Our Lovely Guest Speakers

The other day in class (January 28th) we had two lovely guest speakers come and talk to us about real estate development in the Bryan/College Station Region. Because I am particularly captivated by real estate development I knew that the lecture from Dr. Mike Gentry and Dr. Sam Harrison would be especially exciting! And I cannot wait to tell you all about my favorite parts of the lecture

But first... some background information.

Dr. Mike Gentry and Dr. Same Harrison both live and work in the College Station area. Both men went to Texas A&M, were in the Corp of Cadets, and love the Fighting Texas Aggies. Mr. Gentry is a lawyer in the college station area and works at a nearby law firm where he specializes in a variety of different areas including real estate. Dr.  Harrison is a practicing doctor at Texas A&M and also owns quite a bit of land that he is currently trying to develop.

Currently...
Dr. Harrison is trying to develop a large piece of property in the College Station area including building a hotel, a living center for the elderly, various retail stores, and our very own Bucky's style gas station. Although the development holds quite a bit of promise, Dr. Harrison and Dr. Gentry were explaining that developing land comes with its own unique requirements and challenges that can make the project a little bit time consuming. Some of the things that they have had to face include zoning, building roads, city planning, historic artifacts,TXDOT and enviromentally toxic soil. Regardless! Their hard work is literally buidling the new face of Bryan/College Station and we should be expecting awesome new business additions to the area thanks to them!

Anyways...
One of the things that I found the most interesting about their lecture is how Dr. Harrison was struggling with the environmental factors of moving the pipe on the land. I honestly had very little idea how expensive it really was to clean up contaminated soil. Being a bit of an environmentalist myself I was quite pleased that these sort of requirements are in place, but still! Cleaning up the mess of someone 60 years ago is a tough hand. I was also pretty intrigued that EXXON will actually clean up the mess for free, it's too bad that they take their sweet time though.

It was an awesome lecture and I hope that we get more like them in the future!