Build the Vision

Build the Vision

development by Matt Walsh | Publisher

34-year-old Matt Leiter is the point person on two high-profile projects on Palm Avenue. He has a vision for downtown Sarasota.

On one of his summer jobs working for his dad as a teen, Matt Leiter sanded the wood in a 1800s-era theater lobby so much he wore off his fingerprints. "I could have a robbed a bank and nobody would have known," Leiter jokes. Other summers, he dug ditches and hauled old bricks out of old buildings his dad renovated.

When he was a management trainee at Caterpillar Inc., striking union workers slashed his car tires, threw tire jacks at his car and called him a "scab" as he drove through the union gauntlet. For six weeks, he worked on the factory-floor production line helping manufacture tractors in Decatur, Ill.

"I got a better sense of humility," Leiter says of the experience.

The 34-year-old Leiter and his partner, Jack Buck, one of his University of Chicago graduate business school classmates, are meeting with city planning officials to begin one of two major developments on Palm Avenue that have catapulted Leiter and his family's business, the Leiter Group, into the forefront of shaping downtown Sarasota.

Leiter and Buck, scion of the John Buck Co., a leading Chicago development firm, won the rights March 31 from the Sarasota City Commission to develop the vacant 2.25 acres at the corner of Palm and Cocoanut avenues - a site the city has been trying to develop for nearly five years.

Capturing the Palm Avenue project follows by about three months The Leiter Group winning city approval to develop a second project on Palm Avenue - an 18-story condominium on the back end of the 1920-era Demarcay Hotel building, adjacent to 1350 Main.

Combined, the two projects are valued at $145 million in new investment.

For Leiter, point man on both developments, the projects embody the visions and opportunities Leiter and his father see for downtown Sarasota. "This is going to sound like I'm a crackpot," Leiter says, sitting on the patio recently of his restored Irving Street home south of downtown, "but I'd like to see a real white-collar-wage economy that's not so tied to real estate industry. Sarasota has all of the ingredients to be that."

Leiter sees the residents of the 150 condos and guests of the 140-room aLoft hotel, a Starwood Hotels brand that will be in the city project, helping generate business for the Palm Avenue and Main Street merchants. Leiter and Buck also plan to configure the condo portion of their project to be reachable for young professionals, with prices ranging from $200,000 to $800,000 per unit.

At the Demarcay project, a 39-unit condominium, Leiter hopes to add a European design flair, a taste he developed while working and attending graduate business school in Barcelona. He characterizes the Demarcay as "an adaptive re-use" venture that will save and restore the front part of the 1922 hotel building and add an 18-story tower with elevator parking on the back of the lot.

"We thought Sarasota was avant garde enough to handle this," Leiter says. Besides, he says, compacting a lot in tighter spaces is the wave of the future.

"It's not a positive trend to have larger and larger sites with massive structures," Leiter says. "You've got to have some flexibility to allow for an architecturally diverse city." That's what he and his father hope to accomplish with the Demarcay.

All of this is a long way from Peoria, Ill.

Leiter grew up the son of a prominent Peoria trial lawyer/entrepreneur/developer, brother to three sisters. His father, who is chairman and chief executive officer of the Leiter Group, is regarded in Peoria as a renaissance man with an affinity for historic preservation.

When Peoria's downtown was in the dumps - a victim of the malls and the death of manufacturing - Leiter's father, Tom, bought a block of abandoned late-1800 buildings and restored them into the company headquarters and resurrected what Peorians knew as the Apollo Theater, now a downtown showpiece.

While practicing law, Leiter's father also developed over the past 30 years nearly 30 subdivisions, offices, office-retail centers and condominiums. He and his son also are finishing a $220-million townhome-condo-marina development in Placida, between Cape Haze and Boca Grande, known as Hacienda del Mar.

While Leiter's father is the type who sees what can be, the younger Leiter always takes a methodical, MBA approach. "I analyze everything to death," he says. One of his favorite sayings: "Proper preparation prevents poor performance."

When he landed the management-training slot at Caterpillar after earning his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois, Leiter already knew it was a way station for him. He had plans to get experience in the big corporate setting and then get into what he called "a really good graduate business school."

He was accepted to the best - the University of Chicago. And then he decided to go to the school's international business campus in Barcelona. The fact his sister and her husband lived there made it an easier choice.

While in Barcelona and attending school, Leiter worked as operations director at his brother-in-law's dot-com-software firm. Backed by venture capital, Leiter says, the company had all the markings of a dot-com - its 45 high-tech employees wore the cool clothes, drank Espresso and worked long hours. It also lost tons of money.

But they turned it around. Part of the turnaround included Leiter facing many of his colleagues to tell them they were out of work. When the company became profitable, it was also time for Leiter to graduate. He returned to Peoria, looking to apply his new MBA skills.

The first idea: a coffee shop.

As Leiter tells it, downtown Peoria in the early 2000s was a lot like downtown Sarasota. It didn't have a Starbucks. It also didn't have a place for young professionals to hang out, chat or read books and newspapers.

Leiter wrote a detailed business plan to create a chain of five stores that would be a combination of Hudson News, Starbucks and Borders. He opened the first one, City News Cafe, in the heart of downtown Peoria's Main Street, complete with clocks tracking time in Hong Kong, Baghdad, L.A., New York, London and Peoria.

It became popular, but it didn't take Leiter long to realize that being a retailer means you can become a slave to the business. The plans for five stores went on hold.

About this same time, Leiter also took on his first "adaptive re-use" development project as the point man for his father. The Leiter Group purchased the top two floors of a 1903, four-story factory building that had been converted into the Illinois Antique Center. They turned them into 23 loft apartments that rented for $950 to $1,000 a month.

They were a hit. They also gave young Leiter the bug to move to real estate development full time.

"I realized real estate development was a much more consistent business," he says. "In retail, you need to have scale and be well capitalized."

Leiter's introduction to Sarasota came from his parents' friends in Boca Grande, where the elder Leiters have had a home for about 10 years. "A lot of people there office in Sarasota," Leiter says. Their introduction to the Demarcay came from Sarasota real estate investor/developer Howard Rooks, a unit owner in the Leiters' Placida development. Rooks thought they might like the Demarcay project.

After acquiring the property for $2.2 million in July 2005, the Leiters spent a year with city officials trying to come up with an acceptable design.

"They were extremely accommodating," says Jane Robinson, the city's director of planning and redevelopment. Adds Harvey Hoglund, senior planner: "They go a step beyond."

In spite of this, Palm Avenue merchants strongly opposed the Leiters' plans, in part because the merchants had just barely endured construction of 1350 Main. In response, the Leiters have agreed to hold off construction on the Demarcay until the summer of 2008.

Meantime, Leiter and his classmate, Buck, are preparing to move forward quickly to construct the 400-space parking lot portion of their six-and 11-story project at their Palm Avenue joint venture - in spite of expectations that developers whose projects didn't get selected will file protests.

Leiter understands the magnitude of the project. He knows what's at stake - his, his father's and their company's reputation. "It's unsettling to be in a profession where the initial assumption is that developers are not taken seriously," Leiter says. "But I want to execute the exact vision. I feel I owe it to people."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Executive. Matt Leiter

Industry. Real estate development

Key. Creating buildings that fit a better future for an area.

The Other Partner

When Matt Leiter decided to enter the bidding for the Palm Avenue project, he turned to one of his former classmates at the University of Chicago's graduate business school - Jack Buck.

Buck is the son of the founder of The John Buck Co., a Chicago development and property management firm with A-rated credentials and size.

The Buck Co. in more than 25 years of existence has developed more than 25 million square feet of offices, high-rise condos, hotels and retail complexes, primarily in Chicago. Those projects have totaled $9 billion in financing.

It also manages more than 10 million square feet of office space in Chicago and Washington, D.C.