John Long.

HIGHRIDGE PARTNERS

Figuring out all the businesses in which John Long is involved is like entering a hall of mirrors, wherein Long's face is reflected from every surface. Which one is real?

Apparently, they all are. Long and his partners do business under a bewildering number of names: LAMCO, Lamwest, Lampro Management, Summit Commercial, Metropolitan Development Associates, Western Pacific Housing, Haverford Capital Inc.

Recently, Long decided to group all his various operations under the umbrella of Highridge Partners, although he continues to do business under the other names, as well.

While Highridge is the umbrella, "we want to keep the other businesses distinct and unique." Why so many business titles? "It provides less confusion. Each business is distinct and unique and we want to keep them that way," he says.

Confusion is possible. After all, Long serves as the managing partner of more than 20 real estate partnerships, with aggregate assets valued at approximately $200 million, and with involvements as various as office buildings, apartments, industrial parks, shopping centers, residential subdivisions and notes secured by real estate. His other activities include financial services, public-private development and opportunistic investments.

The financial backers of Highridge's activities include Wall Street investment banks, credit companies, pension funds and offshore investors, whom he declines to name.

If Long's career is a hall of mirrors, however, the image we see is that of a man in motion. The 46-year-old Rancho Palos Verdes resident, who bases his businesses in El Segundo, manages to keep busy in his various guises. A self-described "contrarian" investor, Long made news in April with two very different deals.

The first is a 40,000-square-foot government building and 24-screen multiplex theater (largest in the Western U.S.) that a Highridge affiliate is developing in Norwalk. The second deal involved another Long company buying the two-building Whittier Financial Center. In south Orange County, another Long entity is building two residential subdivisions for first-time buyers.

Long's activity in home building reflects his experience as division manager and vice president with Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., the state's largest homebuilder, in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, however, he felt restless. "I felt at that time I understood housing, but wanted to understand more about real estate in general," he recalls. Eventually, he adds, "I found I enjoyed the commercial side even more than the housing side."

The Harvard Business School graduate founded LAMCO with another Kaufman & Broad alumnus, former President and CFO Gene Rosenfeld, who is now managing partner of Highridge.

Instinctively a contrarian investor, Long and Rosenfeld tested their counter-cyclical inclinations in the oil-bust landscape of Texas in the 1980s.

Now Long's contrarian instinct has brought him to redouble activities in California. "Our strategy today is not to be in all 50 states, but to take markets like California, which is undergoing its own set of economic issues, and develop different strategies around the state's recovery. In my opinion, California is bottoming out, and will recover, although values will not spike up the way they did in the '80s."

Long describes himself as a "very active manager," but adds, "I do not mean hands-on."

"I am active in the conceptual planning, and I work with the operating partners. I don't do numbers. What I do is to say, 'Here is the market.' I like to create ideas and I like to make use of something that somebody else may not have seen how to do."