From basketball to fancy dress, the fun-loving property tycoon
THE first thing you notice about Ric Lewis is his height. At 6ft 10in this former basketball player is the tallest man in property. Probably. The second observation is he knows how to throw a good knees-up. No other chairman can lay claim to DJing at beachfront bashes they host where bankers, estate agents and lawyers can raid a fancy-dress box and knock back tequila shots. Probably.
Lewis is the 57-year-old founder of property investment giant Tristan Capital Partners, which has a near £11 billion real estate empire, including offices, warehouses and retail parks here and in Europe. He chuckles as he recalls the infamous parties his firm has held at Mipim, the annual champagne-soaked industry conference in Cannes.
Sitting in his Berkeley Square office in a navy suit and crisp white shirt, Lewis says: “We think we are good at taking our business seriously and ourselves less so.”
However, in these days of lockdowns and self-isolation, being fancy-free is not so easy. Mipim was postponed and property deals have juddered to a halt as viewings become impossible.
It’s hard to believe how much has happened since Lewis was discussing his ambitious London acquisition plans at the start of the month, having been part of a £245 million swoop to buy a cluster of shops and offices called the Holborn Links Estate. The deal is designed to capitalise on soaring business demand for space once Crossrail opens.
But with coronavirus having huge implications for the bricks and mortar sector, his tone has rapidly changed this week.
“We are focused on being careful, safe and vigilant and putting our people, partners and clients first and the business a very close second,” he says.
“There are a lot of potential outcomes and it’s too early to start debating long-term effects. Instead, we are preparing for multiple scenarios so that we are poised to continue and win as we emerge from this difficult period.” Throw in other well documented problems, from Brexit to plunging retail property values, and 2020 looks tough.
Not that Lewis will be cowed. He grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, famous for the witchcraft trials of the 17th century and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. A dual UK and US citizen, he still has a strong American accent.
His mother worked for a telephone company and father was chief of the fire department with a carpet and window-cleaning business on the side, where Lewis helped out as a teenager.
He was academic at his state school and credits a careers adviser for encouraging him to apply to top universities. He went to Ivy League Dartthough mouth College to take Spanish and economics, then to Harvard Business School. While studying he played some pretty serious basketball, including once against Michael Jordan (“we got pasted”).
An internship at an estate agency followed, then a graduate programme at Shawmut Bank, Boston, before he joined property investor AEW in the late 1980s as an analyst. He became a partner in just seven years.
Lewis helped lead AEW’s big expansion into Europe, moving to London in 1998 with a joint venture division called Curzon Global Partners. Its first big purchase was a logistics property in Spain, at a time before Amazon made warehouses sexy. But the business is best known today for selling buildings at a big premium just before the global financial crisis.
The secret, he says, was that Curzon had invested in a “deep” research team which saw the crash coming while the rest of the market still thought “the party was going on”.
It was sell, sell, sell. Says Lewis: “We got the money in and said, ‘look, we’ll sit on our hands, but coming out of the crisis there’s going to be real value’.” And so it came to pass.
When AEW went into new ownership Lewis set up on his own. “A polite way to say it is I had a disagreement of philosophy about how the business should run.” It wasn’t easy, he says: “I didn’t think I was going to leave AEW. So even it turned out well, that was a really sad and profound, hard moment for me.” He and his partners set up Tristan in 2009, and US insurer New York Life bought a 40% stake in 2018. Lewis remains the majority owner and his partners are also shareholders. Tristan is known for its diverse portfolio. Among its holdings is retail property, which is struggling industry-wide as tenants seek rent cuts amid brutal High Street conditions. But that is balanced with offices and industrial parks.
While being a significant player in major EU markets, Tristan is committed to the UK despite Brexit, which Lewis was against. He sounds most upbeat when discussing the charities he backs. These include Black Heart Foundation, which helps finance under privileged youngsters, often from ethic minority backgrounds, through university or courses. That may one day result in the property industry getting more diverse. Lewis thinks that you would struggle to find many BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) bosses in the sector.
In addition, he chairs Impact X which is a fund aiming to raise £100 million for start-ups led by BAME entrepreneurs in the UK and Europe. He says: “I don’t want to be the champion of diversity, but I would be shirking my responsibility to be a senior, accomplished BAME person, and not go ‘let’s keep going’.”
James McCaffrey, a managing director at property specialist Eastdil Secured’s London office, is among Lewis’s fans. McCaffrey, who first met Lewis in the 1980s, says: “He has range like no other person I know, from the boardroom to the basketball court.”
You may be surprised to hear that Lewis, a father of two teenage girls, has time to do anything outside of work. But most mornings he’s in his home gym in South Hampstead and is often to be found on a golf course. Oh, and then there are the TED talks.
When Britain gets out of the coronavirus nightmare, hopefully the deals will come rushing back. Lewis is likely to find it’s all work and no time for play.