A: If one thing’s clear it’s that you, my dear Pia, have been doing some serious wishful thinking. Not that you’re totally off the mark. The dude in question is David Sloan, a real estate agent with Roy Wheeler Realty. But he sure ain’t just giving the scooters away. To get your hands on those wheels you would have had to shell out as much as $205,900 for one of the four Oak Grove cottages on Fifth Street behind the Blue Moon Diner that Sloan sold a few months ago.
As an added incentive to homebuyers interested in the development designed by Bill Atwood and built by Daniel Walter, Sloan hatched the plan to give away one scooter per buyer. That’s right, four lucky new homeowners now proudly own Geely’s Big Chief scooters. The Chinese imports come in black, blue and pink. Ace assumes that pink is a bone thrown (like a girl) to the ladies of the houses.
Lest you worry that you missed your chance to get a new house and scooter in one fell swoop, five more lucky ducks can snap up the as-yet-unsold cottages in a new Atwood-Walters development going up across the street from Oak Grove. These ducks, too, will get a stylish scooter courtesy of salesman Sloan, if they so please.
Sloan has promoted the gimmick for a couple of reasons. There’s the ever-increasing traffic congestion on W. Main Street and he says he wanted to discourage people from putting another car on the street. “It’s a high-density project,” he explained. “So we’re just trying to encourage a more urban means of transportation.”
But it’s not all one grandiose gesture of “think globally, act locally” environmental good will. The next scooterlicious reason Sloan ticks off is that, with four three-bedroom houses and two two-bedroom houses in the development (not to mention another two houses sold through Piedmont Housing Authority and not subject to the scooter deal) built on merely one-third of an acre, there is simply not enough parking space. (Ace hopes that other W. Main area developers are listening.)
Sloan purchases the two-wheeled wonders new from a Richmond dealer who cuts Sloan a bulk-buy “special-price-just-for-Sloan” of about 1,000 smackers per bike. The Big Chiefs get about 90 miles to the gallon, which certainly rides the moral high road.