Like many of his Midwestern colleagues, Bob Moore left Indiana in the mid-1980s to begin his career in commercial real estate in Dallas. The market was booming and there was room to make money. But within two years, things had changed dramatically: banks were failing, the S&L crisis was unfolding, and office buildings were being built and sitting vacant with no deals in sight.
The developer Mohr worked for wanted to take his salary away and switch him to a commission-only position. Instead, the industry up-and-comer decided to start his own business and focus on the emerging specialty of tenant representation. “I worked out of an executive suite that someone let me use, and my wife helped me out,” Mohr says. “We didn’t have a lot of money to put into buildings at the time, and I thought that tenant representation and corporate people, which is something nobody wants to hear, were making an insane amount of money for their work. You know, when you renew a lease, you get paid 4 percent of your gross income. So I thought that might be a good area to focus on.”
His first deal was a 3,000-square-foot lease for the Christian Broadcasting Network. Initially, the business focused on renegotiating contracts with tenants. As the real estate market recovered, Mohr Partners grew. Clients asked him to do the same thing in Atlanta and other markets that he had done in Dallas, and the firm evolved into one that specializes in multi-location, multi-year deals with national tenants.
In 2017, after 31 years of growing and running the company, Moore decided to take on a new challenge and sold the company in a management buyout to then-president Robert Shibuya (who is now chairman, CEO and largest shareholder). Moore Partners had 18 offices at the time, but now has 24 offices and is one of the largest tenant-based consulting firms in the world.
“I’d been doing the same thing for so many years that I was ready intellectually and, above all, to try something new,” Mohr says. But retirement wasn’t on his mind. He quietly started a side business in capital markets in 2000 and decided to double down on his investments through a family office. Things were going well.
Through Moore Capital, he buys and develops retail, industrial, hospitality and office projects across the country, and may branch out into student housing. In Dallas, he put about $2 million into a 12-story office tower at 4851 LBJ Freeway, which he bought in 2020 and is nearly full. Among other improvements, he upgraded the building’s cafe and hired Dallas-famous chef James Rowland to run it. “I also took the old Trammell Crow model of hiring a good security guard that everyone knows,” Moore says.
He’s currently making $7 million in capital improvements to a hotel in Austin and developing a 705,000-square-foot logistics facility in Surprise, Arizona. The project, in partnership with Rosewood Property Company, is the first one for which he’s put outside capital into. Moving forward, Moore plans to pursue more hospitality deals. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, but if you get it right, the yields are much higher,” he says. He’s also been busy acquiring industrial properties, but plans to proceed cautiously with office purchases. “Prices are down 35 percent,” he says. “There will be some great opportunities out there, you just have to wait for the right timing.”
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Kristin Perez
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Christine is CEO Working across the magazine and its online platforms, she is a nationally award-winning business journalist and…
