The autobiography of the man who played a real-life game of Monopoly and won the largest real estate empire in history.
1684116945
William Zeckendorf and Edward McCreary
Notes
The secret of any great project is to keep it moving, keep it from losing momentum, and this, for me, meant a constant flow of telephone calls and trips, often by company plane, to Montreal, Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Denver, and points west….My observation has always been that after a certain key point you must move ahead as if a project were assured—in order to assure it—because if you wait around for all the pieces of the puzzle to fit before closing a deal, you can wait forever.
In moments of crisis, one’s world tends to become simplified, and its people and events fall into distinct categories…When you cross the ocean on a steamship, you will notice that on some days, though there may be a prevailing wind, the ocean waves may actually come from five or six different directions at once. As these waves move by and through one another, they sometimes cancel each other out. At other times they augment each other and can create high crests and low troughs in the ocean. When the proper combinations of waves come together, these peaks and valleys on the ocean’s surface can be enormous. To a passenger in a modern, high-speed steamship, such waves are merely an interesting phenomenon. To the skipper of a low-in-the-water sailing ship, however, the sudden appearance of the wrong combination of waves in such a gusty sea can spell disaster.
If you show hesitancy or fear, you may already be half-defeated. If you put on a bold front, and fight with everything you have, you can win. Moreover, once you have won a few battles, you are usually left alone: in the jungle, no animal thoughtlessly attacks the lion.
The real-estate business can thus ride out most recessions but tumbles farther and longer than most other businesses in a real depression.
The crystal ball we used was the simple, built-in type. The only trick was not to be so awed and frightened by the present that you were not able to see the future that lay within it.
That first experience of Teotihuacán has left me with a sense of how the proper combination of mass, space, and setting can complement each other. It was to enormously influence what I consider to be the most important work of my life.
I didn’t try to bargain. I hate to bargain. If, in my judgment, a property is worth the asking price, I see no reason to try for less. A lot of shrewd dealers think this foolish, but I notice that others tend to lose more business, and to poison relationships, by trying to refine an already good bargain beyond a reasonable point. There is a much better flavor left in everybody’s mouth when such haggling is avoided. I wanted the property, their price seemed reasonable to me, and so we were in business.
As my friend Jim Lee at the Central Bank put it, “I don’t care what you paid for it, what matters is the value of the building now. If you created a new value by getting a good lease, we will lend on that value.”
A citizen of a small town can, through circumstances or design, come to know almost everyone in the community. On the upper levels of our own business-oriented society it is the same. The threads of mutual acquaintanceship spread everywhere. In some cases they work and weave together as tightly as a piece of waterproof cloth. At other times they scatter out like the strings of an unfinished net, but each strand is somewhere connected to others. What I did in the course of my work was continuously pick out and weave together a great variety of these strands. Whenever possible I made use of existing connections between people. At other times I created new ones. And deals that did not go through, every bit as much as deals accomplished, can usefully illustrate how, at the top, what one might call the “village system” of contacts operates.
…we had early determined that any urban renewal program must meet a number of criteria:
- a project must reach a certain critical mass in order to generate a self-sustaining reaction.
- the components of this mass must be properly balanced. For instance, it is usually a mistake to build only housing or only commercial projects in a given area.
- the development must be properly connected to the city of which it is a part.