Richard S. Ziman

Multi-million dollar developers to first-time homeowners all agree that timing is everything in real estate. And few in the industry can anticipate trends better than Richard S. Ziman. Whether it was landing his first professional job, as an attorney for Loeb & Loeb in the 1970s, when real estate law was practically non-existent, or when he began investing in office buildings in 1982, creating the privately held Pacific Financial Group, decades before L.A.’s commercial market began to mature, Ziman has always been one step ahead of the industry.

He took the commercial investment firm he founded, Arden Realty, Inc., public in 1996, years before Wall Street began infusing capital into the real estate sector. Arden’s IPO was oversubscribed at 9 to 1, (debuting at $20 per share), and the firm eventually grew into the largest publicly traded office landlord in Los Angeles. Nearly a decade later, when Ziman engineered Arden’s sale, whose portfolio had grown to 20 million square feet and more than 200 buildings, to General Electric, the stock was trading at $45 per share. The $4.8 billion deal was the largest real estate transaction in the history of Southern California, and a 10-year Arden investor would have seen a 20% annual return since the firm went public. Today, as the chairman of American Value Partners, Ziman oversees a $500 million discretionary fund (backed by the likes of pension fund giants CalPRS and CalSTRS) and, once again, all industry eyes are poised on what the gold-fingered executive will do next.

Perfect timing is also the term to describe Ziman’s involvement in the UCLA center that bears his name. Who else would have sensed, in 2001, that Westwood was ripe for a world-class center linking students, faculty, and real estate professionals? Who else but Ziman, whose philanthropic gifts have ranged from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to the City of Hope Medical Center, could have jumpstarted such a far-reaching facility right in his own backyard? “Real estate is much more than just an industry,” Ziman says from his Beverly Hills home. “It’s a social, political, personal, and economic reality that permeates our everyday lives. From the freeways we drive on every day to work, to the County parks where we send our kids, real estate is the connecting fiber that impacts everyone.”

If Ziman had never endowed a single program at UCLA, his philanthropic legacy would still be intact. But when the opportunity came along to be the naming donor for an academic research center in his own industry, he knew it was the match of a lifetime. “I actually went to the law and dental schools across town at USC,” Ziman recalls, “but in my heart of hearts I’ve always been a Bruin. My law practice was based on the West Side, and over the years I’ve had opportunities to teach at UCLA and see, first-hand, the quality it has produced.”  Ziman says there’s not a public university in the country that combines top-flight faculty and students with research expenditures like UCLA. “The work coming out of UCLA has an impact that’s felt on a global level, and that was the kind of real estate center Southern California needed,” he notes.

When Ziman talks about real estate, particularly the Southern California office market, people listen. He says that one of the reasons he got out of buying and selling commercial buildings is that he felt the market had pretty much peaked. “Cap rates are at all-time historic lows, and pricing just can’t go any higher,” notes Ziman. “I have one more good ten-year-run left in me and I didn’t want it to be with a public company. That’s why AVP was such a unique and appealing opportunity.” Ziman’s latest endeavor operates as a “fund of funds”. With half-a-billion in capital from the nation’s largest public pension funds, AVP finds emerging real estate funds, managed by seasoned investors (not developers), and invests anywhere from $40 to $60 million per fund. The funds, which range from $125 to $350 million, touch real estate projects all over the nation, from Washington D.C. to New York to Dallas. “We are the largest firm in our category in America, with half-a-billion in assets right out of the box,” Ziman says proudly.

People also listen carefully when Ziman talks about his goals for a world-class real estate center. Having served on advisory boards to the nation’s best centers – The Zell/Luire Center for Real Estate at Wharton, the Fisher Center for Real Estate at UC Berkeley, and the Real Estate Institute at New York University – Ziman feels UCLA’s potential is a cut above all others. “Los Angeles has the largest and most diversified economy in America – a critical mass of economic sectors, from manufacturing to high tech to entertainment,” he continues. “The chance for synergy between this huge reservoir of knowledge and such a dynamic economy is unprecedented. Real estate is as much about political and social forces as economic and the Ziman Center, more than any other facility in the country, I feel, can fulfill that imperative.”

Ziman says that spanning campus disciplines and resources was his vision for the Center the moment he became the naming donor; and new relationships with UCLA’s Schools of Law, Architecture, Urban Planning, and Engineering have made good on that goal. Likewise for the Ziman Center’s recent summit on housing, which brought together mayors from around the nation to address the crisis in low-income housing. “The people behind the Ziman Center came within two percent of passing a $1 billion affordable housing bond for voters in the City of Los Angeles,” Ziman reflects. “It’s vital that we engage the politicians who, in the final analysis, will have a great role to play in how real estate impacts our urban centers. Are we up to the challenge?  I believe the answer is yes, if the vision begins at institutions like UCLA, working in tandem with business and political leaders to take us to each successive level of innovation.”