Mr. Hines got his first opportunity to build a major skyscraper when Shell Oil invited him to compete against several national real estate developers to build a new regional headquarters for the company in downtown Houston. With the energy crisis of the mid-1970s slowing Houston’s oil-dependent economy, Mr. Hines decided to take his firm national. “Using great architecture as a point of difference transformed us from a Houston developer to a national one.”Mr. Hines would transform his firm several more times. He first took on major equity partners, like pension funds, to reduce the amount of risk in his buildings, setting in motion Hines’s evolution into, in effect, a huge private equity firm focused on real estate. “Then we got into buying other people’s buildings,” Jeff Hines said.

Source: International New York Times August 27, 2020 22:52 UTC