Randall Rowe, co-founder and chairman of Transwestern Investment Co. LLC, a real estate investment firm based in Chicago, has been elected chairman of the National Realty Committee, a Washington-based lobbying group for the commercial real estate industry.
Rowe is a former executive vice president of Sam Zell’s Equity Group who left in 1996 to start up Transwestern along with Stephen Quazzo, another former Equity executive.
The Chicago-based company started a little over two years ago with two employees and a secretary and now has 40 people in the Chicago office, $1.25 billion in assets, comprising $800 million of existing assets and $450 million of assets under development, according to Rowe. Another investment fund is targeted to raise another $500 million in equity, he added.
He is also chairman of Transwestern Property Co., an allied real estate operating firm that had been based in Texas before Rowe and Quazzo founded the investment group. The property company has since shifted its headquarters to Chicago as well.
Including a recently announced merger with a Washington, D.C., real estate firm, Transwestern Property will have 1,100 employees based in 24 cities and 60 million square feet of real estate under management, Rowe said.
“We’re a broadly diversified national company that can compete with other large real estate companies like Trammel Crow, LaSalle Partners, CB Richard Ellis and Insignia/ESG,” Rowe said.
Rowe said he left Zell after more than six years when it became clear that the billionaire financier was taking his real estate operations public through real estate investment trusts.
“It was a good time if one wanted to build one’s own company with a group of partners,” Rowe said. “We’ve grown so quickly because we’ve gone out and attracted seasoned senior partners to a broad-based partnership.”
Top people like private partnerships because as senior partners they can participate in the real estate equity directly and be in line for big payoffs, which isn’t possible in a public company, Rowe pointed out.
Rowe looks back warmly on his experience with Zell, which varied from running the office properties group to heading Manufactured Home Communities Inc., Zell’s trailer park business.
“Sam’s been very supportive,” said Rowe, who joined Equity after leaving Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. “He gave me great opportunities to do a lot of exciting things.
“It was a great place to be. Nobody was more active during the real estate downturn than Sam. From my perspective, it was a great experience.”
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Another former Zell executive, Casey Wold, is president of Chicago-based TrizecHahn Office Properties, which owns the Sears Tower and wants to buy One IBM Plaza and 225 N. Michigan Ave.
Before joining TrizecHahn three years ago, Wold was Equity Group’s office acquisitions chief–reporting, incidentally, to Rowe.
Seems like at least some alumni of the Zell College of Real Estate Knowledge don’t fare too badly.
Easy listening: Construction sites aren’t what they used to be in the days when the view of a big, ugly earthmover (the machine, that is) lurching around in a muddy hole was enough to glue eyes to gaps in the fencing.
Chicago’s Golub & Co., which is developing the Bristol, a 41-story condominium tower at Rush Street and Delaware Place, has installed a sound system in its canopy-type construction barricade at the site, which pipes in classical music and jazz.
Golub President Michael Newman said that the purpose of the music is to have the site reflect the standards of its high-toned Near North neighbors the Whitehall and Four Seasons Hotels.
“It occurred to us that those who passed this way might appreciate the sounds of Mozart or the music of Lionel Hampton,” he said.
As long as Mozart and Hampton don’t object to being background for a backhoe, it makes sense. But why not go all the way and serve afternoon tea as well?
Ironworkers and crane operators, lift those pinkies.