediation, to make it so that your foundations are strong enough for the buildings to hold up, and to remove things that are in the ground that you really couldn’t foresee, and don’t foresee until you’re actually doing the work. We were digging at 40 West Third – on a Friday afternoon, just finishing up the excavation to then go back and do our land compaction – when the machine hit a brick cistern, which had to be 100-plus years old.
It was sanitary and fresh water, with a brick wall in between. So we stopped, had to call and get it pumped out, and then we filled it with light-weight concrete. It delayed the job three days, and cost us a couple grand, but it’s just weird stuff. So really I’d say that’s the biggest difference – the unexpected things – that was the biggest learning curve for us. So now we factor that in – you can’t test in enough depth to know exactly what’s there, you’d have to drill a hole every two feet – so you do twelve test borings and you just have to budget for it.