Expanding The Horizon
One woman's advice helped make or break much of the growing Dallas skyline, but it's her personal horizon where the expansion has been most satisfying.
If Diane Butler gave you advice, you'd probably take it.
Something about her delivery feels like a sanity check. She’s
not a therapist, but the trait does come in handy when Butler has to
ease the anxiety of her clients—including the likes of Ross Perot—who
have invested millions of dollars in the ongoing redevelopment of downtown
Dallas, based on her advice.
“You can’t do anything in real estate unless you understand the value of things,” says Butler, a consultant and valuation expert who was raised in Alligator, Mississippi, pop. 200.
She explains the explosion of urban development as being due mainly to lengthening commutes. “People are spending two hours trying to get to work,” she explains. “Dallas has shown a real willingness to create a downtown district like other cities: housing, retail, work—all in one self-contained pod,” she adds, noting that over four million square feet of vacant, obsolete space has been renovated since 1996. Creating a 24-hour community is what’s behind places like Victory Park and Crossroads (the latter a planned 500-acre redevelopment project near Texas Stadium), two major projects her firm, Butler Burgher Inc., has consulted on.
Figuring out demand for a particular real estate venture starts with a list of questions focusing on supply and demand. With Victory Park, Dallas’s 75-acre downtown development, one of Butler’s tasks was to determine what type of office space would generate the most demand: Do you need a 200-story building or a 20-story building? What kind of space is available nearby? What other projects have succeeded in the area? What else has failed? Can the roads handle the traffic? Parking available? How long will it take for rent to cover the cost of the building? “You’ve got to help the developer figure out how much of a risk they are willing to take.” Butler says.
She acknowledges that it’s a lot of fact mixed with a few best guesses, but getting the combination right for over 15 years now is how Butler has built her business, which she sold this year to LandAmerica, a real estate investment company. Far from cashing out, she is now General Manager of LandAmerica’s Valuation Corp., in order to take advantage of the chance to establish a national presence instead of just a regional one.
While Butler’s firm has expanded, so has the presence of women in the commercial real estate business. “Fifteen years ago, there were just a few of us. Now it’s about a third women,” she says. Joining a women’s networking group, Commercial Real Estate Women, Butler found a place to reach out to both other professional women and young women who aren’t aware of the job opportunities in real estate. Butler’s
clear: Women have to empower other women.
A trustee on the CREW Foundation board, she says
she really got more involved after a bout with breast
cancer in 1998. “It’s really driven me, this need to
give back,” she says of her work with the group. And
to that end, she and several other members started
a group that helped launch a nationwide mentoring
program called CREW Careers, an outreach group for
young girls ages 12 to 16, to educate them about the
variety of well-paying careers available to them in the
commercial real estate business.
This is just one of her causes. “I’m a bit of a
nonprofit groupie, I guess,” says Butler, who also sits on
the board of The First Tee, a charity group that reaches
out to underprivileged youth through golf—a sport she
plays so often she’s got the pale feet of a golfer’s tan.
In addition, she does volunteer work for Habitat for
Humanity, and looks forward to expanding the CREW
Careers program to reach college-age women. “At the
end of the day, you’ve got to do something other than
just work,” Butler says.
But as Dallas’s downtown continues to revitalize,
Butler and her work are poised to grow along with it.“When we started this, I was always thinking we were
going to be a boutique firm,” she says. “As our clients
grew, our business grew. I had no idea we were going
to be this big.”
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