LEGENDS
& ICONS
65
DOUGLAS DURST
With his father Seymour Durst having
spread the family’s real estate base from the
east side of Midtown Manhattan to the west
side, Douglas Durst has presided over its
expansion—first as president and
now as chairman of the family
firm—while also putting his
own stamp of environmental
responsibility on it. The Durst
Organization’s 1.8-million-
square-foot Four Times
Square, completed in
1999, is widely
regarded as the first
green skyscraper, with
eco-friendly features
including solar energy
panels, on-site electri-
cal generation, low-
glare windows and
non-toxic building
materials. “The skyscraper is the symbol of
American architecture, and Four Times
Square has changed the way we think about
them,” Joseph Romm, executive director of
the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions
in Washington, DC, told Time magazine in
1999. The 48-story tower, with a tenant ros-
ter currently including publishing giant
Conde Nast and law firm Skadden, Arps,
Meagher & Flom, also helped change the
way people thought about Times Square,
which had become a symbol of urban decay
in prior decades. Ten years later, One
anchor tenant Bank of America, raised the
sustainability bar to a new level as the first
commercial high-rise to achieve LEED
Platinum certification. Although Durst
spoke out in 2007 against the rebuilding of
the World Trade Center, in 2010 his com-
pany was selected from a field of heavy-
weights to take a minority equity stake in
One World Trade Center, along with taking
over leasing and management at the
2.6-million-square-foot office tower now
under construction. Ironically, One World
Trade will now be anchored by Conde
Nast, which will relocate to Lower
Manhattan from Four Times Square.
HAROLD A. ELLIS JR.
Harold A. Ellis Jr. sold homes part time for
his friend John Grubb while attending college in the 1950s, and in 1958 the pair
formed Grubb & Ellis in Oakland, CA
along with Grubb’s brother Don. Ironically,
considering that the firm today is familiarly known as Grubb, it was Ellis who
worked to grow it beyond its origins as a
small residential brokerage. “Ellis built a
small Oakland brokerage into a powerhouse whose circular yellow and black
signs dot thousands of stores, offices, factories and other commercial properties
for sale or lease across the country,” the
Los Angeles Times noted in its 2009 obituary
of Ellis. He was convinced that larger firms
would eventually rule the industry, and he
sought to include Grubb & Ellis in that
elite circle. At one time, it was the largest
Ellis
independently owned, publicly traded real
estate firm in the US. Ellis stepped down as
CEO in 1992, forming Ellis Investments
with his children. “Hal Ellis was one of the
single most inspirational leaders I have
ever known,” George Marcus, co-founder
of Marcus & Millichap, told GlobeSt.com
upon Ellis’ passing two years ago. “He was
one of those charismatic people who made
you want to follow him,” added Marcus,
who started his real estate career in Grubb
& Ellis’ San Jose, CA office. “He had the
vision of building a national organization
and knew that so much of the service business depends on choosing the right people
and inspiring them to do better than they
otherwise would.”
HENRY FAISON
Henry Faison established his reputation in
the Southeast as a prolific retail developer.
By 1975, when he tackled the Eastland Mall
in Charlotte, NC, Faison had already built
on a collection of Mel Simon shopping centers. In 1985, Lincoln
National Life issued a pass-through
CMBS, followed by five other life
insurers, and Midwest Federal of
Minneapolis completed the first
thrift mortgage pool securitization.
Over the next three years, the CMBS
market hit a record $3.7 billion.
Chump change today, but it was
groundbreaking for that period.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
IN US REAL ESTATE
Offshore buyers had been active in
US real estate for years—a June
1968 FORUM article proclaimed
America to be the “Land of
Opportunity for Foreign Realty
Investors”—but the 1980s marked
a golden age for this type of activ-
ity. Foreign ownership of domestic
commercial real estate more than
doubled to $24.5 billion between
1982 and 1987, according to the
National Association of Realtors.
The increasing globalization of
national markets was a deciding
factor, and headlines in 1989 pro-
claimed that the Japanese were
buying up New York City, thanks to
Mitsubishi Estate Co.’s $846-mil-
lion purchase of a 51% stake in the
Rockefeller Group, which owned 15
Rockefeller Center buildings. The
deal was widely misconstrued as
an outright Mitsubishi takeover of
Rockefeller Center; in fact the
Japanese firm’s actual ownership
stake in the landmark office com-
plex was fairly small.
1980
PASSAGE OF FIRPTA
The Foreign Investment in Real
Property Tax Act imposed a tax on
gains from the sale of real estate
where none had existed before.
Prior to FIRPTA, foreign entities were
exempt from paying taxes on the
