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NAP BRINGS FORMER RIVAL INTO FOLD
1/14/2005
Published in the January 7, 2005 edition of Atlanta Business Chronicle
By Ray Glier
The era of the celebrity partner who trolls for headlines is starting to fade, which makes it appropriate that North American Properties Inc. has picked up Ralph Conti as a partner and vice president of development.
He is more "we" than "me," a developer with brief answers about himself, but longer answers about the way business should be conducted.
"Ralph is just a very unassuming, down-to-earth-type person, a very straightforward personality and that's why he does well," said Don Chasen, an independent developer in Palm Beach County, Fla., and former president of Homart Development. "I think that's why people enjoy working with him. They know they are getting the straight scoop. He's up front and honest and works with a lot of integrity."
Conti, 48, formerly of Developers Diversified Realty Corp., will work alongside Mark Toro, who opened the North American office in Atlanta in 1996. The company has built a a reputation as a power broker of power shopping centers, those Target-based retail spreads that dot Atlanta and other areas of the country.
But the company also is starting to zero in on mixed-use projects with Conti on board.
Toro stressed that Conti was not hired to take North American away from its core business of green-field power centers in suburban locations. What Conti will help the company do is marry its residential group in Dallas with the retail group in Minneapolis for mixed-use projects in Atlanta and other parts of the country.
"One of the things Ralph brings to the table is the national perspective," Toro said. "Ralph has contacts all over the country and understands what it's like to work in markets other than Atlanta. It's likely the future will take us elsewhere."
But don't count on the demure Conti to try and swing the big deal just to make an immediate impact.
"Some of the best deals are the ones you don't do," he said, adding: "I have been very fortunate and very blessed to work with quality people. Sometimes they say it's better to be lucky than good. You can't do this stuff by yourself."
His lack of self aggrandizing is not the most significant reason Conti got a job at North American. It was his ability to make things happen when it looked like things could not possibly happen.
Toro said he watched Conti pull a metro Atlanta project out of the ditch in the early 1990s when Toro was with Cousins Properties and Conti was with Homart.
A member of a local planning commission was holding up the project, but Conti said he uncovered a conflict of interest and got the courts involved. The project sailed to completion.
"We were cross-town rivals then," Toro said. "We were working on competing projects around Perimeter Mall. While we were doing our project, he was slugging it out with DeKalb County and Fulton County and, in our business, if you see a competitor struggling, you almost smile about it. We were watching it as a competitor and saying 'they're going down'."
When Conti pushed the project through, Toro decided he had to keep an eye on Conti for a possible future partnership, he said.
Toro said he and North American had the inside track on a development in midtown Miami recently until Conti and Developers Diversified grabbed the deal out from under them.
"We believed we were a front-runner, and Ralph beat us on it," Toro said. "That was, to a great extent, what sealed the day (in hiring Conti). He swooped in and cleaned our clock."
It's fitting, then, that Toro and Conti team up with North American because they are developers with similar backgrounds. They come from the technical side of building -- from the actual swinging of hammers.
Conti, who is from New Castle, Pa., got his start in the construction business as a sophomore in high school working for a friend's father.
Conti later owned his own construction company for 10 years and can still drive through his hometown and see houses, multifamily units and commercial buildings that he actually built with his own hands.
But try and wheel the spotlight toward Conti and ask him if it is the technical side of construction that makes him unique or his long list of successful projects, and he waves you off.
"I'm a fairly persistent person and I like to establish a vision and go for it," he said. "I would just as soon tell you it is better to be lucky than good."
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