Henry S. Miller and the Fine Art of Middlemanning

Robert Cullum knows a bundle about selling a piece of goods, especially if the item fits in a grocery store (Tom Thumb Super Markets) or a drug store (Page Super Drugs), but developing a 13-acre piece of choice North Dallas property is something else entirely. That’s why, in late 1971, he called in Henry S. Miller Companies’ Herbert D. Weitzman, a wry-grinning young executive who combs his shaggy hair down over his ears like car fenders.

Weitzman welcomed the call, especially when he discovered what Cullum, chairman of the Cullum Companies, had in mind. Cullum wanted Weitzman to take those Meadow Road-Central Expressway acres and turn them into money. As executive vice president in charge of the Miller Co.’s commercial-retail division and as president of HSM Shopping Center Co., Weitzman had done it before.

The property was a valuable plot, something like $1.6 million ($3 a square foot) at the time. It would take some skill to blend an appropriate retail-commercial concoction and turn it into a compensatory pie. Weitzman knew it.

Weitzman began to draw on the Miller companies’ broad array of “middleman” expertise -a battalion that the organizational executives openly tout but few competitors aspire to simply because of its numbing complexities. The Cullum project, as it turned out, had its complexities, too. It was a good match-up.

Since the site was close to a number of office complexes, Weitzman penciled in another one for the Meadow Road plot. But that took only two acres. To flesh out the remaining acreage, he considered variously an air-conditioned mall shopping center, a disjointed Old Town-type shopping center, an “L” shaped shopping center like Preston Royal Village and a variegated plotting with a Tom Thumb grocery, a motel and supporting retail facilities. But nothing worked. None would produce enough retail rental to pay for the project.

Then Weitzman remembered a mall with an air-conditioned front sidewalk that the Weingarten grocery people had constructed in Houston, and he packed the Cullum people off to have a look. They liked it and Weitzman liked it. So now, six months after the first phone call to Weitzman, the Cullum Companies had an economically sound concept.

Weitzman coordinated affairs with an attorney for the Cullum Companies, Houston Holmes. With Holmes’ approval, the Miller man went looking for a financial partner in the project, and he quickly found one in Southland Life Insurance Co. After that came the selection of an architect, which the Miller Co. coordinated, and a contractor. All this took about nine months.

But by now Weitzman could see the local office building market softening, and with Cullum’s okay, he dropped plans for the five-story office facility for the moment. He approved a leasing director, Robert Swango, of the Miller staff, and the wooing of choice and appropriate tenants began, among them a gasoline station (Shell), a quality cafeteria (Romana of San Antonio, to whom they sold 33,000 square feet), and occupants to complement Tom Thumb and Page Drug along the mall. Leasing went quickly, and before construction was completed, the project was 100 per cent obligated, with 33 tenants.

There was still the matter of the two acres where the office building was to have gone. Weitzman proposed dividing the area into three parcels for sale to quick food establishments. And they did, to Denny’s Coffee Shops, Bonanza Steakhouses and McDonald’s hamburgers. “You couldn’t get an outhouse on the property now,” Weitzman jokes.

Meadow Central Mall opened in late 1973, with jovial congratulations all around. For the Cullum Companies the project’s favorable outcome meant a nice income-producing property as well as a choice location for another Tom Thumb Super Market and a Page Super Drug. Though its exact earnings are confidential, the Henry S. Miller Companies probably made about $150,000 in development fees and is getting six per cent of the estimated $5,000,000 in yearly rental income as leasing agent for the 108,000-square-foot center.

As Dallas area real estate deals go, the Meadow Central Mall wasn’t particularly big. But it is a classic example of how the Miller Companies, as the consummate middlemen of that tricky, sticky business called real estate, grew in sales from a respectable $91 million in 1971 to a mammoth, $241 million in 1973 – a healthy 265 per cent.



Henry S. Miller is Dallas’ leading middleman -the most advanced species in a city which for more than a century has advanced the art of middlemanning. We’ve memorialized war heroes, philanthropists and corporate insignias, but we haven’t paid homage to the man that made Dallas what it is -the middleman. Quite simply, Dallas wouldn’t be here without him.



Middlemanning started the day John Neely Bryan pitched his tent on the banks of the Trinity, here to found a city and make a living out of promoting it. Later, cotton buyers somehow convinced farmers they needed a middleman right here in Dallas to deal with manufacturers. And then the banks made a fortune off oilmen, when not a drop of oil was produced in Dallas. So, in a city filled with middlemen, it’s only natural to have a middleman to buy, sell, manage and appraise property. His only memorial is the ubiquitous billboard -“This property for sale. Call Henry S. Miller.”

$241 Million in’73

Miller can help you search for land, develop it, manage the property, appraise it, sell it and practically anything else you might want to do with it. Miller owns very little property himself, but makes a handsome living off those that do with his cradle-to-the-grave land dealing services. Here’s a company which stands for the very essence of Dallas -an outfit that makes money by wheeling and dealing off the wheeler dealers. Take somebody else’s money, skim a commission, put the money to good use in an investment. Then manage the investment (cut yourself in for a commission) and when your man gets ready to pull out, help him do it by finding a buyer, and while you’re at it, pick up a brokerage fee. For a commission, Henry S. Miller will run your life.

His father, who had started the Miller company the same year that son Henry Jr. was born, gave his blessing. “He told me that he didn’t want to hold me back,” recalls Henry Jr., a tall, slender, slightly slump-shouldered man. In 1960, the firm’s brokerage volume was a modest $13 million. Five years later, with the firm still building its staff, it was still only $20 million. Then finally, in the late ’60’s the light switched to green and Henry Miller’s companies shot forward, leaving their competitors behind, benumbed.

Higher, higher, the numbers climbed: $91 million in sales volume for 1970; $170 million for ’72; $241 million for ’73. The company outgrew new offices in One Main Place in three years and had to delay moving into 2001 Bryan Tower when officials realized that one floor wouldn’t house everyone. (The 30th floor is headquarters, but offices also spill over to half of the 29th.) Miller companies also operate seven general offices and seven residential real estate offices.

The reason for the cramped quarters is clear to the Miller Companies’ competitors. Everywhere they turn, they encounter the Miller Companies’ distinctive double-inverted “V” logo -on highway signs, in advertising, attached to office buildings, shopping centers or apartment walls.

Their boom was fueled, of course, by the Age of Real Estate during the past few years in Dallas. But those days are gone now, and not even the Miller company has been able to escape real estate’s increasing hard times. The official word from the 30th floor of 2001 Bryan Tower- the Miller Companies’ headquarters – is semi-bearish. “1973 for us was spectacular,” says Vance Miller, the young square-jawed Miller president. “But that was 1973.”

This year, stagflation and all, the line charts for housing starts have plummeted like a wounded mallard, and interest rates, of course, are even now barely retreating to a reasonable level. Industry spokesmen, trying to smile their way around the fear and exhaustion in their eyes, keep reminding that “accommodations are the fundamental need of society” and that “this is, as you know, a cyclical business, after all.”

But the figures don’t lie. And those cold-granite figures show that these are, indeed, hard times.

For the Henry S. Miller Companies, the hard times come during an interesting turn on the track. It is, frankly, brass tacks time for one of the pet, vaunted theories of board chairman Henry S. Miller Jr., the 60-year-old Chartered Life Underwriter whose fondest dreams now surround him as he sits in his art-and-sculpture-studded Bryan Tower office.

“I think we are opportunistic to a large extent,” suggests Henry Miller. “But then,” he adds, taking back some of that, “we have not stuck our necks out to make a quick buck, even though there have been some opportunities to do it.”

In an industry that has battled uphill against its stereotypes, that statement could be viewed with jaundice. But there is a point to be made. Miller’s expansion hasn’t been nilly-willy. The reason that the Miller company was so late getting into residential sales – where it achieved an instant, gilt-edge success of $40 million in 1973 -was because the Henry S. Miller Real Estate Trust (REIT) had a higher priority. Yet the company waited so long to get its REIT going that it nearly missed the latest boom for this type of investment vehicle. The reason, moreover, for the REIT’s delay was to leave undisturbed other priorities, including a warehouse development and leasing division. The denouement of that unfortunate episode was that the Miller company learned that it had entered a crowded field and had misjudged the financial exposure. Finally, Miller ordered the operation closed down completely.

Real Estate College

There have been other terminations and/or disappointments: a casualty insurance firm (Henry S. Miller Companies, Insurance), which was sold in 1971 to Alexander & Alexander after three years of modest success; a maintenance operation, intended to provide the Miller company’s many owner-clients with cost savings on painting, plumbing, electrical work, etc. (It didn’t pay off; too many of the maintenance demands were seasonal, creating manpower inefficiencies); and a recreational properties department, which has had its problems trying to sell units in such projects as LTV Recreation Development’s Steamboat Springs, Colorado, condominiums.

Miller’s influence on the middleman game in Dallas has been just short of remarkable. As one local real estate man put it, “Every major real estate company in this city is staffed with people who learned the game from Henry S. Miller. The one exception is residential real estate, and that’s only because Miller was late getting into it. Miller’s people sit a young man down and tell him what to do. They give him some direction, and if he becomes successful, he generally moves out on his own or to another firm. I can’t help but think this must bother Miller’s people. But after all, the company made plenty of money off the young man’s success.”

Some, like Herb Weitzman, learn the Miller middleman game so well that they stick around and become part of the Miller army. “Weitzman,” said a local commercial realtor, “is quite simply the best in town when it comes to taking a piece of raw land and transforming it into a damned nice shopping center. If he weren’t with Henry S. Miller, he’d still be the best man in town.”

What Miller does best is get two or more parties together and then handle all of the complexities that can be involved in a multi-million-dollar land deal or the leasing of a 1.3-million-square-foot building (2001 Bryan Tower), the redesign, expansion management of a previously marginal shopping center (Preston Royal Village), or the planning of a project from scratch (Meadow Central Mall).

Net Profits: $2.2 Million

The main corporate entity for all this is the nine-divisioned Henry S. Miller Co., Realtors, where most of the brokerage business is handled. That doesn’t account, however, for the Henry S. Miller Management Corp., a subsidiary that handles the shopping centers – there are 60 in the stable now -and some office buildings. There’s the Miller Multi-Management Corp., oriented to apartment buildings. The business of Henry S. Miller Appraisal Corp. is as its name implies; ditto for the HSM Shopping Center Co., Metro Search Apartment Locators and Henry S. Miller Development Corp., which builds industrial and office facilities. The publicly held Henry S. Miller Real Estate Trust, organized in 1972, buys equity interests in land and buildings; the Tri-Tex Cattle Company offers advice to farmers and ranchers; and the HSM Real Estate Securities Corp. safeguards joint venture offerings. Advice-for-hire, finally, is the trade of the Henry S. Miller Real Estate Council.

It can be a lucrative business. Since the Miller company is privately owned (70 per cent by the Miller family, 25 per cent by non-family board members and 5 per cent by other company employees), it releases no annual profit-loss figures. Henry Miller has revealed that the firm’s profit margin has dropped as the company has grown in size; for the 1972-73 fiscal year, Miller notes, “Our before-tax net profit was about 15 per cent of our gross income.”

That gross income can be roughly calculated. For the calendar year of 1973, the Miller company brokered a volume of $241,339,238. For most of their services, they collect five and six per cent standard commissions, and six per cent of $241 million is about $14.5 million. And 15 per cent of $14.5 million is roughly $2.2 million in net profits. If this analysis is anywhere near correct, the 1973 profits of the Henry S. Miller Companies put the firm in the same profits league as such Texas companies as Earth Resources, Lone Star Brewing, Ennis Business Forms, Pioneer Texas Corp., the Western Co., Allright Auto Parks, Varo, Justin Industries and Ada Resources, all of which posted net earnings in the $2 million-to-$3 million range last year.

Now one thing a good middleman has to keep in mind: If the people you are middlemanning for run into hard times, so will you. So why not hedge your bet? Expand the middleman game into so many areas that there’s no way they can all turn sour at the same time. If land sales are off, leasing is often the place to be. Shopping centers might be stagnant, but why worry? Housing might be red hot. Things in Houston might be slumping, but land sales in the East Texas piney woods might be dynamite. The prudent thing to do, Miller thought, was to diversify, and so he did, spreading his middlemania practically everywhere there was a deal to be turned.

Not only has Miller’s expansion produced some lemons, expansion brings up the fundamental question: Is his operation spread so thin that people at the top of the Miller heirarchy don’t really know what’s going on at the bottom? Not long ago, Mrs. Mona Biskamp became the first Miller residential sales associate to step into the Miller Mark Multi-Million Club. She attained this high honor by brokering three million dollars’ worth of residential property last year, all for Henry S. Miller. When asked about the Miller Mark Multi-Million Club, Vance Miller stares blankly and replies, “I don’t know what it is.”

And then expansion threatens to sully the reputation of Henry S. Miller’s forte, property management. In talking with Miller executives, employees and competitors, it is easy for an observer to get the idea that the Miller company has pushed its current management capacities to the outer limits. It is deceptively easy, when you are managing huge property complexes, to take on more than your staff can handle, and it is to your advantage as a leasing and managing agent to take all you can get. As one of Miller’s competitors (but one who eschews the property management business because of what he terms “the built-in potential for abuse”) explains, “The management company is compensated on the basis of gross rental. Therefore, its goal is to lease space. If a tenant wants you to spend $10,000 on gewgaws for his space, then the management company is inclined to want to spend it because it doesn’t affect its bottom line; it only affects the building owner’s bottom line.”

’Potential for Abuse’

This individual is, in fact, currently unhappy with the Miller Companies’ management of a Dallas-area building in which he has a minor interest. As he tells it, the building is 96 per cent leased and yet it is still losing about $500 per quarter. The matter, says the complainant, is an old one: “They are spending too much money for operation and not getting enough money for rent.” He adds, “That’s one of the problems of a management company. There is so much to manage, they can’t give anything the amount of time it needs. At least, not the amount of time the guys who have got the bucks invested in it think it needs.”

The aforementioned “potential for abuse” is painfully obvious within a cluster of subsidiary real estate-related companies like Henry S. Miller’s, companies that do practically everything. The amount of “overlayering” of services and support among the various subsidiaries at Henry Miller almost defies an organizational chart. Examine, for example, the Miller Companies’ REIT, a stock traded over the counter. It was established in 1972, ostensibly to give “the little man” easy entry into and egress from real estate investment. But hardly had the ink dried on the Miller REIT’s initial underwriting than the Dallas real estate rumor mill cranked up: The Millers had set up an REIT to dump their marginal deals in! To which one Miller competitor replies, “Baloney!” He observes, “Their trust is paying dividends as good as anybody’s.”

The trust’s chief administrative officer, David Donosky, while more circumpsect in answering, insists that the Miller REIT has purchased no properties owned or controlled by any of the other Miller entities. “Our purchases have always been made on an arm’s length basis with knowledgeable third parties,” he contends. And yet the potential for abuse, at least, remains: the Miller REIT paid other Miller companies $284,000 for advisory services and $94,000 in management fees for the ’73-’74 fiscal year. Donosky notes, “In relationship to the Miller Companies’ gross, it is small, but it’s a significant amount of income.”

Adding to the nexus of potentially compromising relationships surrounding the REIT is the fact that Henry Miller Jr., the Miller REIT chairman, is also on the board of Dallas-based Lomas & Nettleton Mortgage Investors, one of the nation’s largest mortgage trusts. Isn’t this a little like having an IBM board member also sitting on the board of, say, Telex? Not really, argues Donosky, who is married to Henry Miller’s oldest daughter, Patsy. But it was a subject sensitive enough to give pause both to Miller and to Lomas & Nettleton, for whom the Miller company had handled the leasing of 67,000-sq.-ft. of office space in 2001 Bryan Tower. Says Donosky of the outcome, “Lomas didn’t consider it conflicting, but really complementary. Lomas is a large mortgage trust and we are a medium-sized equity trust. We are operating in two different spheres.”

Joint Ventures Sensitive

Another sensitive area is the joint venturing of land -the process known generally as land syndicating. Business has not been red-hot lately, but syndication is still an important feature on the Dallas real estate scene. Essentially, it involves a broker or syndicator, in this case, the Henry Miller Co., that locates a parcel of raw, undeveloped, usually urban land that has potential for appreciation and then tries to assemble a group of buyers, or joint venturers, who will each purchase an “interest” in the property. Later, if all goes well, the group sells out at substantial profits. Ideally, again, the system allows “the little man” (defined as someone with between $5,000 and $100,000 in nonessential cash) to invest in really large transactions. The Miller company, to its credit, has generally stayed with large transactions – ranging from $200,000 to $3 million-involving only a few joint venturers. “Our average land transaction is about a million dollars,” says Horace Vail, an executive vice president. “And there would be an average of ten people involved.” Vail, who formerly headed the 32-employee investment land division, contemptuously dismisses land syndications as small as $50,000. “Why do it?” he asks. “If a deal takes only $50,000 in cash, we’d have perhaps 50 prospects who could handle it alone.”

The stinger for the syndicator in the land syndication approach is the ticklish matter of inventory. In a company as large as the Miller company, there must be a number of available land parcels -land on which the company has put up earnest money – awaiting closure. Holding all of this property is a risk, of course. What if, for example, a tight-money situation develops, and suddenly there just aren’t any joint venturers out there willing or able to put up the cash to close a deal? Then the syndicator loses his earnest money. A big syndicator loses lots of earnest money. When that happens, the boys in the trade don sackcloth and ashes, retire to their favorite bars and trade doleful laments on the curse of “missing the market.”

Last December, at the Sailmaker Bar and other such watering holes, the Miller Companies’ land syndication people were divesting themselves of such plaintive spiels. They had missed the market, failing to close a bunch of deals and thus forfeiting gobs of earnest money. How much money is a company secret, but one glum Miller sales associate, gulping scotch and water, confided, “We really missed it bad.” It hardly assuaged the embarrassment to note that a lot of other land syndicators missed the market, too; the debacle only served to remind the Miller executives that a big company can flub up just like a little one. Its miscues just cost more, and maybe linger longer. Says an outsider, “That hurts the reputation of a company, and the whole syndication business, in fact. It makes it tougher when you go back into the market to buy.”

Land syndications have been taking it on the chin anyhow. It’s been too easy to pretty up just any ol’ parcel of dirt, surround it with a bunch of legalese, issue a brochure filled with color pictures and expansive predictions about future values and dump the whole package on unsophisticated and unsuspecting investors.

Would the Miller company do a thing like that? Well, Mr. Miller doesn’t blink at all as he refutes the suggestion, not that they would openly defraud their investors, but merely the suggestion that in handling such a large volume of syndications that perhaps they have ventured a deal or two where they should have known better. Miller’s reaction, cool and precise, is predictable: they have a tough screening committee, they turn down far more deals than they accept (nine out of ten, or something like that), and in a couple of hundred syndications they have never had a total, final bomb on their hands. The question, put to another knowledgeable but independent observer, draws this response: “I think there are four or five companies that do a little better job in their property selection than the Henry Miller Co.- Wilson Properties and Hank Dick-erson, for example -but Henry Miller does a good job. They are selective. There are some companies that do a poor job. The Securities & Exchange Commission has already cracked down on some of them.”

SEC Investigating

The Fort Worth office of the SEC refuses to confirm or deny any interest in the burgeoning land syndication operations in the state. However, it is known that at least 50 Texas land syndicators have been asked in for consultation in recent months, among them the Henry S. Miller Companies. In each case, company representatives have been asked to bring business records for the past two years.

The subject of the SEC makes Carol M. Bennett, the Miller Companies’ securities expert, nervous as a virgin on Bacchanalian Night. Bennett is the big blond, block-shouldered finance man that Miller lured away from Rauscher Pierce Securities Corp. last year to head up the HSM Real Estate Securities Corp. The courts and the regulatory authorities have largely decided that those land syndication deals are really securities, like common stocks, and have been all along. And to be safe, the big land syndicators like Henry Miller Companies are treating land syndications like securities, with full-disclosure prospectuses and such.” There have been a couple of court suits that have urged realtors to start doing this,” admits Bennett. But that’s all he’ll say for the record about the longtime unwitting violation of securities laws by some real estate syndicators.



The setting up of HSM Real Estate Securities Corp. is another manifestation of Henry Miller Jr.’s odd co-mingling of the cautious and the venturesome. The image of a barnburner goes against the man’s grain, and yet he has, as the record shows, kept up the pressure for experimentation. Son Vance expresses the company’s philosophy this way: “We try to be ready for opportunities. We know there are gaps in the market, but you can’t do all things at once. So when you see a person to fulfill that gap, you can be set and ready. The same way with properties.”

$100,000 Paychecks

With residential sales, the catalyst was a person: the indefatigable Virginia Cook, now a Miller Companies board member, who had moved out on her own after an enviable track record with Paula Stringer Realtors, when the Millers took her in. (Her husband, Firman, is a Miller senior vice president.) The company’s highly successful property management business began just as unexpectedly 10 years earlier. It was the doing of a New York firm, the Futterman Corp., that called without warning, complimented the Miller reputation and asked if the company would like to operate a few thousand Texas and Louisiana apartment units and some office buildings. In yet another instance, the Millers expanded (into Fort Worth) because a developer (George Mallick) asked them to handle the leasing of a new building; the Millers’ expansion to Houston, correspondingly, came because former employee Gene Carter made a similar request. More recently, the company set up its cattle management business because two cattle experts were suddenly available from the unrelated Walton Miller Companies.

“I wouldn’t want to say,” says Henry Miller cogitatively, “that it has been a matter of luck. If we hadn’t worked hard and been competent, we wouldn’t have been called on to handle all this.”

Handling “all this” is, to be sure, an increasingly tougher job. The debacle over land syndications last December was, in part, an example of how things can run out of control in a big, sprawling company.

And of course one way of dealing with all of this is to call upon an old Henry Miller Companies pillar -the middleman. Miller has thrust a middle management plateau in between himself and his salesmen. Now instead of splitting the sales commissions 50-50 between the company and the salesman, a supervisor has been cut in. “The salesman averages about 45 per cent, the company 40 per cent and the supervisor about 10 or 15 per cent,” says Miller vaguely. “I feel this is one of the key elements in our growth.” The Miller salesmen occasionally gripe about their cut, but their bosses have a ready argument in the income potential of salesmen who are armed with the Henry S. Miller name. Vance Miller puts it succinctly: “There are probably a couple of dozen people here who started without any tangible assets. And now they are millionaires. And there are probably at least 25 employees each year who earn over $100,000.”

What has been one of the most attractive features about getting your start with Henry S. Miller, however, has fallen to economic ill winds. When the company wanted to move heavily into office, shopping center and warehouse leasing, Miller attracted veteran salesmen by offering a little grubstake called the “unguaranteed draw.” A man could come to work for Miller and draw off a company account until he started making a decent living. If he left the company, the salesman didn’t have to repay the draw.

Not so anymore. Several months ago the unguaranteed draw was replaced by a “commission advance plan,” which means a salesman can take out a loan, which he repays out of his first sales commissions. The critical difference here is that the advance is a loan – a legal instrument of indebtedness which must be repaid.

“We started the draw plan to beef up our commercial leasing force,” explains Vance Miller. “Now it’s in good shape. We found it interesting that some of our Houston people who weren’t moving much space under the draw plan have suddenly started producing without it.”

No matter what the starting conditions may be, a steady flow of well-tailored young men with the Dry Look flock annually to the door of personnel director E. Mitchell Weatherly, who seldom needs to recruit. (Only once in 60 years has Miller felt compelled to advertise for salesmen.) “The best recruiter,” says Vance Miller, “is a successful salesman, and we have lots of those around here.”

If ambitions are any measurement, and if the economy even halfway rights itself, more and more of those eager, earnest young men can expect to get a hearing on the 30th floor. While Vance Miller is not the spittin’ image of his father, who was of his father, he shares Henry Jr.’s sense of Manifest Destiny. “Clients are coming to us when they need the impossible,” the Miller Companies president says matter-of-factly. “Early last week, a major client called and asked if we could raise three million dollars in the equity of a large development.” Miller needn’t add that today’s equity market is as lifeless as warmed-over ice cream. “I told him that I thought we could.”

Arab Money Coining?

But like the chairman and the founder, the latest Miller to have a hand in charting the company’s future doesn’t appear prone to act hastily. With Arab oil money beginning to trickle in, the company’s fledgling international operations hold promise, but there are no plans for a London office of Henry S. Miller Companies -yet. Within the home state of Texas, distant El Paso beckons, but only as a place for investments. Vance Miller notes emphatically, however, that the company must expand residential sales, but only to Houston and Fort Worth next year. The Rio Grande Valley looks attractive, but it’s too early, says Miller, to think about a full-service office in Brownsville or Harlingen.

Likely, when the moves of expansion come, they’ll develop because of the apt appearance of a special person, property or deal. Because when you are Number One, those special persons, properties and deals have a way of turning up. “And let’s face it,” asserts former employee Alan Jones. “They are number one.”

Miller is number one because he knows what strings topull and when to pull them. He can drum up money, whipup some plans for you, select an architect and contractor,then supervise the construction. He can brew up just theright combination of tenants, lease them the space andthen manage the property for you. That’s what a middleman might call turning sawdust into gold.