What’s an Infomart?

TRAMMELL Crow means business. It’s simply an unchallenged axiom. He means business when he talks about a new real estate venture. He means business when he firmly shakes a hand. And he means business when he puts the money on the line. And even when he’s not doing the talking, his name alone has come to mean business.

Big business. The 69-year-old Texan is widely considered to be the biggest private real estate developer in America, with an estimated $4 billion in gross assets spread throughout the three company clusters that he founded: the Tram-mell Crow Co., Trammell Crow residential companies and Crow family companies. The Crow empire has built and leased office buildings, trade centers, industrial parks, shopping centers, hotels and the enormous Dallas Communications Complex-the movie studio facility at Las Colinas. Last year, Forbes magazine estimated his personal worth at $500 million.

The most visible monuments to his success are some of the makings of his success: the World Trade Center, the Apparel Mart and the other five buildings that compose the Dallas Market Center, his world-famous complex of wholesale merchandise showrooms on Stemmons Freeway, which attracts 500,000 potential buyers each year.

Come November, another Crow building will open beside these others: a striking glass facility designed to resemble London’s Crystal Palace of 1851. It’s a $92 million gamble called Infomart-the “International Information Processing Market Center’- and if Crow is betting right, it will forever change the way computers and computer byproducts are marketed, while changing Dallas’ place in the international computer arena. Like the Apparel Mart and the World Trade Center, Infomart will be a collection of permanent showrooms where wholesalers of computers and information processing-related products can display and sell their wares. It will, to quote the leasing campaign’s literature, “compress the buying cycle” by bringing together buyers and sellers under one roof in an atmosphere that is both competitive and educational. Retailers will have the advantage of one-stop shopping and a vast number of options to choose from. Manufacturers, in turn, will multiply their potential number of clients and will have an immediate barometer of the competition. Good for buyers and sellers alike. Good for the market. Good for everyone. Or so the promo goes.

Now under construction on a 25-acre site at the corner of Stemmons Freeway and Oak Lawn Avenue, the seven-story building will consist of 1.5 million square feet of space, 910,000 square feet of which can be leased for permanent showrooms. Most of it is being leased for between $24 and $33 per square foot. To date, more than 130 companies have leased or pledged to lease the various-sized showrooms-65 percent of the 225 showrooms that are available. With less than six months to go until the opening, that’s higher than Infomart’s marketing team expected, and they seem certain that by November, Infomart will be filled. More important, it will be filled with the companies that count. Already committed to space are Texas Instruments (10,000 square feet), AT&T Information Systems (15,000 square feet), Televideo (6,000 square feet), Xerox (24,000 square feet) and IBM (33,000 square feet). Once opened, Infomart is expected to draw at least 350,000 prospective buyers annually.

Infomart won’t be the only computer-oriented trade mart. There will be one in Boston called BOSCOM, scheduled to open in mid-1985 and consisting of 1 million square feet. In San Francisco, ground was broken last December on a computer market called Datamart. But Infomart will be the largest of its kind, and it won’t be the last. Last November, plans were firmed up for Crow to design and operate a 2.4 million-square-foot, $400 million wholesale computer mart in New York City as part of the increasingly controversial $1.5 billion plan to redevelop the Times Square area. If all goes according to schedule, Infomart New York will open at the end of 1986 or the beginning of 1987. Already, Crow and Infomart president Bill Winsor are envisioning a West Coast computer mart, which will probably be located in Los Angeles, as well as one in Chicago. They see such a four-pronged network as a way to not only ride the market but also to make it feed itself. Ultimately, they plan to take computer marketing to Europe, where computer manufacturers claim only about 3 percent of the world market.

As the story goes, Crow had an idea for a computer marketplace about 20 years ago, but his friend Ross Perot talked him out of it. The time didn’t seem right. Today, with both hardware and software prices dropping drastically, with such an incredibly high demand for computers and with more and more manufacturers entering the business (each offering a mind-boggling number of products to choose from), the time appears ripe. And it’s particularly ripe for Dallas. According to last October’s Computer World magazine, Dallas is the fifth largest computer market in the country behind New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C., area. Boston ranked eighth, Houston ninth. By late 1986, other experts estimate, Dallas will be the third largest center of installed base computers. (Surprisingly, Apple Computers manufactures more products in Dallas than in California.) Aside from the benefit of having a full house of tenants, the Infomart staff is hoping that the facility will encourage more companies either to move their operations to Dallas or to at least open offices here.

Crow and Winsor are billing it as a mec-ca for conferences, seminars, special-interest meetings and conventions. It is designed to be a place to learn, a place where products can not only be displayed but technology explored and problems solved. Aside from showrooms, there will be a 500-seat auditorium, several large conference halls, 15 seminar rooms and year-round events, some of which will educate the “end users” -individual retail buyers. Already, more than 100 trade shows and professional meetings are scheduled for Infomart’s first year.

The building’s architecture, designed by Martin Growald and Associates of Fort Worth, is a reworking of the design of the Crystal Palace, which was built in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than six million people visited the great glass structure during the 141 days of the exhibition, and they are said to have marveled at the 300,000 glass panels supported by 3,800 tons of wrought-iron and cast-iron casings. Almost 14,000 exhibitors displayed more than 100,000 items, including foods, furs, musical instruments and machinery. Crow sees this historic marketing extravaganza of the Industrial Revolution as a fitting predecessor to what he probably views as a grand embodiment of the computer age. Unlike the Crystal Palace, however, the building currently being constructed is called “Phase 1,” which means that if Crow knows what he’s doing, there will surely be more to come. When necessary, the Infomart facility may be increased by eight floors.

There are uncertainties, however. Will Infomart be filled? Will it stay filled? If the current computer mania levels off, will smaller companies be able to afford the space? Will large companies need the space? And will other marts weaken Infomart’s stronghold? But for now, this latest Crow venture is proceeding with the kind of low-key confidence that has characterized his many other victories, and such worrisome questions just don’t seem to come up.