 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Shopping Centers Today -> February 2004
 PRINT THIS STORY: |
  CHANGE TEXT SIZE: |
JAMES E. MAURIN TAPPED FOR ICSC CHAIRMAN
BY EDMUND MANDER
 |
Maurin, chairman of Covington, La.-based Stirling Properties, has served ICSC as a trustee (1997-2003), a state director for Louisiana (1995-1997), a vice president of the Southern Division (1998-1999) and as chairman of the Spring Convention in 1999.
Maurin has also been one of the retail real estate industry’s leading advocates in Washington, D.C., serving on ICSC’s Government Relations Committee for more than 10 years.
Real estate was not Maurin’s initial vision for a career, however. He graduated from Louisiana State University in 1971 with a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering. As an intern at Boeing Co. in 1969, he worked on the Apollo 11 rocket that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. But having observed the number of scientists who lost their jobs after the moon mission was completed, he chose to go into business.
In 1972 he graduated first in his class with an MBA in finance from Tulane University. The timing couldn’t have been better. The Arab oil embargo and the rise in oil prices that followed the 1973 Israeli-Arab war proved to be a boon for Louisiana’s oil industry and economy, stimulating a rise in demand for retail.
Maurin, who went on from college to become a senior CPA at Ernst & Ernst (later Ernst & Young) recognized an opportunity. Along with two college friends — Roger Ogden and Gerald Songy — he founded Maurin-Ogden Properties in 1975, which opened its first shopping center in 1976. The company built big-box stores for Kmart and Wal-Mart and during the 1980s developed a series of grocery-anchored neighborhood and strip centers. In 1988 Maurin-Ogden merged with brokerage firm Stirling & Associates to form Stirling Properties.
But Maurin faced some major hurdles, the largest of which was the collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s, which brought the real estate industry down with it.
“When our business was failing in the ’80s, I kept going to work each day, and things kept getting worse and worse,” he recalled in a cover story for Louisiana’s State Business Magazine in the fall of 1999. “I asked myself, ‘Why are you fighting this? Give up and start over.’ Lots of other people were doing just that. I don’t know why, but we just kept plugging. People noticed. We began rebuilding the business around people who joined our team or stayed with it because of the no-quit mentality.”
From his experiences then and at other times, Maurin says he has learned one of the most important lessons of his life.
“Our successes teach us very little; our failures teach us everything,” he said.
To date, Stirling, with 15 offices and 280 people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, has developed more than $300 million worth of property, including retail, office and residential projects. It is also a leading real estate services company in the region; it manages some 6.2 million square feet of commercial property, about 65 percent of which is retail, and also provides brokerage and market research services.
Yet Maurin is emphatic that all these accomplishments are the achievements not of one man, but of a team.
“The skills that it takes to make good decisions are different from the skills it takes to execute good decisions,” he explains.
As Maurin looks ahead to his year as the ICSC’s leader, a top issue he identifies is the erosion of property rights through regulatory restrictions on development. Many of the rules and regulations that inhibit development are created by bureaucrats, not elected officials, he notes. “The biggest challenge that we’re facing is to our right to build.”
State and local officials, too, are throwing up hurdles in front of developers, he says, requiring them to pay a host of so-called impact fees to fund roads, schools and other infrastructure — even though their retail projects end up generating a windfall of tax revenues for those same communities.
“We need to make sure that their [local authorities’] approach to those are reasonable,” he said, noting that ICSC is monitoring legislation at the state levels as closely as it is watching the agenda in Washington.
Another challenge in the coming year will continue to be Internet commerce, at least so long as online retailers — unlike their brick-and-mortar counterparts — are not required to collect state and local taxes on Web sales, Maurin says.
And while e-tailers are able to evade tax collection altogether, brick-and-mortar landlords are being hit even harder as state and municipal authorities raise their property and sales taxes to make up for budget shortfalls, he says. “It’s a double whammy for us.”
Bankruptcy reform is another priority for ICSC this year, he says, noting that though an ICSC-related bill was passed in the House last year, it failed in the Senate. “We still live today in our industry with problems of commercial abuse of the bankruptcy laws,” he said.
Maurin has been active in supporting the industry’s interests through a number of channels besides ICSC; he is a board member and past chairman of the Urban Land Institute’s Louisiana District Council.
If, as expected, Maurin is confirmed at ICSC’s Spring Convention in Las Vegas in May, he will become the organization’s 45th chairman, succeeding Kathleen M. Nelson, who heads the real estate portfolio of the TIAA-CREF pension fund.
Maurin, 56, lives in Hammond, La., with his wife, Lillian, and three daughters.
 | Current Issue November 2008 |