Van Zandt?s Premonition Proves Sage

Tommy Van Zandt doesn’t mind talking about the accident.

“When I fell off the ladder and I hit the ground, and I heard my neck break – as soon as I hit the ground I knew I had a broken neck – I had no pain,” Van Zandt said. “Within 10 or 15 seconds of that, I don’t know if it was shock or whatever, I felt all the feeling go out of my body.

“So I’m thinking, ‘I’ve fallen and broken my neck. OK. Now I’m paralyzed. OK.’

“Then about 10 or 15 minutes after that, breathing was getting tougher and tougher because of the paralysis. My diaphragm didn’t work.

“I was praying so hard. I thought, ‘OK, Lord, if this is my time, let me see my wife and kids. That’s all I ask.'”

Van Zandt, co-founder of the Fayetteville commercial real estate firm Sage Partners, eventually was transported to Washington Regional Medical Center. That was Feb. 7, 2009.

In the more than 13 months that have followed, Van Zandt has learned to live as a quadriplegic. Ups and downs have come and gone, and more of both are an inevitable fact of his new existence.

Still, Van Zandt sports the same grin he wore for 49-plus years before his fall.

“In many, many, many ways,” he said, “it has been a blessing.”

 

Arkansan by Birth

Van Zandt was born in Little Rock, then moved with his family to Fort Smith at age 4. He lived there until he made the short jaunt to attend the University of Arkansas.

After graduating in the summer of 1981, Van Zandt took a job selling engineering products for The Phillips Petroleum Co. He lived in Dallas, but covered a six-state area.

“I was very successful, and in that job I learned that I had the ability to sell,” Van Zandt said. “When I got out of college, I didn’t know if I had the ability to do anything.”

Van Zandt also learned a tough lesson about working for a conglomerate – all his hard work advanced and benefited the company’s aims and bottom line more than his own.

“I got a Cross pen for my efforts,” he said, adding it didn’t take long for him to start looking for opportunities in an “eat-what-you-kill industry” like commercial real estate.

Van Zandt’s interest in commercial real estate sprung from other places, too. Both Van Zandt’s father and grandfather had roots in the real estate industry, and there was the notion Dallas had become “the mecca of commercial real estate at the time,” he said.

After about two years of what Van Zandt described as “convincing” those in charge, he was hired by Midway Development in 1984. He later spent a few years at Bright Realty and 10 at Transwestern.

It wasn’t long after he was hired by Midway Development, however, Van Zandt had an even more fortuitous encounter. He met Robyn Sims, a Mississippi girl who graduated from the University of Texas, in 1985. They were married in 1987.

By that time a real estate crash in Dallas was coinciding with nationwide troubles within the financial industries. As a result, Van Zandt got a real-time education in the kinds of business principles and practices that would prove invaluable two decades down the road.

“That’s what he cut his teeth on,” Robyn Van Zandt said.

 

Arkansan by Choice

Despite his professional success, Tommy Van Zandt began to yearn for a return home after almost 20 years in Dallas.

“I wanted to come to Northwest Arkansas,” he said, “and I wanted to come to Fayetteville, very specifically.

“It’s where I wanted to raise my children, No. 1.”

Thus, Van Zandt moved his family to Fayetteville in 2000. That’s when he met Brian Shaw of Irwin & Saviers Co.

Shaw jokingly referred to that first meeting, at Applebee’s in Fayetteville, as “a blind date.”

“We hit it off from day 1, but that’s easy to do with Tommy,” Shaw said. “He hits it off with pretty much everybody.”

By the end of that initial meeting, Shaw had a simple, yet direct, message for Van Zandt.

“I don’t want you working with anybody else but me,” Shaw said he told Van Zandt. “I knew a good one when I saw one.”

It is well-documented those were good days to be in the commercial real estate business, and Irwin & Saviers enjoyed its share of the fruit. As far back as 2003, though, Van Zandt began to see warning signs amid the booming development of Northwest Arkansas.

“Any time that you have a situation where there’s very aggressive financial markets – where money is free-flowing – and you’ve got plenty of open land to develop with a surplus of developers, then you know it’s going to be overbuilt,” Van Zandt said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

A lot of people have said similar things, given the luxury of hindsight. What separates Van Zandt is he said it practically from the get-go.

“Right now the U.S. economy is very stagnant,” Van Zandt was quoted as saying in a 2003 Business Journal article. “There hasn’t been growth in the last three or four years. But, it continues to grow here because Wal-Mart continues to grow. But what if Wal-Mart went through some poor economic times?”

In that case, Van Zandt continued, Northwest Arkansas could suffer more than a similarly sized market because it’s not very diversified.

“The biggest difference here is that a larger market is driven by institutional factors, meaning the national banking industry, insurance and pension funds,” Van Zandt said. “Those factors invest so much in commercial real estate. You don’t have as many of those institutions investing in this area. So much of the activity here is driven by local investors. There are certain guidelines for development institutions will require. But when you have private and local investors, some of those guidelines don’t always have to be followed.”

Van Zandt closed the article by explaining how developers get into trouble when they disregard the needs and wants of the market.

“Supply and demand and net absorption need to be scrutinized now and always when looking at new development,” Van Zandt said. “Northwest Arkansas is seeing there is a group of ready, willing and able developers. But you can only develop to the market.”

Van Zandt said more recently another distinction worth noting is while Dallas is home to some of the largest developers in the world, many of those who entered that arena in Northwest Arkansas had made their money via other industries. Van Zandt was quick to add, however, he hasn’t taken any delight in the end result.

Instead, Van Zandt has tried to guide Sage Partners, the company he co-founded with Shaw in 2005, according to a core set of rules.

“We’re not perfect,” Van Zandt said. “We got into some deals we probably shouldn’t have, but we sure weren’t overrun with bad deals because we knew the situation would change pretty quickly. And it did.”

 

What’s Next?

The good news, Van Zandt said, is the Northwest Arkansas market should rebound faster than the one in Dallas, which took about 10 years to correct itself. He pointed out while the Dallas metroplex has about 250 million SF of multitenant office space, Northwest Arkansas has about six million, barely more than 2 percent.

Van Zandt also believes any cuts made by businesses like Walmart, J.B. Hunt and Tyson are minor compared to many of those in other industries and parts of the country. Those companies, Van Zandt said, make Northwest Arkansas “a little more recession-proof than the rest of the country.”

As for Sage, Van Zandt said business was down about 20 percent in 2009, but 2010 “has started very favorably, from what we’re seeing.”

“I think the dip is going to be short-lived,” Van Zandt added. “I think in 2010 we’re going to see a lot of light at the end of the tunnel.”

Shaw and Sage partner David Erstine agreed. They said the company’s market share has increased, which allowed Sage to turn a profit in 2009. That represents a continuation of a trend some other firms haven’t been able to claim during the economic downturn.

They also pointed to corporate clients with heavyweight names like Disney, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark and Walmart, in addition to locals like Washington Regional and Harps Food Stores. All of those have helped Sage in its continued leasing activity and building sales, and an out-of-area land transaction was an added boost.

Van Zandt’s fingerprints are on many of those relationships.

“A lot of people were willing to stick with Sage because of their relationships with Tommy Van Zandt,” Erstine said.

 

A Prayer Answered

It’s Van Zandt’s relationships with friends and family members, he said, that have fueled him during his recovery. After spending more than six months in a Colorado medical facility, Van Zandt returned to Fayetteville in mid-September.

After a few early obstacles, Van Zandt began going to his office at Sage. Over the past month or so, Robyn Van Zandt said, he’s spent an average of four hours every workday at the office.

Van Zandt’s return has put smiles on the faces not just of his co-workers, but his seemingly bottomless pool of friends. More than 1,000 people showed up at fundraisers for him in both Dallas and Fayetteville.

“The reason he has so many good friends who care so much about him is because he’s such a good friend to so many people and he shows them that he cares about them,” longtime buddy Dan Broyles said.

Those kinds of words haven’t been lost on Van Zandt.

“When you have so many people that are providing you positive friendship,” he said, “you can’t let those people down.”

More than anyone, though, Van Zandt has drawn inspiration from his wife and sons, Ross, 18, and Jack, 15. He said one of his most vivid memories from his time in the hospital is of Robyn Van Zandt walking through the door of his hospital room.

“She just had this huge smile on her face and there was all this love,” Tommy Van Zandt said. “I thought, ‘Gosh, there’s no way I could ever choose anything other than: I’m gonna beat this thing one way or another. I’m gonna go glass half-full.'”

Robyn Van Zandt remembered that day, too, and her eyes welled when asked what she said to her husband.

“I’m here. I’m not going to leave you,” she told him. “This is a new chapter in our life, and we’re going to do this together. We’re looking forward.”

Tommy Van Zandt has taken those sentiments and run with them.

“I have a new life, and this new life has been pretty phenomenal,” he said. “To have so many people express their feelings to me has been amazing.

“Not many people get that opportunity unless they’re very ill or dead. I get that, and I take it pretty seriously.

“This life that I have now is pretty fabulous.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t rough patches.

“We have our days,” Robyn Van Zandt said. “We cry sometimes; sometimes we’re scared to death.”

“The only hard part is the obvious, the physical part,” Tommy Van Zandt said. “I want to hug my wife and my children, and I can’t do that.”

“I’m a hugger. I love to hug people and I can’t do that. Other than that, that’s about it.”

More often than not, Van Zandt said, he chooses to dwell on what he still has rather than what was taken from him. It all started with the prayer he offered as he lay motionless, the plea to see his wife and children.

“Right then they all showed up and started calling the ambulance, et cetera,” Van Zandt said. “So I get in the ambulance … and all I remember is I felt so happy. I told my sons, and one of them, in particular, ‘Always laugh. Just laugh. Just be happy.’

“That’s when I knew the hand of God was on my shoulder, because He allowed me to be positive and think about happiness during that situation. It’s pretty unbelievable.”