Twenty-two new standard market apartments will be available this year in Fort Scott, if all goes as planned.

Shane Lamb is president of Rural Asset Management and  Rural ReDevelopment Group, De Soto, KS., and decided to take on the former Fort Scott Manor Nursing Home, 736 Heylman Street as  a redevelopment project.

He purchased the property in January 2022, which had been closed for approximately three years, intending to create 24 standard market apartments.

In a prior interview, Lamb said they didn’t receive any state or federal grants or funds. They did apply for them but did not receive any.

Work began last year on the project.

“We went drastically over budget and over time,” he said. “All our contractors were slow, winter was slow.”

“We jumped off that project to finish phase 1 of a project in Iola,” Lamb said.

Lamb said the Fort Scott project will be restarting this week.

Phase 1 of the Fort Scott project will take approximately 60 days once started. It will take six months for the whole project to be completed.

The building is approximately 20,000 square feet and has been completely gutted, and all new materials have been used.

The Fort Scott property will not be low-income apartment rentals but instead will be for the standard market, with prices for the large one-bedroom apartments at $675 to 695 per month, Lamb said.

“We focus on rural towns and rural housing,” he said in a prior interview. “Typically, we purchase nursing homes, schools, hospitals…single-use vacant properties we convert to housing.”

Lamb said he always tries to use qualified local contractors and buy materials locally.

“I always try to keep the money local,” he said. “It doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. Sometimes you can’t find local partners to meet those deadlines…because they are so busy. We do have a couple from Fort Scott, Chanute, and Iola.”