Word: corrigan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Glass Roof. On the property, site of the old Hong Kong parade ground, Corrigan and Wynne plan to build a luxurious, $12 million, 25-story hotel to take advantage of Hong Kong's drastic shortage of hotel space. The hotel will have 1,040 air-conditioned rooms, elevators and escalators, a shopping center and bazaar, a permanent exhibition hall, and an all-glass roof under which diners and dancers can gaze out upon one of the world's loveliest bays. The Texas partners hope to get back their investment in three to five years...
...Corrigan has built his fortune by getting back his investments from property, then putting them to work again. The son of an Irish immigrant family of eight, he quit school in St. Louis after the fifth grade to help with the family finances, got into real estate when he was 28 by buying a drug store, soon began building neighborhood stores, paying off his mortgages with the rent. He shocked conservative operators by building apartment houses behind his store buildings; they said that people would not live in "back alleys." But Corrigan found that his tenants liked the shopping convenience...
...steadily acquiring more property with the help of long-term loans ("Long-term credit never hurt anyone. It's short-term credit that breaks people"), Corrigan rode the countrywide real estate boom. He now owns some 100 shopping centers scattered through the U.S., 200 apartment buildings with more than 15,000 rooms, 15 hotels, ten office buildings. Among his properties are the Emerald Beach Hotel in the Bahamas, the 1,660-room Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the 1,500-room Adolphus Hotel in Dallas and the Bank of Georgia Building now under construction in Atlanta. At 31 stories...
...Office. Corrigan operates his empire from an unostentatious suite on the 17th floor of Dallas' North Ervay Building (a just-completed Corrigan property). He has few other interests. Says he: "I have more fun in two hours in my office, trading and dealing, than my friends do in a day on the golf course...
Some Texans feel that Leo Corrigan moves too fast; a prominent banker confided to him a few years back that every year for 15 years he had been predicting that Corrigan would go broke within the next twelve months. But Corrigan believes: "If you don't have a hell of a lot of nerve, the boys in the know will always scare you to death." He claims that he could stand 60% vacancy in his properties and still survive (the vacancy rate is now a low 2%). He points out that he has so many blue-chip tenants-banks...