[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hi, I'm John Koh and welcome to Icons of DC Area Real Estate, a one on one interview show highlighting the backgrounds and career trajectory of leading luminaries in the Washington, DC area real estate market. The purpose of the show is to highlight their backgrounds and their experiences and some interesting stories about their current business as well as their past, and to cite some things that you might take away both from educational standpoint as well as lessons learned in the industry and some amusing and sometimes interesting background stories. So I'm hoping that you will enjoy the show. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to share that both this podcast and the community I started in 2021, called the Iconic Journey in Cretever, is now part of a new nonprofit organization with that same name. The new company will offer opportunities for sponsorship to grow the community both in membership and in programs. It also allows you as listeners to show your appreciation for this podcast, which has delivered episodes twice monthly since August 2019 with a charitable contribution.
Transitioning the community and podcast into the nonprofit organization is underway. The community, which is open to commercial real estate professionals between the ages of 25 and 40 years old, is currently up to 65 members and growing. If you would like to learn more about either joining the community or contributing to the podcast, please reach out directly to me at johnterprises coenterprises.com separately, my private company co enterprises. Now we'll focus only on advisory work for early stage real estate firms and career counseling. If you have interest in learning more about its services, please review my
[email protected]. dot thank you for listening. Welcome to another episode of icons of DC area Real Estate. My guest for this episode and the next two episodes is Brad Olson.
Brad has been my ultimate mentor in real estate for the last 40 years and is a luminary in the world of international real estate investment.
Brad's career spans over five decades, and even in his quasi retirement, which he's now in, he continues to shape the industry through his advisory work.
This episode marks the beginning of our three part series reviewing his phenomenal career. Join us as we delve into the wealth of knowledge and personal anecdotes Brad shares, offering a deep dive into the makings of a real estate icon and the life lessons that have guided his journey.
In the final episode, three of my crew members will join me for a comprehensive review of the series, which I hope you will find enjoyable.
So here are the highlights from the first episode. Brad shares his profound insights on the importance of creating a ripple effect with our actions, a philosophy inherited from his father. He talks about the significance of relationships in real estate, underscoring their value through his ongoing advisory work and client interactions.
Navigating retirement and the global capital markets. He clarifies that his retirement was his personal choice and didn't impact the capital markets, which he jokingly said some of his clients accused him of.
Then we dive into into his background, his childhood, as I do with most interviewees, he grew up in the 1950s in suburban Chicago, pretty much middle class. He attended Princeton University. His father was an employee at the Wrigley company that made chewing gum. He had a chance to meet Ernie Banks, his childhood hero for the Chicago Cubs.
He excelled at Princeton and went on to Harvard Law School, driven by his long standing ambition to become an attorney. Despite struggling and disliking his time there, he emerged successfully and joined Hopkins and Sutter, a small firm in Chicago. He then joined a real estate company as an in house counsel, where he learned a lot about the real estate business from a mentor there. He was then approached by Richard Ellis, an international chartered surveying surveyor company from England.
They had several offices in the United States and he joined in the Chicago office in 1980.
As a british owned firm, they provided unique foreign perspective to real estate. He learned how to market to pension funds locally for capital or nationally in the international strategies and started acquiring property on behalf of Richard Ellis. Subsequently after that, a couple of years he formed the Lexington company when he and his colleagues decided to break away from Richard Ellis and it's a private equity firm, and he formed it with the money from as he talked about with Arthur Rubloff and other investors.
They faced the early 1990s financial issues and then Richard Ellis approached them to buy them back, which he then reaffiliated with them and then subsequently left again.
And we then evolve into talking about his setup for starting his own firm, but we also go into his relationships with dutch investors, which he developed at Richard Ellis, along with some notable transactions.
And that's how the first episode ends, and he'll talk about his clients at Atlantic Partners, his company, in the next episode. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Brad Olson so.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Brad Olson, I'm ecstatic that you agreed to join me for what I hope is an epic conversation about your background, education, career, life, and the lessons learned along with a fantastic imprint of you've left with literally hundreds of people around the world. While this podcast is aimed at DC Icons, you are a world renowned icon of real estate as you generated business in multiple continents and countries.
I shared your background and backstory about our relationship and the introduction, along with some amazing testimonials with some of your clients and friends.
Before we go into your origin story, please talk about what you are doing now. Quote, retirement, end quote. As I know you, you still keep your hand on the pulse with at.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Least two active clients.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Thank you, Brad.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: Thanks Sean, for that over the top introduction and for our decades long friendship and for inviting me to do this podcast with you. But before we begin, I need to apologize to you for making you wait so long to do this podcast and to your listeners who might have been expecting to hear from another of your icons of DC real estate. I most definitely do not qualify for that title, and I don't know that I've earned the title of icon of global real estate, but I appreciate the suggestion.
I know that this is your podcast and you want me to start by talking about what I'm doing in my retirement or what I call my quasi retirement. But I think I first need to talk about two life lessons that I learned from a father in an early age, because both are relevant to what I'm doing now, and both will come up again and again throughout our conversation. So with your permission, I'm going to start there and come back to what you asked me to answer.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:08:24] Speaker C: The first of the life lessons is a metaphor. Both these from my father.
The metaphor was you drop a petal into a pond.
And my father taught me that while the pebble may make an almost imperceptible splash when it enters the water, the ripples it generates reach out as far as the eye can see and sometimes beyond. So he told me, be the pebble. Don't worry about making a big splash. Instead, worry about the ripple effect of your actions on others.
And I would say, John, that the ripples I've created by seemingly small actions over a period of 50 years had an incredible impact on my career and my life, as well as those around me. And we'll discuss all that. It's interesting that years after I heard from my father, I came across a quote from the Dalai Lama, which reads, just as ripples spread out, when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far reaching effects. Now, I don't think that Dalai Lama was quoting my father, and I don't think my father came up with this thought on his own. It was probably a life lesson he'd learned from his decades of life. But it's a critical one for me and you and your listeners may get tired of my ripple. But you're going to hear about ripples that have reached far and wide and really have really dictated what my career has been and what my life has been. The second lesson from my father is a bit of a cliche. But it was his constant reminder not to burn my bridges behind me. Again, cliche. Everybody talks about it, everybody's heard it. But I've been conscious of that advice throughout my entire career. And in fact, I've modified it by adding a corollary which I call building bridges to nowhere.
And by that I mean networking with people, not because of what they might do for me today, but simply because I enjoy their company. And I have no idea where we might each other down the road, 510 20 years from now or whether we ever meet again. And you are a perfect example of that. John, you and I built a bridge to nowhere. We created this relationship which has not resulted in any business for you or for me, but it's been a fantastic relationship, one which has enriched my life. And I trust yours as well.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Certainly mine. Yes.
[00:10:45] Speaker C: So now back to your question. What am I doing these days?
First of all, I want to shoot down the nasty rumor that's being spread by some of my friends in our industry. That my retirement announcement triggered the freezing of the global capital markets.
Or alternatively, that I retired because I foresaw exactly what was going to happen in those capital markets.
I want to assure you and your listeners that the connection between my retirement and what's transpired in the capital market since I retired at the end of 21 is purely coincidental and not positive.
My original plan, John, was to retire at the end of 2020. I was going to announce my retirement that October at my annual dinner at Expo Real in Munich. We'll talk about those dinners later. But my Munich dinner was always my favorite night of the year, even before COVID I begun planning the October dinner.
And then Covid came and first MIPM and then expo were canceled and I had to rethink my retirement plans. And so I decided to postpone my retirement for a year. Not for any good reason, but simply because there was nothing else to do. Because of COVID I still love what I had been doing. My health was good, fortunately. And I felt like I still had lots of energy. Lots of friends in the industry did not believe me when I said I was retiring.
But I guess I wanted to go out when I still could go out on my own terms. Sort of the professional athlete who says, I'll come back for one more season because I love the applause and he comes back and everybody says, why did he come back? He should have stayed away. I've told friends this story, and I say, you would never have told me it was time to quit. Oh, sure, Brad, we would have told you you should quit. No. No, they wouldn't have told me. And I would have been out there making comments or been a presence that I regretted afterwards. And I did want to reprioritize my life a bit. John. I didn't have a buck. I don't have a bucket list. But there are plenty of things I want to do while I still can. Louise and I and our kids, we have ten grandkids. They take up time. I enjoy spending time with them. And so what I wanted to do was pause, basically stop what I had been doing for so long and focus more on a slower pace, more personal time as a result of one of those ripples, I mentioned earlier that my dad's. From my dad's metaphor, I'd been advising a local Raleigh developer, Gordon Grubb, for more than 20 years, starting back to when he was part of his family business. And then we left to start his own company, Grub Ventures.
Gordon asked me to continue with my work with him after I retired, and I agreed. And so Gordon and I talk probably almost every week, and we get together every month or so depending upon what he's doing.
Over the years, I've acted as a sort of consigliere to Gordon.
I help him with company strategy, potential developments, acquisitions, financing, just about anything you can else, anything else you can imagine from a small real estate company initiated his first institutional joint venture with Walton Street. I helped him structure his joint venture with Jamestown on a large adaptive, mixed use project just outside of downtown Raleigh. Both those two were also results of ripples. And we'll get into all those. All these things connect. But there is this continuum of relationships over these are 40 or 50 years. The second client for which I'm still working in my quasi retirement is also the result of ripples. In the midst of COVID in September of 2020, a german friend and a former client of mine introduced me to one of his clients. It was a german family office that was interested in entering the US multifamily sector. And my friend told the client that if they were interested in the US, they should talk to me. And so for months, as they were trying to figure out what they were going to do, I acted as a sounding board and as their consultant, without pay. There is another continuing story in my career, John, and that is that I frequently don't get paid for what I do. It's sort of relationship driven. And sometimes something comes of it, sometimes something doesn't. In this case, it was interesting work. I liked the person I was talking to. I thought of this as building a bridge between here and the client in Germany. Maybe it was to nowhere. But, hey, at that point, I had plenty of time. It was Covid. I could do what I wanted to do. And then, in late 21, they asked me to take on an official role as their advisor. After I retired, they were going to pay me. I told them I'd have to check with Louise because my retirement was, in large part, a joint decision between Louise and me. I asked Louise and she said, no, you can't do that work. She was worried that because of my work with Gordon, if it took on the german family, I'd be working too much. So I went back to the Germans and I told them Louise said no. And they laughed, and they thought I was kidding. I said, no, no, I'm serious. If she's not happy, I'm not happy. So we enter into a negotiation. And the irony of this negotiation is it wasn't about pay.
It wasn't about what my title would be or what my role would be. It was rather how much of my time they could have and satisfy Louise. In the end, Louise agreed that I could spend 10 hours a month with this client, knowing that there would be months when it was more than ten, and there would be months when it was less than ten. And so I now serve as a member of the board of their us real estate investment entity. Again, back to my analogy, to my metaphor. Another pebble, more ripples. This came because of the german client will come back into my story again. So both my current clients in this quasi retirement are the result of things that happened decades before. And then, John, in addition to what I call my official responsibilities with my clients, I admit that I spend a fair amount of time each month just talking with friends I've developed in the industry.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: Listening to what they're doing, connecting to other friends. As you and I have talked before, I've always been a connector. And that hasn't stopped with my retirement. So just last week, I got a call from a dutch friend, who, by the way, I've now put on to you. You'll hear from him. He reached out to me to get my thoughts on an initiative he was working on involving Germany. He wanted to know my thoughts, and did I know anybody he should talk to? So, of course, I connected him. Someone in Frankfurt and the two of them have already hooked up. And then on Friday, I had a Zoom call with a friend based in Frankfurt who was looking to expand his team in Germany.
And he said, any ideas, Brad? Of people I should reach out to? So here I am sitting in Kerry, North Carolina.
My friend is sitting in Frankfurt. He's trying to grow his office, his business in Frankfurt by hiring germans. And he calls me to find out who he should talk to. So I hooked them up in Cary, North Carolina. In Cary, North Carolina, I hooked them up with two people already. They've got meetings scheduled. They're going to talk about it. So I tell people that I'm perfectly happy to stay connected with them and I'm happy to serve as a connector for them as I did last week, as long as I don't have to do any real work. So the model here is use my relationships and my knowledge of markets and people. They help other people do what they're trying to do and just don't do any work. So the model's working reasonably well.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: So my follow up question on your two clients is part of your strategy to figure out an exit for yourself of those relationships?
[00:18:22] Speaker C: Oh, John, what a perfect question. So if you ask my two clients, they would say you could exit when you die, Brad, and not before.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: That's not fair.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: Gordon. We've had very candid conversations with both of them and I think Gordon, probably, Gordon Grubb probably has a realistic view that the relationships lasted 23 years, I guess, this year. So 22 or 23? No, I guess it must be more than that. 25 years and maybe it's got another five year run to it or something like that job. He certainly isn't setting any time table on end time on it. And I haven't. We've talked about that. It's not going to last forever, but it's fine. My German was quite funny about it because we had this conversation, they're going to be developing and acquiring multifamily assets in the US.
And I said, well, I'll get you through the startup phase.
And she said, no, no, Brad, you got to be here for the round trip.
I don't want you being gone until we've actually exited these investments because I enjoy working with you and I appreciate your guidance. She and I have do not have, we've not reached agreement on what the end date is for that relationship. But again, as long as I'm having fun, as long as she's not taking too much of my time, as long as I can do it. And I feel like I can add value. I'll do it. But I guess the question you didn't ask, which I gave you an answer. I'll give you an answer. The question you didn't ask me, which is, what about all these other people calling me who want to be the third or fourth client, right.
Each one of those. And there have been several really interesting situations of late. Each one gets a resounding no. No more clients. And this is even with very close friends who know my Louise or know my sort of my plans. Oh, Brad, it wouldn't take a lot of time, I promise you. You don't have to work too much. But we really need you.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Well, because of your network. Because of your network and people. You know, you could put people that have a need that thinks they need you into somebody that I think you believe in, that could do what you do. Now, no one in the world could do what you do, but 100%. But, you know, people that are pretty good at things that they could, you could help them with.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: And I've been doing exactly that, John. So I was introduced to an incredible woman who has started her own venture capital company. I mean, she's. She's one of these people you meet. You walk away thinking, my God, she's unbelievably smart. She's incredibly connected to the world as it's going to look like. What it's going to look like in 20 years, let alone today. And she said, well, Brad, how could you help me build my business? It's not real estate, it's venture capital. But you know, all these people. And I said, not interested, but I've got a couple of people you should talk to. So she's talking to a good friend of mine in Europe. And a good friend of mine in Canada.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:37] Speaker C: Thought that one of those people could help her do what she's trying to. What she's asking, exactly.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Well, that's. With Gordon, you can do the same thing, it seems to me, eventually.
So. Yeah, well, that's.
[00:21:50] Speaker C: I'm not sure. I'm not sure most people. This will come back to that. We'll get to it later. I guess that my business model doesn't work for very many people. So I'm not sure there are a lot of people who would do the work that I've done the way I've done the work, but.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Well, yeah, you are unique.
[00:22:05] Speaker C: That's a different, whole different question.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: We'll get into that later.
So now let's go back in history to the Stone Ages, as they say.
[00:22:16] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Chicago, 1940s and fifties.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
So I guess looking back at my childhood, John, I guess what was most remarkable about it was just how unremarkable it was. I would describe my childhood as pretty typical for a white, middle class kid in suburban America in the 1950s. I grew up in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, 45 minutes out on the train line from the city. I folks both grew up in Chicago. They moved to Palatine when my dad got back from Europe in World War two, along with hundreds of other veterans. And a town that was 8000 people when they got there was 50,000. By the time I went off to college or something, my dad took to Chicago, northwestern, training Chicago every day. He worked at the Wrigley company. My mom was a stay at home mom until my younger sister started kindergarten, at which time she took a job as a kindergarten teacher's assistant in our neighborhood school, and she stayed as a teacher's assistant for 30 some years. Now, here's the irony of ironies. She did it. And this sort of, I'm my mother's son. In many respects. She did it because she enjoyed it. She enjoyed being around the kids. She enjoyed the community of the other teachers.
And the astonishing fact is that when she retired 30 some years later, she'd never asked for a raise. She worked for the same wage that she was doing it for money. She was doing it just, it was fun. So I get that story. I've often commented that I remember my childhood as being sort of a combination of the Ozzie and Harriet show, leave it the beaver, the Donna Reid show.
It was this really easy life.
We didn't have a lot, but we didn't know we didn't have a lot. We had enough to do with what we wanted to do.
And staying with that television analogy, this will shock some people, I suppose. I think I decided that I was going to go to law school when I was still very young as a result of sitting around the family room with my family watching Perry Mason. Perry Mason.
So I decided I want to be a lawyer. This, I must have been seven or eight years old, John. And the crazy thing is a kid, when he's seven or eight, figures out what he's going to do and actually does it. You know, people want to be cowboys or firemen or whatever, right? Anyway, that was the lawyer background. And then the other comment I make about my youth, and I think it is relevant, is I was a voracious reader.
I constantly had a book. We go to the library during school and I'd finish a book. By the time I got back to clapped to the classroom, I read mostly biographies and books about sports. And I will say that one of the great pleasures of being retired is that I now am back to reading just for fun. I read, typically a book or two a week. It's a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. I read a lot of british histories, and I literally could fill my day sitting reading a book.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: What was your favorite childhood book?
[00:25:25] Speaker C: Oh, well, that's an interesting question, John. There were two series that were really critical to my interests or really part of my interest in the sports books. There was a series called Chip Hilton. Chip wrote about various high school athletes. Hmm. High school age athletes in every sport. Chip Hilton was like. He was like the all american boy athlete. And I don't know how many of the books he wrote, and I read the other one. And I've actually come across Chip Hilton books in used bookstores. The other series I've never run into again, they were blue cloth books with yellow printing on the covers. And it was a series of, I don't know, 30 or 40 biographies of famous people.
I've never tracked down the series that grab a hold of one, but literally, I read everyone from COVID to cover in the entire series. I like series, by the way. I do that now. I find an author I like, and I read everything. So I've got a couple of british writers whom I didn't know, but I found on Kindle Unlimited, and I'm on, you know, book number 19 or book number 23.
One of my favorite writers has a book coming out in two weeks, and I can't wait, you know, again, it's just. It's. Those are british mysteries. Police, detective, murder, whatever. I read another one that's got a spy, sort of a Jack reacher, hero american writer. Anyway, so, I mean, I do that. And then growing up, I was never an athlete. I played little league baseball and midget football. Not well, but I did it until I realized I was really small and these other kids were getting really big.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: What does your dad do?
At Brinkley?
[00:27:18] Speaker C: Yeah. No. So I gotta finish off on the athletic stuff, and I come back to riddle. So my dad had swam competitively in high school and college. He actually swam against one of the swimmers who ran for the US team in the 36 Olympics in Berlin. So he taught us to swim at a very early age.
And I would spend virtually every summer day at the community pool. I was not a swimmer. I was a diver. I liked to dive. I didn't like to swim. As much as he did. And then the other thing, John, I have to mention, I was an eagle scout. Dad had been an Eagle scout. My dad had been a scout at World fair in Chicago. At 33, I got active in Scotty because of him and stayed with it when others had dropped off to find. When they discovered girls in high school, I finished off at.
So I grew up with a brother and two sisters, and like most of the kids in America in the fifties, I'd expect the same is true for you. My entire extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all live within 45 minutes of us. So we saw the family all the time.
And you asked about Wrigley. My dad, Wrigley, he was in what we now would call HR personnel back then, but he also had, when he came, joined, he'd worked at Wrigley's Chicago factory before going to college and before going off to war. And he came back from the war, and very shortly, I think he'd taken one job in between. He started at the Wrigley company, and Mister Philip Wrigley, who was the owner of the company two generations ago, took a shiny to my dad. His own son was much younger. I think he liked the fact that my dad had served in the war. My dad had been in the quartermaster corps, so he understood goods and services.
And Mister Wrigley gave my dad responsibilities that were sort of unrelated to his official job. So the Wrigley company owned the Wrigley building restaurant on the ground floor of the Wrigley building. And my dad was made president of the restaurant. In addition to everything else he did, he was president of the restaurant. So once a year, we'd gone out of the restaurant. Back then, people didn't eat out. We didn't. We eat out twice a year, once in Palatine and once down at the Wrigley building. And that was interesting, because the head chef. This is going to tie in. I'm going to get back to your ultimate question, I guess, but it's going to tie in to my next point. The head chef was a tall black man from the south side of Chicago. Now, palatine, growing up, was all white, and by my high school years, we had a hispanic family.
The son was the class behind me, the daughter was in my sister's class, three years behind me. Fantastic family. I got to know the kids well, but they, they were the only people who weren't white in the whole school.
So we would go down to the restroom and out of the restaurant. We had this sort of the number one table. When we would go down for the family. And out of the door from the kitchen would come this gigantic, in my mind's eye, black man who was the head chef, Jim Barnett. I remember I was. This is John, this is 60 some years ago. I remember Jim like you remember the guy.
And I remember particularly because he was a personal friend of my childhood hero, Ernie Banks.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Of course. The Chicago Cubs.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: So the Wrigley company owned the Cubs. The Wrigley family owned the Cubs. So once a year, we would get Mister Wrigley's box seat behind the dugout.
But, wow, this is a time when professional athletes didn't make much. So Ernie lived on the south side of Chicago, and you would do odd jobs, and he knew Jim for the neighborhood. So Jim would come out and we'd get the real story, and he'd be telling me about Ernie Banks. So I would say that for sure, Ernie was my childhood hero. I met him numerous times as an adult. He was always incredibly gracious. I remember interrupting a quiet evening he was having in the lounge at the Four Seasons Chicago.
And I would say, this is going to sound corny, but I. It's okay. Despite all those years of playing for a losing team, he somehow always managed to project his positive outlook. Let's play, too. And somehow I still admire that outlook. And I will tell you, John, it's been the outlook I've had to life, not because of Ernie Banks, but because of all these things in my life. And it's my attitude. I was telling someone the other day, I'm probably in a bad mood three days a year. I just don't get that way.
I guess I recognize how fortunate I am and have been so. I've been. I've been a die hard cup fan my entire life, since 2016, when they won the World Series, was the high point of my life. I told Luis at the time, I could die today and be a happy man.
Kind of like Michigan winning the national championship.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: That's huge for me.
[00:32:16] Speaker C: But you didn't have to wait 68 years for it. I did.
And then one other substantive point, John. Unlike virtually everybody else you've interviewed, and I've listened to your podcast, I had no connection to real estate growing up. No one in my family worked in real estate. I lived in the same town my entire life, my childhood, and in the same house from the time I was about six until I got out of law school. So no real estate connection whatsoever. But go ahead.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Where'd you go to high school?
[00:32:50] Speaker C: Palatown High School. The local public high school. And you know, the usual kinds of things, active in school, lots of friends. But part of interesting thing was, because of boy scouts and the church youth group, and having gone to one of the feeder elementary schools at Feeder junior High, I had friends from all over the town and from every imaginable group, so I was not in a clique. I moved among all the cliques and.
[00:33:19] Speaker B: Well, you weren't an athlete, so you weren't.
[00:33:21] Speaker C: I wasn't an athlete, but I knew. I mean, a lot of my friends were athletes, so that was fine. I was in, you know, the advanced classes, so I knew the smart kids, but I also had grown up and gone to school with kids who weren't on that end of the spectrum.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: So my guess is you're in the top ten of your class. I'm just going to speculate on.
[00:33:37] Speaker C: That's a fair guess, John. We won't get into the details of it, but. Yeah.
But the other interesting comment about growing up, and this comes back to sort of where I ended up.
Considering how much time I've spent out of the United States in my adult life, it always amazes people to know that I didn't have a passport until I was 30.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness.
[00:34:03] Speaker C: I had not been outside the Midwest.
Our summer vacations, we would, my folks rented a cabin up in Wisconsin. We'd go up to Wisconsin, two weeks. We'd fish, we'd swim, we'd boat. But the boat, I mean, you know, a canoe or rowboat or a boat with a small boat, we go fishing. Nothing powerful. I never water ski. Didn't have a boat that we could water ski. We rented a boat or doing there. And I was eight years old, John, before we even. I even left the midwest.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:34:34] Speaker C: We were eight when I went to Washington, DC to see the capitol and meet our congresswoman and tour the FBI building. And then I didn't get back east again until I was 15.
We visited New York and watched my brother graduate from Princeton. And the other amazing thing this is, it's embarrassing to actually say this, but I didn't get much past the Mississippi until after law school. Wow. I'd been to Minnesota, I'd been to Iowa, but I would say Des Moines or Minneapolis St. Paul would have been the farthest west I got to before I got out of law school.
For somebody who spent so much time outside the United States in mild duck lot, that's all amazing. But I will say, John, come back to your comment about my dad's work at Wrigley. I was exposed to the world outside of suburban Chicago. So one of the things he enjoyed doing, the Wrigley company is based in Chicago, and in his role, he participated in the international meetings. So every year, international directors, directors of Wrigley operations around the world. And they were everywhere, obviously, chewing gum industry would come into Chicago for their direct. Each year, he would bring a group of them, maybe eight guys, six, eight guys, to our little house in Palatine to throw a traditional local to show them what the real american family looked like and how we live. They did a barbecue at the house. He would. He had a vendor. He could find flags from each of the countries. So each year, beyond the. On the dining room dresser cabinet would be a series of flags from around the world. So I got to figure out which flags were which. And then when they would arrive, they wanted to talk to the kids because they all had kids, so they want to talk to them about what did we do, what Richard? And so I got to hear all kinds of funny accents. I got to hear about places I'd only read about in books. And I even got an australian pen pal for a while. All as a result of this exposure that my dad gave us. He couldn't take us overseas, but he could bring overseas to us. And so that was part of it. And the other thing I remember again, vividly, for a variety of reasons. I was five or six years old. My grandmother was born in Copenhagen, my dad's mother.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:36:58] Speaker C: And one of my danish. One of our danish relatives came to visit us when I was five or six years old. He was 21, 22 years old. He was this tall, blond haired, vigorous guy with a buddy of his. They were traveling around the United States, and he talked with the funniest accent, and they had the funniest words for things. And it was just so eye opening to meet somebody who was so different. Even though we were family, technically, he was like a second cousin, my father. And then years later, he and his wife would vacation with my folks in Florida. Louise and I would have spend time with him. And then I started doing business in Denmark. And every time I went to Copenhagen, I would see him.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Oh, that's great.
[00:37:41] Speaker C: Together. We'd have lunch together. And he died during COVID my folks had built. He died during COVID So I could go for the funeral. But as soon as I could get on a plane, I got over there, and I had met his son and. And his son's family. And we were sitting at it at a lunch table in the middle of Copenhagen. And I said to Klaus, Klaus, it would be a real shame. Your father and my father created this relationship between our two families. It would be a shame if that bond died. So let's commit that. We'll make sure it doesn't. And so then and there, we said, all right, we're going to do it. So one of his daughters, who's just graduated from high school, is coming over to study in. In the Americas, and she spent several weeks with us, and his whole family came and spent a week with us at the beach house we've been back to spend. I celebrated my birthday two years ago with his family in Copenhagen. Oh, that's great. Just exchanged messages with him last week. We're trying to figure out our next visit, so.
But again, it happened because of the introduction to him as a young boy and then the fact that my business allowed me to travel internationally. So that's the early story, John. I don't know how much more you want, but that covers the basics.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: That's great. That's great. So, on to Princeton University. Talk about that experience.
[00:39:00] Speaker C: Yeah. I probably wouldn't have gone there, John, if my older brother. My brother was six years older.
He applied, got in, went there. I saw it when I was in 8th grade when he graduated. And like you, John, I guess if. If he hadn't gone there, I probably would have ended up somewhere in the midwest. Might not have been Michigan, but it might have been something like Michigan, and. But he ended up there and I wanted to follow his footsteps, so I applied and got in. And I think with all the discussion about legacy admissions policies, I probably wouldn't have got in. Might not have got in if he hadn't been there first. And my dad, through his Wrigley connections, had friends who'd gone to Princeton, who helped both of us get in. So there was clearly there is.
I have mixed emotions about the notion of limiting legacy applicants, but I get the story. But I also know that I was. The benefit of.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: It was all mail then, wasn't it?
[00:40:02] Speaker C: It's not only all male, it was 50% public. I mean, private schools, prep schools. So I would say I got on campus. I wasn't a hick technically, but I was definitely unsophisticated relative to my peer group. As I say, about a majority of the class was still coming from prep school. We were all male until my senior year when they admitted women for the first time.
And I remember as an entering freshman, you meet all these people and you get the freshman directory that shows who all these people are. And believe it or not, John, I was more impressed by the fact that chef Boyardee's son was in my class than that Steve Forbes then that Steve Forbes was in my class. I didn't even know what Forbes magazine was at that point, right? But Steve Ford was in my class. But Mario Boiardis, there really was a chef Boyardee spelled it differently than on the spaghetti can. But his son. His son was in my class, too. And I remember calling back home on the Sunday calls, telling my younger sister, you won't believe it, Bev, Jeff Boiadi's son is here.
But I love my time at Princeton. John. It was an incredibly personal education. One of the things that existed then and still now compared to a lot of schools. The senior faculty members in most departments taught the introductory courses. Their view was that if we want to engage and attract to our department the best students, we should give them the best professors. So unlike places that had teaching assistants that taught introductory classes, literally, the who is who of the faculty taught our freshman classes. And it was this personal education, 3200 undergrads. There was no meaningful. There were no professional schools other than architecture, so no business school, no law school. A reasonably small graduate school at that point in time. So it was all focused on undergraduate education.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Was Einstein still teaching at.
[00:42:01] Speaker C: Einstein had died before I got there. He was there the last year. My brother's career in Princeton. He was still at the Institute for Advanced Studies.
But I talk about this again, it's this notion of how personal education was. I was walking across the campus my senior year through the main quad in front of Nassau hall, and I saw Professor Mammon, who'd been one of my french teachers freshman year. He was now the dean of students.
As we crossed each other's path, he said, brad, how are you doing?
He remembered you remembered me from my freshman year and all kinds of stories like that, of the personal nature of it. And then the last semester was tough because it was Kent State. The killings of Kent State and what's going on now on college campuses brings back those memories of my last semester, the Kent State Vietnam period. Much worse than what these students are facing.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:43:06] Speaker C: Having a conversation. We were at a graduation. One of our granddaughters graduated from UNC Chapel Hill this weekend. And I was sitting in the graduation ceremony and her other grandfathers down a few seats to me. We got started talking about the draft lottery.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:22] Speaker C: And that happened my senior year at Princeton. And that evening, a group of us sat around the television waiting to see where. What was going to happen with our lives. Yeah, it was real. Ours was the first college class that was not going to be entitled to deferment for further academic studies. So in other words, going to law school, going to business school, going to medical school, none of that would have kept you out of the draft, depending upon your number. So literally, we were sitting around and this is, I was talking in front of me, guy I didn't know at all, another grandfather from some other graduating students said, what number were you? I mean, this is, again, I don't think this generation has an appreciation for what was going on then and how impactful those days were. And I don't mean to diminish what's going on in Gaza or this the challenge. Yeah, but what we went through that.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Last semester, I was in the last draft, okay? I was number 300.
[00:44:29] Speaker C: I was 310. And I. So I managed to miss it anyway. That's my Princeton experience.
Yeah.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: And for the listeners, my son went there. So Brad's references to places I understand because I walked that campus many times. It's a beautiful place. Hmm, spectacular.
So then Harvard Law School, was that next, or would you go someplace?
[00:44:54] Speaker C: I took a year off. I took a year off and worked for, I did spreadsheets in the Chicago office of Atlantic Richville, the oil company, through really a job I had, senior at Princeton, was two buddies and I drove. One of the executives at, lived in Princeton, worked in Manhattan, worked at Rockefeller center. And so he didn't like to drive. He didn't want to take the train. So he hired us to be his drivers. So we pick him up in the morning at like 07:00, drive to Manhattan, turn around, drive back. And then one of us, same person or difference, would drive back up in the afternoon and pick him up and bring him home, which was really fascinating because I got to meet literally one of the senior executives, Atlantic Richfield. So I was going to take a year off. He said, we've got an office in Chicago, why don't you work for us? So I took a job doing spreadsheet analysis back before there were computers and anything else. So it was literally the large columnar paper working on spreadsheets.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: So were you a political science major at Princeton?
[00:45:54] Speaker C: I was in what was then called the Wilson School, which is now the school of Public international Affairs. And I would describe my major as american political history. And I wrote my senior thesis on Mayor Daley from Chicago.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: Oh, that must have been interesting.
[00:46:09] Speaker C: It was fascinating. It was absolutely fascinating. I got to, really got to meet some really interesting people who had been close to him. That was fun. So I did that. Took off here. And then I got to Harvard. And, John, I can openly admit that until I got to Harvard, I loved school.
And I did well in school. And it was never an issue for me. I got to Harvard Law School. If anybody who's listening this hasn't seen the movie paper chase, go rent it. Because perfect. It was. It was filmed my first. My third year. First year.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Kingsfield.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: Kingsfield. So I had my own Kingsfield. So I have a Kingsfield kind of story. Anyways, I got there and I come out of Princeton. I was. You know, I thought of myself as reasonably intelligent, kind.
But I. But I have never, ever been in the company of so many incredibly smart, talented, accomplished people. I think the average age of earner in class was like 28.
They were PhDs and Rhodes scholars. They had really cool, cool stuff.
And they were just unbelievably smart.
And I will say that I was totally intimidated by how smart they were. And by the way, we were the socratic method to learn the law.
I will admit I didn't get it. I can remember seeing. This is funny because I ended up in real estate. I can remember sitting in my first year property class.
And Steve Deutsch, who'd gone to Mit. And it was literally like a rocket scientist kind of mind. I mean, just brilliant guy we had. Harvard was the largest law school in the country. People didn't realize that sort of three sections. So all your classes first year with all the same people. So 130 or 40 of us in this section. So Steve was in all. He. All the same people in all classes. So Steve and the professor were having this socratic dialogue. Literally, three words would get out of one mouth and they would answer. And then five words would come out and the other. And literally, I had no idea what they were talking about. So I turned to the kid next to me. I don't remember who was sitting next to me. He had assigned seats. I can't remember who it was. I said, do I have the same book? Because I have no idea what they're talking about. That was Professor Michaelman for property.
I had him later for a local government law class. And we did really well. But not first year in my first year class. So interesting, your Kingsfield comment. I'll come back to him, but interesting. In my first year class, both Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Mitt was actually in our section. And my Kingsfield story relates to Mitt, I guess. But Chuck was not in my section. And as far as I know, we never met, but Mitt hung out with friends of mine. So, I mean, and obviously I knew who he was, but we both had the same. We were in the same section, so we both had the same contracts. Professor. Professor Arita, who was by far the best professor first year in terms of being able to teach the way paper chase and Kingsfield said you were supposed to teach, but, you know, you thought you were totally prepared, and he hung you out to dry because he was going to go someplace you didn't want to go. And it happened to Mitt in the contracts because people ask me, what do you remember? The only thing I remember about Mitt was he was as embarrassed to be in the class. He was embarrassed by the professor as I was at other times. That's all I really know about. Medic. He was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn't know him well. But at the end of this is. This was the last year Harvard law school had one exam. Your only grade for the whole year in each course was an exam at the end of the year. Incredible pressure. In fact, one of my friends, not close, one of my friends come from Kansas, committed suicide the week before exams.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:50:03] Speaker C: So last year that Harvard required one exam for the whole year. But I remember walking in to take my contracts exam and, you know, 130 people in the room, they tell you to start, you open the test book. And I read the first question, no idea what he's talking about. Second question. I went through the entire, I don't know, maybe eight or ten questions because there were essays.
And I had this sinking feeling that I had the wrong book, the wrong test book. He also taught Andy trust. I said, maybe I got the antitrust book by mistake. I'm looking around the room and everybody's writing. I'm thinking, oh, God, now what? I'm going to flunk this course for sure.
And then I went back and, you know, you reread the questions. Okay, now I kind of see what he and I did. You know, I ended up with a fair grade in the course, not a great grade. I ended up with fair grades across the spectrum, but not great grades. And I guess I probably ended up in the middle of my class. But I hated law school. I love meeting people. I had some fantastic friends. I could tell stories all day long about friends. But my first year of law school, in order to get away from the campus, I took a job selling men's clothes in a department store.
It just. It was just the antithesis of Princeton. It went. You were. You went from the most personal education imaginable to a dehumanized experience. First year at Harvard Law School, and I hated it. It got better by the second, 3rd year because I got to take classes I wanted to take, and I got to know more people and had relationships. But law school and I, we weren't made for each other, I can tell you that, but.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: So you went into the law profession, though.
[00:51:47] Speaker C: I did. Well, you know, I had this conversation with people.
Young people say, I'm thinking of going to law school. What do you think? I said, well, only go to law school if you're going to practice law, because otherwise you just put yourself through three years of misery. Now, Mitt was in the joint MD JD MBA program, so he was only with us the first year they got his MBA. Also, my sense was that I need, I always thought I was going to be lawyer. So I went to law school to be a lawyer. I should go be a lawyer. So between the second and third law school, I clerked for a firm in St. Paul because I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to Chicago. And then my third year, I interviewed with firms from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee and Chicago, because by then I decided I wanted to be in Chicago. And I ultimately decided on what was then a medium sized firm, Hopkins, etcetera. And I don't know, I thought about this a lot, John, knowing we were going to have this conversation. I don't know when I decided that I like real estate. I do know that as an elective, I took a course at the graduate school design on real estate investment. And then I worked about 20 hours a week my third year law school in the legal department of Cabot Cabin Forbes, which ultimately became Cabot properties.
[00:52:57] Speaker B: Oh, sure.
[00:52:57] Speaker C: So I knew the real estate side of things by then was interesting to me. And I guess it was after the CCNF time that when I got the opportunity, Sutter, I had to pick up focus. They had a rotation system. So I picked real estate law as my focus initially. And during that first year, I worked with two young real estate lawyers, Steve Bell and Dave Scott. This was 74, and we were in the midst of the 73 to 75 recession. And much of the work I did with Steve was related to the downside of real estate. So evicting tenants or foreclosures representing lenders.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: That was the REIT bust. And the mortgage REIT bust was the.
[00:53:40] Speaker C: Early seventies, but also just the collapse of the economy in 74. And, you know, at Harvard, again, this is different every school, but they told us they were teaching us how to think like lawyers, but they didn't tell us how to be a lawyer. We had no practical day to day lawyering skills. So I learned those on the job from Steve and from Dave and especially Steve Bell's Leo secretary, a woman named Donna Moran, who was incredibly patient with me as a rookie lawyer because I knew nothing. So she had to show me how to do everything. It was embarrassing to be the lawyer and have the secretary teacher, but she was great at it. She knew how to do everything.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:54:15] Speaker C: Dave Scott's work was completely different. Dave's primary assignment was to be outside counsel for a suburban real estate company, JM Anderson. And so, working with Dave, I got to do real real estate work. Had leases and mortgages, construction contracts, architectural contracts, pretty much everything, because the client had, many years early, bought the land on which Woodfield mall was built by Tobin.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:54:40] Speaker C: And it sold off the land to Tobin and kept a lot of the periphery land. So they were building office building, shopping centers, single tenant retail all around there. So. And Whitfield Mall was like 5 miles south of where I grew up. So I knew the area really, really well, and I enjoyed that.
I'll say the deal side of the business. I really enjoyed working with Steve Bell and Donna. And I remained close to Steve for many, many years and hired him later to represent real estate clients of mine. But I really love the work I did with Dave and the work with James Landerson. And I quickly established a fantastic relationship with the senior management at the company and in particular with the, essentially the COO and deal guy, a guy named Rich batch. And basically, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to do deals. I wanted to work on deals. I didn't want to do foreclosures, although I did. And so a little after a year, a little before a year, I'd been at Hopkins sutter rich fashion. I would be out in their offices, and they were, offices were in displays by the airport by where. And I'd go out. Sort of part of my job was to go out and meet in their offices to go over leases or go over contracts with them. And as I said, rich and I built this very quickly built this fantastic relationship. So it's like I'm less than a year out of law school, and rich pulls me aside. He said, I want you to leave Hopkins, etcetera. I want you to come here as our general counsel.
And I said, rich, you got to be nuts. I haven't even been out of law school a year.
There's no way in the world I'm ready for that. So he took my no. And then six months later came back and said, okay, brad, I'm making you the same offer. Go home this weekend, tell me what it takes to come join me as our general counselor. And if you don't come, if you don't take the job, I'm going to go hire somebody else and you won't get to do any of the stuff you like to do. So I went home. I said, okay, what's. How ridiculous can I be? Back then, beginning lawyers made nothing. So I, you know, double my salary. I wanted a company car, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:56:40] Speaker B: Were you married at that time?
[00:56:42] Speaker C: I was married at the time. I walked back into rich. I stayed on Monday morning. And so here it is. He said, fine, when can you start? He didn't. With no negotiation. It's like, that's it. So as I still went behind the years real estate lawyer, I became general counsel of a real estate development architectural construction company and set on a plant that would change my life forever. So the key again, this is sort of bridges and ripples and all this sort of stuff. Over the next four and a half years, rich became my godfather, my mentor. Everything I did, everything you can imagine in terms of legal practice in real estate, leases, sales, financing, architectural contracts, construction contracts and zoning and planning. Because as I said, jea. While they had made their names as industrial developers, by the time I joined, they did everything. They had office, they did retail, the condo development in Florida, hospitality. They own the Holiday Inn next door, entertainment. They had yacht clubs, tennis clubs, skating, ice skating rink. And they had these very large land holdings in Schomburg. I don't know, John, what the comparable town to Schomburg is in the DC area, but this was the growth city of the growth town of suburban Chicago where all the highways. Meth.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it'd be the dullest airport area in Chicago.
[00:58:00] Speaker C: In Washington, that's probably about right. And so because we had so much invested at risk in this town, what they did on the zoning board or the village board became critically important to my company, the company I work for.
And so I was volunteered by rich to be basically a resource to the zoning board and the village board as they went through a complete review of the subdivision control and zoning ordinances and literally rewrote the ordinances in meeting after meeting, month after month for probably two or three years that I spent a good chunk of my evenings once or twice a month out in Schaburg. And of course, here's where the bridges, circle of life, all this sort of stuff comes to play. When I was growing up, my dad was mayor of Palatine. He later was township supervisor of Palatine township. Palatine Township and Schomburg Township were back to back. So my dad knew people in Schomburg. He was a former mayor who was not mayor when I was going there, but connected people. The people who were there knew that my dad knew them. I knew what I knew, sort of how things worked in village and township government because of my dad's experience. And I built this great relationship, a great rapport with the staff at the. At the village and with the boards, in part because I'd been willing to commit all this time and again.
It wasn't charity work. I was doing it because my client, really, my company I represented, really cared how they handled things, like, know, parking lots of lighting and landscape.
[00:59:43] Speaker B: So were they one of the largest real estate operating companies in the Chicago area at the time?
[00:59:48] Speaker C: No, no, no. They would have been one of the two or three most important developers in Woodfield, in Schaumburg.
[00:59:54] Speaker B: Okay. But not in the region.
[00:59:56] Speaker C: Just not in the region at all. They owned. They owned an office building in Des Plains, where their offices were. They owned a whole series of old industrial buildings, because they started as industrial.
[01:00:06] Speaker B: Builder, like Elk Grove Village, that area.
[01:00:08] Speaker C: Elk Road village around the airport. Right. Bensonville, Lincolnville, Lincoln Benson, and all that area around the airport.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: I know it because I worked in Chicago for several years.
[01:00:21] Speaker C: Yes. You know it well.
And so I was. I was getting the legal education day in, day out, because I was negotiating all these deals. And then rich, rich batchen, at some point along the way, started giving after hours lessons in real estate investment development to a small group of us. This is just how wonderful a guy he was. So Greg Campbell was our head of property management, and then two outside brokers whom rich had known from prior worlds, guys named Artie Kamens and Ron Frayne, who both went out to have stellar careers in Schwarzwald. Yeah, exactly. They would hang around. They would come in after work, we go into the conference room and Richard take out some book or some set of papers, and he'd say, okay, now we're going to look at developing an industrial building, and here's what you have to know, and here's how you do it. Totally unrelated to the legal side, simply the business side of real estate.
And we did that for months, probably meant once a month for, I don't know, ten or twelve months, something like that.
[01:01:26] Speaker B: So you got a lot of education there.
[01:01:28] Speaker C: A lot of education. And so he was, in every sense of your word, mentor? JOHn he was my mentor for my first days while I was still at Hopkins and Sutter, until the day he died, years after I had left jea. And the ripples again, I'll come back to it again. The ripples from that time continued to impact me, continue to this day. Impact me to this day. Just last week, I was on the phone with Greg Campbell because we celebrate, we're both the same year, we're born the same year. We joke because he's six months older than I am. So I call him and he's how does it feel to be 76, Greg? Oh, you'll find out in six months, Brad. Don't worry. But again, all of that that happened then, the relationships, the training, the exposure to this enormous breadth of real estate from this little company in Des Plaines, Illinois. It was part of everything. And so the Greg Campbell part becomes really relevant because then I go to work for Richard Ellis. How did I get to Richard Ellis? Well, Greg had left Anderson the year before, become the head of property management for Richard Ellis in the United States. Of course, Richard Ellis were in Chicago. Somehow through a headhunter, I guess, they found a, and Greg went and joined Richard Ellis. And a year later, I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do? I realized by then I didn't want to be a lawyer the rest of my life. I wanted to get in the business side. And Greg said, come on and talk to our boss. His name is Don Bodell. Talk to him about who you are, what you do and what you want to do. And at that point, Rich Ellis was just starting to market itself domestic us clients.
[01:03:10] Speaker B: What year was this brand?
[01:03:11] Speaker C: 1980.
[01:03:13] Speaker B: And how long Richard Ellis been in the United States at that time?
[01:03:16] Speaker C: They formed, they came to us in 76. And up until then, all they had done was to represent uk institutional investors and private families buying real estate in the US from border to border. They were active all across the United States when I joined them. They had offices in the Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. They added New York when I was, while I was there.
And Don, who was canadian by birth and a heck of a nice guy, one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to know. It's great. Here's a story, Brad. We want to start marketing to the us institutions, but we don't think a marketing person is the answer. We think your experience as a real estate attorney, with the degrees you have and the experience you have, you'll be able to talk to these pension funds and insurance companies on a completely different level than if we want to hire a marketing guy.
[01:04:11] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:04:12] Speaker C: We're hiring you to be a marketing guy. We want you literally to go tell the story of Richard Ellis around the United States. So my first year or so, I was on the road. I will tell you that my mother never understood why I could stop being a lawyer and do this, whatever it was I was doing. But for basically the first two years, all I did was travel around the country. Don became another of my mentors and time went on. My partner, my friend. But those first two years, I was literally calling on us pension funds, insurance companies, wherever they were. So the glamorous stops were, you know, New York, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta. But I was going to Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Dayton and Sacramento and Jefferson City, Missouri, and places that, you know, places I've never been, that's for sure. And we only had one success story from all those two years. I learned a lot about the pension system and I learned a lot about traveling around the United States. But we landed one client, which was the St. Paul companies up in St. Paul.
[01:05:15] Speaker B: Minneapolis.
[01:05:16] Speaker C: Yeah, big. A big financial services company.
And got that assignment through the person who was at that point, they had a real estate, a guy named Jerry Scott. Jerry would end up becoming my partner, and along with his wife Pat, our closest Louise and mine, our closest friends lived, ultimately moved to Chicago, lived right down the street from a couple blocks away from us in Oak park. But that was the business we had. And with the St. Paul companies, John, now it comes back to your DC story.
We bought 1819 l Street for the St. Paul companies from far Jewett, and we bought phase one of the Lafayette center project from far Jewett.
[01:05:54] Speaker B: How did you find that relationship with Far Jewett?
[01:05:58] Speaker C: It was, we had a broker, we had someone in our Chicago team, guy named Paul Wilson, who covered DC for us and did a lot of different things in DC for UK clients. But through that process, said that far Jewett and brought Jerry into far Jewett, made the deal between the St. Paul companies in far juicy.
And then, I don't know, a couple years after I had joined, the guy was running the midwest for us in Chicago, Brit. We opened an office in New York and he moved to New York. And Don asked me to become the regional manager for Chicago in addition to everything else. So I now had a real estate function in terms in addition to this marketing function. And that's basically when we met. John.
Now, I'm not calling just on pension funds, but I'm now responsible for acquisitions and transactions. Transactions in the region, which was the region was everything north of Dallas and everything west of DC, all the way to Denver. So we didn't do anything. Denver was covered by the San Francisco office. So we did. Basically, it was the twin cities, Washington DC and Chicago in terms of major markets. And basically my role there was to get out, meet people and meet the brokers in the market and talk about what we were doing. And we had bought 208 South LaSalle. Before I took over that role, my job was to sell 208 South LaSalle. Actually, it wasn't my job to sell it. My job, it was my job to take a retirement. Ridiculous offer from one of the syndicators who was active in the market at that point.
[01:07:30] Speaker B: Describe that building a little bit, perhaps.
[01:07:33] Speaker C: 280 South LaSalle is like a classic old bank building. It was built as headquarters for bank that had long since gone away. Columns on the outside, marble everywhere. At the foot of La Salle street, which was the financial hub of the city, to the right as you went out the door was the border trade. Across the street was the Federal Reserve Continental bank building and the Continental bank building. We bought it for a UK client. We represented a commingle fund of uk pension funds. We bought it for them. It must have been 81 or thereabouts. I joined Rich Ellis. I worked on the due diligence for the team. And then basically what happened in the early eighties, there was this explosion of syndication syndicators were taking advantage of the tax laws had been appeared. Basically they could sell the tax write offs and the. The traditional view of what value is in a building was thrown out and it was not what's the value of the building as income producing asset is as much as what's the value of the tax write offs that the building after tax rates, the after tax benefits, and those benefits were incredibly valuable. When the highest tax rate in the US back then, John, 80, 81, must have been in the upper thirties. Low forties percent, I guess something like that, maybe even higher.
And so we were perfectly happy. Sitting on to a south of Sally was generating good income, was essentially fully leased. We were doing a massive renovation project, floor by floor, releasing at higher rates, feeling really good about it. And then VMS, which actually Peter Morris was a Princeton guy.
We didn't know each other at Princeton, but we connected. When we found that out, BMS came in the door one day and said, we want to buy a two way south of Sal. And we said, it's not for sale.
They said, we want to buy two. It's not for sale. He said, it's not for sale. And they said, but there must be a price at which you would sell.
And there was a price at which we would sell and they paid it.
[01:09:43] Speaker B: Do you remember that? What that number was?
[01:09:45] Speaker C: I don't remember the number, John, but it was probably something like a 40 or 50% premium over what we paid for it three years earlier or four years earlier. Something like.
We didn't do IRR calculations for that british client back then. But the IRR would have been skyrocketing, would have skyrocketed and return of equity would have been fit anyway. And then, of course, shortly after we did the deal the tax laws were changed and the syndication market essentially disappeared until the. I'll call it the 2010s or so when the non listed REIT business came up to replace the syndication market. I'm exaggerating.
[01:10:28] Speaker B: 1986 to 2010. That's a long time. Yeah.
[01:10:32] Speaker C: That's essentially when that money was out of the market. Now, there were still lots of syndication, there was a lot of private partnerships. But it wasn't the public market. Syndication.
[01:10:41] Speaker B: Public market.
In 1982, my wife and I went in there and signed our first life insurance policies.
Northwestern Mutual was a full floor tenant of that building.
And the guy that I said, I'll never forget this office. I mean, he had a. I think a 5000 square foot office. It was a huge office with a beautiful view. It was up on, I think, either the top floor or that building probably had close to half a million square feet.
[01:11:13] Speaker C: Right.
[01:11:13] Speaker B: It was a big building.
[01:11:14] Speaker C: It was a big building. Big floor plan with a light well in the middle. It had a fantastic. I don't know whether we'd ever seen it, John, but had a fantastic banking hall because it was built as headquarters for bank. So you went up sort of the mezzanine level and there was this beautiful. Not quite as beautiful as the rookery but this beautiful banking hall that had been covered over because nobody used it.
Anyway. It was neat space. Neat space.
[01:11:39] Speaker B: So that was your first huge deal?
[01:11:41] Speaker C: That was the first big deal in downtown Chicago for us in the first round of Richard Ellis. You and I met during that first step.
[01:11:50] Speaker B: 8384.
[01:11:52] Speaker C: Yeah, 8384. I guess you met Don first and then I, Don Andrews in Lake Forest. We were looking at the west western corridor, the west suburbs trying to buy office buildings out in Oakbrook. And you were marketing buildings out there.
[01:12:06] Speaker B: Yep. Yep.
[01:12:08] Speaker A: You helped me.
[01:12:08] Speaker B: So I went with you and we went and called on owners and said, we're representing buyers and you're going to pay my fee and all that good stuff, because you can talk a little bit about what chartered surveyors did, which is the Richard Ellis Mantra, but you always represented the buy side, so talk about that a little bit.
[01:12:30] Speaker C: Yeah. So in the UK, the profession of charge surveying is sort of like being an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor. There is a profession, you have training, you have exams, you or you apprentice. Essentially it's the investment advisor on the real estate transaction. And in the UK, each side in the transaction would be in a real estate transaction would be represented by a charge surveyor or multiple charge surveyors. So in a lease transaction, the tenant had a charge surveyor firm representing him or it, and the landlord had a firm firm representing it. In a sale transaction, the seller would be represented, typically by two different charge there. So Jones Lang and Rich Ells might represent the selling and then two other charge firms, one or two would represent the buyer and each side buyer and seller would pay its fees to its advisor. Sort of this whole discussion that's now coming down in the US about residential brokerage contracts, that there should be a. A buy side broker and a sell side broker. Well, when Rich ells came to the US in 1976, it made the decision that it would do buy side brokerage only because it didn't want to compete with the sell side brokers in their business, because they would be less likely. So if you were at Coal bank or CB commercial and you knew that we might be pitching the same assignment to get a project to sell, you'd be less willing to work with us on the buy side. Right. So Richard Ellis made the conscious decision in the early years to only be buy side advisors.
Jones Lang Wooten, which was the other gigantic UK charter surveying firm that came to Richelieu, came to the US about some time, took the opposite view. They said, we'll be buy side and we'd be buy side and sell side just as we did in the UK and as they did everywhere else in the world.
They didn't care that they were going to run into some problems with sell side brokers, and they did very well on both sides of the coin. Our view was that we do better on the buy side only. And so we stayed by side until, actually, it wasn't until my second tour of duty of rich Ellis in the early nineties that Rich Ellis started doing any investment sales stuff. So when you and I were talking, the advantage was that we could pay you, or if it was a brokerage, if it was a brokerage assignment, that you were brokering something and you were going to get paid by the seller in the traditional american transaction. At that point in time, the selling broker was getting paid a commission. There was no fee paid on the buy side.
We brought into the equation that, yeah, we don't mind. You take as much commission as you want, John. We're going get paid by our client, which is the buyer. And it made it much easier for us to access the market. We saw lots of deals. Once we explained it was not easy explaining that model. It seems pretty obvious now, but at the time it was revolutionary. People didn't believe that that was the case. They always thought, so how much of my fee you want? I don't want any portion of the fee. Not only do I not want any portion of fee, I can't take any portion of fee. I remember having negotiate agreements in writing saying specifically, under no circumstances do we want a part of your fee as a way to get that business done to the buy side. So that was the basic model. And I think that the nature of our relationship, you and I, John, it's a perfect example of sort of my business model. For 40 plus years, I spent time with people building up relationships. I jokingly said before that I was quite prepared to build bridges to nowhere if I enjoyed the person's company. And I thought it was interesting stuff, I would spend the time and energy to develop those close personal relationships, even if I didn't have doing business with that person. And I've said this forever, very few people, very few people I've run, maybe nobody else I've run into in my career has been willing to take such a long view of the business career.
And the other point I want to make about this time, this is sort of now we're early 1980s.
Other point I want to make, and this is, I know that you're primarily focused, these podcasts are primarily focused on younger professionals, real estate, business. And the point I want to make is that sometimes things seem to happen by accident.
And I encourage your listeners to recognize that not all accidents are bad accidents in terms of careers. And I have two accidents. What I'm going to talk about now, one we'll talk about later, but the one I want to talk about now is I had just left Richard Alice. So it's the end of 83, and I get a call from the guy in charge of marketing at Richelle's who was still there after we had left. Group of us had left. He said, brad, I just got a call from Rich Ellis UK. Rich Ellis London, and there's a group of real estate professionals from the UK called the center for Advanced Land Use Studies. It's at Reading university and they're taking a tour, bringing a bunch of real estate people from the UK, traveling around the US, going to various cities to study the real estate markets in those cities as sort of continued education class for these people now reading, reading university in the UK. I'm not sure either school would appreciate my comparison, but essentially it was the madison of the UK. It was the preeminent real estate university in the UK. It still is a fantastic university for real estate. And they organized this for a series of years. They organized these tours of the US and they were coming to Chicago. And this is sort of, again, the difference in mentality between me and most of the people I dealt with, including the people at Richard Ellis. So the Richard Ellis people who were left after we left said, I don't want to do any, I don't want anything to do with each people. And the guy was running marketing, said, well, you know, I gotta do something for him. So I'll call Brad.
So he called up and said, brad, there's, I got this from Rich house, London. We don't want, nobody in our shop wants to do this. These people want a tour of the United, of the Chicago market. Would you give it to him? And I guess, of course, happy to do it. So, I don't know, there were twelve or 15 really interesting real estate professionals from the UK, came to Chicago, spent a couple of days, and I toured them around the market. I got to know a number of them, and one in particular, a guy named John Miles, who was that point, was a partner in a boutique investment brokerage business in London, a few years younger than I. But we just hit it off immediately. The next year John came back. He was the leader of the tour. The next year we did the tour again. He brought his wife, his wife Melanie and Louise became good friends.
They have been close, close, personal friends ever since. 84 then. And we're going to jump ahead to Lexington for a second. But when we formed the Lexington company, we created a fund, the Lexington Property Fund. And when I was telling John about it, he said, well, maybe my partner's not wanting us. So we created this vehicle. And little did I know, but John, his partners became investors in a Lexington property fund, which we created. But again, it was one of those accidents, as they say. Sometimes accidents, I mean, accidents do happen and sometimes they produce wonderful results. So the young listeners should remember accidents are okay.
[01:20:17] Speaker B: So what developed for you to leave Richard Ellis and then subsequently to start the Lexington company at that time.
[01:20:24] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a super topic, John. So essentially, when Rich Ellis came to the US, it came. The US operation was a subset of the investment department of the London office. So Rich Ellis did everything around the world, valuations and what we would call appraisals, investment sales, investment purchase and leasing, all that kind of stuff.
But the US operation in 1976 was created as a subset of the investment department of London only. So we had no official ties to Richard Ellison, Hong Kong or France or Germany or Spain or anyplace else. We literally reported to London and ultimately we reported to the head of the London investment department, who was effectively the chairman of Richard Ellis US.
But there was a younger UK partner between us and him.
And that partner was incredibly talented and he played a huge role in getting Rich Ellis on the map and off the ground in the US.
But some of us in the US had a personality problem or had a problem with the organization being so wholly dependent on what London wanted to do.
And so all of the american directors, this is now mid 83. All the american directors. Don Bodell was president. Greg Campbell was a director in charge of management. I was a director, regional manager and head of institutional marketing.
We all wanted to change things. We wanted more control over our business. So the team in Dallas, team in Atlanta, team in San Francisco, and us, but not the team in the New York, because he was british, he was a uk guy. We said, we went to London investment Park. We said, we want to change and it's either our way or we leave. And they thought about it for 15 or 20 seconds and they said goodbye.
So literally overnight, every one of the us directors resigned and the team in Dallas set up their own business. San Francisco set up their own business. The guys in Atlanta went in various directions, one of whom ended up being a conduit for a client later on. And basically we had no office, no jobs, no anything.
It was going to be Don and Greg and I.
And then while we were trying to figure out what we can do, Greg got a call from Homer.
And Omar gave him the sort of proverbial offer he couldn't refuse, and they made him head of property management at Homer.
[01:23:11] Speaker B: That's when I met Greg.
[01:23:13] Speaker C: That's when you met Greg. Fantastic guy, just incredibly talented.
[01:23:17] Speaker B: And I knew the name was familiar. I just know now I clicked.
[01:23:21] Speaker C: And so Don and I are on our own and we know what we're going to do. So I said, let me call Rich batch back at jea so I'll call Rich up and I say, here's what's happening.
And Rich said, well, why don't you don set up an office here, we got extra offices. Come set up an office in his planes and figure out what you want to do. And in the meantime, Brad, you can do some legal work for us again because we miss you.
So while we're trying to figure out what we're going to do and Donna's trying to put together a couple of deals, I'm practicing law again for JDAe, and now we're late 83, early 84. And our old friend Jerry Scott from the St. Paul company says, I'm really tired of working for a big company myself.
How would you like a third partner? There you go. And it all sounded really good, but we didn't have any money.
But Don knew Arthur Rubloff.
Arthur Rubloff, at that point in time, was undoubtedly the most famous name in Chicago real estate.
He was Donald Trump without the baggage.
He was the consummate gentleman and the benefactor of, I don't know, dozens of real estate firms that got established in the Chicago market in the eighties and beyond.
Seventies, eighties. And. And the alumni of Rubloff, his brokerage business he operated for a long time, were legendary in the Chicago market. Liglin Beitler, Goldie Wolf, I mean, you know, go right down the list, the famous people in the Chicago real estate business. So Don approached Arthur and said, we're trying to start this business and we need some startup capital. And Arthur said, sure, how much do you need? What do I get? This sounds good. So we set up in 74, the Lexington company with Arthur's backing.
84. Sorry, 84, Arthur's backing and other interesting cool. Arthur. Arthur was just this. Did you ever meet him, John? Did you ever have?
[01:25:28] Speaker B: I never met Arthur. But of course he brought on my former mentor in Chicago, a guy named Ed Holmer.
[01:25:37] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:25:38] Speaker B: Ed worked with Arthur Rubloth. I never did a chance.
[01:25:43] Speaker C: Arthur was this amazingly colorful, dapper gentleman. I guess by the time we met him, he would have been well into his seventies. He would walk around with a bowler hat and a cane. And when anybody went to visit Arthur in his office, which is at that point was at 69 West Washington, you go into his office and you'd have your meeting and then he would say, wait just a minute.
He had a room in his office filled with gifts, literally, it was a room probably 15 by 20ft in area, floor to ceiling gifts, umbrellas, shoehorns, everything imaginable that he could give out as a souvenirous. So whenever you went to visit Arthur, he would go out, he'd come back and he'd give you a shoehorn or.
[01:26:35] Speaker B: Umbrella or whatever with a rubel name on all.
[01:26:38] Speaker C: With the rub off. Exactly.
[01:26:40] Speaker B: Of course, yes.
[01:26:41] Speaker C: I still someplace. I still have the brass. I still have the brass shoehorn. And it was Arthur Rubelof in script engraved on the shoe.
But we couldn't have done it without Arthur. And she said he later brought on Ed. Homer. Ed sat on our board, his as Arthur's representative. So I got to know Ed, there's another art grid home. Great Ed Homer store. So Ed and I are in a taxi on the way from downtown Chicago out to the airport, and Ed reached in his wallet and he said, do you have one of these?
This is before any hotel chain had cards, regular customer cards, or any of the airlines had their programs. Hilton had a Hilton VIP, Cardinal.
And Ed said, brad, you travel all the time. You should have one of these cards.
I'll call Baron. Baron Hilton and I'll get you one of these cards. So a week later, I get a letter in the mail from Baron Hilton himself with my personal vip card. And I remember several years later being on a call with the Hilton at reservations. By then, people had all kinds of these cards. And the guy said, whatever, you don't get rid of this card because this card is like magic. In the Hilton system, if you have one of these cards, it means you knew somebody when knowing somebody mattered. And for years after, I would get benefits from Hilton as a result, anyway, just for listeners.
[01:28:00] Speaker B: Ed Homer. I worked at Homer Development company in 1981 and 82. Ed was president of the Homeart development company at the time he came there for my prior employer, which was Abco properties. He had been president of Chrysler Realty Corporation, who Charles Koch had acquired from Chrysler Corporation when Lee Iacocca was chairman. And Ed Homer came with them and then left to start to begin presidency at Homer and then hired me to come in as a development guy there. And then I went to work for CB, and that's when I met Brad. So it's just to give a little backstory there.
[01:28:39] Speaker C: Anyway, so Don and Jerry and I decided to set this company. We needed a name for the company, and we're batting around names, you know, sitting around, what do you call ourselves? And I suggest the name Lexington as a tongue in cheek reference to the initial battle of the Revolutionary War, since we were breaking away from the London office of Rich Ellis.
[01:28:58] Speaker B: That's interesting.
[01:28:59] Speaker C: It just so happened that there was also a Lexington in Chicago, and we had a feud with them for a while, about a year of the name, but they finally gave up complaining about what we're doing anyway. So between 84 and 89, we grew the company to about 60 employees, three offices, Chicago, Minneapolis, and eventually DC, where we hired Esco Corjonen to run, to run the business. And our first major client was the St. Paul companies, which had followed Jerry to the Lexington company. They brought us to DC, their relationships with Bart Jewitt, and we ended up buying the two buildings, Lafayette center for St. Paul, and worked on a series of transactions with the Fart Druid companies. And over time, because Jerry was originally from Minnesota, he focused much of his energy on growing the Minneapolis business, became major players in the Minneapolis market, and had a really good team of people there. And Don and I, three partners at that point in time. Don and I devoted time between Chicago, Atlanta, and DC. Don and I both did Chicago, Don did Atlanta, and I did DC primarily. Again, we were all overlapping. Somebody needed help, we did it, we helped. And I inherited the far jute relationship and started spending time in your market there, John. I do. So I do have a connection to the market, but I definitely am not an icon there.
[01:30:16] Speaker B: Well, you have proteges that came to Washington. Yes, we're pretty prominent people here for a while.
[01:30:23] Speaker C: That's true.
[01:30:24] Speaker B: Including Esko Corhonen, you already mentioned, who was a founder of FCP, a major company in this market. His partner, Lacy Rice, was one of my podcast guests. And then Brian Barry, who subsequently ran the Tishman spire office here and just retired this year from a multifamily developer in Chicago that he was affiliated with.
Those are two examples. And then Jamie Stolpestad is the other one.
[01:30:52] Speaker C: He worked there for a while.
[01:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he was in Washington for a while as well. I think he was with Spaulding and Sly for a while.
[01:30:59] Speaker C: GE for a while. GE Capital for a while.
[01:31:02] Speaker B: Right, right.
[01:31:04] Speaker C: Anyway, my first assignment with far Jewitt ended up with the far Jew relationship involved the planning for and the capitalization of 625 Indiana Avenue northwest.
This was a PADC project, so we were under the auspices of PADC, Pennsylvania Avenue Development Company. Right. And I interacted with Abe Poland's group, because Abe owned the building that we bought to where we had developed. And under PADC rules, Abe had to continue to own some sliver of a piece of the deal. So every transaction, everything that happened, had to have Abe's signature on it. Park Jewel was great working with architects and developing really neat looking nice buildings, functional buildings. This was a mid block building. Lots of challenges to it, but ultimately well designed. Interesting thing. But we needed equity. And so we're now in the second half of the eighties, and we need money. And it was not a deal for the St. Paul companies. It was not a deal for a lot of people we talked to.
But I was introduced to Larry Nussdorf, who worked for Jim Clark at Clark Enterprises.
Larry and I got to know each other quickly and liked each other a lot. He was a Wharton grad. Smart as all get out, tough as all get out. But we established a really good working relationship early on. And in the end, Clark Enterprises, through Larry, put up the bulk of the equity that we. That was required.
Sort of another interesting anecdote. And I have plenty of these. If you. If you don't want them, just stop me. John. But Larry, Larry and I both like baseball. Third job was a cub fan. Larry's a baseball fan. And so on one of my trips to Washington, he said, come on, we're going to Camden Yards. This is right after they opened Camden Yards. I got to see Camden yards. But more importantly for a baseball fan, I got to see Cal Ripken play one of his 26, two consecutive games. That was pretty exciting.
[01:33:00] Speaker B: Gal was special.
[01:33:01] Speaker C: Gal was special, and the ballpark is special. And again, we've gone multiple generations since then. But it's still a neat place to watch baseball. Anyway. 625 Indiana was finished in 89. And with Don's help, we ended up selling it to Markboro properties out of Canada. Just as the capital markets were trending down. We got out. We got out just fine. But the mark was getting ready to collapse on us. And we also bought. We advised Mark Baron on building in downtown Chicago. 300 South Wacker Drive. And this is, again, back when we're all doing different things. And as it relates to the investors, Jerry was really focused on keeping the St. Paul companies happy. And doing things with private investors and other insurance companies in between cities to build our portfolio. The twin cities. Don started in the mid eighties. Focusing on japanese investors. They had entered the market.
There were a number of the big japanese banks. With major offices in downtown Chicago. And through the Chicago bank offices. Don was introduced to some of the mega japanese players back in Tokyo. So we were doing work, consulting work for the japanese banks in Chicago and the real estate portfolios. Don said, I want to start calling on the investors in Tokyo. Can you make introductions? And he made a series of trips over Tokyo. Again, not cold calling, but with introductions provided by the banks. And his efforts led to an assignment we got on behalf of Meiji Life Insurance Company, one of the big japanese life companies, to acquire a downtown office building in Chicago. And we worked together to, by a super majority interest. There were technical reasons why we didn't buy 100% in three first national plaza, which is a project that had been developed by Hines Heinz.
[01:34:49] Speaker B: That's right, sure.
[01:34:50] Speaker C: Joint venture with the world Edge Shell pension Fund. But the dutch story there at the time, and we closed it in 86 or 87, I'm going to say maybe 88, 87 maybe. It was the largest single property transaction in the history of Chicago estate. And it was done by this little company, the Lexington company, representing this gigantic japanese life insurance company. So it was a momentous transaction from our perspective. But again, we're talking technology like three or four generations ago, but indication of just how long ago it was. We had to run out by a fax machine because it was the only way we could communicate with Tokyo overnight. It was one of these first generation thermal paper fax me.
[01:35:35] Speaker B: Right. The scrolling paper.
[01:35:37] Speaker C: The scrolling paper, exactly. And we had to get used to working with japanese investors, which was culturally a very different thing because again, ill say it multiple times. I dont mean to make generalizations about all people from Japan or all investors from Japan or all investors from the Netherlands are all investors in Germany.
But dealing with the Japanese on that transaction, which was a very big transaction, we got used to the notion that yes, yes, yes, yes didn't mean yes, yes meant, I understand what you're saying, let's move to the next point. I understand what you're saying, let's move to the next point.
But it was a fantastic cultural experience.
I remember the man who was running Meiji's real estate in the US, Meiji's senior realty based in New York. I remember being visiting him in New York and him asking me, would I like to go to a japanese restaurant for lunch?
And this was like, japanese restaurant as in Japan, japanese restaurant. This is not like, you know, going to Benihana or something, right? This was in Park Avenue south. He went there regularly because his offices were nearby. He knew everybody. You took off your shoes, you had a low table. And he said, do you want me to order? I said, sure. And he said, are you willing to try things? I said, I will try anything you order because that's my nature. I like, I'm willing to try. So he ordered this meal for us, which included sea urchin.
And I ate the search and actually liked it. And he looked at me like, are you kidding? Me. No Americans ever had sea urchin with me and liked it. I said, no, I think it's fine. And I've since ordered sea urchin other times. But it was this cultural experience of dealing with different people from different cultures. And part of it, John, was this openness I had, part of it being a naive midwesterner growing up that you didn't know any better and treated everybody with respect, even though they were different than you. And that mindset has helped me over the years, years dealing with people from different cultures, with different perspectives of how to do business. You don't get along with everybody. You don't do business with everybody, because not everybody shares your views or your perspective on how things should get done. So that was Don's focus was Japan. My focus ended up being the Netherlands. And so, again, this is one of those accidents that happened. And this accident candidly changed my career and allowed me to do amazing things with amazing people for the rest of my business life. So we learned that a dutch investor by the name of Wilma, Wilma W I l M A, was in the. We saw it in the Tribune or rains Chicago business that they'd acquired the building that had been known as blueclass Blue Shield building at 222 North Dearborn. Blue Cross was moving out of the building. It was going to be vacant. The Dutch were buying it vacant. And Don had run across the wilma name. Don was covering Atlanta. Wilma had been active in the Atlanta market for a number of years as a general contractor and a developer. And Don had met the guy who was running Wilma's office in Atlanta on one of his various trips to Atlanta. He said, well, let me call my guy in Wilma.
So he reached out to his Wilma company act, and the guy said, well, it's not us. The family that owns us has an investment arm called Wilma Vasgood, Wilma real estate.
They bought it for the family. We have nothing to do with it. But here are the guys who are running the show for the family. Introduced us to two people. We reached out to two people and said, we have this thinking we are of the you, that you might need a local asset manager because you're sitting over there in Maast Street, Netherlands. Maastricht, as in Maas Maas, which was the family.
And we gave them this sort of introduction to who? The Lexington company, who we were at the Lexington company, what we did in other buildings, our relationships to the market, blah, blah, blah.
They came into town, we met. They said, give us a proposal. We gave him a proposal. And they said, great, you got the job. So we're looking around Don, Jerry and our center. Who's got time to do this? Don was busy doing something. Jerry's busy doing something. I had time on my hands. They said, okay, Brad, you take the dutch assignment on what became known as 55 west whackers. So literally, because I had less on my plate than anybody else, I got the assignment to become the asset manager for Wilma on their acquisition in Chicago. So they bought the building vacant. They'd already hired Hirsch Klaff of Claff Realty in Chicago. John, you must have run into Hirsch at some point.
[01:40:31] Speaker B: I have, yeah.
[01:40:32] Speaker C: Amazing.
[01:40:34] Speaker B: His operating company.
[01:40:35] Speaker C: Yeah, he's got an op company now buying. Buying retail.
[01:40:39] Speaker B: They were buying stuff here. Retail properties in this market.
[01:40:42] Speaker C: Buying a lot of.
[01:40:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:40:44] Speaker C: Really interesting guy. Fantastic. Anyway, the wilm assignment ends up being one of my father's proverbial pebbles in the water. It would generate ripples that dominated my career for years to come. And. And two of those are particularly interesting to me. One is that over the next 15 years after starting Wilma, I ended up representing virtually every dutch investor that came to the United States in some. Some form or fashion back when they were direct investors and they became REIT investors. Then they got out of the market. They came back in the market. And I think that with the exception of ABP, which is the public employees pension plan, I work with virtually every dutch investor. Dutch pension fund that came to the US in the case of Shell, it was on the other side of the transaction, on the Heinz deal. But others I was representing as a.
[01:41:34] Speaker B: So how did you build those relationships?
[01:41:38] Speaker C: I wish I could say it was thoughtful and carefully designed strategy, but much of it just sort of happened. And part of that was the willingness to get on a plane and fly to the Netherlands. Part of it was, again, this notion that even as Lexington, we didn't have so many breathing down our neck that said, you had to do it this way or you'd get fired. I got to meet my second client when it became clear that we were doing work with Wilma and I started making these trips. I met a group called, with the initials GAK, which was pronounced in Dutch in an unpronounceable way for me or something like that. They were an investment advisory firm. They represented the government entity which managed what was the equivalent of our Medicare. So they basically were managing the assets. If you thought of. If you thought of Medicare Medicaid, the funds that fund Medicare Medicaid being managed by third party managers. That's what the Netherlands had. And so they managed real estate assets or the government that paid out Medicare. They were big player. And they also represented a series of industry pension funds. So over the road workers, the guys like our teamsters union, was a pension fund for the truck drivers, was a client of GAk.
And I just really developed a great relationship with. The guy was running us real estate for GAk. As a result of having met him with this background of knowing what the Dutch did and how they did it and being.
I'll say, john, that the Dutch were more midwestern than they were eastern or California or southern. They were very direct, must know fuss, no marketing, no Wall street kind of stuff. Very straight shooters.
[01:43:29] Speaker B: Anyway, let me stop you just for a moment. There was an intern who worked with me at the Saul company. And he came to the United States through a connection through the BF Saul company. And his father's name was Harry. Thierry.
[01:43:46] Speaker C: Okay. I didn't know you were for. I didn't know Harry's son worked there. He did.
[01:43:50] Speaker B: He worked at the saw company for a whole year. And he actually had Thanksgiving dinner at our Holland.
Anton Terry did. Yeah. And I stay in touch with him, but he mentioned his father's name. But I knew it was pretty high up in the pension fund world in Holland, so I'll just mention that.
[01:44:09] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Interesting.
[01:44:10] Speaker B: What was his role?
[01:44:11] Speaker C: It's a small world, by the way, in that regard. So that's one of the great benefits of dealing with the Dutch.
Two aspects of that small world. One is everybody knows everybody. And so if you get in with one, you get in with all of. Basically the downside of that is if one of them decides he doesn't like you or you do something wrong, everybody knows about it immediately. So the black ball system worked very effectively. But if you call it a white ball system worked equally effectively. And so much of the. Much of the growth of my business with the Dutch was the result of the fact that I had done well by the first few clients. And they spoke well of me when I went to see somebody else. So Miguel Gak, they were literally just entering the us market. They had done a deal in Colorado Springs on their own, which proved not to be very successful, and deal in Boston on their own, which had not been particularly. These were little deals. And at that point in time, PGGM, which is the second largest pension fund in the Netherlands, the pension fund for the healthcare system, the insurance, the hospital professionals. So doctors, lawyers, doctors, nurses, all that kind of stuff. They had already been active in the US. They were active in Alexandria back in the early eighties when I joined Rich Ellis. John, at that point, they had created a wholly owned subsidiary in Atlanta called Dutch Institutional Holding Corporation DIHC. And they were very big players in the us market before any of the other guys got really serious about it.
[01:45:41] Speaker B: Let me stop you for a moment. There was a developer, Alexandria known as Savage Fogarty.
[01:45:46] Speaker C: Exactly.
[01:45:47] Speaker B: Which I believe was affiliated.
[01:45:49] Speaker C: That's how they did their deal in Alexandria. That's exactly right. Absolutely. That was the connection.
[01:45:55] Speaker B: Canal center. Canal center on the water.
[01:45:58] Speaker C: Exactly.
[01:45:58] Speaker B: In the Potomac river in Alexandria. Okay, got it.
[01:46:02] Speaker C: Connection. So PGM is now out doing big deals around the United States.
[01:46:07] Speaker B: Right.
[01:46:08] Speaker C: And in DC. You remember, John, that market square was a project started by western. Western development. That's right. Another PADC deal.
[01:46:19] Speaker B: 701 and 1801 Pennsylvania.
[01:46:21] Speaker C: They ran out of money. I'm going to put color on it. I don't. Western probably would deny that they ran out. They needed money, put it that way. They needed more money. They didn't run out of money. They needed more money. And they enter into a joint venture, essentially becoming the minority co development partner with Trammel Crow.
[01:46:38] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:46:39] Speaker C: DIHC. Yep. So PG, GM's entity, DIC and trammel Crow essentially were the moneyed developers of market Square.
[01:46:50] Speaker B: Well, interestingly, Brad, that property just traded in the last 60 days, or actually 30 days. Yeah. Interesting to PRP.
[01:47:02] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah. What's his name? Paul.
[01:47:04] Speaker B: Paul Doherty.
[01:47:04] Speaker C: Doherty bought it.
[01:47:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:47:06] Speaker C: Anyway, so Gak has the view that instead of going out and doing all these big deals on its own, which it couldn't do because it didn't have a team in place, they would buy pieces of the deals that DiEC had created for PGM, the other Dutch funding the Gak hired us to negotiate the purchase of a minority position in Market Square from DIHC. At the same time, DIHC was doing a deal with Heinzhe Boston called 500 Boylston street, and we negotiated the purchase of a piece of that deal. We had hired a guy named Dudley Malone. We had a lot of experience in Boston. He worked for a Middle Eastern development firm and he was covering Boston for us. And so we advised JK on the pricing of the deal in Boston, as we had done on the pricing of Market Square.
And this was happening.
Modern Boylston was delivered brand new by Heinz in 89. Again, we're now at that point where peak market peak is coming.
[01:48:18] Speaker B: Inflection point.
[01:48:19] Speaker C: Inflection point, perfectly put. So the 500 Boylston was phenomenally successful, at least up beautifully. Because at the time, it was the best building in town. There wasn't much space.
And GK, when it did the deal on 500 Borliston, was given an option to participate in phase two, which would be 222 Berkeley street.
So they retained us. This is like, two years later, a year and a half, two years later. All right, so should we do the second phase?
And we did the work and we said, no, the market has turned. The deal that you've been offered is the same deal you were offered on phase one when the market was on the upswing. Now the market's corrected, and they want you to take the same economics you did on phase one. We said, we don't think it makes sense. We recommend you pass on it. They did it anyway.
And they did it because the logic of it was understandable. I think I would have still listened to our thinking on it. But their logic was, these two phases are essentially back to back connected. They're basically two buildings on the same block. And if we're not in phase two, we have the risk of conflict of interest. As tenants get moved from one to the other, we might suffer from a conflict. So they said, no, we're going to go ahead and do it anyway. So a number of years later, after the crash of the early nineties, this is now I'm on my own. So it's 95, 96, something like that. Yo, Pinning, who was the number two at Gak, was a guy who inherited the Gak business. When his partner, the head guy, moved to Dic, yo reached out to me and said, brad, could I meet him? And one of the board members of the client, the fund they were advising in Boston to tour the properties.
So, yeah, okay. For sure. Yop was a fantastic person, a prince of a guy. Anyway, so we meet up for the night before the tour at their hotel, and he's introducing me to the board member. Now, the board member knows that they did really well on phase one and that they lost their equity on phase two.
I'm being brought in because I was the advisor.
And it would have been very easy for Yop to just say, and Brad was our advisor in Boston. Instead, Yop said, brad advised us to do phase one. He told us not to do phase two, and we did it anyway, and we lost all the equity.
Now that was the dutch approach.
Aren't many people we know in our industry who would have been so forthright and so willing to accept responsibility or a bad decision, as yoke did that night in Boston. A fantastic, fantastic relationship. Anyway, so his boss, the guy who'd been number one, Jan Kuman, had gone from Gak, moved to DHC, and retained us as Lexington to help him on some things. And then. And then, just as that was happening, we're now early nineties. This is where about to start doing stuff.
The tax treaty between the Netherlands and the US.
A new treaty was signed in Washington on December 18, 1992.
This is as big a watershed moment in terms of dutch investment, us real estate, as anything that's happened in the last 50 years. Probably we could talk about the treaty in depth.
It had a major impact on how the Dutch were invested. I'm not going to give you the tax discussion of it, but in order to understand what happened with the Dutch in the years following, you need to understand the treaty. Basic treaty terms. The single most important provision of the new treaty as far as dutch pension fund investment in us real estate was concerned, was that the treaty stated simplistically that the dutch pension funds who invested through domestically controlled reits, the income from those reits would not be taxable in the US. Now, by the definition of what's a domestically controlled REIT got negotiated, interpreted different ways, but essentially, if more than 50% of the shares of the REIT that owned the real estate were held by us taxpayers, us entities, it was domestically controlled. And so if a dutch pension fund owned its real estate in the form of a REIT, where more than 50% of the shares were owned by Americans, by us investors, us taxpayers, the income generated was tax free to the dutch pension. The idea being this is a tax free entity in the Netherlands, we should treat it as tax free in the US because it's a pension fund for the benefit of pensioners.
This came just as the market had crashed, was crashing.
This treaty came basically the same time as the roll up, limited partnership roll ups were happening in the market. John. And you knew?
Yep. And so over a period of, let's call, call it 92 to 95 or 96, virtually every major dutch owner of real estate in the United states upright its in its interests into what became domestically controlled public reits.
PGM did it, ABP did, gak did it.
And the net result was that they were no longer direct owners of us real. They would not buy a piece of real estate and own it. Basically, what they had been doing was buying it themselves, keeping it on their balance sheet, paying tax. Now they realized they didn't have to worry about tax. All they needed to do was own it in a REIT that was more than 50% of the stick. So the combination of the treaty and the upreach changed the universe of dutch investment in us real estate. I'll say overnight in the context of my career, where it was overnight, it was a period of years.
But just to give you two interesting tidbits of that, by the time PGM had rolled up its assets three times, two or three times, their assets ended up in Sam Zell's equity office REIT.
And when Sam sold that REIT to Blackstone PGM, the Dutch pension fund, was the single largest shareholder of equity office REIT. Wow.
[01:55:03] Speaker B: That was the largest transaction in us history at the time.
[01:55:07] Speaker C: And at that point in time, dutch pension funds owned 10% of all us REIT shares.
Wow. It was just this incredible seismic, watershed moment that affected all of this. And so now we're back to sort of what I'm doing as the ripple effects of my first little accidental assignment for Wilmot, 55 West Wacker in Chicago. The first ripple is that all of a sudden I became knowledgeable about the importance of domestically controlled reits and the if the impact of the REIT structure on tax efficiency for dutch pension funds.
[01:55:56] Speaker B: So you could have gone on the boards of just about every, every upbreed in the United States.
[01:56:03] Speaker C: It was an amazing situation. But the. So that was, that was, you know, again, back to this ripple, this ripple metaphor. That was one ripple, the other ripple from it, which is, I'll call it sort of a play on six degrees of separation. This theory that basically any two people are only six or few social connections apart.
[01:56:20] Speaker B: Right.
[01:56:22] Speaker C: Wilma decided to replace Claff with Rubloff, the Rublav brokerage arm, as the leasing and management agent for 55 west whacker. So I got to work closely with Rand diamond from Rubloff.
[01:56:35] Speaker B: Sure. My wife worked there for about a year at Rublav.
[01:56:40] Speaker C: So later I, Rand was president of a brokerage alliance called GVA, which had, it's sort of a way that the independent brokerage firms are trying to compete with JLL and Richelieu, CBRE, CBRE of the world.
So Rand became president of GVA for a term. This is the late 1990s, and he helped me secure a consulting assignment from GVA. They were trying to figure out how do they. How, how do they brand their business on the global. How do they do global business? Because they were only doing local domestic business.
I got that assigned. But then, more importantly, he introduced me to a series of the GBA network around the country. So it was Steve Collins in DC who was at that point at Larsen, Ball and Gould, David Fitzgerald who was at Whittier Partners in Boston and Blair Booth at Goodman, Seeger, Hogan, Hoffler here in the triangle. These are all people I met solely because Rand had become the leasing agent of the building, which I took over by accident because nobody, neither of my other partners had time.
So those three names are going to come back regularly. In the story of my 26 years, Atlantic partners, Steve would become one of my closest, has become one of my closest friends in the us industry and probably has introduced me to more my future clients than anybody else and incredibly responsible for the success. Dave Fitzgerald out of Boston would introduce me to the german family, which retained me to hire that to buy the ground lease position for him in Chicago. And Blair would introduce me to Gordon Grubb. So each of them had some, like, major role in what my business was to become. And I would not have meant any of them except this accident of taking on the Wilma son. And my mom sort of believed in fate. She thought things happened because they must happen that way. I believe in my mom, my father's metaphor out the pebble in the water, much more so than I believe in my mom's fate. And so sometimes these ripples reach the other side of the shore. The shore. Sometimes they dissipate before each other. So let me bring. Yeah, go ahead.
In my case, the work from Wilmo, the ripples reach Rand and then Steve, David and Blair, and rest all the show. Go ahead. Sorry.
[01:58:59] Speaker B: So I'm going to now segue to my experience with Lexington, with you coming to Washington, and you came in, you had the money, and you were investing, and this was 1991, and I was in December of 1990, I was told by the BFS company that I was going to go on straight commission because the company was a very short cash flow, because Chebyshe's bank was teetering on the brink of becoming part of the RTC.
[01:59:29] Speaker C: Exactly at the time.
[01:59:30] Speaker B: And so this was a savings and loan. Frank Saul owned it, and that was its largest asset. And that entity invested in land in northern Virginia heavily. With another podcast guest of mine, Bob Kettler, who was heavily involved in major land use development deals in northern Virginia, a good portion of Loudoun County, Virginia.
Three or four big subdivisions there that all went bust during the SNL crisis because that's where the capital came from to do them. So this goes back to, okay, so the salt company has to figure out how they're going to pay their, not only their bills, but their company and keep their properties afloat. The company at the time had 23 operating entities, one of which was the mortgage company I worked for, which was the mortgage banking firm. So we were the, you know, the institutional investment group that represented life insurance companies. And we had the interface with the national investment community, whereas everything else in the company was local and owned real estate. So some of the owned real estate included 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, which was adjacent to the two buildings. Brad just talked about the market square and John.
[02:00:48] Speaker C: And on the same block is 625 Indiana. That's right across the back of your building was the front of our building at 605 Indiana. And you had me come in and see the salt people when we were trying to develop 625.
[02:01:01] Speaker B: Yep. And one of the properties that came on the market, and it was a quiet market sale, was white Oak shopping center in Silver Spring, Maryland. And so we got the numbers to Brad and at the time, because he was one of the candidates to buy, to bid on it. And so, and at the same time, Frank Saul junior was out, or, you know, BF Saul II was out talking to giant food to do whatever he could with other retail that he owned, because they owned quite a bit of retail. They had a shopping center reit that went private two years earlier, and then, of course, went back out public, calling Saul centers. They were one of the 93 94 upgrades. But anyway, before this is before that. So, White Oak, Brad had a letter of intent, Lexington company and a letter of intent to buy the property. A couple of his analysts spent a lot of time underwriting it and getting it ready. And you met with Phil Carasi, who at the time was the operating head of the BF small and real estate investment trust, which was the operating company that owned the retail at that time.
And we thought you had a deal there. It was pretty close, but for some reason they decided not. It was late 1991, and suddenly giant came through, buying another shopping, another two shopping centers, one in the district and one up here on Rockville pike in Montgomery county, to close by the year end. And that's what gave them enough liquidity to stave off the RTC and move forward.
But it was interesting, you at least got a chance to meet senior people at the salt company at the time.
[02:02:44] Speaker C: So, John, the money that we had available for White Oak was coming out of what we call election property fund. We had created a commingle vehicle.
The St. Paul companies were our anchor investor, and they were joined by Gak, my dutch client, came in as an investor in the fund. John Miles and his partners, my old buddy from the tour of Chicago, came in for more money. He bought properties in the Twin Cities and bought a warehouse in suburban Chicago. And we looked at the properties there in DC that you're talking about. And interestingly enough, we, when the market corrected, we managed to hold each property, hold on to each property. Nothing got given back to a bank.
And our dutch client, Gak told me, Joe Pitting, I mentioned it before, Boston context told me later that the only fund in which they invested in that vintage where they got back all their money, was the Lexington property fund.
Wow.
We had great hopes for it. We thought it was going to be the beginning of a business for us in terms of investment management business.
[02:04:00] Speaker B: So what happened?
[02:04:02] Speaker C: Well, this is about the time when we're now fast forward to late 1988.
Back, back and forth to your time zone, your timeline a little bit, John. But Don and I had maintained great relations with a number of our old Richard Ellis contacts in London. After we left to form Lexington, we'd taken on a couple of assignments that the people who survived us, that Rich Ellis didn't want to do. They thought they were beneath them. And then Barry White, who was the chairman of Rich Ellis International, and I had a great friendship.
He told me on one of our calls, listen, our son Simon's coming to tour the United States with a buddy of his from university, because they stop and see you in Chicago. So they stayed with us for a few weeks. They had no clue what they were going to do. And we hooked them up with all kinds of people and figured out who they could go see along the way the rest of their trip. But we had a, Don and I had great relationship with these people. And in late 1989, late 1988, we get this call from Barry with a crazy, what we thought was a crazy proposition. So in late 1988, Barry White reached out to us with a proposition. He said that the group which had succeeded us at Richard Ellis was now going to break away from Richard Ellis and form their own company. The company that would become Yarmouth and Rich Ellis International wanted to buy the Lexington company and bring us back into the rich Ellis world. It was hard to imagine that the circle had come all the way around again. But in August of 89, Don, Jerry and I sold the Lexington company to Rich Ellis International and the three of us became international shareholders again. This is 89. This. The market fever is hot. And Richard Ellis was like, go full speed ahead, open your own office in New York. Go out and hire a bunch of people. We need to really, we need to grow this, because this is now the rich elves name. And Yarmouth is going to have already has a whole lot more people than you have. And they're going to be taking away all our business. So we need to build, we need to grow rich fells.
So we did. So can't point to what I'd call a Lehman moment like the GFC.
But for me, the crash of, I'll call it 1990 to 94, was the most significant and impactful of all the recessions I've endured since I graduated from law school. It was worse for me than a GFC. It was worse than for me than what we've been going through right now. And it's impossible for young people, even those who are going through what we're going through now, to understand just what we went through with all of that RTC experience.
I ended up getting an assignment from my old law firm, Hopkins and Sutter, to became the number one law firm for the RTC FDIC.
They hired me to be their, essentially their workout guy on a project in Panama City, Florida through this period. But what happened, we come from this high of this flood of capital from Japan and elsewhere around the world, including my dutch friends. Developers were building office, delivering office buildings in major markets only on the basis of what they thought the cap rate was going to be when they finished.
They didn't have to make any sense from a holding period if they knew that they could sell it at a ridiculously low cap rate.
Suddenly, seemingly overnight, although it obviously it took a few months, maybe six months for us to realize what was going on, the capital markets froze completely.
Vacancy rates in these to be delivered office buildings in every major market in the United States skyrocketed and panic set in.
I remember, John, and you probably do too. The number of people we knew in our industry who just abandoned real estate altogether, they just quit because there was no future real estate. Literally. They had to go find a job doing something else, which ended up in what we later called the lost generation of mid level real estate executives. You talk to people who survived that.
[02:08:21] Speaker B: Period, they alive to 95 was the era.
[02:08:26] Speaker C: Exactly. So that was one thing which I've told young people this and they think I've lost my mind.
But commentators, this is now, we're now in 93, 94, commentators who were talking about the US off of market were comparing it to the building of the transcontinental railroad.
They said that we only had to build it once and we never had to build it yet. So what they were saying was we built so much office space and it brewed from, let's call it 87 to 93, that we were never, never going to need another office. We had built so many office buildings in the period from, let's call it 87 to 93, and the vacancy was so high that commentators were saying we never had to build another office building that we would never fill up the buildings we had. And again, the comparison was to the transcontinental railroad. You build it once, you don't have to build it again.
[02:09:22] Speaker B: Well, values dropped almost 50% to 60% in most major cities in office. And that's when Sam Zell rolled up. His equity office was about 93 or so.
[02:09:36] Speaker C: That's when he got the reputation of being the gravedigger. That's right, grave dancer. And so this is all going on in the context. And Don, Jerry and I got hit, really got hit personally. Now, we never defaulted on loan. We built this interesting portfolio of investments for our own account in the twin cities, and we were sure those investments were going to be giving us a very nice retirement, but we lost every one of them. Never defaulted on a loan, but we ended up with zero out of that portfolio. Wow. The properties we acquired for Lexington all stayed above water, as I said, but we never saw a dime of a promote from that portfolio which we had counted on. We'd sold our Lexington stock in exchange for a combination of cash and stock from Richelle. So the value of the Richelle stock that we'd received dropped precipitously. And all of a sudden, that deal that we thought had been such a great deal didn't seem so good. And very importantly, and this comes back in detail as we talk about how I set up and operated Atlantic partners, we started having let go really good people. The bottom line was rich Als London said, you got to cut, you got to cut. It's sort of your Frank Saul story. And so people that they rushed us to hire in late 89, all of a sudden had to go. And we let go. People that had, they were great people, they did great work, they'd become our friends, but we had no choice but to let them go. And then the final point, and really the crowning blow of it all, was this unique bond that I formed with Don and Jerry. Don Bodell and Jerry Scott changed the pressure of what we were going through. We still were all friends. Don had heart surgery and said, brad, I can't work the way I was working before. I need to take it easy. I'm going to come in nine, leave it, come in at nine and leave at five. I'm not taking stress home with me, so that's all I can do. Jerry said, I don't like this anymore. He said, I'm leaving Chicago. He moved his family to Big Sky, Montana, because he wanted a different lifestyle for family. So all of a sudden, I left as the only principal of the three still working full time to try to keep things afloat.
It was a very difficult time for us, all of us, and certainly for me personally.
And that led up to the next phase of my career, which was the decision to take a sabbatical, leave Richard Hollis, and do something else. And that was basically, we sold our condo in downtown Chicago. We moved into an apartment. We knew something was going to change, had to change, going to change. I joined with the idea of trying to find a new job while I was still working at Richard Allison, and I decided that wasn't fair to the rest of the employees who were counting on me to keep the company going. And I couldn't do both things. I couldn't go out and find a job while still doing my day job. And so I decided to quit and make it fresh cut, clean cut. I called, reached out to Barry White, who is our chairman and a good friend, and I said, barry, we need to meet. So in October of 94, we met New York. I said, I've got something to tell you. He said, I got something to tell you. He said, you go first. I said, I'm quitting at the end of the year.
And he said, you have another job. He said, no. I explained, I didn't think I could find a job while I was doing my job. It's too important that I do my work.
So I said, I'm resigning with no plans.
And I said, okay, so what were you gonna tell me? And he said, well, I know the job for you, Richard Ellison. I said, thanks, but no thanks. I'm done. So he put everything we couldn't fit in our car into storage. It's sort of like raiders of the Lost Ark, these big wooden crates that came and loaded all of our belongings in Chicago, put them in the storeroom in a storage facility. One of our clients, Rich Ellis, was a UK client, was partnering in development of a golf course in golf course community in Naples, Florida. When you heard we were going to Florida for a while, he said, well, just, you're gonna have membership in the club. Go play as much as you want. So over the course of the next three months, we played 66 rounds of golf.
[02:14:02] Speaker B: Wow.
[02:14:03] Speaker C: But I'd always wanted to go to Australia, back from my pen pal days in my. My dad had brought the Australians to visit. In May of 95, we dropped our dog off with family in Calabash, North Carolina, and headed off on a six week trip to New Zealand and Australia. Now, this is when there, we had no permanent address because we had given up our apartment. There were no cell phones, there was no Internet, there was no any of the stuff that made it possible to do this easily.
[02:14:33] Speaker B: Did you sell all your real estate assets at that point?
[02:14:35] Speaker C: We had no real estate assets left at that point in time.
[02:14:38] Speaker B: You were liquid. Okay.
[02:14:40] Speaker C: We had, our assets from our old Lexington days had gone back to our partners to liquidate, so we had no debt. Lexington property fund had been liquidated with no promote to us, we had sold our condo in downtown Chicago and been renting. So yeah, we were about as liquid as I could be at that point in time. But we got a post office box in Naples, Florida, so we had some place deliver mail, and we signed up for an old fashioned telephone answering service. So if you called our phone number, which would have been a Chicago number, you would have been told you reached, you know, John Co answering service. You're calling for mister. Olson. This is Olson. We're taking phone calls for them. And we would, from time to time call in from Australia to see if we had any messages. But as we traveled around Australia, we met this wonderful, slightly older woman who then introduced us to the people who live in a post office box. They couldn't believe that somebody could actually not have an address, a permanent address, not have a phone number. Anyway, we had six wonderful weeks traveling Australia and New Zealand.
We're on a flight back from Sydney to LA in late June, and Louise turned to me and for only the second time in the six months we've been off, said, so where are we going to live?
I said, without missing a beat, I said, let's go to North Carolina. She had family here. We've been coming here for years.
We wanted a slower pace of life. We both like golf. I like college basketball. So on June 30 of 1995, after picking up our dog in Calabash, North Carolina, we arrived in Raleigh. We rented an apartment, but we still left everything behind because we didn't know we were staying here. Rented apartment. We rented furniture, made a couple of runs to target bed, bath and beyond, bought household goods, and started life in North Carolina.
[02:16:32] Speaker B: Why Raleigh, Durham? Why that area?
[02:16:35] Speaker C: Again, with a remarkable lack of thought.
We had been back and forth, Raleigh in Chicago a bunch of times because her family had lived here, her father and stepmother lived here. I liked the idea of a college town. I liked, we liked the idea. The weather was nicer. We wanted something smaller and slower. I tried to argue. I argued for Washington, DC, early on. And she said, too big, too busy, too expensive. So we settled on Raleigh because it was family. We had family. She had family here. It was slower pace of life, lower cost of living still on the east coast United States, because at that point in time, I assumed I would still be doing work with my european investors. The logical choice, in some respects, would have been Charlotte, because it was a business hub and better airline service. But we knew this town. We knew enough about the town. And I like college towns. And this is, you know, college town USA with Chapel Hill and Duke and NC State all here. It has a real college feel to it.
Anyway, so we ended up here. It's now June 30. Let's call it. Let's call it July 5 or 6th. We were in an apartment. We've rented furniture. We've gone to target. We bought, you know, pots and pans, that kind of stuff. And now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do. There was a side of me, and you and I talked about this, John, that said, why not go off and create an investment management business? Why not go out?
[02:18:04] Speaker B: And I tried to convince you to do that, start that. Yes.
[02:18:08] Speaker C: Great contacts you have overseas, right? But what I realized after going through the pain of having to fire people, I didn't want to manage people anymore. I didn't want the responsibility of other people's lives.
And I knew I'd have that if I built a company along the lines you and I were talking about.
[02:18:35] Speaker B: I was ready to bring money to you. I was ready at that time to bring money to you to start managing. As I remember, I had people that I knew your capabilities, and I knew enough people looking for operating partners that would have been perfect.
[02:18:53] Speaker C: And I probably would have made a lot of money over the years, and I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun or nearly as much, as much a sense of personal control of my life.
And so I literally, from, let's call it July to September, October, I'm going around talking to people I know initially, like talking to you. I didn't talk to many Raleigh because I didn't know anybody in Raleigh. This is the strange thing. I'm here in Raleigh, and I don't know a soul in Raleigh in the real estate business, right? But I knew people elsewhere. And so I had at Rich Ellis, at the end of my time, Rich Ellis, I was serving as the asset manager for the Royal Mutual Insurance company, Royal London Mutual Insurance company, which had a portfolio of assets in the US which they were selling off. And the only meeting I took in the first six months of the year was a trip to Boston to meet with Royal London, because we owned an exo sheet theater in Boston. And the Royal London people, Rodney Pollard, who was the head of real estate, said, Brad, we don't care that you're not Richard Allison anymore. You're our asset manager.
We want you.
So be our asset manager. And about the same time, I was having a conversation with a guy named Don Conover. Don, this is summer of 95. I'd met Don back in the early 1980s when my job was running around the world, around the US, talking to pension fund people. Don, at that point, was working with Charlie Ellis at Greenwich Associates, which was an important consultant to us. Penn. Oh, sure, Greenwich was dead close to Don. And in the late eighties, Don had formed Greystone Realty Corporation, venture with New York life. Greystone was created to assume responsibility for all of New York Life's equity real estate portfolio to build a third party investment management business for New York life.
Well, in the early nineties. This is back to my DC connection. I'd represented SITQ, which is a subsidiary of Ivan Ocambridge, which was the real estate arm of Case de Po, a big canadian pension plan.
On a negotiation with the Greystone. I was representing Sitq. Don and his team were at Greystone, and we ended up forming a joint venture with New York life to acquire an office building there in DC. So I got to know the Greystone people, and now I've moved to Raleigh. And at that point in time, Don and Chip Lockhart and the rest of their team at Greystone were trying to grow this third party business. Don had great contacts with us pension funds from his days at Greenwich, but didn't know the outside world, foreign people, and knew what I had done at Richard Ellis. He said, well, Brad, why don't you come with us and go raise money for us in Europe? I said, well, I want my own company. So, fine, set up your own company. We'll hire you. This is now the very end of October. In 1995. Don said, I'm ready to sign a contract tomorrow, but you need to form a company.
So, November 1 of 1995, I signed the paperwork to create Atlantic Partners.
[02:22:07] Speaker A: This concludes part one of three episodes with Brad. In part two, we discussed the growth of Atlantic partners and his unique business approach.
And then in part three, we will discuss his association affiliations, his lecturing at University of Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins here in Washington, and his personal perspectives.
Thank you again for listening, and stay tuned for next episode.
