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Events during. the past five years have administered a fiscal stress test for residential developer Rick Ferguson, and 2013 has been a year of restructured debt and real estate holdings.
Ferguson offered only a few comments related to his private financial dealings although some of his challenges have spilled into the public domain.
* A business partner, Gene Cauley, disintegrated financially leaving Ferguson to sort through a debt-laden real estate portfolio they shared.
* Ferguson also was stung by a Ponzi scheme that featured uninsured, high-yield certificates of deposit issued by a bank that Texas financier "Sir" Allen Stanford owned in Antigua, where he was knighted. Ferguson declined to say just how much the investment scam cost him, but it is believed to have been more than the $2.5 million that another former business associate, Steve Wortman, has acknowledged losing in the same scam.
* The top-end housing market, the bread-and-butter of Ferguson's upscale home building business, all but dried up as the Great Recession bore down.
All of this brought additional pressure on the ambitious Waterview Estates project that he and his father, Randy, launched.
The 38-lot opening phase of Waterview Estates, overlooking Lake Maumelle near Roland in west Pulaski County, is home to eight houses, two of them owned by Rick Ferguson. Another is owned by Bank of Little Rock after the bankruptcy of homebuilder Jon Lewis.
"We're all struggling," Ferguson said of the market conditions.
Financial strain shook...