William Zeckendorf Quotes
103 William Zeckendorf Quotes (Bill Zeckendorf Quotes)
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The secret of any great project is to keep it moving…
William Zeckendorf
Howard Hughes is eccentric, but he has always been his own man, and he has great vision.
William Zeckendorf
I have never been afraid of debt, because debt is what gives you leverage…
William Zeckendorf
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
We did it because it had to be done, and nobody else could do it.
William Zeckendorf
In matters as in matters small, around the world as in Montreal, I find it is not logic but emotions, sometimes carefully rationalized to resemble logic, that more often than not decide most issues.
William Zeckendorf
Financing and building a great project is a bit like building a road through mountain country; around every bend there is a surprise, and a great part of the excitement and interest in a development, aside from its conception, lies in the challenge of finding new ways around the many difficulties that crop up.
William Zeckendorf
I’ve had no reverses of anything except money. My sense of accomplishment is full, and the cities and the art and the architecture I have influenced will live long after I am gone.
William Zeckendorf
Webb & Knapp was the largest urban redeveloper in the nation. We placed twice as many bids as we finally won, and in doing so Webb & Knapp made Title I respectable. Time after time it turned out that our decision to bid was what drew other builders out to bid as well.
William Zeckendorf
It was our designs that set the planning and architectural standards others had to meet.
William Zeckendorf
I recognized that we could afford to lose ground income if, by giving tenants a prestige building, we could ask for rents fifty percent greater than those in the immediate vicinity.
William Zeckendorf
Unfortunately these great projects were not money-makers for Webb & Knapp; we were spread too think in too many places to be able to hold these properties through an unexpectedly hard time, but the flaw was in me (I was trying to do too much too quickly) rather than in the projects.
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.
William Zeckendorf
I am as fascinated by cities, how they grow and where they go, as by the men who make them go. It is the men, of course, who count for most; what they are, their city is.
William Zeckendorf
Many a company has come in behind another one and found oil where others thought there was none.
William Zeckendorf
The secret of any great project is to keep it moving, keep it from losing momentum, and this, for me, meant a constant flow of telephone calls and trips, often by company plane, to Montreal, Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Denver, and points west.
William Zeckendorf
We had committed ourselves, and the eventual return from these projects promised to be so great that we carried on.
William Zeckendorf
One day when the head of Morgan Guaranty stuck out his hand at a gathering of bankers and said, ‘Bill, you look like a million dollars,’ I could crack back, ‘I’d better – I owe you three million.’
William Zeckendorf
Once declared bankrupt, Webb & Knapp was out of the reach of individual creditors and in a fiscal limbo where no one could do business with us.
William Zeckendorf
In moments of crisis, one’s world tends to become simplified…
William Zeckendorf
Only my personal assets, not my brains, were in hock. I still knew how to make money for people.
William Zeckendorf
I decided to declare personal bankruptcy. Making money is something I can always do. There are certain debts of honor I shall see are paid, but filing for bankruptcy was the only way to finally clear my entanglements with Webb & Knapp and start a new life.
William Zeckendorf
If you put on a bold front, and fight with everything you have, you can win.
William Zeckendorf
Once you have won a few battles, you are usually left alone: in the jungle, no animal thoughtlessly attacks the lion.
William Zeckendorf
New York real estate, like every other business in the country, was booming in the twenties.
William Zeckendorf
Generally there are three categories of real-estate investors – those who borrow nothing, those who borrow the maximum, and those who borrow conservatively.
William Zeckendorf
As a New York City real-estate broker, I made my living on two fronts. On the one side I was a negotiator for property owners trying to salvage their estates by renegotiating mortgages with banks and insurance companies. Meanwhile, I also keep busy scouting out the increasingly scarce buyers for properties that the banks and insurance companies were doing their best to unload.
William Zeckendorf
I was shocked; our doubled-hulled, unsinkable investment was beginning to look like a miniature Titanic foundering in ice cubes. Here was a nightclub so popular you couldn’t get into the place, yet its operators could not pay their rent.
William Zeckendorf
This made me keenly aware that it paid to look at the real estate business not as an end in itself but as a device for bridging gaps between the needs of disparate groups. The greater the number of separate groups (or their needs) that one could interconnect (or satisfy), the greater the profit to the innovator-entrepreneur.
William Zeckendorf
Learnt the virtues of buying for cash and selling for credit. I was also discovering that there are multiple sources and uses for money in real estate.
William Zeckendorf
Webb & Knapp could not hold all our properties, because we would need the money to meet our tremendous commitments in yet another new field.
William Zeckendorf
In a commercial project make sacrifices to get your first key tenants.
William Zeckendorf
Everyone end up better off than they started.
William Zeckendorf
But never, except for rare moments, have I ever had my head very far above the financial water, and never have I let this trouble me.
William Zeckendorf
Better a tight and assuredly profitable real estate market than an open and uncertain one… For instance, they were consistently over looking the even greater return on investment that imaginative new building efforts in Denver might develop.
William Zeckendorf
My observation has always been that after a certain key point you must move ahead as if a project was assured – in order to assure it – because if you wait around for all the pieces of the puzzle to fit before closing a deal, you can wait forever.
William Zeckendorf
The lesson is that in a city, a relatively minor investment in open space can pay off handsomely in better rents for whole blocks in the area – if the city and property owners can raise their eyes above and beyond the limits of their own sidewalks.
William Zeckendorf
We had determined that any urban renewal program must meet a number of criteria. 1) That a project must reach a certain critical mass in order to generate a self-sustaining reaction. 2) The components of this mass must be properly balanced (For instance, it is usually a mistake to build only housing or only commercial projects in a given area and 3) A closely related element, the development must be properly connected to the city of which it is a part.
William Zeckendorf
A development must add to the existing or potential flow of business and people through an area.
William Zeckendorf
These, the only unsecured debentures Webb & Knapp ever issued, were what would trigger our bankruptcy in 1965, but then the deal was all to the good.
William Zeckendorf
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