REAL ESTATE: Toward the Millennium

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A svelte blonde in a black sheath dress, with mink stole draped casually over her right arm, stopped during an inspection of a new apartment house on Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard last week and gushed: "It's the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen. But, I mean, it's even nicer than our house." Near her, a trim, wavy-haired man gravely replied: "Thank you, madam." For Norman Tishman, 56, president of Manhattan's Tishman Realty & Construction Co., the compliment was no surprise; his company had planned the building to be the most luxurious cooperative apartment house in Los Angeles, with some units costing $125,000.

From his new apartment building, Norman Tishman could look down Wilshire Boulevard toward five 13-story Tishman office buildings and the site of a projected 22-story Tishman office building in downtown Los Angeles. Such hustling has in the last few years made Tishman the biggest single landlord in Southern California, added to the firm's reputation as a pace setter for real estate men in other cities as well.

Uncut Diamonds. "We're investment builders, creators, not land speculators," says Tishman. "We buy for a specific purpose: to develop." Tishman covers the whole spectrum of real estate, from buying and building to renting and managing. The company specializes in opening up new areas of cities, is often followed by other firms once it builds. "If you get there first," says Tishman, "you find remarkably little competition. I first trust my instincts to pick the sites, then take a thorough economic survey. If the survey bears out my instincts, we go ahead. If not, I stick with the survey and forget my instincts. This is no business for guesswork."

Though Tishman is based in New York, the firm has moved into such growing areas as Los Angeles because Tishman feels that development opportunities are about exhausted in Manhattan. "To me," says Norman Tishman, "a piece of underdeveloped property is like an uncut diamond to a jeweler. I don't see it as it is—I see it as it will look when it has been properly developed." Today Tishman operates 31 large office or apartment buildings and three shopping centers in five U.S. cities (including West Hempstead, L.I.; New Orleans; Philadelphia), has other buildings under construction in Cleveland and Buffalo. Tishman's buildings win few architectural prizes, are often deplored by architects as unimaginative, even ugly. But they please tenants —and cut costs—because they lay heavy stress on economy of space, no-nonsense layouts.

Above 86th Street. The Tishman firm was started in 1898 by Norman Tishman's father Julius, an immigrant peddler who turned to real estate to get money to educate his children. Julius Tishman built small tenements in downtown Manhattan until 1910. Then he decided, against all advice, to erect a nine-story luxury apartment on Manhattan's West 93rd Street, despite a tradition that no well-to-do New Yorker would live above 86th Street. The building was profitable, and Julius Tishman made his fortune by continuing to build above 86th Street for the next ten years.