Colorado Real Estate Journal -
It was about 1987 and Rich Morean was working as a trader for a firm in New York City. Morean, who recently opened a Denver office for SKB, a private equity real estate firm based in Portland with almost a $3 billion portfolio, wanted to get into real estate. A friend from the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, where he had recently received his MBA after playing football for four years at Colorado State University, was visiting Morean and his wife, Barbara, in the Big Apple. “We decided to make a weekend of it,” doing things like catching a performance of “Cats” on Broadway. The weekend culminated a night of gambling in a hotel owned by Donald Trump. Trump was well known in New York and the East Coast at that time, but had not yet become a household name. Morean had brought a number of resumes with him, and after a number of hours of playing Blackjack and craps, he decided he should really play the odds and see if there was a chance he could use his resumés to catch the eye of The Donald. Morean, his wife and the other couple went to Trump’s offices in the building. “It was way up high, probably on the 30th floor,” Morean said. “We came to the floor and the name Trump was on the door. To my surprise, the door was open.” The office, however, was empty. He, his wife and the other couple took copies of Morean’s resumé and placed it on each desk. On the top of each resumé they had scrawled: “Forward to Trump in New York City immediately!” “We were young and we thought it was pretty funny,” Morean said. “It was one of those goofy things that young kids do. Honestly, we had a couple of drinks, too.” He never heard back from Trump, but a few months later he was hired by a company headed by an even larger real estate titan, Trammell Crow. “I think Mr. Crow was one of the first billionaires in commercial real estate,” Morean said. He was offered jobs in Chicago and Tampa, Fla., and chose Chicago. After several years with Trammell Crow in Chicago, he moved to Dallas as part of a team that managed the interests for the Crow family. In Dallas, he worked closely with Trammell Crow, his son Harlan and Don Williams, then CEO of Trammell Crow Co. “It was a great experience and a real learning experience,” Morean said. There, he was recruited by Kennedy & Associates (now Bentall Kennedy), one of the nation’s largest commercial real estate advisers, which manages investments on behalf of large pension fund investors, such as CaLPERS, or the California Public Employees Retirement System, which manages the largest public pension in the U.S. with about $180 billion in assets. However, Morean and his wife missed Denver. “My wife is a native and I had called Denver home since junior high,” Morean said. “We had lived in seven different cities,” he said. “Our three children had been born in three different cities.” He told Kennedy he would take the job, on the condition he could move to Denver. “I kind of forced the issue and they tolerated it,” Morean said. “They weren’t planning on opening a Denver office.” He set up a one-man shop in Denver and immediately attracted a lot of attention from developers. “They all kind of wanted to get to know this guy with the CaLPERS money,” he said. He quickly did a number of joint-venture deals with Trammell Crow. “One thing I am really proud of is that we did the first new office building in the Central Platte Valley,” he said. “We did a joint venture with Legacy Partners on a 10-story, 285,000-square-foot building that is now the Gates headquarters,” Morean said. They bought the land from David Syre’s Trillium Corp.“Back then, the only other thing in the Central Platte Valley were a couple of residential buildings by East West Partners,” he said. He left Kennedy to join Barney Visser, the co-founder of Furniture Row. “Barney and I became close friends and our families are still very close,” Morean said. “I helped him open a number of Furniture Rows, including developing that big one in Lone Tree near Park Meadows,” Morean said. After that, he joined a division of General Electric. “I ran the GE Capital Real Estate office in Denver,” Morean said. This time, there was no question of where he would be headquartered. “GE had a Denver office about 10 years before and they wanted to have one in Denver again,” he explained. At GE Capital, he invested money from the company’s balance sheet in joint-venture deals. “We primarily did joint ventures with multifamily projects, which is kind of exciting because multifamily is such a hot asset class today,” he said. “I had an opportunity to work with most of the top 50 apartment development companies in the country.” However, during the Great Recession, GE shut down the division. He joined SKB, where he will be raising capital for the Portland-based company. He expects SKB will be announcing its first Denver deal, part of a national portfolio purchase, in the near future. “I haven’t done everything in commercial real estate during my career, but I have leased space, sold properties, developed properties, financed and recapitalized deals. Until now, I have never been involved in the capital side. This is a new frontier for me.” Working from anywhere other than Denver was never a question. “Denver is certainly not as big as a Chicago or a Dallas,” as far as locally based institutional resources, he said. However, he can jump on a plane anytime and meet institutional investors such as pension funds and endowments, or rich individuals or companies looking to put some portion of their investment capital into commercial real estate. When not involved with real estate, he likes to spend time on the golf course. For Morean had a 7 handicap during the downturn, but has found that his golf game is not quite as good now that real estate is staging a comeback and he can’t spend as much time on the course at the Glenmoor Country Club in Cherry Hills Village. He also likes to spend time with his family biking on the Highline Trail. “On Father’s Day, when my kids ask me what I want, I always say, ‘Go on a bike ride with me,’” Morean said. But unlike some people in commercial real estate, he’s not a competitive biker with a super-light machine. “I just have an old mountain bike,” he said. “I’m good after an hour or an hour and a half.” However, he is passionate about Denver and never plans on leaving. “There is not a job on the planet that I would leave Denver for,” Morean said. “Life is too short.” So even if Trump finally responded to the request he made about a quarter of a century ago and offered him a job in New York City, he wouldn't take it. “After all of these years, I have never met Donald Trump,” Morean said. “The closest I ever came to him is when I sent him one of his books and asked him to autograph it, which he did.”