When you point this out, he'll quickly dispel the notion that there's anything easy about acquiring 850 acres of prime but raw land in two counties, developing 3 million square feet of industrial property on that land and having a key financial backer - Kentucky Central Life - go belly up midway through the project. That's essentially half the story of Riverside business park, Bullock Terrell & Mannelly's enormous mixed-use development straddling Cobb and Douglas Counties. Bullock Terrell & Mannelly, which Terrell, Alan Bullock and Jay Mannelly started in 1985, delivered the first Riverside building in 1987 and sold the last 1 million square feet to JP Morgan and Crescent Resources in 2000.

"If we had to do it today, we couldn't do it," Terrell said. "It wasn't easy. There were a lot of hiccups along the way, and we learned a lot."

Bullock, Terrell & Mannelly is one episode in Terrell's varied, 36-year career where he's essentially been there and done that, whether it was running Carter's brokerage division or developing residential land earlier this decade when the market for that kind of thing was still booming. These days, he's running his own firm, Highgate Partners, where he's providing brokerage services for a select group of long-term clients and raising equity for acquisitions. He's also enjoying the opportunity to serve on various boards and mentor aspiring young professionals through NAIOP and UGA's Terry College of Business.

He faces the same quandary all distressed-asset investors face these days, a dearth of suitable product, but he has the advantage of experience and patience when it comes time to pick and choose the best opportunities to deploy capital.

"I'm going to buy something that makes sense, and put some of my skin in the game," Terrell said. "I'm just like everybody else who's anticipating this flood of distressed assets that hasn't materialized."

Skanska worked with Westin to replace the building's 6,350 windows with thicker, more energy efficient glass earlier this year, and now the construction firm moves on to upgrade the 1,000-room hotel's central plant, a $13 million project.

That only involves cutting an approximately 20x20-foot hole in the central plant wall, which is 82 feet above street level, disassembling and removing 35-year-old, 1,500-ton chillers and boilers and replacing them with more energy efficient equipment and switching out the property's electrical service, too. Oh, and building in redundancy so that the 73-story hotel remains operational throughout the whole process, which is expected to be completed by the end of next summer. Skanska will replace the chillers first during the winter and then the boilers and work in close coordination with the hotel to insure minimal disruption for guests.

"You have 1,000 rooms and you can't have cold showers or have the kitchen down," said Al Gogolin, senior vice president of Skanska. "We had to approach the whole job by starting backwards."

With the new windows, new central plant and room renovations Westin plans to start late 2011, the hotel can reduce energy consumption by 50 percent.

"We insulated the outside. Might as well do the inside, too," said Ed Walls, general manager of the Westin Peachtree Plaza.