William Zeckendorf Quotes
103 William Zeckendorf Quotes
1 2 3
[On his tailor in 1942] By now he knew that I would always pay, but he also knew that he might have to wait.
William Zeckendorf
A letter-writer is not necessarily a real-estate man. What you should do is ask these men to demonstrate their ingenuity and wisdom by showing you what they’ve already accomplished.
William Zeckendorf
[On selling John Jacob Astor’s properties (America’s first multi-millionaire when he passed away in 1848) for the last in the line William Vincent Astor who had inherited $69 million in 1912 when he was 23 years old when his father drowned with the sinking of the Titanic] I soon learned there was an invisible but tangle aura about the Astor properties that made them attractive: if the great Astor estate had owned them, they must have extra virtues, because Old Astor had been so shrewd.
William Zeckendorf
A number of refugees who had come to the United States from Hitler-controlled Europe were becoming modestly prominent in the dormant New York real-estate market. These new buyers were far less interested in the total price of a property than what the actual down payment would be. A low down payment gave them maximum leverage for the inflationary rise in values that they were anticipating.
William Zeckendorf
When we made our initial proposal regarding the management of the Astor estate, I had refused to state a flat fee. I explained that when we delivered he could pay us what we were worth: if we didn’t deliver, he didn’t have to pay us anything.
William Zeckendorf
At the end of the first year we had added enormously to Astor’s assets and tripled his earnings. Through his lawyers, Astor kept prodding us to present him with a bill, and finally I did so, for the amount of $350,000.
William Zeckendorf
I found Vincent Astor quite amiable, sometimes humorous, but not very bright. He had inherited a native shrewdness from his forefathers. Nevertheless, if he had not also inherited his great fortune, he probably could not have done much on his own.
William Zeckendorf
[On John Jacob Astor VI] He wanted to be a noted philanthropist but was too engaged with the social aspects of being an Astor to do very much about it. He had a series of very nice wives, three in all, but he left no heirs except his foundation.
William Zeckendorf
Between 1942 and 1945 Webb & Knapp earned $835,000 in fees and commissions, plus $872,000 in profits from operating various properties. During this same time, our total assets grew from two to seven million dollars while our tangible net worth of assets over liabilities had climbed from minus $127,000 to over two million dollars.
William Zeckendorf
The crystal ball we used was the simple, built-in type. The only trick was not be so awed and frightened by the present that you were not able to see the future that lay within it.
William Zeckendorf
I was one of those who recognized that the Depression was past and then acted on this recognition.
William Zeckendorf
The problem was not in understanding what was going on but in convincing others that it was indeed going on…
William Zeckendorf
I also learned the needs of buyers or tenants, such as Woolworths or Allied Stores, and when we spotted something they should like, I would buy it and then turn it over to the most likely tenant.
William Zeckendorf
When we bought outside New York City, we were merely putting our money where America’s growth was the strongest.
William Zeckendorf
I can no more resist a real-estate deal than a smile at a pretty girl…
William Zeckendorf
I hate to bargain. If, in my judgment, a property is worth the asking price, I see no reason to try for less. A lot of shrewd dealers think this foolish, but I notice that others tend to lose more business, and to poison relationships, by trying to refine an already good bargain beyond a reasonable point. There is a much better flavor left in everybody’s mouth when such haggling is avoided. I wanted the property, their price seemed reasonable to me, and so we were in business.
William Zeckendorf
A common Wall street myth had it that I wandered into Webb & Knapp one day during the early war years to use the phone. The partners of the firm then went off to war, and when they returned, found I was in charge and that they had become millionaires.
William Zeckendorf
[On creating the United Nations headquarters] That night I could hardly sleep as I chased my own ideas, tied them down with facts and figures, altered them, made compromises, returned to original notions, and finally realized that I was no longer dealing with fantasy but with genuine possibility.
William Zeckendorf
The challenge was not in selling land but in creating value by using it judiciously.
William Zeckendorf
We would either capture their imagination and start them rethinking, or we would not, and one of the critical elements would be the price.
William Zeckendorf
[Robert Moses] Moses won the battle between us by sheer, brute force. I say brute force because he twisted the mayor’s arm, but the mayor’s arm was available for the twisting, and that is where I was caught by surprise.
William Zeckendorf
I was sophisticated enough to know that you don’t often get things done by fighting in the newspapers.
William Zeckendorf
During the war period Webb & Knapp had been closing as many as three or four transactions a week. Since an acquisition or sale might take anywhere from a few days to several months to close, we always had two dozen or more active transactions in hand.
William Zeckendorf
We kept stocking up on new properties the way a retailer stocks up for Christmas. We become known as an outfit that had money or could find it and was not afraid to buy big.
William Zeckendorf
By temperament my partners were investment managers (Webb & Knapp’s original business had been the management of properties) rather than investor-speculators.
William Zeckendorf
One has to realize that New York City, where you can buy anything, is really a giant, Oriental bazaar in concrete disguise. It is the greatest such bazaar in the history of man, and, true to the type, it is a marketplace where birds of a father and merchants of a type flock together – the money lenders and speculators in one section downtown; publishing, TV, and advertising men in midtown; and the cloth merchants in between.
William Zeckendorf
[On building 112 West Thirty-fourth Street] we began lining up clients, and met with almost instant success. In fact, every time we turned around, we had to redesign the building to make it bigger. We eventually changed the plans five times, to wind up with the biggest and tallest building that city regulations would permit.
William Zeckendorf
Just as a man living in a mountain valley sees and is closely aware of only a few of the nearest great peaks above him, so too, is it with a man comfortably settled as some modest elevation in our own society. If he begins to climb, however, he will soon notice from his new perspective that there are actually a great many peaks on all sides around him. What’s more, once he has reached a high enough altitude, he will discover something else. He will see that many of the greatest peaks – interconnected by high ridges or narrow plateaus – are, at this new level, readily accessible each one to the other. The temptation to keep moving on this high ground can be irresistible.
William Zeckendorf
A significant number of upper-level people are smarter, more aggressive, and in some ways, more self-assured than the average, but a good many dwellers on the heights got there entirely by accident. They were born there.
William Zeckendorf
[On early Denver real estate attitudes] Better a tight an assuredly profitable real estate market than an open and uncertain one. The logic was admirably conservative.
William Zeckendorf
[On building Denver’s first skyscraper] It was an office complex much ahead of its time that has withstood time’s passing.
William Zeckendorf
Life is short, its possible experiences many…
William Zeckendorf
The caption read: ‘They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.’ I bought that ad: it said it all.
William Zeckendorf
During the late 1940’s… suspecting that there would be a worldwide shortage of tanker bottoms, I had put Webb & Knapp into the shipping business. We acquired four T-4 tankers and a number of C-2 cargo ships which we chartered out. In the mid-1950’s we sold off our ships at a gain, making me one of few men in the world ever to buy from and then sell back ships to Greeks at a profit.
William Zeckendorf
If in 1955 and 1956 we had pulled in our horns and nursed only a few key projects along, I could have settled back as a multimillionaire and staid property holder. But with all of America before us and with so many useful things waiting to be done, I no more knew how to settle down to mere money counting than a bee in clover knows how to doze in the sun.
William Zeckendorf
What I was consciously doing at Webb & Knapp was creating an integrated real-estate and development company… No such thing had ever existed before, but then, neither had the kinds of projects we undertook.
William Zeckendorf
I lived and loved a hyperactive sixteen-hour day.
William Zeckendorf
Standing out in the sun, in my bare feet and shorts I thought enviously about how an investment banker acquiring a ten-million-dollar industrial corporation has a much easier time of it than a real-estate man buying a ten-million-dollar building. The investment banker can divide and sell the ownership and rights in a corporation in a great many ways, a piece at a time.
William Zeckendorf
Investment bankers have over the generations invented as many ways of catering to investors as there are investors with particular personal needs, whims, or tax requirements.
William Zeckendorf
Why can’t we break the property up, just the way an investment banker does?
William Zeckendorf
1 2 3
Return from William Zeckendorf Quotes to
Quoteswise.com