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Green: TrizecHahn buy calls for patience

In a separate conversation, Los Angeles-based Westfield America Co-President Richard Green discussed the process of acquiring TrizecHahn's 13 centers in California and Washington, and how the experience of Westfield's 1994 acquisition of CenterMark Properties will ease this transition.

You'll be assuming management in blocks from August through December. Where do you begin as you start assuming control of these centers?

Mr. Green: The first step is always to just get familiar with the properties in depth, get familiar with the people, and let the people get familiar with us. One of the great things about CenterMark is that when we took over the management we found an extraordinary group of people. ... So we're quite hopeful and expect the same thing to occur here.

You're getting some high-profile projects. How anxious are you to start working on them?

What is so great about the opportunities is that we're extremely familiar with [them]. ... So it's very efficient to be able to stop off and do those centers. That is an intangible benefit, and it is hard to monetize at this point. It's terrific.

What are the lessons that you learned with CenterMark that will help you absorb these properties? And what will be different, because this is such a different universe in many ways in this industry?

One of the lessons that we learned from CenterMark: You have to be a little patient before you can get immersed in it. It takes time to get the systems up and running, get all those intricacies about the centers into your system. So it takes time.

The CenterMark transition went very smoothly when you look back at it, and it was a much harder transition because we really went from eight to 20-something centers. ... The leasing and development areas tend to flow fairly easily in terms of getting familiar. The difficulty always is in the back rooms, which have more of the strain and stress: accounting, staffing, getting the information in, getting the legal systems, the paralegals up and operating.

Our goal is always to get on top of rental stream, understanding what's going on with leasing, because that's the first thing out the door. If you don't get that out the door, then nothing else works. If you get that out the door, everything else follows. There's a tendency for us historically not to worry as much about the back rooms. We learned from CenterMark that it's very important to make sure that is coming along at the same pace as the other things.

What has the reaction been from the tenant community?

I can only tell you that we have had very positive reaction from the tenants. The tenants are looking at [the fact] that they can come out sit down with one person and cover all of San Diego. [If] they want to come to California, they should be knocking on our door. If they have complexities in California, they should be knocking on our door -- we see a lot of that. It will be very positive for the tenant. If they want to come to St. Louis, they should be knocking on our door.

Are they concerned with just dealing with one landlord in terms of a competitive atmosphere?

I've never found that. Tenants are our life. We'll do anything to help them and bring them into our system. We can offer a range of opportunity -- the benefit is that we can put a plan together for a tenant. ... We need tenants; they are terribly important to us. I haven't seen us get to the point that we had the luxury of saying, 'we're going to keep you out of an area.'