More on Vantage Pointe

Published: Friday, September 5, 2008 11:50 AM PDT

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This story today was the first I'd written about Vantage Pointe, the biggest residential condo project to be built in downtown San Diego. But it's not the first time the project has been covered in voiceofsandiego.org. My colleague Will Carless used to write about the housing market and he wrote this story in February 2006 about some of the issues while Vantage Pointe was under construction.

Will looked at the fact that the developers had raised prices on some of the units reserved in the first phases of sales. He talked to Randy Klapstein, the CEO at the developer, Pointe of View, about the change. Klapstein said that they'd had to shift some design and architectural pieces around, and some buyers saw their units increase in size. They had to pay for that somehow, he said.

Will talked to a guy who wasn't so happy about the change:

But investors like Beau Randall, who saw his condo shoot up in price from the $385,000 he reserved it at in March 2004, to $495,000 after the design changes in July 2005, said he was devastated when he had to drop out of Vantage Pointe. He said he had missed out on a "once in a lifetime opportunity," and had also missed out on other projects that he could have bought into.

"I spent a year and a half of my life waiting for this project to move forward," he said.

I caught Randall on the phone this week to ask how he feels now about getting out of the project. He said he ended up buying a unit in Fahrenheit, another downtown project, and was happy about that decision, especially since the others who reserved units alongside him have yet to move in to their new homes.