LUNCH WITH: JULIEN J. STUDLEY.

Views from the top

Julien Studley's office does not overlook Central Park or the Statue of Liberty, the two views he described as New York's finest. In fact, his company does have an office high up in the World Trade Center with a view of, ho-hum, the Brooklyn Bridge. But spending time downtown, he said, would cost him too many opportunities.

"Today I had lunch around the corner from here," he said last week from his third floor office at 300 Park Ave. "And on the walk back I had three good encounters with people. Three people who I either do business with or would like to. Nowhere else would I have that."

Don't cry for Studley just because his office only overlooks the Waldorf and St. Bartholomew's church. The view may not be of the skyline, but it does give a good glimpse of the bedrock of his business: Midtown skyscrapers, owned by a good half-dozen noted landlords. It would be a great place for any shepherd to watch his flock from.

Studley is fond of saying his business runs counter to the landlord's business. He is a tenant rep: it is the consumer of real estate whose interests he guards, and he's been at this as long as about anyone. So he spent 2000 riding the warpspeed economy, along with everyone else, cashing in on technology, he said, while deliberately avoiding investing in it.

"I had all these questions with my wife, who kept buying these stocks," he said. "She said the NASDAQ was going to 10,000, I said it was going to 3,000. Ultimately it wound up below 2,000. You can't tell. You just can't tell. But it looks like Warren Buffet was right."

The current doldrums run deeper than just the now-infamous technology tank that arrived with the new year. He said he doesn't blame the dot-coms for taking space they ultimately couldn't afford, nor does he blame the tenant reps that advised them.

"It wasn't just the dot-coms," he said. "There was an overall feeling that the economy would just keep going. You always hate to predict where these things are headed. You can guess at the market but not at the economy. The key is figuring out how to make an intelligent deal."

So ask him where the Next Big Thing will be, and he blanches.

"I've learned not to look for it," he said. "I think it will take us at least ten years to forget the lessons of the last Next Big Thing."

The Internet, he acknowledges, isn't going anywhere, and there are still dot-coms and there are still companies that need them. He said he has "a few" people working on telecom hotels, assessing their value and trying to stay a step ahead of that market. But he said they would have no effect on his bottom line.

"We've placed no bets, and we won't made or lose millions. We will serve the people who use it or need it, but we won't speculate on it. I don't know where they are going yet, but so far we've amassed a lot of information about them. But I don't think we will ever do what Insignia did, placing a $40 million bet on high tech."

Insignia/ESG launched a service called EdificeRex.com, which initially foundered but may be finding -- with the help of more cash and promotion from its patron -- its sea legs.

Studley is not your typical New York Real Estate Guy. There is no business degree from NYU or Helmsley pedigree. Ask him about the One Big Deal that made him and he's stumped. His corner office is smaller than your average conference room and has far lower ceilings than the surrounding space. His office featured two bouquets of fresh flowers, which prompted a boast about how inexpensive they were. Attendees at a business meeting there are offered not sushi but sliced apples, which in Midtown in June get devoured like peanuts at a ballgame.

He was born Jewish in Belgium in the 1930's, so there was a hasty escape to Cuba in 1943. Cuba in 1943 was more the domain of Hemmingway than Communism, and while forbidden from pursuing certain avenues, he and his college-educated parents found work in the diamond industry before coming to our shores at the end of the war.

After some prompting ("Nah, it's too corny..."), he sheepishly described how he wound up in real estate. He had attended high school in Cuba but decided he would rather work when he got to New York. He fell in with the diamond crowd for a while, then read about the United Nations deal, how David Rockefeller had been assembling properties on the east side to develop them but was convinced by his peers to donate the land for the greater good, both the city's and the world's.

"I thought it was an extraordinary idea. So I went over to the Real Estate Board, got a list of companies and started banging on doors."

The company that hired him, Brett Wycoff Potter & Hamilton, as well as subsequent employers, are a Who's Who of firms you've probably never heard of. But the properties he wound up working on endure.

"Mr. Hamilton hired me because he thought I would be good at working with the Jewish community, so I made four dollars a month managing 400 Madison Avenue for two years."

Believe it or not, the girl he was dating at the time was underwhelmed by the $4 a month he was making, and had her father, Max Berley, hire him at a generous $39 per month. He worked there for three years, then managed commercial lofts for L.V. Hoffman for a few years. Then Korea happened, and Studley found himself in the service of Uncle Sam.

"The army was like a college education for me, and it's what made me an American," he said. "Both as a person and because it's where I became a citizen."

He spent six months with the Tennessee National Guard before shipping off to Germany, where his linguistic skills earned him a position debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors. It was the era of Joe McCarthy, and Studley found himself part of the anti-Communist propaganda machine.

"I was a corporal working for a top-secret organization, living in a fancy hotel where even the officers wouldn't dare check up on me. It was wonderful."

He got his discharge in 1952 and went back to L.V. Hoffman for two years, when he decided it was time to become his own boss. "I got my real estate license. I lived and worked on 51st Street but got a 57th Street mailing address. And my third employee, Maurice H. Solomon, is still with me."

The big deal that put Studley on the map never really happened, though; the business just grew over years of work. "It was a war of attrition."

In 1965 Studley opened an office in Chicago. "We were the first firm to really grow out of town. We never got really big in New York City, but soon we were in Boston, Washington, D.C. and California. Everything just built up."

One question that needed to be asked is "Why tenant representation?" A man who was once a cog in the anti-Communist machine made his fortune in Demand-Side economics.

"Owners are by their nature very tough, and tenants don't know the business, so I have more to offer them.

"A good market for tenants is a good market for us, so less activity means less revenue. No, we aren't dancing on the street because the subleasing market is up. We dance in the streets, along with everyone else, at the end of the boom; when we all start to think it will last forever," he said.

"I've learned over time that when you have your best year ever, it means to watch out for next year. We just had four years in a row where each was better than the previous one. We knew at some point it had to end. But there would be no need for us if the market didn't fall once in a while.

"If everything was predictable, who would need us?"