LEGENDS
& ICONS
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tions of the past 40 years, including the sale
of the Pacific Lighting Corp./Southern
California Gas Co. properties in Los Angeles,
the relocation of Boeing’s corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago and the
four-million-square-foot occupancy of
Merrill Lynch at the World Financial Center
in New York City, said to be the largest office
lease in the world. Today, with Cushman as
co-chairman of the board, the formerly New
York-centric firm is making a massive global
push. “This is the first time we’ve ever had
such a far-reaching structure in place,”
Cushman told Forum earlier this year. “This
is the way it should be.”
BRUCE DUNCAN
Named president and CEO of First Industrial
Realty Trust Inc. in January 2009—a period
that represented a low ebb for commercial
real estate in general—Bruce Duncan did
not bring an extensive background in industrial real estate to his new assignment. He
did, however, bring the financially challenged REIT an
extensive background in real
estate, period: “a lot
of gray hair” and
experience with
managing “a number of cycles,” as he
put it in discussing
First Industrial’s
fourth-quarter 2008
results. That Bruce Duncan
included a three-year stint as president and
CEO of apartment REIT Equity Residential
Corp.; five years as chairman, president and
CEO of Cadillac Fairview Corp., one of
North America’s largest owners and developers of retail and office properties; and 16
years in a variety of key management roles at
JMB Realty Corp., including president and
co-CEO of JMB Institutional Realty Corp.
Further, at the time of his appointment by
First Industrial, Duncan was chairman of
the board at Starwood Hotels & Resorts
Worldwide; he had also been Starwood’s
CEO on an interim basis for five months in
2007. The Chicago-based industrial REIT’s
most recent quarterly results speak to the
results Duncan has obtained there: year-over-year increases in funds from operations
and decreases in net losses, along with a 400-
basis point increase in occupancy.
ROBERT DUNCAN
Over the 33 years since he founded
Transwestern, Robert Duncan has masterminded the privately held firm’s expansion
from a small Texas development company
into a diversified national real estate investment and operating organization. Along
with building the firm’s leasing and management portfolio to 255 million square
feet as of 2010, Duncan has earned prestigious recognition by his peers. He was
inducted into the Texas Business Hall of
Fame this past November, and in July of this
year the Cornell Real Estate Review named
him the recipient of its 2011 Industry Leader
Robert Duncan
Award, bestowed on those who exhibit the
integrity and influence to create a lasting
legacy in the industry. “Robert Duncan’s
visionary leadership has helped Transwestern
distinguish itself by leveraging its operating
model to bring diversified services to owners, investors and users of real estate,” commented David Funk, director of the Program
in Real Estate for Cornell University. “As our
team studied the industry for transformational leadership, Robert and Transwestern
stood out for their achievement of bringing
local market knowledge and project management know-how to a very wide array of
clients. Robert and Transwestern set their
sights high with the goal of creating a fully
integrated service delivery system. And they
did it.” Duncan began his career with
Trammell Crow in Dallas, where he was
responsible for commercial operations in
the San Antonio region. In 1978, he left to
form Transwestern.
This put the spotlight on 1031
exchanges as one of the few income
tax benefits still available.
1980s…
CMBS MARKET KICKS OFF
In the gradual economic recovery of
the early 1980s, life insurance com-
panies, having successfully reposi-
tioned their bond portfolios, turned
their attention to the commercial
mortgage market, which was slowly
rebounding after 1979’s “Bloody
Sunday” event virtually halted all
lending. As detailed by industry vet-
eran Thomas F. Wratten in a 1996
primer on the CMBS market, institu-
tions started off by selling whole
loans to one another and in December
1983, the very first securitization in
the secondary commercial mortgage
market took place when Fidelity
Mutual Life Insurance sold $60 mil-
lion of 100% beneficial ownership
participations in commercial mort-
gages to three life insurers. Fidelity
took on the servicer role and agreed
to advance principal and interest, as
well as repurchase or substitute new
mortgages in the pool for any in
defaulted ones. The deal, engineered
by Salomon Brothers Realty Corp.,
received a AAA rating and prompted
three other insurance firms to tailor
similar deals over the following year.
