The Richest Real Estate Investor in The World (Part 3 - Final Part!)

We continue our education of the history of The Irvine Company, picking up where we left of  in the 1980's through 2013. Excerpts from the book: The Irvine Ranch: a Time for People" by Martin A. Brower.

Read this entire episode here: https://tinyurl.com/y6s85em4

About 4,000 residential ground leases made over a 15-year period were coming up for renewal. The new rent, set at 5, 6, or 7% of the fair market value of the land, had been written so that rent would remain flat for an original 20 or 25 years. At expiration, the Company could charge 5, 6, or 7% of the new fair market value, but few foresaw how steeply land values would rise during the two decades. The residents created a Committee of 4000 to ask the company to discard the leases they had signed and to obtain more favorable conditions. They secured extensive news media coverage, took advertisements, held mass rallies, and won favorable community support, and as a result, the Company’s credibility plummeted. The Company made the Committee of 4,000 a new offer. The leaseholders could buy their land at an average of 50% of its appraised market value, and because interest rates were high, the Company would permit homeowners to pay for the land over a 30-year period with a variable-rate loan beginning at 10% - an acceptable interest rate in the mid-1980s.

Key takeaways:

• Donate land to create a university or anything that will attract a lot of people to live in the area, build around it.
• Donate a lot to the community to help your company have a good public image.
• There were many trials and tribulations, even when the city entitled something; some activists were able to reverse that.
• They went through all economic cycles. They very rarely, if ever, sell, which is something I fully believe and agree with.
• I heard from someone familiar with being a tenant that they are very strict landlords; you can’t have one thing out of place.
• I personally looked at some of their multifamily apartments, and they are very well run.
• He is very particular about how things look; he would remove trees that looked “old school” and put palm trees to make a certain area look better, and now I notice that every shopping center he owns has palm trees.
• He made his execs work very hard; I met someone here that knew one of his VPs, and when this VP was taking a vacation, Bren made him come back to work due to a problem, and it turned out that the problem wasn’t that big of a deal. To me, what that says is that the VPs were highly paid, and also that we all need to resolve an issue very quickly when it arises at that level, or at any level, in my opinion. Don’t ever let things linger.
• Nothing lasts forever; if you made a mistake on one thing here, you fix it for the next one.

Key takeaways on purchasing The Irvine Company:

• Be where the people are, go to the events that they go to, be in front of them. One of the partners that Bren had was at a horseshoe, and he ran into an Irvine Company family member, and that started the conversation of “has the ranch been sold yet,” which led to this person partnering up with multiple people, including Bren, to make the initial 50% purchase.
• Talk to the people who will get the deal done, in this case, they contacted the same lender. Bren always worked with the top people in the industry, whether they were CPAs, attorneys, lenders. Always go to the top for a significant opportunity.
• Get the seller what they want, in this case, one of the heiresses, Joann, to be a 10% stakeholder on that initial purchase.
• Corporations have a target number they will stop bidding at; this one was just under 20x of annual earnings, this one 3 million below the 20x annual earnings.

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