“What promised to be a good year is now quite uncertain”
Jeffrey Brauer talks to GCA about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his projects.
“I have been sheltering for the most part, but since I work from home the last few years, I see no real big change to my day-to-day routine,” said Brauer.
Brauer’s projects under contract move ahead, one a master plan, the other a construction project: Iron Horse golf course in North Richland Hills, Texas.
“The Iron Horse work has been declared essential as an infrastructure project by the city, and they issued ‘essential workers’ letters to construction personnel if they got stopped on the way to the job,” said Brauer. “The master plan project is up north, and we weren’t planning on meeting until spring anyway.
“I had one client meeting and one pre-proposal conference cancelled, both unfortunately just after I arrived at my destinations. One was in Chicago, so I got a fix of a ‘Chicago Hot Dog’ in the airport, and boarded the next flight home, in what has to be a contender for the most expensive fast food run ever!”
Before the virus hit, Brauer had recently signed or received agreement in principle on three projects.
“The agreements all came on my 65th birthday and it seemed like a sign not to retire quite yet – I was planning on holding out at least a year or two anyway,” said Brauer. “As of last week, one is ploughing ahead with a delayed start date – again, up north, so no real big deal yet – and another is postponed indefinitely, although the wording of the letter is that they expect to cancel a lot of non-essential contracts having spent so many unanticipated funds. I haven’t contacted the third project yet but suspect the same. I also have two others in the sales process, which I don’t expect to hear from.”
Brauer recognises that the virus has had quite an impact on his golf course projects. “What promised to be a good year is now quite uncertain. Good news is, I don’t owe anything, and am set for retirement… Wait, just checked stock market… Not quite set for retirement!” Brauer joked.