{"id":774,"date":"2019-04-22T00:00:08","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T04:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/?p=774"},"modified":"2020-10-29T16:35:57","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T20:35:57","slug":"san-antonio-based-builder-darren-casey-talks-about-dealmaking-and-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/san-antonio-based-builder-darren-casey-talks-about-dealmaking-and-development\/","title":{"rendered":"San Antonio-based builder Darren Casey talks about dealmaking and development"},"content":{"rendered":"

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April 22, 2019<\/p>\n

Photo: Matthew Busch \/ Contributor, Contributor \/ For The San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n

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In 1980, Darren Casey was president of his fraternity at Texas State University when the frat house burned down.
\nFlush with insurance money, Casey discovered the art of property flipping and the plump returns on investment that a roaring real estate market can deliver.
\nHis fraternity got a new house, and the West Texas native \u2014 who as a teenager spent summers at what he called \u201cCamp Oil Field,\u201d working on drilling rigs \u2014 got his first intoxicating taste of dealmaking.<\/p>\n

Casey, 59, settled in San Antonio soon after graduating, hustling commercial leases downtown. \u201cI knocked on a lot of doors and became a pretty successful leasing agent,\u201d he said. He saved his commissions and started his own company, Casey Development Ltd., in 1989.<\/p>\n

His company has developed more than 4 million square feet of multifamily projects and commercial, industrial and office space, most of it in San Antonio, though he has projects up and down the Interstate 35 corridor between here and Austin.
\nIn 2007, Casey completed one of the biggest commercial real estate deals in local history, selling a portfolio of 900,000 square feet of office and industry space valued at $114 million. And though his passion for real estate deals started on the streets of San Marcos, not in the classrooms of Texas State\u2019s business school, Casey is a staunch supporter of the university. He talks it up whenever he has the chance, and he donated $1.3 million to Texas State in 2008. The university\u2019s athletic administration complex is named for him.<\/p>\n

Casey talked with the San Antonio Express-News at his company\u2019s headquarters at 200 E. Basse Road, the former home of troubled radio giant iHeartMedia. How much did he pay for the property? \u201cNot enough,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The following transcript was edited for length and clarity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q: What was it like growing up in Andrews, Texas?<\/p>\n

A: Oh, it was heaven. Greatest high school in Texas, greatest town, greatest community. I remember one time my dad said he got a big promotion. And I said, \u201cDad, we can\u2019t leave this \u2014 this is the greatest life ever.\u201d I played several sports \u2014 we had a great golf team. We went to the state championships several years.<\/p>\n

My father was my foundation of discipline and integrity, and he had the West Texas handshake. My mother was entrepreneurial and a salesman \u2014 she started a business. We always could be better, and Mom, to this day \u2014 both of my parents are in their 80s, and my mom\u2019s still out there working.<\/p>\n

Q: Does she still own a dress shop?<\/p>\n

A: Well, she owned three \u2014 in Andrews, Odessa and Midland. I forgot which one they closed. She followed me and opened up one here. She\u2019s where I got my entrepreneurial sales stuff.<\/p>\n

My dad set a very moral foundation. If you say you\u2019re gonna do something, you\u2019re gonna do it. If the neighbor\u2019s yard wasn\u2019t mowed, you went and mowed it. You know? We didn\u2019t go to camp. In high school, I stocked groceries at three in the morning, and on the weekends, I\u2019d work on drilling rigs.<\/p>\n

Q: Was that your dad\u2019s doing?<\/p>\n

A: No, it was just the way of life out there. Everybody in West Texas has a very strong work ethic and, you know, it\u2019s small town. So when I went off to Texas State, it changed. I was like, \u201cOh, my gosh \u2014 there\u2019s a world outside of going around the Dairy Queen every Friday night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: Your time at Texas State must have made a big impression on you. You\u2019ve given a lot of money to the university.<\/p>\n

A: Texas State truly changed my life \u2014 that and a couple of friends in my fraternity. That\u2019s really where I got into the real estate business. Our fraternity house burned down, and I was the president. We took the insurance money and went out on I-35 \u2014 this was 1980 when the land flipping on 35 was going around. We took the insurance money, flipped it for a bunch of money, and I said, \u201cWow, this is kind of cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: Did you wind up with a new fraternity house at some point?<\/p>\n

A: Yeah. But, you know, that piqued my interest. I was getting a business degree, and that summer I was working offshore drilling rigs. But that\u2019s when I decided I wanted to be in the real estate business and got my real estate broker\u2019s license.<\/p>\n

Q: Why offshore drilling rigs? Was it the money or the adventure?<\/p>\n

A: It wasn\u2019t the adventure. But it was an adventure, especially in Hurricane Allen. No, it was the money. My dad gave me an allowance and helped me pay for school, but between student loans and that, I wanted \u2014 there were things that I wanted, and the only way I could get them was work. … It was a hell of a lot of money working on offshore rigs, but it was \u2014<\/p>\n

Q: Also hurricanes.<\/p>\n

A: It was scary.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

Q: What was working on an offshore rigs like?<\/p>\n

A: It\u2019s like you\u2019re a worm and everybody there are lifers \u2026 from Louisiana to Canada. They don\u2019t like college boys, so there was a lot of hazing. They\u2019re like, \u201cI bet you can\u2019t hold that hundred-pound sack right over your head.\u201d It was real fun \u2014 it was cement and I was sweaty. I\u2019m like, \u201cYeah, I can\u201d and I hold it over my head, just standing there. And then the guy behind me takes a razor blade and cuts the sack. A lot of fun.<\/p>\n

And then, on the weekend, all these boats would go around those rigs with girls, fishing. You\u2019re sitting up there in your coveralls and hard hat, and you\u2019re like, \u201cOne day I\u2019m gonna have one of those.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: What did you do after graduating from Texas State?<\/p>\n

A: I tried to move back to West Texas for a year. But my dad encouraged me to go to (Central Texas), said, \u201cGet the hell out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, I was interviewing in Austin and in San Antonio. That was really back in the mustache days. Everybody smoked in the office. I went over and applied at an office over there in Energy Plaza. They said they\u2019d get back with me. But I was like \u2014 I gotta have a job. I mean, I didn\u2019t have any brakes on my car, I didn\u2019t have a back seat. I gotta have a job. They never got back to me, so I started calling and calling. So I went and sat in the lobby every day, 8 in the morning waiting for him to come to his office. That\u2019s when I learned a trick \u2014 every executive always has a back way to get out where you don\u2019t have to walk through the reception area because there might be somebody sitting there waiting for you. I already had some sales skills, and I sat in his office every day until he said, \u201cAnybody that would do that \u2014 sit there \u2014 I\u2019m gonna give you a chance.\u201d And he said, \u201cHere\u2019s the deal: You\u2019re gonna work in downtown.\u201d But he saw my car and said, \u201cYou can\u2019t drive clients around in that.\u201d So he said, \u201cHere\u2019s the deal: I\u2019m going to take you down here to Alamo National Bank and I\u2019m gonna co-sign a (loan) for $3,000, and you better produce.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: What was downtown like in the early- to mid-1980s? Was this before the real estate crash?<\/p>\n

A: There were incentives to revitalize downtown. There was a lot of rehab developments. My first two assignments were 110 Broadway and the South Texas Building, but they didn\u2019t have any parking. so they were unleasable. Back then, we didn\u2019t have computers, cellphones, this and that. You had your Day-Timer Planner and your notepad, and you had your shoes, and you dressed nice, and you knocked on doors, and you tried to get information. \u201cWhen does your lease expire? How many square feet do you have?\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a building called Heritage Plaza, and I did 19 deals one year, when Albert Bustamante was our county judge. It gave me an opportunity to meet people, and it evolved into me buying Travis Park Plaza.
\nBut all the money and all the tax incentives and all the things that (city and county officials) had given, it didn\u2019t work. Nobody wanted to live down there. There were no grocery stores, no young people. I think it\u2019s really come back now, between the River North and the Museum Reach. My good friend Kit Goldsbury (the billionaire behind Silver Ventures, the Pearl\u2019s developer) \u2014 the Pearl has had a lot to do with why downtown is happening now.
\nI\u2019m excited about downtown right now. We didn\u2019t have the population before, but that was 1987.<\/p>\n

Q: You started Casey Development in 1989, and you pretty quickly turned your attention away from downtown. Why?<\/p>\n

A: I was following opportunity. I studied major thoroughfares, and I was able to buy major intersections at Wurzbach Parkway and I-35 and U.S. 281, and 20 years later we have Wurzbach Parkway finally completed. I\u2019ve bought some of these large pieces of land, which I\u2019m proud that we\u2019ve been able to hang in there during three corrections. A mentor of mine taught me to not buy land without a use, and that\u2019s kind of been my theme ever since.<\/p>\n

Q: But you would have bought land at Wurzbach Parkway and the highways if you\u2019d known it would take so long to complete the parkway\u2019s construction?<\/p>\n

A: Oh, yeah, because I had a use. That\u2019s where we did the Kmart deal and Northside Ford. So I had all that, and I had all the other surrounding it. … We developed almost immediately a feed of office out there, and I still own a nice piece out there. That was a sweetheart deal \u2014 that was the basis of Casey Development and getting started with it.
\nBut San Antonio has always been a second tier market on a national level. You know, we\u2019re not Austin.
\nBut we like Austin, and San Marcos has really been a cherry for us. San Marcos has been great. We\u2019ve done a lot of deals there. There was a lot of political controversy, but we\u2019ve got a 13-story project going on there right now \u2014 literally on (the Texas State) campus. It took 10 years to get approved.
\nAnd we really love New Braunfels. We\u2019re doing some pretty good work there \u2014 two projects.<\/p>\n

Q: What kind of projects are you focusing on now?<\/p>\n

A: I\u2019m not focusing on doing big shopping centers. I\u2019m focused on (smaller) commercial buildings because Amazon isn\u2019t gonna bring you your coffee or do your nails or give you your ice cream or whatever, right? So we\u2019re focused on small stuff because with the big-box stuff, who knows what\u2019s gonna happen. Amazon and online shopping has really killed the bricks-and-mortar piece of the big shopping centers. So we\u2019re focusing on the smaller, day-to-day-type of things. And multifamily remains our primary platform.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got a project that\u2019s going up called Sunset at Treeline. This is my contribution back to San Antonio for doing such an ugly development at (the intersection of) 281 and 410. This my \u201cI\u2019m sorry\u201d building. The architecture in this thing and the amount of money we\u2019re spending on this is, it\u2019s to make up for the disaster that I did at 281 and 410, which was my first development.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 22, 2019 Photo: Matthew Busch \/ Contributor, Contributor \/ For The San Antonio Express-News   In 1980, Darren Casey was president of his fraternity at Texas State University when the frat house burned down. Flush with insurance money, Casey discovered the art of property flipping and the plump returns on investment that a roaring...","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appnetdemo.com\/caseydev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}