Sherwood Blount’s First Million
Poor Texas boys used to get rich running cattle or drilling for oil. Now they get rich doing real estate deals out on the urban frontier. And those deals all start with someone deciding he doesn’t want to be poor—ever again.
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It ain’t that good a piece of land, you know, Sherwood,” Shaddock said. “Now the McKamy property’s worth that. If we could get the McKamy property I’d have a clear three hundred acres.” He paused for a minute and stared off into space, thinking wistful thoughts about the McKamy deal and how much more he liked it than the Stiles deal. “Well, look,” he said finally. “Let’s do this about Stiles. I got to check a couple of things. Let’s talk to Stiles and if he really wants to sell—well, then let’s see what the color of his blood is.”
Sherwood’s instinct was that unless he could get Shaddock’s mind off McKamy it would be difficult to do the deal, so he decided to spend the rest of the afternoon getting himself a little insurance—another potential buyer whom he could fall back on if Shaddock pulled out. He drove to a complex of gold-tinted office buildings on Central Expressway called Campbell Centre and called on Bruce Weale, head of a development company called The Apartment Group. He spread an aerial photograph of the magic corridor before Weale, a quiet man with longish graying hair who was wearing a brightly colored shirt, open at the neck, and a gold chain.
“Now, Bruce,” said Sherwood, “this is the Ballinger tract right here. We closed it on May eighteenth. Stiles’ price is forty thousand an acre. If it were lower he’d have to think about it.”
“It doesn’t front on Preston Road,” said Weale.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Weale stared at the aerial for a long time and scratched his head, as if he were trying to decipher an encoded message. “You got to have a lot of vision to see that as an apartment complex, don’t you?” he said, and laughed nervously.
“You sure do,” said Sherwood. “It’s hard to imagine. But think back two years. Would you have thought land a little ways down on Preston’d be selling for eighty-five thousand an acre?”
“Hell, I wouldn’t have thought that a year ago. I wouldn’t have thought that six months ago.” He stared at the aerial again. “Well, you better just let me play around with my numbers and go out and look at it.” Sherwood thought Weale probably wouldn’t be interested, but you never could tell when a visit like this would pay off.
The next morning Sherwood walked into the office grinning triumphantly, picked up the phone, and called Shaddock.
“Shaddock?” he said. “You sitting down, boy? Guess what just happened? John McKamy got married last weekend to Bobbie Jacobs. She called me up last night and told me. She said he’s getting his cows loaded up and taking them to Fort Worth and then they’re going traveling. I said, ‘Bobbie, what about selling the place?’ She said, ‘Honey, he’s not gonna sell that place now.’
“When you get down to it, Peter,” Sherwood went on, anxious to underscore the import of the surprise wedding, “I think this means we’ll buy the land one day but it’ll take more time. It could be this time next year”—which is to say an eternity in far North Dallas real estate—“before we buy that deal.
“Now I wanted to tell you this right away because I know it’ll affect your decision on what other land we’ll buy up in that corridor since we could can’t buy the McKamy place.” Sherwood knew that Shaddock knew there was just one piece of property in the corridor that he could conceivably buy—Stiles’ maize field. It was that or nothing now. “I’ll talk to you soon, Peter.” When he hung up, Sherwood had the feeling that his fish had taken the hook.
Driving Day
Thursday is driving day at Sherwood Blount and Company, Realtors, and one Thursday in June the staff gathered in preparation for the drive at seven-thirty in the morning. Sherwood believes in getting an early start; he gets up most days at five-thirty to jog, and likes to be in the office by seven, an hour ahead of everybody else. “I’m always thinking about that competitive edge,” he says. “I know my competition meets at nine, so we’re gonna met at eight. You got to stay sharp. You get a little fat, a little saggy, and somebody’ll knock you off. That’s why I have every phone number I ever dialed memorized—if you make thirty calls a day like I do, and it takes you thirty seconds to look up each number, that’s fifteen minutes a day wasted. It adds up to another week of work a year. Lunch? My philosophy is, don’t waste time eating lunch if you don’t have to. You’ll just blow two hours.”
On driving day everyone meets in Sherwood’s office, and in they came: Rusty McDearman, the old man of the office at 30, a tall, affable red-haired man who played defensive end at SMU; Rick Fambro, compact and determined, a formed SMU quarterback and Sherwood’s first employee; Alden Wagner, Jr., son of a prominent shopping center developer, another SMU boy but not a ballplayer; Robert Aycock, also the son of a real estate man and a friend of Alden’s from SMU; Tim Black, a strapping 24-year-old who started his working life as a fireman under Captain Sherwood Blount, Sr., and is now switching to a career in real estate; and Buck Aubrey, a tall, genial, chubby young man, the son of a well-to-do North Dallas orthodontist who does deals with Sherwood and arranged for Buck to work there as a summer intern before his senior year at the University of Texas. All of them had come to work there for pretty much the same reason—as Sherwood wrote Rick Fambro after Rick had closed his first deal, “I know of no other business where a young man willing to work can attain greatness as quickly as in real estate.” Captain Blount was there too, pouring coffee for everyone, a solid man with an iron-gray pompadour who spends his off-duty hours helping out—putting up signs, filling up the company car—in his son’s business.
Like everyone else in his office, Sherwood wears brand-new three-piece suits even in midsummer, an immense college ring, a gold Rolex watch, tasseled loafers of soft leather, and an expensive haircut that just grazes his collar and the tops of his ears. A visitor would immediately identify Sherwood as the leader of the group by his strong, self-conscious stage presence. He cocks his head and shoots his cuffs and swaggers a little when he walks and winks and does double-takes, holding all these gestures for a long second to make sure they register on his audience. Together, Sherwood Blount and Company could have been a Sunbelt football coaching staff on its way to an alumni luncheon.
They sat talking for a while around a big oval conference table in Sherwood’s office, which is on the tenth floor of the Metropolitan Savings building in Preston Center near North Dallas. One wall of the office is covered with a huge aerial photograph of the Metroplex; two other walls are gold-tinted glass. When all of them had started on a second cup of coffee, they went downstairs and got into the company car, a big Chevrolet Silverado, with Sherwood behind the wheel, and drove off into their turf—the areas to the north, east, and west of the office, an endless American dreamland of shopping centers, apartment complexes, subdivisions, town homes, new homes (never houses), convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.
A realtor’s best friends are his telephone and his car, because it is imperative that he know intimately both the people in the business and the empty land of the city where he works. The rite of passage into the business is six or nine months spent trying unsuccessfully to make the first deal and driving relentlessly around town in every spare moment, memorizing the location and particulars—size, access from the street, nearby development—of every vacant lot and supermarket and gas station. If the construction crews at the new mall are taking long lunches, if a fish-and-chips shop in Garland is doing badly, if there’s a For Sale sign on a weedy patch of ground in Mesquite, a good realtor will know about it. The ability to make deals depends on knowing what’s going on, which in turn depends on driving. Dallas’ best-known realtor of a generation ago, an old codger named O.L. Nelms who used to buy land cheap from farmers and resell it to developers, made the bond between realtor and car famous in Dallas. He drove an old white station wagon that wheezed along dirt roads and fields, its sides painted with the legend thanks for helping o.l. nelms make another million.
Sherwood headed north on Preston Road. “Now fellas,” he said, “it’s really a dice game up here in North Dallas. But if you want to get up there and really devote yourself to learning this real estate, if you really run your wagons, then we can go up there and really, really be competitive.” He drove over the LBJ Freeway, festooned with malls and office buildings. “Man, oh, man,” he said, and shook his head philosophically. “I hope I’m around the next time they build a freeway. You can make a killing. I mean enough to retire on.”
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