Windstream buys N.Y. firm for $37.5M
Windstream Holdings acquired a privately owned New York-based telecommunications network management company for about $37.5 million in an all-cash deal, the Little Rock firm said Tuesday.
The company, MASS Communications, provides voice, data and network connections to small- to-midsized global businesses in the financial, legal, health care, technology, education and government sectors.
The purchase will give MASS Communications' customers access to Windstream Enterprise's services, said Layne Levine, president of Windstream Enterprise & Wholesale.
Darren Mass, chief executive officer of MASS Communications, will become the president of resale for Windstream's enterprise and wholesale business unit.
-- David Smith
Work starts on Conway housing for aged
Work has started on the $20 million Ridgemere residential development for the elderly on a 14.5-acre site in Conway.
The Dallas company behind the project describes it as a 92-unit luxury housing campus that will feature independent living, assisted living and secure memory care. It is expected to open in the fall of 2019.
Amenities will include a lake with walking trails, landscaped courtyards with water features, movie theater, pharmacy and general store, beauty salon, library and rehabilitation center, Abby Development said in a release.
Ridgemere includes a single-story 75,000-square-foot building housing 48 assisted-living units and 24 secure units for residents with Alzheimer's or other memory-related diseases. That aspect of the project is worth $14.6 million, according to its building permit.
Ten duplexes will be built, each housing two independent-living cottages with two-vehicle garages, full appliance packages and high-end finishes. Their value is an estimated $2.7 million.
The property, at Prince Street and College Avenue, was acquired in 2016 for $1.9 million.
Abby Development builds and operates similar developments throughout the South. It will begin work on a similar project in Rogers within three months, company executive Weston Green said.
-- Noel Oman
Shovels turn at site for Georgia terminal
SAVANNAH, Ga. -- The Port of Savannah began construction Tuesday on a $127 million rail terminal designed for longer trains that can take advantage of bigger cargo ships arriving at the busy seaport and target new customers in the Midwest.
The new hub for transferring cargo between trains and docked ships will be a "game changer" for Savannah, the nation's fourth-busiest container port, said Jimmy Allgood, board chairman for the Georgia Ports Authority. It will replace two smaller rail terminals at the port.
The new Mason Mega Rail terminal will add thousands of extra feet of track to enable the port to load trains that are 10,000 feet long. It will also double Savannah's capacity to move 40-foot cargo containers by rail to 1 million containers per year by 2028. About half the added capacity will be available as soon as 2020.
The port authority's goal is to expand Savannah's customer base farther inland and compete for cargo that currently moves through ports on the West Coast. Allgood said the new terminal will allow CSX and Norfolk Southern trains to carry cargo directly to cities such as Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, shaving up to 24 hours off transit times.
Port officials say the longer, more efficient trains will also reduce the need for trucks to haul cargo, removing about 200,000 tractor-trailers from Georgia highways each year.
The Army Corps of Engineers is about midway through a $973 million deepening of the Savannah River shipping channel that links the port to the Atlantic Ocean.
-- The Associated Press
U.S. home prices jump 6.2% in January
WASHINGTON -- U.S. home prices posted another big gain in January, pushed higher by a shortage of homes for sale.
Standard & Poor's said Tuesday that its S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index climbed 6.2 percent in January from a year earlier. That nearly matches December's 6.3 percent gain, which had been the fastest 12-month growth in almost three years. The January increase was in line with economists' expectations.
"The home price surge continues," said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
As the spring home-buying season begins, house shoppers are facing higher prices and fierce competition for a limited inventory of available homes. But a strong job market has given American consumers, including an influx of younger millennials, the confidence to shop for homes anyway.
Prices rose 12.9 percent in Seattle, 11.1 percent in Las Vegas and 10.2 percent in San Francisco. Chicago and Washington D.C. posted the weakest annual gains: 2.4 percent each.
The increase in house prices is easily outpacing wage growth and inflation.
-- The Associated Press
Chevron bets on deep-water Gulf drilling
Chevron Corp. is studding the ocean floor with heavy-duty pumping gear as part of an effort to make deep-water oil discoveries competitive with shale.
The idea is to force crude from newly drilled wells in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico to flow through miles and miles of pipe to platforms built a decade or more ago, said Jay Johnson, Chevron's executive vice president for upstream (exploration, drilling). By lopping off the billions it would cost to construct each new platform, offshore exploration begins to make economic sense again, he said.
"So new areas like Anchor, Waterloo, Tiger, Gibson, Whale, Ballymore, we've got a portfolio of new discoveries waiting for development as we continue to bring these costs down," Johnson said during a presentation Monday at the Scotia Howard Weil Conference in New Orleans. "There are a lot of questions whether deep-water can compete. But things are changing in deep-water quite dramatically."
-- Bloomberg News
Business on 03/28/2018