2006 Executive of the Year

Urban Legend: Ronald Ratner reshapes America's cities and leaves a lasting footprint.

15 MIN READ
Ron Ratner checks out one of the company's newer projects, Loft23 in Cambridge, Mass. The 51-unit property is part of University Park at MIT, a master-planned development adjacent to the MIT campus.

Shawn Henry

Ron Ratner checks out one of the company's newer projects, Loft23 in Cambridge, Mass. The 51-unit property is part of University Park at MIT, a master-planned development adjacent to the MIT campus.

Forest City Enterprises

Founded: 1921

Headquarters: Cleveland

Employees: 4,190

2005 Revenue (residential group): $585 million

Residential units owned: 34,829 (as of Jan. 31, 2006)

Residential units under development (projected) year-end ’06: 10,869

Geographic coverage: National

Leadership Lessons: Ronald Ratner

Age: 59

First job: High school special education teacher

Ideal leader: My father, Max Ratner (a company founder)

Best business decision: Deciding to surround myself with the best and brightest colleagues I could find.

Greatest challenge as a leader: Constantly maintaining a balance between the entrepreneurial drive necessary to do great real estate and the administrative discipline necessary to survive the experience.

Hobbies: Wooden boat building and architectural moonlighting

Community involvement: Includes board or committee memberships at Brandeis University, Western Reserve Historical Society, Park Synagogue, NMHC, and NAHB

Family Matters

Family values run deep at Forest City Enterprises.

The Ratner family name is a powerful one in the real estate industry–and for good reason. The multi-generational family business, which dates back 80-plus years, has become one of the most dominant players in both the residential and commercial real estate industries.

The company’s history shows the American dream at work. After the Ratner family immigrated to the United States from Poland in the early 20th century, four siblings (including Ron Ratner’s father, Max) started a lumber business in Cleveland in 1921. The business naturally morphed into a land development business, since land could be bought cheaply during and after the Great Depression. The company went public in 1960, and today its nearly $8 billion portfolio includes approximately 35,000 rental units, 2,500 hotel rooms, 22 million square feet of retail stores, and 11 million square feet of office buildings in 25 states and the District of Columbia.

A strong family bond and core ethics have helped keep the company afloat from one generation to the next, say family members and business colleagues. “In most family businesses you find them jockeying for positions,” says Victor MacFarlane, managing principal of San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners, a pension fund manager that partners with Forest City. “This family gets it that the sum of the parts is greater collectively than it is individually. Because of that, they have created something that is big enough for each of them to shine in their own individual way.”

Marching Orders

Forest City enters the military housing segment. Ron Ratner is putting his famous detail-oriented skills to work in a new area: military housing. Two years ago, Forest City entered the military housing niche, looking for opportunity during the apartment market’s downturn, and now Ratner’s office windowsills are lined with thick three-ring binders and handbooks detailing U.S. Navy lingo, guidelines, and executive updates for the company’s two military housing projects in Hawaii and Illinois.

But Ratner isn’t intimidated. “We have done a lot of programs where we work with public housing authorities, have a targeted market, and partner with a public entity in the same way we are a partner with the various military branches,” says the Forest City Residential president and CEO.

Military housing projects represent an immense undertaking, even for a company of Forest City’s scale. But the company quickly learned how to work effectively with the federal government, says Joseph F. Calcara, chief of real estate for the Army Corp. of Engineers in Washington, D.C. “I would put them in the upper tier of flexibility and adaptibliity in terms of dealing with some of the challenges out there.”

Such large-scale projects are critical to the company’s success, Ratner believes. “If we are going to add to the value of the company and add to our shareholder value–which is really what the game is all about–we have to do something of reasonably large scale.”

Hall of Fame

As Multifamily Executive’s 2006 Executive of the Year, Ron Ratner joins an impressive crowd. Past winners include:

2005: Tom Bozzuto, The Bozzuto Group

2004: Steven LeBlanc, Summit Properties

2003:George S. Quay, Village Green Cos.

2002: H. Eric Bolton, Mid-America Apartment Communities

2001:Arthur Evans, A.F. Evans Co.Properties

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