On what sort of men did the magic wand of partnership fall in those early days? Crow has always been pretty clear about what he wants. "I ask myself if he's a nice person," he says, "a good human being, someone you like to see coming into the room. Has he got any brains? Is he disciplined and eager enough to get up in the morning without an alarm clock? Is he the sort of man whom other people want to succeed?'
This is an astonishing set of criteria. "Someone you like to see coming into the room," for God's sake! What about merit, expertise, experience? And what about toughness, aggressiveness, competitive spirit, hunger, realism, and the like? These, after all, are emphatically the personal values of Trammell Crow himself, the values of the man who made himself into someone The Wall Street Journal called "America's biggest landlord.'
The fact is, there seems to be a strange anomaly in the character and behavior of America's biggest landlord. On the one hand there is the man who is described as hating his competition, as wanting to own the world. For what is Crow if not a caricature of the cowboy capitalist, scoping out the opportunities at the local saloon, shooting out the competition, and loping off into the sunset with a fortune recently estimated by Forbes at $750 million. The annals of U.S. real estate are filled with loners like that: independent operators, men with grand, often grandiose visions.
This is the macho elite to which, by the testimony of his friends and admirers, by the testimony, indeed, of his own sly-shy self, Trammell Crow ought to belong. Nice people, people whom you want to succeed; somehow these types don't belong in the same picture as Crow, the cowboy capitalist. Yet the anomaly of the great operator's career is that he may be remembered as much for the partnerships he has made, and the equity he has shared, as for the deals he has made and the fortune he amassed.
* * *
When Trammell Crow talks about building relationships with people, he gives a glimpse of the ambition that drives this formidable deal maker and partner maker. It is an ambition for power. "Partnerships make for a humanly rewarding life," he said last spring, speaking more philosophically, one suspects, than comes easy to him. "There's also an element of right and wrong in it: a fair distribution of the fruits of common labor. We have here a fraternity, a camaraderie, a brotherhood, which I find very satisfying. At the same time, in a partnership, you leverage yourself. I'd rather be one strong man among other strong men than one strong man among weak ones, or one strong man alone.'
But power alone is not enough. Trammell Crow wants power over time. That meant building a company that will survive him, a somewhat quixotic enterprise in the real-estate industry. Partly because development is so local, so ad hoc, so irredeemably particular, nothing lasts for very long, certainly not human relationships. Real-estate companies tend to be the lengthened shadows of their founders, and when the founders die, their companies die. Crow is determined that this shall not happen to his company. As he and his partners never tire of announcing, they vow to keep it "evergreen."
Nothing better demonstrates the strength of Crow's will in pursuing this end than his responses to the sometimes catastrophic ups and downs of the market. In two separate and extraordinarily fateful moves over the past 15 years, Crow sought to rationalize, then to centralize the delicate network of partnerships he built in the first 25 years.
His first major restructuring came toward the end of the real-estate depression of 1975-78. According to observers, Crow went into this time of trial with an organization organized in name only. "It was d/b/a all the way," Shutt remembers, "Trammell Crow doing business as the Trammell Crow Co." A reporter for Fortune, assigned a story on one of America's "biggest real estate entrepreneurs" in late 1973, before the crash, could barely contain his astonishment at the structural chaos he saw. "Just as remarkable as Crow's ability to raise money is his bewilderingly complex organization -- if, indeed, the term organization can be accurately applied," he wrote.
Equally astonishing, however, were the bottom-line results turned in by this peculiar way of doing business. About 15 operating partners had already become millionaires, the reporter was pleased to note, and 4, including Crow, were worth more than $10 million.
But Fortune had caught Crow at the top of the slide. A year later he was at the bottom, though pluckily staggering over to the ladder to get back up again. What had happened, of course, was a lethal combination of high interest rates and overbuilding. Trammell Crow (d/b/a the Trammell Crow Co.) soon found himself with several hundred million dollars of debt.
Enter now (as if TCC really were one big, rich family) the heir apparent. He is J. McDonald Williams, called Don, and the course of his succession has seemingly been smoother and more certain than if he had been to the manor (that is, the corporation) born. A native of Roswell, N.M., Williams came to Dallas in 1966 fresh out of George Washington University Law School. After working for a big law firm for some years -- a firm that handled a lot of TCC business -- he and a friend quit to found their own partnership. They located in the same building as Crow. "I had no hope of getting any major business from him," Williams recalls. "But I thought we'd get some crumbs."
