The rest of this article is available to premium members only.
Login or Become a member

But there are manufacturers in the city. Federal-Mogul makes brake pads and discs there. Omega Apparel makes uniforms for the U.S. military. Shiroki North America makes auto seats.

Then there’s Smithville’s Kingston, a company with ties to billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Kingston makes motors and timers for appliances. Recognizing that the future of appliance manufacturing in the U.S. looked a touch dim, the company has launched a new product that is probably one of the more unique ones around – the Air Elegance Body Dryer.

Commercial version of Kingston's dryer

That’s right, a full body blow dryer, like the hand dryer in public bathrooms on steroids. Kingston has already been pitching commercial models. But this month, the company is introducing one for the luxury home market.

New products rarely get their design and development start in Smithville. Usually, the products are designed far away in bigger cities. The patent is still pending but the company has been pitching it to potential customers.

“The body dryer is our product, developed from the ground up,” said Kevin Mumpower, Kingston’s director of new business development. “It’s our brainchild. We developed it here in Smithville and are in the process of building and selling the product.”

Developing the new product is an attempt to keep the company stable into the future. Mumpower said the company typically makes components, not end products. But the appliance market has been shifting and Kingston needed to diversify revenue and keep the company growing and viable in Smithville.

“The appliance market in the U.S. has been stable and saturated for years,” he said, adding, however, that the market is starting to deteriorate as companies shift work to low cost countries.

Strategic planning and brainstorming brought about Air Elegance Body Dryers, the only idea to meet all the criteria company management set for developing a new product. Mumpower said the product has growth potential and fits into the trendy “Green” movement with power and water efficiency since there are no towels to wash and dry.

But it’s not the only body dryer of its kind. There’s also the Tornado Body Dryer made in Indiana that is a similar concept. Kingston’s is installed in the wall with larger nozzles while the Tornado is a slimmer aftermarket type of product.

Kingston, which employs 100-120 people, and makes washer and dryer timers and motors, oven door locks, ice maker and water softener motors and other control and hardware products. In addition to Kingson, Fetzer Cos. owns a stable of companies that include the vacuum cleaner company Kirby and the company that makes Ginzu Knives. Berkshire Hathaway has owned Fetzer since 1986.

Air Elegance Body Dryers are currently sold in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Canada as well as here in Tennessee. So far most of the sales have been commercial but Mumpower gave no specifics numbers.

These body dryers are primarily used near pools or in public shower areas and have already been installed at water parks, a university in Florida and other places throughout the United States.

The smaller of the two body dryer units available on the market is the KAT2 recessed body dryer, which is a stainless steel unit designed primarily for the bathroom and shower area, carries a price tag of $3,995. Kingston’s luxury home model will be sold at a lower price than this unit. A more powerful unit sells for $9,979.

It’s not yet clear how well the luxury home model will do given the state of the housing market at the moment. Acceptance may be an issue as well. A Nashville high-end homebuilder, who hasn’t seen the dryer in action, bristled at the idea and said he’d stick to towels.

For Omni and its parent TRT Holding, however, the downtown hotel is a big bonus. The deal gives TRT an additional

…{+}

The rest of this article is available to premium members only.
Login or Become a member

Word that Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin was looking at downtown came with a thud.

Why? The answer is that the deal has been floating around for months and isn’t considered a sure thing. It’s not even clear that the company has settled on Nashville. Other cities are believed to be in the running.

Lockheed Martin has looked all over Nashville, not just downtown. And brokers around town are patiently, or impatiently, waiting for some sort of movement and have been for months.

There’s also a little bit of hair on the deal, however. As NCC reported back in March, a company was looking around for 20,000-30,000 square feet, which would grow by 20,000 feet a year over seven years. (Since no deal was imminent here, NCC intentionally withheld the company’s name earlier this year so as not to jeopardize the city’s chances in winning.) But first Lockheed Martin has to win a federal government contract. To do that, the company has to basically put a place marker on space, taking it whatever space is selected off the market, which means no more marketing it. In a sluggish real estate market, owners may not be terribly eager to take such a risk.

The operation is believed to be a call-center/back-office operation for a non-defense related federal agency. After all, Lockheed isn’t in just the death and destruction business. The company is quite diverse in the government arena. A year ago, for example, the company won a $170 million with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services to help improve governmental health information technology systems. A large part of that contract is providing desktop support, help desk and call center services.

Getting TI

Jackson National Life Insurance hasn’t started its tenant improvements yet on the Cool Springs space it selected in May but it has an architect for the interior.

The company chose Gresham Smith & Partners for that work. Jackson National is still working on vetting construction companies to handle tenant improvements.

IRS cheap land

Acquest Development, the New York firm developing the building for the IRS, scored on the Cool Springs property that will hold a 135,000-square-foot building.

Brokers said the land was suited more for retail development than an office building. In fact, retail developers had the property at one point. Then the economy tanked and Regions ended up taking the property back, according to one broker. Of course, that usually means pennies on the dollar in acquiring the property. And since retail development is pretty much at a standstill and the site’s not considered good for Class-A office, a government office building is about all that makes sense, brokers said.

“They are probably on the cheapest Cool Springs land you can find out there,” a broker said. It will be interesting to see the sale price on the land and how that stacks up in the area.

The idea didn’t die. It just took a back seat to the convention center and now has renewed interest and effort.

The Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies is now working on an assessment of sports here and is expected to complete the work over the next few months. Leaders in the summit effort hope Mayor Karl Dean will get the report and then call on the community leadership to come together to create a sporting vision and strategic plan to carry Nashville forward.

Last year, government and business leaders had started work on the summit idea with the notion of determining whether Nashville was doing all that it needed to recruit sporting events. The summit was to have occurred last year but getting the convention center approved took center stage.

The Vandy study will look at such areas as the impact sports have on Nashville, particularly on the city’s image, corporate recruiting and economic impact. Additionally, the analysis will include comparative studies of other cities.

One of the criticisms thus far has been that Nashville doesn’t have ample coordination in recruiting sporting events. The Metro Sports Authority, Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Nashville Sports Council each handled recruiting and aren’t always working in concert.

…{+}

The rest of this article is available to premium members only.
Login or Become a member

Jones is the second developer to take on the 1,100-acre property that includes horse barns, a 25,000-square-foot manor house, a horse track, a polo field and unfinished residential lots. Jones acquired 300 acres of the property in April and has the remainder under contract through Dec. 31.

Milky Way Farms got its name from candy millionaire Frank Mars who built the early 1930s, helping spare Giles County from the Great Depression. Mars died four years after building up portions of what was then 2,800 acres. He widow, Ethel, retained the farm, which produced a Kentucky Derby winner in 1940. After she died in 1945, the family sold the farm and there have been various attempts at making the farm a profitable concern in some way.

Jones is taking over where previous developer Charles Ausburn left off. Ausburn got caught in the banking and housing downdraft and the property went into foreclosure last May, owing First National Bank of Pulaski $5.1 million. He died in January not long after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Ausburn arrived in 2006 with plans for a high-end second-home community centered around horses and a golf course. There were 750 homes planned. Lots were being sold for $400,000 and work had started on the golf course as well as Founder’s Ridge, essentially the subdivision within Milky Way Farms. The developer built one house in 2007 and sold seven lots but then into 2008 work on the development hit a stand still as financial markets collapsed and the country went into recession.

Jones has set his sights lower. He’s selling lots that have a view for $96,000 and those with lesser views for $48,000. Jones isn’t going to finish construction of the golf course. He said wasn’t sure that a golf course was ever a good idea. Instead, Jones said he’s focusing more on the farm’s equestrian aspects and building up that end of the Milky Way Farms.

To raise funds and bring in potential buyers, he’s taking something of a country club membership approach in which folks can buy a share in the farm to have access to all it offers. “They can buy a symbolic portion of the farm,” Jones said. “Or they can use it as an option to purchase.”

That scenario would help close on the remaining acreage. But he’s also still looking for investors outside of the membership idea. Whether it works is another matter. When the property came up for auction last year, other investors took a look and passed, including several from Nashville.

The rest of this article is available to premium members only.
Login or Become a member

…{+}

The rest of this article is available to premium members only.
Login or Become a member

Twice the average volume yesterday pushed the stock to a 52-week low of $9.12 before closing at $9.15. But this morning shares have traded for as little as $9.00.

In general, the broader market has been struggling to get traction. Pinnacle’s stock, however, is still reeling from its July 21 quarterly report showing more losses. This year the bank has reported $33.2 million in losses, $27.8 million in the second quarter.

A volume of 1.5 million shares traded that day, significantly higher than the daily average of 231,000 shares, to push the stock price to under $10 a share. That’s far off that bank’s all-time high above $37 per share in 2006.

Pinnacle’s stock has been on a slope downward since 2006. Ten days before it’s most recent quarterly report, Pinnacle’s shares had traded over $14. Then it started a free fall.

Like many other banks, Pinnacle is dealing with problem loans to reduce exposure. Losses on foreclosed real estate loans more than tripled in the first six months compared to last year, $11.7 million and $3.7 million, respectively. The bank reported $33 million in foreclosures in the second quarter.

Local real estate folks question whether the loan problems for Pinnacle will worsen given how much of the bank’s outstanding loans are in commercial mortgages and development. The bank reported that through June, of the $3.3 billion in loans, it had about $1.1 billion in commercial real estate mortgages and another $411 million in construction and development loans. That latter is down from $525 million at the end of 2009.