Coda
The Decade Ahead
Andy left the car in the back lot a little before nine on a Thursday in July 2031. As chairman he came in two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and worked from the small room off the landing that had held boxes for years. Nadia met him in the back hallway with the new analyst beside her. The analyst had taken the desk the last analyst left in April. She had come out of UT in May, and she held a spiral notebook against her chest with two printed pages tucked inside the cover.
“Tell him what you asked,” Nadia said.
The analyst glanced down at the pages before she answered. “A Fund V deal came in overnight. A garden property in Garland, built in 1991. The record says we had it under contract in 2016, so I asked it why we let it go.”
Fund V had closed at six hundred million the spring before last, and its deals came in through the overnight inbox the way Fund IV’s had. She handed him the pages. The memos from the syndication years had gone into the firm’s record the year before, a batch at a time. The answer ran a few lines, each with the page it rested on. The firm had signed the contract in October 2016 and let it go in December. The environmental report had found a dry cleaner on the next parcel, closed for years, and the seller would not give the firm the extra weeks it needed to test the soil. The deposit had come back in full. The second sheet was the page of the memo that the last line named: typed, a little crooked on the scan, with a line added by hand at the foot and initialed. Seller won’t extend for soil testing. We walk and get the deposit back by Friday. A.D.
He remembered the building, and that fall. He would have said the seller had walked away over price. The page said otherwise, in his own hand.
“What will you ask the broker?” he said.
“Whether anybody ever tested it,” the analyst said. “And who has the letter from the state that says so.”
Andy gave the pages back. She slid them inside the cover of the notebook and followed Nadia along the hall to the conference room, and Andy stood by the back door until it had closed behind them.
At two Maggie came along the landing and took the chair across his desk without being asked, as she always had. She was chief executive now, with her own office, whose door she still closed when it mattered, and she had brought two pages.
“The open-end fund’s queue for the quarter closed on the thirtieth,” she said. “Everyone who asked to leave gets paid in full, at the June values.”
“Who signed the June values?”
“The outside appraisers, on every building in the open-end fund, as its documents promise each quarter. The older funds still send them a quarter of their buildings at a time.” She set the first page face down on the desk. “The committee approved both on Tuesday.”
She laid the second page on the desk. This was the last page of a model, sent with a letter from a firm in New York that had called in the spring about buying into Service Capital. Andy read down it from the top with his pen capped. More than half of what the firm earned now came back every year, and more than a quarter of the recurring fees had no clock on them at all. Near the foot, on the line for the founder, the buyer had put five percent, with a note in the margin in somebody’s neat hand. Fund IV key person.
“Fund IV,” he said. “That one’s done investing.”
“I’ve asked Fund IV’s advisory committee to add Scott’s name and mine. Fund V’s has them already.”
“And the top?”
“They have us at about a hundred thirty-five.” Maggie did not look at the page. “Their number, on their model.”
Andy gave the page back to her. “What are they after?”
“Chicago’s twenty percent, and some of your eighty.”
“Has Chicago seen the letter?”
“Before I had. I’m taking it to the board in September with a recommendation. You’ll have the papers a week ahead, like everyone else.”
“OK,” he said.
She picked up both pages and went back along the landing. When she had gone he opened the draft September agenda she had sent round on Monday, and found the letter from New York already on it, the third item, with her initials beside it.
On Friday morning he drove out past Pflugerville to a property the firm had bought for Fund II and renovated a building at a time. It had gone into the open-end fund the July before, one of the stabilized Fund II and Fund III buildings that seeded it, each appraised from outside and approved by both funds’ advisory committees first. Nobody meant to sell it again.
He parked by the leasing office at a quarter to eight. The sprinklers were going along the front lawns, and the live oaks the crews had planted beside the drive during the renovation were tall enough now to shade the first row of carports.
Andy walked the front buildings first. Across the lawn, at the third building, Dana Tran stood with the outside appraiser, out for the property’s yearly site visit. He was photographing a roofline while Dana read him something out of her notebook. She saw Andy and nodded, and went back to the appraiser’s question.
By nine it was already hot, and he let himself into the leasing office for the cold air. An older man in a feed-store cap stood at the counter signing a renewal for another year, and the leasing agent, who looked younger than the new analyst, turned the pages for him and showed him where to initial. When the man had finished, the agent looked over at Andy.
“Are you here to see an apartment?”
“I’m walking the property this morning.”
“Are you with the appraiser? He went round with Dana.”
“I’ll catch them up,” Andy said.
The man folded his copy into his shirt pocket and went out. The agent initialed the renewal, wrote the date beside her initials and laid it in a wire tray marked July, on a stack of others that had come in the same way, one household at a time. Andy went back out into the heat to find them.