Texans in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong's New Government Building, the bidding session was tense and sweaty. For 2 1/2 hours, interests from Hong Kong, England, Japan and from the U.S. (Pan American World Airways) maneuvered against each other in an effort to grasp the prize: 40,000 sq. ft. of the most valuable land in Hong Kong, smack in the middle of the city's bustling financial district. Suspense mounted until the noth bid was made. Then, while little groups huddled together to see if they should raise their bids, the gavel banged down decisively. The winners, with a top bid of $2,480,000: two Texas millionaires, Leo Francis Corrigan, a real estate wheeler-dealer, and Toddie Lee Wynne, whose pile comes from oil and real estate. Said Corrigan triumphantly: "The others had to spend so much time in conference that they lost out. We had complete authorization right with us."

Complete authorization means that Leo Corrigan, who flew to Hong Kong to oversee the bidding, is his own boss. He has built up a real estate empire worth more than $500 million by buying up choice pieces of real estate and holding on to them. Corrigan still owns all but four of the 180 major real estate purchases he has made. He rarely takes on partners (Wynne is an old friend), will take complete charge of the Hong Kong property, give Wynne half the profits.

All-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.

Leo 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, ever since has tried to build shopping centers into every development.

By 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, it will be the highest in the Southeast.

Fun in the 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, telephone companies, etc.--that "if they should go, everything would go, including the mortgage companies. There are 40 ways to get into trouble in my business, but I've discovered that there are also 40 ways to get out of it."

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