Mr. Stockert: The company has its roots dating back to about 1971. It was founded by John Williams in Atlanta. John founded it on the principle that if you developed a high-quality, multi-family community, and you landscaped it well and provided excellent service, that you could appeal to a renter-by-choice segment of the market, and a higher- end segment of the market. That's really been the company's foundation and something that the company has adhered to for the last 30 years. The company went public as a real estate investment trust in 1993. So it's been a public company now for about eight years. I guess probably in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the company started getting away from what would be considered the more traditional suburban garden apartment project that you see as cities expand outwardly. It started to focus on locations that were more infill locations, and started to do a little bit more dense project. That transformation of the product type has accelerated in the last several years to the point where now almost everything that we do today is an urban infill apartment community. Many of the projects that we do today are no longer the four- and five-story product but now include high-rise apartment projects in downtown locations. So there's been a fairly significant change in the product type that we've focused on over the last few years. The reason that we've done that is because we believe that those assets that are in locations that are harder to duplicate will have a better return profile over the long term. That's obviously what we're in the business to create.
TWST: Does this relate to a general tendency of people to want to live
in cities as opposed to the suburban ideal?
Mr. Stockert: I think that we obviously don't appeal to everybody, but
our renter profile is typically a fairly young professional. You find
that those folks are attracted to the cultural, recreational and social
amenities that go along with living in city cores. I think, clearly, in
many cities today, you've seen a real effort on the part of local
governments to revitalize downtowns and try to bring people back. We
believe that there's going to be more of that. Being in Atlanta, it's
come home in a big way in this city. With the traffic congestion and the
attendant air pollution, there's been a fairly big push in the city of
Atlanta to try to revitalize the downtown and midtown areas. We think
that those are going to be very attractive places for people to live.
We're developing very successful projects there.
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