Erickson Retirement Communities

Seniors having trouble selling their homes are seniors who can't move, so Erickson Retirement Communities rolled out a plan of attack last year: personal moving consultants to help prospective clients find buyers in the toughest housing market in decades. It's starting to pay off now, the company says. Seniors are moving into 200 to 300 of its apartment homes a month, up more than 10 percent from a year ago, said Tom Neubauer, executive vice president of sales. But that improvement - after several years of worsening economic conditions - wasn't quick enough to prevent the Catonsville-based senior-living provider from filing for bankruptcy protection this week in order to reorganize.

If any business proposition ever looked like a sure thing, betting on aging Americans, rising home values and the advantages of tax-exempt companies might have been it. For a quarter-century it paid off for John C. Erickson, who built the retirement-home chain bearing his name into a billion-dollar operation that spread from Massachusetts to Texas. Along the way he acquired a yacht and multimillion-dollar homes and started a charitable foundation that had $139 million in assets in 2007, the most recent year information is available.

Erickson Retirement Communities, a pioneering senior-living developer founded 26 years ago with the opening of Charlestown in Catonsville, filed for federal bankruptcy-law protection Monday with a plan to restructure more than $1 billion in debt and sell the struggling company to a local investment firm. Erickson said the Chapter 11 filing was necessary to restructure debt, split the core management and real estate businesses into separate entities, and pave the way for a sale. Erickson, which has 23,000 residents in communities around the U.S., said it was being purchased for an undisclosed amount by Redwood Capital Investments LLC. That company is controlled by Jim Davis, who is the majority owner of the $5 billion, Hanover-based staffing firm Allegis Group; he could not be reached for comment Monday.

A man who built an empire on the idea of living large in retirement is having to scale back a bit himself. John Erickson, whose Erickson Retirement Communities operates 19 communities in 11 states, will try to unload his Inner Harbor corporate penthouse in an auction Saturday. Bids for Harborview's Penthouse 4A begin at $950,000. List price for the 3BR, 3.5BA, 3,922-square-foot waterfront condo was $4.6 million when Erickson first put it up for sale a year ago. "The goal of the sale is to support Erickson's ongoing efforts to maintain and enhance liquidity," said Mel Tansill, an Erickson spokesman.

With the recession continuing to freeze even one of the most reliable housing sectors, Erickson Retirement Communities has dropped plans to buy and develop up to 188 acres of historic Doughoregan Manor in Howard County as a senior living complex. Erickson's decision to abandon a nearly two-year-old plan to build 2,000 senior housing units on the parcel creates uncertainty for the manor, the only home of a signer of the Declaration of Independence that remains in family hands. The family of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the declaration, had hoped to use money from the sale of the parcel to restore and preserve the nearly 300-year-old family mansion and other historic structures once occupied by their famed ancestor.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has laid off most of the staff of its Erickson School of aging studies and reduced the number of professors because of declining philanthropic support and slower-than-expected growth, officials said Tuesday. The Erickson School is unusual in that it receives no continuing state funding. Revenue comes from donations, and tuition and program fees. But the economic downturn has slowed philanthropy, and companies aren't spending as much as they used to on continuing education for their employees.

Erickson Retirement Communities, which develops and operates retirement communities in 11 states, laid off 260 employees Wednesday, a 2 percent staff reduction that the Catonsville-based company blamed on the deepening recession. Most of the cuts came at corporate headquarters, Erickson said in an announcement yesterday. The company, which operates 20 communities and has 13,000 employees, said a decision to slow its aggressive growth and development plans led to cuts in full- and part-time staff in construction, development and corporate support functions.

More than 60 people eager to learn more about the proposed $300 million Erickson retirement village proposed for Doughoregan Manor showed up before the official 6 p.m. start time at Ellicott City Senior Center on Tuesday night. "I want to see what's going on and what they're doing," said Paul Martin, 77, who came with his wife, Jean. Like many others, they were curious about the 1,500-unit project and whether they might want to live there one day. The Martins live across Frederick Road from the 153 acres Erickson Retirement Communities has contracted to buy from the Carroll family's historic estate, they said, and after 53 years in their house, they're thinking of moving to the retirement community, if it's built.

In preparation for its first general public meeting on plans to build a senior-housing complex on the edge of historic Doughoregan Manor, officials of Erickson Retirement Communities have spent weeks building support for the project by meeting with leaders of several area community groups. Erickson's preliminary concept plan is scheduled for an open house-style presentation from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the county's Ellicott City Senior Center, 9401 Frederick Road. In recent weeks, the company has been dropping in on groups and laying out some of the parameters of the project.

Acquisitions Phillips Edison & Co., a Baltimore-based owner and manager of community shopping centers, purchased the 83,438-square-foot Orchard Plaza in Altoona, Pa. Financial terms were not disclosed. Williams Scotsman acquired 330 mobile units from Fort Worth, Texas-based General Modular Corp. The newly acquired units will be added to the Baltimore firm's Dallas/Fort Worth branch operation. Awards Blind Industries and Services of Maryland received an Employment Retention/Growth/Upward Mobility Award from the National Industries for the Blind.