1736 Magazine - Fall 2018

BACK TO BROAD
After flirting with retirement, downtown developer Bryan
Haltermann ratchets up acquisitions
PHOTO BY MICHAEL HOLAHAN
By Damon Cline
A
fter nearly four decades in the
real estate game, Bryan Haltermann
was ready to call it
quits a few years ago.
The man who has done
more than any one to get people living in
downtown Augusta had reached what he
thought was the apex of his career.
“It had gotten less interesting because,
really, over the last five years I bought
very few buildings,” he said. “So it was
more about maintaining what I owned.
And that is really not the exciting part of
the business, I can tell you.”
But then he felt something he hadn’t
felt in years: excitement.
Perhaps it was the economic rebound.
Maybe it was exuberance from the Army
Cyber Command announcement. It could
have been optimism over the Augusta
University merger. Or the Miller Theater
coming back to life. Or the development of
North Augusta’s Riverside Village.
It might have been all those things.
“Things started looking good for the
first time in 40 years,” he said. “Some of
the things I was kind of looking at came to
fruition. I said, man this would be a stupid
time to step out. So that changed my
retirement plans considerably.”
Instead of selling off his properties, he
began buying more, including 901 Broad
St., which he is turning into nine loft
apartments with the Laziza Mediterranean
Grill on the ground floor; and 702 Broad
St.,a five-story mid-rise office he plans
to convert into a mixed-use building with
apartments and a rooftop bar.
Today, Haltermann’s portfolio includes
nearly four dozen downtown buildings
valued at $7 million and includes more
than 70 apartment units. His company,
Haltermann Partners, is at 1137 Broad St.,
the first downtown acquisition in 1986.
The building had two first floor tenants,
a used shoe store and rehearsal space for
a rock band called “Abandon.” Neither
commercial tenant lasted, but his idea to
convert the upstairs space into apartments
turned out to be a winning strategy he
would replicate over and over.
“I found some medical students who
wanted to park their bikes in the hallway
and ride to school,” he said. “I said,
‘Hmmmm. There’s something to this. You
don’t get as good a return if it was office,
but it’s less risky. So from then on, residential
was a key part of everything that
I did. Most of my buildings, two-thirds of
the cash flow is from upstairs. The downstairs
is really secondary.”
But before he became a property mogul,
the 63-year-old developer was a historic
renovation consultant with Historic Augusta,
where he specialized in helping
local developers such as Peter Knox Jr.
secure tax credits for their redevelopment
projects.
Tax credits provide cash incentives to
developers seeking to preserve the “character
giving features” of buildings located
in historic districts or listed on the Na-
1736magazine.com u 29