I believe jsbrook was talking about the Residences at the Ritz, which is a different building than the Murano. The Murano is practically sold out, and there is finally a ground floor tenant there. Drove by the other day. I believe it is a Credit Union who took the spot.

The Residences at the Ritz is 281 units. They had trouble selling out because the building came online during the housing market crash. It seems they're finally putting the rest of the condos on the market.
http://www.thecondoshops.com/listing...-ritz-carlton/

Corner spot still vacant. ??????

Just a little note from while I was shopping for condos in the city...

While looking there, I found that the Murano may nearly be sold out but A LOT of the units are owned and being rented out instead of lived in full time, allowing for many empty units, so that fact that they are nearly sold out may be a little misleading.

Also, the crazy thing is that they are pricing their units the same as the Ritz while using sub-par materials, being in a less convenient location, and not having near the quality of service and amenities. Was really mind blowing...

Whether or not the people are living in them, they're still sold. I think you're confusing sale numbers with occupancy numbers. The condo developer does not give a rats ass what the people do with their condos once their sold.

^^^Yes, both a developer and an HOA (the latter of which is a legal framework for common ownership partially or fully set up by the developer and participated in by the developer until a certain period of time passes and all units are sold out) care what is done with units.

A developer may be concerned about warranty risk with units that are rented out. Secondly, if a developer is still selling out and the goal of the tower was to create a real live-in tower where families or empty nesters could comfortably live, the developer may not prefer to have units rented out while they are still selling out. Thirdly, depending on the time, the lender, the local/state regulations, etc etc there could be hits against other buyers finding financing with a certain percentage of units rented out. The lender is at risk with the developer, and unless a building was marketed towards offshore buyers, or opportunistic investors who would rent out and/or flip units, neither the developer nor the lender wants those buyers.

Over simplifying this, but to say that a developer doesn't give two rats' asses who units are sold to is akin to saying a developer or owner of a retail center or office tower doesn't give two rats' asses about the tenant mix (just as other prospective AND existing tenants care who their neighbors are).

Nothing different there. I haven't checked yet (last page) to see what the update on SLS is, just saw this comment and decided to reply.

Yep. All right. I was talking about the Ritz. Murano now has a ground floor American Heritage. Would be nice to see their other vacant ground floor spot fill with something other than a bank.

Did I hear right that construction is scheduled for September? When they say 'construction,' that doesn't mean digging, does it? I'd hope they start digging soon.

The term "construction" usually includes the initial excavation (for foundation work, etc.). Sorry, but you'll probably have to wait until September for that. :(

It does seem strange that they are demolishing these buildings only to let the lot sit empty for 4 months.

Demo from yesterday.

http://i.imgur.com/hsEA0Rgh.jpg

Can someone make a diagram for this?

It's coming. Finally got photoshop up and running on my new computer.

LOL I'm working on one, too :)

Your new FMC render looks fantastic. Nice job!

Thanks, boxbot!

I've submitted the SLS drawing and included a note asking the diagram editors to update the building's height in their database to 590 feet / 179.83 meters.

I originally tried doing the SLS diagram in 3-D perspective (like FMC) but had to revert back to 2-D because the tower was looking way too fat. It was also hard to match up the west and north elevations because some of the images in the developer's PDF were vague or even seemed to contradict each other.

Hopefully thisisforreal or another drawer can get a better handle on it and do a 3-D perspective at some point.

I bet yours is better than mine. I'm a rookie with just 1 drawing under my belt. But I love the renderings (I've only been posting in the forums a few months but I've been visiting the site for more than 10 years) and want to pick this up as a new hobby and get decent at it. Now that the kids are old enough to sleep well at night, I've got a bit more free time in the evenings :tup:

My goal is that the Philadelphia city link is up to date with everything we can rightfully put there.

I wouldn't assume that - your W drawing is fantastic! I've also only done one other drawing (the new FMC rendering added this past weekend) and am using Illustrator, which means that no matter how well I draw the building, it loses all kinds of detail when compressed down to the 1-meter-to-1-pixel GIF format (which as far as I'm aware, has to be rendered at 72 dpi.)

If you go to the Drawings Pending Approval link in the SSP Diagrams section, you can see the SLS drawing I uploaded last night. This is my original 300 dpi version from which the drawing was compressed:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ps7csnxsu8.png

See how I drew the crown with 14 glass panel sections and 15 spiky thingies across the top? But when I save it in the 1:1 GIF format for the buildings diagram, the spikes disappear and it looks like I drew only 7 glass panel sections.

Even in this 300 dpi version, at the 180-pixel-tall size, detail is lost on the horizontal bars at the top of the building's podium; they appear to vary in color between white & gray, when in fact I drew each one with a gradient from off-white to gray to simulate shadow. Maybe I should try rendering the next one in Photoshop like you do to see if that prevents loss of detail. (Although the loss of detail can be a good thing when details of a proposal aren't clear - you can just fudge some parts knowing the detail won't show up anyway lol.)

I'd also like to get all the realistic Philly proposals/UC's drawn - I'll check with you before starting the next one to make sure we're not duplicating efforts. Not that multiple versions of the same building are bad, but we'll cover ground faster if we don't duplicate.

I haven't checked out those diagrams in a while, shouldn't One South Broad be moved down a bit now that it no longer has the PNB on top of it?

Wow, that looks fantastic! When I did mine in Photoshop, I set my ruler to metric, and then my canvas was 1 pixel = 10 cm. That way I was working with 100 pixels (10x10) for a square meter. Then I just guestimated from that one crazy perspective from the ground and the one architectural rendering to get a feel for how big something was. When I shrunk it to 1/10th its size at the end, the base turned out horrible, but the upper part worked all right.

If you already have that in vector format, rasterize it in photoshop with 1 pixel per 10 cm and see if you can do a better resizing there to retain the crown details.

Or maybe we'll have a joint venture in this? Ha ha.

What is the link or where is the "Drawings Pending Approval link in the SSP Diagrams section?" I'm interested in see these works. Thanks.:tup: