It was not, of course, by reasoning alone that he achieved this extraordinary success. All during the first great growth spurt of his career, property values rose and rose and rose. Even so, Crow needed something besides good luck, good money, and good reasoning. In the world of the entrepreneur, personality is destiny, and Crow's personality has always promised him a good one. Though he has long since reached a time of life when for most men only the past seems full of promise, and though his home state -- his principal base of operations -- is in the midst of the worst slump in real property values since the Depression, the old operator is full of optimism about the future. "How can you be pessimistic in this country," he asks, "when we're seeing millions of people move into the economy annually -- women, blacks, Hispanics? Why, it's like adding another country to your economy every year!'
Much more significant than Crow's optimism are his qualities of will and of energy. "The real secret of Trammell Crow," says one of his early partners, "is that he works harder than you do. He believes that persistence is far more important than genius. Never, never, NEVER give up -- that's his motto." If the operator has ever stated a credo, it probably comes down to this: "I believe that my fate is in my hands and no one else's. Nobody's going to take care of us but ourselves. I don't ask the government to help me; I don't ask you to help me. I just do what I have to do, and if I do right, I hope I remember how I did it, so I can do it the same way the next time."
But with Crow, toughness isn't everything. He has also been extraordinarily creative. Tom Shutt, who was with Crow for 18 years, beginning in 1962, can list Crow's innovative achievements right off the top of his head. He pioneered the idea of office and service-center malls: warehouses, essentially, but with 14-foot ceilings that could be adapted for high-tech repair centers, fitness centers, and the like. He pioneered the specialized trade mart -- Joseph P. Kennedy's idea, as in the Chicago Trade Mart -- but now devoted to a single industry: furniture, clothing, information processing, whatever. Recently, he has founded a Communications Center, a type of market center for film, video, and radio production. One of Crow's investors, a man who has done business with him for 30 years, says that Crow (unlike most real-estate developers) "thinks of himself as a manufacturer of a product -- space. He always used to say that he wanted to build a company, an organization that would be the IBM of the real-estate industry." And behind these accomplishments, there is the deal-maker. "He loves doing new deals," says Ned Spieker, a former partner of Crow's in San Francisco.
Wherever there were good real-estate deals to be made, and good people to make them with, Trammell Crow would pick up partners. He moved through the cities of the land, trailing behind him one young partner after another, each of them inspired with the deal-maker's spirit, each of them very smart and very competitive, and most of them to become, thanks to him, very rich.
Tom Shutt remembers how it was. Shutt is 57 now, managing his own considerable affairs out of an office at 2001 Bryan Street, Dallas, the first major office building Trammell Crow ever built in downtown Dallas. Twenty-six years ago, however, when Crow was building warehouses, Shutt was his first in-house leasing agent. This was no mean distinction. Rarely in the history of real estate had a developer ever thought to lease or sell space himself. But if space was a product like any other, then it made far better sense to keep control of the marketing process. But more important, Shutt was the first in a long line of agents who became of Crow's partners. "I'd been working for him for about 18 months," Shutt says, "and one day Trammell comes up to me and says, 'We're going to be partners.' No papers, nothing to sign. I didn't know what he meant. I don't think he did. I just knew it was better than being an employee."
What he went ahead with was a 50/50 partnership in a 30,000-square-foot building in an industrial park in southwest Dallas. Crow supplied the credit and the know-how (Shutt having neither), while Shutt supplied the sweat and the time. The level of trust, as Shutt remembers it, was almost unbelievable. In the beginning, Crow would find a promising piece of land in Dallas, outline a deal, then turn everything over to Shutt. Shutt would then oversee the purchase, the building of the facility, and the leasing of space. Within a few short years he was operating in St. Louis, still on the credit and good name of his older partner, but otherwise totally independent. There were hardly any controls from the central office. In fact, there was hardly any central office, just Crow and his partners winging around the country doing deals. Once, when an inventory report showed that in one city the partnership owned no less than 600,000 square feet of unleased space, all Crow said to Shutt was: "Looks like you overbuilt St. Louis."
The Trammell Crow Co. is now made up of about 230 partners countrywide. The early partners tell how Crowe came into their lives in roughly the same terms they would use to describe the appearance of a fairy godfather. One day he was just there -- suddenly, inexplicably. Ned Spieker, Crow's partner in the Pacific Northwest until last year, was 25 when Crow entered his life. The year was 1969, and Spieker had been working in real estate, a salaried employee, for three years. "Trammell flew out in his Learjet," the younger man remembers, "and I flew back with him to Dallas. He's a very persuasive guy -- warm, engaging, humorous. Trammell told me I'd be an owner, that what I built would be mine. He'd provide the capital." He also provided the spirit: "Just being around him, you wanted to pattern your life after him. Not in all respects, maybe, but many. There's only one Trammell Crow. I love him."
