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Coffee Talk (Tampa)
Surprise: Gold analyst likes sale
Marshall & Ilsley Corp.'s proposed $715 million purchase of Gold Banc Corp. has picked up at least one fan.
Dave Anderson, chief investment officer at Gold Banc's trust company, loves the deal.
"Of course, the big merger news of the week (at least to us)," Anderson writes in his Nov. 12 newsletter, was the Gold acquisition for $18.50 a share. The consideration, which consists of 85% M&I stock and 15% cash, amounts to better than a 20% premium above where Gold stock had been trading, according to Hovde Financial LLC, which served as investment banker on the deal.
Gold has about $4 billion in assets and is based in Kansas. But roughly one quarter of those assets are in Florida, specifically at 11 branches stretching along the Gulf Coast, from Hillsborough to Charlotte counties.
M&I, a $45 billion-asset bank with headquarters in Milwaukee, says it will keep the Gold name in Florida as well as the senior management. With Gold, M&I would add to a tiny branch network around Naples and have just over 1% of bank deposits on Florida's west coast.
In studying the respective franchises of M&I and Gold, Anderson is not inaccurate to note: "There is virtually no geographic overlap."
A perhaps more neutral observer, Steven C. DeLaney of Ryan Beck & Co., sees the sale as a continuation of M&I's strategy to acquire loyal suburban customers who can be pitched other bank products.
Plus, DeLaney says Gold already uses an M&I affiliate for back-office processing, reducing the chance of a rocky integration of operations at the two banks.
Construction inflation
Ken Simonson, the chief economist at the Associated General Contractors of America, is worried about the cost of building materials.
While consumer prices, excluding energy and food, are staying in line despite bad weather and rising interest rates, Simonson says construction supplies such as concrete and wallboard have spiked in the past year.
The price hikes, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, have Simonson forecasting supply shortages for nonresidential builders through the end of this year and into 2006.
"Many construction inputs are going through the proverbial roof," Simonson says in an AGC news release.
The price of concrete has gone up 10% over the past 12 months, and that is one of the smaller increases.
"Lumber and plywood prices have fallen, and steel prices are mixed," says Simonson. "However, the break on wood products benefits mainly single-family construction, not multifamily or nonresidential projects."
Simonson says the Bush administration could alleviate some of the pressure on commercial contractors by suspending a federal duty on cement imported into this country from Mexico.
Better not gloat
Is the Tampa Bay area benefiting at the expense of New Orleans when it comes to hurricane-phobic conventioneers?
The Bay area's convention and visitors bureau answers "oui," with appropriate apologies to the saloon keepers and T-shirt vendors of the French Quarter.
Since Hurricane Katrina ripped through Louisiana and opened the levees, Tampa has picked up five business meetings that were originally supposed to be held in the Big Easy.
The National Council on Teacher Retirement brought 650 visitors to the Marriott Waterside Hotel in downtown Tampa one weekend last month. The other four groups will be coming to the Big Guava throughout the first half of 2006.
"Of course, this isn't how we want to gain business," Paul Catoe, the Tampa convention bureau's president and chief executive, states in a Nov. 10 news release. "But due to the situation in New Orleans, we viewed our role as helping these clients continue their important work."
That goes especially for the 1,000 travel agents who will be getting together at the Tampa Convention Center next March, instead of on the bayou.
Besides just plain human decency, this trend is nothing to gloat about, for practical reasons. In case you haven't noticed, the Bay area isn't on much higher ground than New Orleans.
Coffee Talk couldn't help noticing that Catoe's news release came out on the same day the St. Petersburg Times reported the Bay area is losing some summer convention business.Karen Brand, the convention bureau's vice president of communications, acknowledged that one company looking for meeting space for 1,500 people dropped Tampa from a short list of sites after Hurricane Wilma pummeled South Florida.
The convention bureau does point out that Hillsborough County's lodging tax receipts for the 12 months that ended in August were 19% ahead of the same previous annual period. But hotel occupancy was down in September, according to the hospitality industry data-crunchers at Smith Travel Research.
Small businesses unprepared
A study compiled by the International Profit Associates Small Business Research Board shows that nationwide, 79% of small businesses that responded to the survey did not have a disaster recovery plan. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of the study participants said that small businesses are the key to economic recovery after a major disaster.
Gregg Steinberg, president of International Profit Associates, the largest privately-held provider of management consulting and professional services to small and medium-size businesses in North America, called the results "unbelievably alarming," particularly since small business make up the majority of businesses in the United States. A total of 325 small business owners and senior managers participated in the voluntary poll.
Correction
In our Nov. 11 cover article, "Caught Up in Deceit," the names of Suzanne Warner-Almengual's first husband, Robert Warner, and her mother, Frances Toledo, were misspelled.
Warner-Almengual says she disputes a contention in court records that her mother placed antiques belonging to her and her current husband on consignment in Fort Lauderdale. Warner-Almengual also says the couple did not form the Frances C. Toledo Living Trust. Other lawyers formed it.
Warner-Almengual says she doesn't plan to apply for readmission to the Florida Bar after her three years of voluntary resignation are up. She says her current husband, Brian Almengual, also doesn't plan to reapply after his five years are up.
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