Alright guys this is kinda cool. As I said I am here in South Salt Lake. It is a beautiful day, as you can see. I am here for the raising of the classic sign of the Ritz Classic Apartment Homes that Weidner is building and I have Joel with me. Joel is with YESCO, YESCO is the sign company & he is going to talk with us a bit about this cool sign. Tell me what is going on and what we are doing today? Joel: Alright, we got the historic bowling pin that has been up since 1958 and it represents a bowling alley that everybody took their kids to, that youth groups came to when they were young & bowling and skating; everybody remembers it, it is very nostalgic for the community. When the bowling alley went away and Weidner purchased the property to build on, the community, especially the city, wanted the sign to stay and it is staying. We took a long look at the sign & did an in-depth survey and determined that the sign would not be strong enough to leave up. Once we started taking off the rusted elements around the sign it was no longer structurally sound, so it needed to be rebuilt. We took the original design and we made it new, we gave it fresh colors, and we are putting it back up. Greg: Right on, so it was built in 1958, that thing has seen some weather! The refurbished sign has some elements of the original sign, but it has some new components as well, right? Joel: Yes, absolutely. The things that remained are the pipe in the ground and letter boxes. The pipe that you see here at this base is a bigger pipe that is sleeved over the original pipe, it is welded off to the original and then weve added a number of rods which extend into the concrete footing; all of that was engineered & all of the base is original to the old sign. The red cabinets that you see, just the outline of the cabinets, have been on the sign for about 20 years. The boxes were still in good condition so we reused them, but we put new faces on them, new copy, new letters, and new LEDs. The original sign had a lot of neon on it & we wanted to maintain that look. Instead of using neon which uses a lot of power, has maintenance issues, and tends to go out every year or so when it gets cold, we went with LEDs instead. The LEDs have a contoured tube around them to make them look like neon, but they are LEDs and much more efficient. Greg: Right on, so we are putting this back up. Is it going to take the guys a few days to finish it out? Joel: Yeah, we want to set the crane free today, so they are going to weld if off and make it structurally sound. We will weld off the pin itself to the base, then we can take away the crane, and then we will work on adding the architectural elements. Greg: Alright right, we are excited to have YESCO as a partner! This is going to be a really cool way to signify an apartment community that will be right behind here. We are going to be putting up 287 apartment homes soon, thanks you guys for helping us do that. Thats it for now, we look forward to putting this thing up and we will get more pictures and renderings up as soon as we can. Alright, take care. Do you have a multi-family investment opportunity you think we might be interested in? Please contact our Vice President of Acquisitions, Kevin Colard, at [email protected] or 425-250-2955
