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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He crossed Alpha Road and Arapaho Road, still heading north, and the development became sparser. There would be an office building or a convenience store set in the middle of pastureland, as if somebody had sent the wrong plats to the construction company. In some of the open fields along the road, cows were grazing; in others there were bulldozers and piles of pipe and beribboned surveyors’ stakes. Signs proclaimed the imminent arrival of subdivisions, with many model homes from which to choose: Accents, Flairs, and Todays; The Carriage House, The Estate, The Oxford, The Heritage. Driving past it all, Sherwood kept up a running commentary: there was no recent sale, no demographic trend, no nasty family squabble over a piece of property, no recent death of an obstinate property-owner that he didn’t know about. He does a lot of homework.
“Any of y’all been to Bennigan’s yet?” asked Sherwood. “I went there last night. Quite frankly, I thought the food was average. Now the design—let’s talk about design for a second. They’re trying to cash in on that Friday’s flavor, but I don’t know if they’re gonna be able to get that Friday’s crowd—you know, your young singles. But it’s a neat concept.”
“Holiday Inn’s starting to get into restaurant concepts,” said Rick from the back seat. “They’ve got a concept called Good Company. It’s got kind of a sit-down Friday’s concept and a salad-deli type concept. Dallas is gonna be their flagship on this, and they’ve got a dynamite location. We did the deal.”
“Rick really did a super deal with them, fellas,” said Sherwood. “A twenty-year lease with two five-year options.”
“They’re aiming for the sophisticated suburbanite,” said Rick.
“These people are out working,” said Sherwood, “and they’ve got a little more income. And yet your Friday’s concept is really the best of many worlds. You appeal to your singles, and to your people who live nearby, and quite frankly you appeal to your older people too.”
By now it seemed they had gone far enough north to have passed the edge of civilization, but Sherwood turned right and presently there were more subdivisions by the side of the road. These were the outskirts of Plano, a town of 3600 souls in 1960 and 65,000 today, and the site of some of Sherwood’s breakthrough deals—his first shopping-center deal, the deal he sold three different times, the deal he sold five times. The keys to these deals, besides persistence and hard work, were relationships and commitment. Real estate people talk about relationships and commitment as much as characters in a Woody Allen movie, but they mean business relationships. Sherwood made that first shopping center deal in part because he built a relationship with Alden Wager, Sr., a relationship that has since deepened into true commitment with the bringing of Alden Wagner, Jr., into Sherwood Blount and Company. Rick is building a fine relationship with Del Taco and Burger King, and Rusty with some Canadian investors.
Good relationships will stand a realtor in good stead, but bad ones can be painful. Once a realtor in Dallas named Herb Weitzman was doing a shopping-center deal in Grand Prairie. A man who wanted to open an Italian restaurant leased one of the first spaces in the center even though it was well known that a national pizza parlor chain was considering a space in the same building. The pizza franchise opened and the restaurant went broke. The owner was irate; he sued but settled out of court. Then one afternoon, more than a year later, as Weitzman approached his car after work, he was accosted by the restaurant owner, who was brandishing a pistol. “Herb Weitzman,” the man said, “this is the last drive you’ll ever take. Because right now we’re going to your grave. And it’s going to be in the town of Grand Prairie, Texas!” When they were almost there, Weitzman managed to jump out amid a hail of gunfire, and now he’s doing deals again—but it just goes to show what can happen.
Sherwood turned and headed west, toward the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, and drove through Farmer’s Branch, Coppell, and Lewisville. This was a curious area. In the late sixties and early seventies Dallas real estate was booming beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, and the hottest of the hot areas was this one. Raw land went from $4500 an acre to $30,000 an acre in two years. In 1974, when the bottom fell out of the market, no area was hit harder. Overoptimistic realtors and developers and homebuilders went broke. Now, in 1979, the market was booming again and Dallas was growing, but all the talk was that there was a recession around the corner and that gasoline was running out. So everyone wondered whether towns like Coppell and Lewisville, near the airport and just past the outer reaches of the suburbs, were finally going to hit or not.
So far they haven’t. Coppell is a tiny town, not much more than a crossroads. “Now, boys, you got to have vision when you get out here,” said Sherwood. “See this corner right here?” He pointed to the intersection of two dirt roads where some horses were meandering. “A motel would just jump at that. And I’ll tell you something else. This town’s ripe for a Seven-Eleven or a Stop-and-Go.” He drove past Coppell and into Lewisville, where he pulled into the parking lot of a half-leased shopping center and surveyed the stores. Off to the side there was an empty asphalt lot in the middle of which stood a weathered ten-foot-high bowling pin, testament to some long-ago deal that hadn’t worked. Across the street some cows grazed under a wooden sign that said Centennial Homes. “Okay, Robert Aycock,” said Sherwood. “You up on this center? You know who Tomlin Clothier is?”
“No, Sherwood,” said Robert. “I sure don’t.”
Sherwood gave him a sharp look. “But you will this time next week, won’t you?”
“Yessir,” said Robert.
Then everyone piled out of the car and went to a Southern Maid Donut shop in the center. Outside the shop hung a faded plastic sign showing a Southern belle in a hoop skirt; inside, the walls were full of bowling trophies, and silent, defeated-looking men sat staring into their coffee cups. They looked up momentarily at the seven sharp young bucks ordering doughnuts, then let their heads fall downward again.
The Offer
For more than a week Peter Shaddock didn’t make any move to buy Jerry Don Stiles’ maize field. Sherwood didn’t know exactly what Shaddock was up to. Maybe he was waiting to see if a couple of other deals came through first. Maybe he was lining up financing. Possibly, he still thought he had a shot at the McKamy land, but that was doubtful—McKamy and his new wife were out of town, no one knew where, and Sherwood was sure he had convinced Shaddock that they weren’t ready to sell and that he had to buy Stiles’ land. Sure enough, Shaddock finally called and set up a meeting in his brother Bill’s law office for the afternoon of Wednesday, June 20.
“My objective,” said Shaddock, when everyone had gathered that day, “is to write a contract for this land subject to something. I don’t care what. It just had to be subject to something.” This meant he wanted to try to buy the land, but he wanted to be able to back out of the deal if for some reason he got cold feet.
“Okay,” said Sherwood. “Then let’s make it legitimate. Let’s make it subject to engineering.”
“And the second thing is, we got to keep it quiet. We’ll do it as Sherwood Blount, Trustee. If Stiles knows I’m buying it, he’ll never sell. You can’t let anybody know. So maybe we’ll set up a dummy corporation or something.”
“Okay, fine. But you’ve got to make him a good offer. He’s got to recognize that Sherwood Blount, Trustee, is the representative of a legitimate purchaser. Remember, you’re looking at a guy with Canadian investors coming into town this week. A guy who fell in love with this property. But he said he’d sell.”
“Well,” said Shaddock, “I’m thinking thirty-five thousand an acre. Seven million. But let’s go back to Sherwood Blount and the commission and so on.”
“I have an agreement with Stiles,” said Sherwood. “I made a hundred and ninety-five thousand commission on the last sale. Stiles said, ‘You son of a bitch, if you sell it again I’ll pay you on the basis of my profit.’ At your price that’d be forty-five thousand. And please don’t tell that to everybody on the street. I want everybody to think that I double-dipped this deal and made another two hundred thousand.”
“You turkey,” said Shaddock, and chuckled.
“But you gotta tell him you’ll pay seven million. Is that what you can do?”
“That’s what I have to do. But if Stiles found out it was me who was making a play at it, see, he wouldn’t sell for ten million.” Shaddock frowned, upset at the thought that Stiles bore such a huge animus against him, although there was no apparent evidence that this was the case. “Now, I’m supposed to get some kind of message Friday. I can’t tell you what kind of message, but hopefully after that I’ll feel very confident. On the other hand, maybe I won’t feel so confident. But let’s plan on getting the contract submitted Monday.”
“Okay,” said Sherwood, “but remember we’ve got to move. He’s got his Canadians coming in tonight. He works seven days a week. No telling what he might do.”
“Shit, Sherwood,” said Shaddock. “he plays golf on Wednesdays, and I know that for a fact.”
My Library
