Developers at Home With GM Site’s Risks
It was the land, warmer weather and the promise of new things that made Robert Selleck gamble and move his family from Detroit to the San Fernando Valley in 1948.
Coldwell Banker offered him a job in Los Angeles as a real estate agent, but with no salary and no weekly guarantee against future sales. Everything was to be based on commission, his wit and his ability to sell. He took the job.
“It was a little adventurous; you’ve got to be young to do that,” Selleck, now 74, remembers.
So he came west with his wife and two young sons, Bob Jr. and Thomas--who would grow up to be TV and movie star Tom Selleck--as the family settled in Van Nuys. At the time, the Valley was more farmland than anything else, with the first crops of suburban homes starting to take root.
Bob Selleck holds up his arm at a 45-degree angle to show how the Southern California real estate market grew for the next 40 years. Selleck rode that wave, as the births of a daughter, Marti, and a son, Daniel, followed. They all lived in a comfortable, middle-class cocoon and watched the Valley grow.
To this day, most members of the Selleck family have made their living off the land--Southern California real estate, that is--and now the old General Motors assembly plant site in Panorama City is in their hands.
Bob Selleck, his three sons and their family business, Selleck Properties, are partners with the Voit Cos. in the planned rebirth of the vacant, 68-acre GM site, expected to cost $75 million to $100 million. Their hope is to turn that hole in the ground into a bustling shopping center with big retail stores, maybe Home Depot, Toys R Us, a supermarket, movie-theater complex and restaurants, plus industrial space for small and medium-size manufacturing firms.
Along the way, they may help jump-start the Valley’s economy by providing a couple of thousand jobs.
The area around the GM site is crime-ridden, but Tom Selleck remembers that neighborhood when it was a better place. “Maybe we can change some of the personality of the neighborhood,” he said. “We’re not in business just for civic purposes. But the Valley is where we grew up, and with all of Dad’s experience in the Valley, it seemed a good fit.”
Selleck Properties in Westlake Village is a small firm with six real estate investments--it’s developed and sold off other sites--and has put up shopping centers from Lancaster to Torrance.
The GM project is their highest-profile effort, and maybe the riskiest.
The business is run by Bob Jr. and Dan, with counsel from their dad, although Tom said, “I’m not just a cardboard cutout.” He likes to know what’s going on, so the family meets once a week to crunch numbers together.
Bob Jr., 52, is the eldest of the Selleck brothers and the tallest at 6 feet 7, while Tom, 51, is the runt at 6 feet 4, and Dan, 40, is the youngest.
Bob Jr. remembers getting introduced to real estate as a child on weekends when his mother was busy with errands, and his dad took them to open houses at homes he was trying to sell. “We sort of picked up an interest in real estate through osmosis,” Bob Jr. said.
Real estate people are quick with numbers and Bob Sr. still remembers the math on his first home in Van Nuys. The price was $11,000, and after his $2,000 down payment, his mortgage was $55.65 a month. He also remembers 1960 as a great year. Riding the real estate wave and selling both homes and commercial space, Bob Selleck’s commissions hit $70,000. That was almost as much as President Eisenhower earned.
Later, he managed Coldwell Banker’s Encino office with 50 agents and served as president of the Coliseum Commission before retiring from Coldwell Banker in 1986.
Given family members’ impressive height, it was no surprise that Tom and Dan played basketball for USC. But Bob Jr. came the closest to making the big leagues. He pitched at USC, and Tommy Lasorda, then an obscure Dodgers scout, signed Bob Jr. to a Dodgers contract.
On the pitcher’s mound, the 6-foot-7 Bob Jr. was a terror. But it wasn’t his fastball so much as his wildness. He played in the minors for three years, never getting past A-level ball, before his wild arm and a bad knee ended his pitching dreams.
Then he followed his father into real estate, working 12 years with Sav-On Drugs and scouting out new spots to open pharmacies. He had a hand in opening 150 stores. By 1983, Bob Jr. wanted his own real estate firm and was thinking of teaming up with some developers. “But Tom said we ought to form a family company,” Bob Jr. said.
By then, Tom Selleck had money to invest. For years he’d been in actors’ no-man’s land, appearing on Salem cigarette billboards and as a model for Chaz cologne. “I was largely unemployed before 1980,” he recalled.
That changed when he became an instant star as the detective in “Magnum, P.I.,” which ran on TV for eight years. By the mid-’80s, he was reportedly making $5 million a year. Acting is a risky field, Tom Selleck said, so “I do not mind taking [an investment] risk if people are straight with me.” And who better to trust than his father and two brothers?
Some of the first Selleck investments were in the Antelope Valley, where Bob Jr. had roamed the area for Sav-On when the desert community was blossoming.
In 1987, their Gateway Center in Palmdale, an $11.5-million project, opened with a Hughes supermarket and a PayLess drugstore. Tom cut the ribbon to help generate publicity.
Selleck Properties remains a small firm, with only four non-family employees. “With Tom’s involvement, and him being so visible, we wanted to be sure that what we did, we did well,” Bob Jr. said.
GM is their most celebrated step, but they have taken on big projects before. In Torrance, the Sellecks and their partners bought 44 acres in 1989, and by 1991 it was open with a Home Depot, Sam’s Club, Smith’s supermarket and Office Depot, an $85-million project in all.
Recently, the family’s biggest real estate accomplishment has been something more basic. “Over the last five years, we feel fortunate that we survived,” said Dan. In the ‘90s as the Southern California real estate market crumbled, many developers crumbled with it and had to file for bankruptcy protection.
The Sellecks had their own hard times. They laid off three employees and some properties took a beating. A Selleck shopping center in Palmdale was hurt when the owner of an anchor drugstore shut it down, and for a while 25,000 square feet of space was empty in a 120,000-square-foot center. Even now, a 12,000-square-foot store awaits a tenant. “It keeps our attention,” Dan said.
Clearly, though, much is riding on the GM project, and there remains a long checklist before any new buildings will stand at the site.
Seth Dudley, senior vice president with real estate brokerage Julien J. Studley Corp. in Los Angeles, notes that many would-be grand projects are announced, then don’t quite work out. With the GM deal, he said, the city still has to make good on quickly issuing permits and building a new police station nearby to quell crime fears. And, Dudley asked, “Where is the money coming from?”
The days of speculative financing--when a lender would hand money to a developer and say, “Build it, we know the tenants will come”--are over. Now developers need tenants signed up before they can get a loan. Dudley figures the Selleck-Voit team may need 70% of the property pre-leased before they can borrow any money.
None of this is news to the Sellecks. The GM project is Dan’s brainchild and he’s scouted the area, betting that the heavy residential concentration within five miles of the old GM plant will lure stores.
A Home Depot three miles away, he notes, is one of the busiest in the city, and the 68-acre GM parcel allows ample room for “big-box tenants,” or retailers who want, but can’t easily find, urban space for jumbo stores.
Bill Lassetter, senior vice president with First Property Realty Corp. in Westwood, said the vast GM site, which is nearly the size of a golf course, is a big plus, regardless of area crime. “If you get a large enough piece of real estate, you can create your own environment,” he said.
Granted, the changing shape of Southern California’s economy means real estate is a more ambiguous trade. In the Valley, aerospace and high-wage manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and for many families who can afford homes in new developments, there is a flight out of the Valley in search of open space, safety and better schools.
While Bob Selleck Sr. still lives in Sherman Oaks, his four children live in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks.
The eldest Selleck is still a handsome man, with angular features--Tom looks most like his dad. He remains athletic, stands straight as a fence post and seems cut from the Ronald Reagan mold.
And like Reagan, his optimism runs deep. “I have tremendous confidence in how many people are still coming out here to Southern California. It’s just hard to maintain a pessimistic attitude,” he said.
That seems to have been passed on to his sons. “Downturns are where the opportunity is,” Tom Selleck believes. “Nobody has a crystal ball,” he added. “We just felt [GM] was worth the risk.”
