Allie Beth Allman, the Queen of Highland Park
When Jason Garrett returned to Dallas because the Cowboys’ new offensive coordinator, in 2007, he knew even earlier than he started house-hunting that one neighborhood would trump all others: Highland Park. He additionally knew there was actually just one realty workplace you name while you’re searching for a house in Highland Park: Allie Beth Allman & Associates. And he knew that one realtor rises above all of them: Allie Beth herself, no final identify needed.
Cowboys proprietor Jerry Jones had been a consumer of Allie Beth’s. Similar with Troy Aikman, whom Garrett had backed up at quarterback on Tremendous Bowl–profitable squads within the nineties. Allie Beth ended up promoting Garrett a good-looking three-story neo-traditional French manor with a pool, for rather less than $2 million. Then, about 4 years later, after Garrett was named the workforce’s head coach, Allie Beth referred to as to say she had one other house he can purchase. “I have already got a home!” he stated. He beloved his place, and its 4 thousand sq. ft appeared like loads of room for him and his spouse, Brill. They’d no kids.
“No, no,” Allie Beth stated, “this one is healthier for you.” It had an even bigger lot and a extra outstanding location, nearer to the Dallas Nation Membership and the Highland Park Village purchasing heart. It will be higher for entertaining, she defined. Certain sufficient, the Garretts purchased it three days later, and Allie Beth received their first home below contract with a purchaser inside 48 hours. She additionally leased and later bought the house of the outgoing head coach, Wade Phillips, for good measure. In a matter of weeks, she’d engineered a trifecta of major-league actual property transactions. She advised her highly effective purchasers what to do, and so they heeded her needs.
The Garretts nonetheless dwell in the home, and Allie Beth, now 83 years previous, stays the queen of Highland Park actual property, in a reign that reaches again some 4 many years. An unbiased city comprising a bit of greater than two sq. miles throughout the boundaries of Dallas, Highland Park is thought casually as the Bubble, a reference to its cloistered world of wealth and energy. In 2022 Allie Beth’s agency was far and away the primary brokerage within the Park Cities, the realm that features Highland Park and its barely much less prestigious sister neighborhood instantly north, College Park. She and her roughly 425 brokers tallied greater than half a billion {dollars} in gross sales final 12 months within the Park Cities alone, greater than 34 % of that market.
Allie Beth Allman & Associates was additionally the main dealer of house gross sales of greater than $2 million all through Dallas County (and greater than $3 million and $4 million and $5 million). For lower-priced homes and out within the suburbs, the corporate is all however invisible. The Park Cities and a handful of different rich enclaves, together with Bluffview, Lakewood, and Preston Hollow, accounts for 75 % of its gross sales.
It’s not that there’s no competitors; in truth, the battles between brokerages could be fierce, with brokers incessantly shuffling between firms on the promise of upper commissions or different perks. However down within the mahogany-
paneled trenches, Allie Beth has lengthy held the benefit; every eye-popping value she secures additional burnishes the agency’s fame and brings extra such offers to her and her brokers.
Maybe no property higher illustrates Allie Beth’s command of the ultraluxury market than the sprawling Crespi-Hicks property, in Preston Hole. The limestone palace is ready amid a posh of formal gardens and reportedly as soon as hosted such grand visitors as Coco Chanel and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Initially a ten,000-square-foot house, constructed within the early forties by Pio Crespi, an Italian depend and worldwide cotton baron, it ballooned to some 27,000 sq. ft within the aughts below the possession of financier Tom Hicks, who on the time additionally owned the Dallas Stars, the Texas Rangers, and the British soccer workforce Liverpool FC. In 2013 Hicks determined to promote the property. Forbes reported the asking value was $135 million—at that time, the most costly house on the market in america.
When Hicks first put the property available on the market, he did so with Douglas Newby, a linen-suit-wearing unbiased dealer with a shock of floppy grey hair who has made a reputation for himself by specializing in what he calls “architecturally vital houses,” and who had represented the property when the Crespi household bought it. Hicks referred to as Allie Beth, who had helped him purchase the home greater than a decade earlier than, to elucidate. “Look, we’re seeing this as a chunk of artwork, and Newby is aware of all these architectural individuals,” he stated. She advised him she understood, however that he ought to know she can be there each time he wanted her. Which, after all, he did, when the house nonetheless hadn’t bought two years later. He gave her the itemizing in any case.
Newby says he acquired “substantial provides,” however that Hicks’s monetary advisers most popular promoting the property in a method that might enable it to be subdivided, at which level Allie Beth took the itemizing. Billionaire banker Andy Beal purchased it in 2016 and auctioned it off the following 12 months to actual property developer Mehrdad Moayedi. He, in flip, parceled off about half of the acreage for growth earlier than flipping the remaining property to the Edwin L. Cox household, of the Cox Oil Firm. Allie Beth was concerned in all of these transactions, turning over one of many lordliest properties in Texas a whopping 4 instances inside a few many years.
Her gross sales document speaks for itself. However the continued dominance of Allie Beth and the corporate she based appears something however assured. As Dallas has accelerated its transformation from frontier boomtown into a world metropolis, an inflow of recent house consumers from the coasts and past has attracted new brokers, upending the social order at the same time as new applied sciences upend the best way houses are purchased and bought. In the meantime, storm clouds have parked over the actual property market amid steep inflation, rising rates of interest, and the specter of recession. And the ravages of time and competitors have fractured Allie Beth’s most valued partnerships in life and in enterprise. The query is not only whether or not an iconic determine can keep on high in a modified panorama however whether or not her type of well mannered energy—a rustic stoicism she picked up as a woman on the North Texas plains—continues to be the best way to win.
Cambridge, Eton, Oxford. Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton. Beverly,
Bordeaux, Lexington. The road names of Highland Park learn like a roll name of upper-crust institution locations, the sorts of locations that home heads of state and horse farms. Drawn up across the flip of the final century by the identical metropolis planner chargeable for Beverly Hills, California, the neighborhood was based as a leafy refuge, full with a advertising slogan declaring “it’s ten levels cooler in Highland Park”—due to the various timber planted on what had previously been farmland. (It additionally, technically, sits at a better elevation than a lot of the remainder of pancake-flat Dallas, however solely by a couple of hundred ft, hardly sufficient to look down on town round it.)
Developer John Armstrong teamed up together with his sons-in-law, Hugh Prather and Edgar Flippen, to determine the eclectic mixture of European architectural types that also defines the city—a Tudor right here, a Georgian subsequent door, and over there an Italianate villa subsequent to a French chateau. In its first few many years, its most-baronial mansions sprawled alongside a number of key streets, similar to these abutting Turtle Creek, whereas the denser aspect streets had been lined with tidier middle-class affairs.
Southern Methodist College started to sprout simply past the northeastern nook of the city in 1911, but it surely was in 1931, with the opening of Highland Park Village, that the realm discovered its emotional and financial coronary heart. Whereas a lot of the remainder of the nation was struggling by the Nice Despair, the residents of Highland Park had been promenading alongside the elegant facades of the Spanish Colonial Revival buildings within the nation’s first-of-its-kind deliberate purchasing heart. One fortunate winner on the grand opening went house with a pony. 4 years later got here the Village Theatre, the state’s first suburban luxurious film home, with terrazzo flooring and 1,350 seats in a single auditorium, at one finish of the plaza.
Drawn up across the flip of the final century by the identical metropolis planner chargeable for Beverly Hills, California, the neighborhood was based as a leafy refuge, full with a advertising slogan declaring “it’s ten levels cooler in Highland Park.”
At this time Highland Park Village is probably the city’s most literal parallel to Beverly Hills, with a constellation of luxurious boutiques—Etro, Fendi, Goyard, Hermès—to rival Rodeo Drive, together with see-and-be-seen eating places similar to Bistro 31 and Café Pacific, the place Dallas energy gamers and billionaires (the Bushes! the Joneses!) can dine amongst their very own.
The air of exclusivity isn’t only a feeling. As was widespread in American communities developed within the first half of the 20 th century, deed restrictions in Highland Park’s early years prohibited members of nonwhite minority teams from proudly owning actual property. Such guidelines had been deemed unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court docket in 1948, but it surely wasn’t till 2003—simply twenty years in the past—{that a} Black individual purchased and lived in a house in Highland Park. The cringeworthy first line of the article saying this growth within the native Park Cities Folks newspaper: “Guess who’s coming to dinner—and staying for some time.”
One other vestige of this fortress ethos persists within the city’s existence separate from the a lot bigger metropolis that surrounds it. Because the Pulitzer Prize–profitable journalist Lawrence Wright wrote in his memoir Within the New World, mid-century Dallas grew to become the “Camelot of the appropriate”—a free-for-all for formidable strivers who didn’t need something of their method, particularly not laws. Highland Park was a haven amid it, a spot the place newly minted millionaires might get pleasure from their cash and separate themselves from the hoi polloi. At this time many households transfer to city in order that their kids can keep away from Dallas ISD and enroll as an alternative in one of many state’s greatest public faculty districts. And the Highland Park police have a fame for ticketing outsiders for the slightest infractions whereas letting residents go.
Maybe the most important impact of Highland Park walling itself off has been on the worth of its actual property. The tidy colonials and bungalows that when stood on the aspect streets have been changed with ever-larger mansions to match these nearer to the creek and the golf course. The tons haven’t grown, after all, so at present the houses stand shoulder to shoulder like sentries on parade, every craning its neck to face taller and prouder than the final. The six-thousand-square-foot manors that rose within the eighties and nineties are being changed or reimagined to incorporate greater ceilings, larger home windows, house theaters, and underground garages with parking lifts. Often, an angular trendy creation, all glass and metal, will come up rather than one thing with Corinthian columns or curlicued ironwork and set the neighborhood aesthetes chattering—which is perhaps exactly the purpose.
“The home is all the things right here,” says Sweet Evans, the founding father of Candy’s Dirt, a weblog about North Texas actual property that publishes business information and gossip together with listings of notable houses. “Your home tells individuals who you’re, who your loved ones is, what you do for a dwelling.” Within the toniest elements of Dallas, she says, houses on slim, deep tons don’t promote in addition to homes on large, shallow ones with extra visibility from the road. “As a result of your private home is your fortress to indicate off.”
Greater than fifteen years in the past, Chicago native Evans was working as an editor for D Magazine when she had the concept to start out her weblog, then referred to as Dallas Dust, which she took together with her when she went solo. Evans started to understand that she’d struck a deep cultural and monetary vein and that it wasn’t simply the houses that drew her viewers. Certain, everyone appreciated to gawk and dream about what lay behind the sloping lawns and round drives of the grandest properties—however additionally they adopted the brokers and the storylines of the gross sales. If the trophy houses of Highland Park had been fantasy worlds to the plenty, the realtors had been portals to these worlds. “They’re the film stars of Dallas,” says Evans.
And Allie Beth Allman grew to become the most important star of all of them.
She grew up Allie Beth McMurtry within the small North Texas city of Graham, about ninety miles northwest of Fort Value, the second of three daughters of a furniture-store proprietor and a homemaker who additionally tended a small farm. Allie Beth was a magnificence queen and cheerleader at Texas Christian College, the place she majored in radio, tv, and movie and received to know her distant cousin, Lonesome Dove writer Larry McMurtry. To Evans, even at present Allie Beth is “the epitome of the Texas ranch woman. You realize, get the rifle out, shoot the dinner, cook dinner it. And by the best way, I can whip up a gown.”
Allie Beth moved to Dallas in 1962 to take a job as a typist on the radio arm of the native ABC-TV affiliate, WFAA, and there she met the love of her life, Pierce Allman, a program director on the station. A crew-cut SMU grad and former airman within the U.S. Air Power, he’d grown up in Highland Park and at one time was the youngest Eagle Scout within the nation, having earned 104 of the 105 advantage badges then obtainable. He additionally had a Forrest Gump–like knack for locating himself on the heart of issues. A few month after he and Allie Beth wed, he witnessed the president of america being shot within the head. Pierce rushed to name the station on that November day in 1963, asking for instructions to a pay telephone from a person exiting a close-by constructing: the Texas College E-book Depository. The person turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald. Pierce’s dwell information report, delivered over the telephone moments later, was among the many first from the scene that day.
A 12 months later, as Dallas grappled with being labeled by its detractors because the City of Hate, town that killed Kennedy, Pierce grew to become the director of alumni affairs at SMU, the place he constructed the college’s first alumni listing—a transfer that might show helpful in enterprise. He later began a PR company that represented highly effective purchasers such because the State Bar of Texas and the Dallas Bar Affiliation. Pierce steadily received extra concerned with Highland Park civic life—main fund-raising efforts and establishing a lecture collection at SMU; serving on numerous boards for the native museum, library, hospital, and Methodist church; cofounding the native historic society; and on and on. There was hardly anybody in Park Cities society circles who didn’t come to know the good-looking couple—Pierce together with his boyish smile and Allie Beth together with her blond hair formed meticulously into what may very well be described as a primary girl model.
By the mid-seventies, as Dallas emerged as a seat of new-money energy—and the house of America’s Crew—Allie Beth had grown shut with Alicia Landry, whom she’d met at a Tri Delta sorority alumnae occasion. Alicia’s husband occurred to be Tom, the legendary Cowboys coach. The Landrys had been trying to promote their house, and so they requested Allie Beth to deal with it for them. She wasn’t a licensed agent, however she had just lately bought her and Pierce’s home “on the market by proprietor,” so she figured she might assist—unpaid—in the identical capability.
The belief of the coach of the Dallas Cowboys helped Allie Beth belief her intestine. Landry didn’t wish to be bothered by consumers, so she hosted an open home whereas he was away at a sport. She roped off the room that contained his assortment of soccer trophies and put in her housekeeper, Edie, to face guard there. When two provides got here that day, every for a similar cash, she confirmed Landry the contracts when he received house from work and requested him to select one.
“Which did you want higher?” he requested.
“These individuals,” Allie Beth responded, pointing to one of many papers. Her alternative wasn’t based mostly on something aside from persona, however Landry merely leaned down and signed that contract.
“I inform individuals, simply do one thing,” Allie Beth says now. “You realize, don’t wait until you understand all the things. You’ll by no means be taught something should you do.” It’s a model of the entrepreneur’s credo—the bias towards motion that anchors the mindset of many Silicon Valley CEOs in addition to most Texas wildcatters. Allie Beth won’t have recognized it on the time, however she was a born hustler.
Allie Beth Allman & Associates launched in 1985, with one of the well-known names in Dallas already on its consumer record and with Pierce powering the advertising. “I’d by no means have had my success with out Pierce,” Allie Beth likes to say, with attribute modesty. Pierce introduced two crucial components to the corporate from the beginning: his peerless community of contacts and his brand-savvy insistence that Allie Beth be the face of the operation.
Over the previous decade, an oil growth had propelled the Texas economic system, spurring wild spending on trophy homes and ranches and serving to to show Dallas right into a hub of the banking business. It got here crashing down when oil costs plummeted and credit score tightened amid a savings and loan crisis that was nationwide in scope, however with Texas at its heart. Actual property values collapsed, and Allie Beth needed to scramble to search out enterprise for her new firm. With many householders underwater on their loans, banks began foreclosing—and there she was, prepared to assist the establishments unload their properties, whereas on the identical time serving to households commerce right down to inexpensive houses. “I grew to become the guru of the trades,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the place the market is; individuals need to have a spot to dwell, so that you alter. You determine a method.” To shut a deal in these days, brokers typically appeared past the actual property itself and urged sellers to throw in additional unique enticements—a group of fur coats, say, or a Rolex.
Driving shotgun with Allie Beth early on was one other younger society maven with a expertise for working the angles. Doris Jacobs was 5 years older than Allie Beth and each bit as formidable, together with her personal head of first girl hair (although hers is extra usually in comparison with that of former U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison). She developed a fame for promoting homes on one in every of Highland Park’s most unique streets, incomes a nickname: the queen of Beverly Drive. Her well-connected husband, Jack Jacobs, had constructed a series of native music shops referred to as the Melody Retailers that hosted visitors together with the Rolling Stones and Tiny Tim. He’d earned the nickname “Swinging Jack” and beloved a great occasion—or a poker desk or a horse race. Just like the Allmans, the Jacobses had two daughters, Teffy and Kim, who grew up with the perfect of all the things. The ladies attended the perfect faculties and had been debutantes at the perfect events, together with La Fiesta de las Seis Banderas, an unique gala cofounded by none aside from Pierce. There have been initially six “duchesses” annually at La Fiesta, and every had a doll unveiled in her likeness, {custom} robe and all.
By the point Henry S. Miller Jr., a neighborhood industrial actual property titan who owned Highland Park Village, supplied to purchase Allie Beth’s agency in 1995, its fame was impeccable. A number of years after the sale went by, Allie Beth stepped away from the enterprise whereas Doris soldiered on below Miller’s possession. However after a nationwide actual property firm purchased out Miller and deliberate to retire her model identify, Allie Beth determined to come back again and begin over—with Doris once more at her aspect, this time as a founding associate.
When Allie Beth Allman & Associates relaunched in 2004, in the identical constructing it had at all times occupied on Tracy Avenue, on the fringe of Highland Park, there was a Texan within the Oval Workplace, oil costs had been climbing, and the Dallas–Fort Value space was including some 100,000 new residents yearly. Issues had been good—however no person might have predicted how a lot better the market would sooner or later get.
On a glowing day on the Highland Park Village Starbucks, Sweet Evans sips an Iced Ardour Tango Tea and particulars how her weblog received the news on which home George W. and Laura Bush had been shopping for again in 2008, after they had been looking for their post-presidency house. “I keep in mind I used to be searching for the tales of the place individuals had been seeing the Secret Service—you understand, the large black automobile. The place was it? What home was it in entrance of?” she says. “Properly, we discovered it.” It was an 8,500-square-foot brick ranch home on a cul-de-sac in Preston Hole, the place the president and first girl’s future neighbors would come with the likes of Mark Cuban, T. Boone Pickens, and Tom Hicks, then nonetheless dwelling on the Crespi property.
A number of hours earlier than Sweet’s brag, Douglas Newby had advised me, over a plate of truffle and lobster pasta at Café Pacific, that he was the one to find the Bushes’ house: “I keep in mind I particularly waited till after Thanksgiving, so they might get pleasure from their Thanksgiving weekend, earlier than I put it on my weblog. I stated if I had been Laura and George Bush, that is the place I’d in all probability transfer, and gave an image of the home to explain why.”
No matter who broke the information, the purpose is that someplace alongside the best way, Dallas actual property grew to become the type of business that evokes heated competitors amongst gossip bloggers. And Allie Beth, after all, was the one who discovered the Bushes that home. She and Laura had traversed the realm inspecting properties, at instances taking off their sneakers after treading by flower beds and peering over fences to take a look at the neighbors’ locations and assess privateness.
Houston has oil. Los Angeles has showbiz. New York has style and finance. Dallas likes to say it has a diversified economic system, however actually one business trumps all of them: actual property.
Houston has oil. Los Angeles has showbiz. New York has style and finance. Dallas likes to say it has a diversified economic system, however actually one business trumps all of them: actual property. And gossip—who’s getting divorced, who died, who made or misplaced a fortune—usually fuels it. Gossip can set brokers off jockeying for a list that might emerge if, for example, a grieving household may must promote. “Info creates worth,” Newby tells me. He and his rivals collect at Café Pacific, the place the appropriate desk indicators who’s necessary, or across the nook at Bistro 31. At cocktail hour, the youthful brokers drink at Park Home, a personal membership upstairs at Highland Park Village the place, the top of 1 brokerage advised me, “they get drunk and loud and simply speak s— about different brokers. I name it peacocking.”
Whether or not it’s the Bush home, the Crespi property, or anything setting Highland Park socialites atwitter, it’s a great guess Allie Beth is someplace close to its heart—and he or she is aware of tips on how to leverage that. Certainly one of her favourite anecdotes issues the day her telephone rang and it was the White Home, inquiring about her companies. “I stated, ‘Anyone is teasing me. Who is that this?’ And so they stated, ‘No, we’re the White Home, and we simply wish to let you understand that Laura Bush goes to be calling you,’ ” she remembers. At this time, she and Laura are frequent lunch companions, and through one in every of our conversations, Allie Beth invited me upstairs to her condominium to see two paintings by the former president—one a portrait of Pierce, the opposite a prickly pear, each presents from the artist.
Even that indeniable relationship can carry on a spherical of sniping from others. Newby makes some extent of noting that there are lots of brokers in Dallas who had been certified to signify the Bushes, however “Allie Beth had a daughter who labored within the Bush administration.” Certainly, Amy Allman Dean spent your entire eight years of the Bush presidency working in varied roles, together with as director of the White Home Guests Workplace. However so what? Making use of private connections is one in every of Allie Beth’s nice strengths, and forging these connections is among the foundations of her success.
She credit Pierce for engineering that. If there was an occasion in Highland Park, he noticed to it that Allie Beth Allman was listed prominently as a sponsor. The Park Cities Fourth of July parade. The elementary faculty bike rodeo. If there was a board or a committee to serve on, he joined it and fairly probably led it. Doris and Jack targeted as a lot on the social scene. “She goes to each rattling social occasion on the town,” says Evans. “You realize, you actually need to make the telephone calls to place offers collectively, and the best way you do that’s by understanding individuals and getting out so much.”
Retaining rating is simply crass. Allie Beth has by no means inserted herself within the top-seller rankings at her firm—she simply stays out of it. “I by no means depend my cash,” she says.
Allie Beth’s purchasers constantly included town’s largest names. Amongst her listings have been the houses of Dick Cheney, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Ross Perot Jr., T. Boone Pickens, Alex Rodriguez, Randall Stephenson, and lots of extra. For such premium properties, each sellers and consumers usually need their transactions to be non-public, in order that they’ll dump market in what’s generally known as a pocket itemizing. Most of the people doesn’t know that the home is on the market; solely different brokers do. The problem is that it may be tougher to discover a purchaser. Some brokers, Evans tells me, record such properties lengthy sufficient to drum up curiosity however pull the itemizing simply earlier than it sells in order that there’s no document of what the client paid. “That’s on your mega ten-, twenty-, thirty-million-dollar houses,” she says. (This apply violates business guidelines, and Allie Beth says she’s by no means performed it.)
To share pocket listings or different market intel, 25 of probably the most elite brokers in Dallas belong to a small group referred to as the Masters of Residential Actual Property. Doris is a member; Allie Beth scoffs at it as little greater than a private branding and scorekeeping train. “I don’t wish to affiliate myself with an outdoor group like that,” she says. And holding rating is simply crass. She’s by no means inserted herself within the top-seller rankings at her firm—she simply stays out of it. “I by no means depend my cash,” she says.
As Allie Beth and Doris had been busy tightening their viselike grip on high-end Dallas actual property, one charity gala at a time, an Ivy-educated former New York funding banker named Robert Reffkin noticed a possibility for what the tech and monetary elite name “disruption.”
The U.S. housing market is price a staggering $45 trillion, but the web—which had reshaped almost each aspect of society—had largely left the actual property enterprise alone. There have been search platforms similar to Zillow, and Redfin was rising as a brand new type of tech-first brokerage. However the bread and butter of the business, the native actual property agent who guides his or her purchasers by each step of discovering or promoting a house, nonetheless operated a lot the identical as ever, counting on shiny print advertisements and intestine instincts. The corporate Reffkin launched in 2012, Compass, appeared so much like a standard brokerage however one outfitted with costly, custom-built expertise geared toward making its brokers extra environment friendly—what neighborhoods to prioritize, tips on how to market a property, tips on how to value it.
It wasn’t as if different brokers hadn’t found the web, however they invested in modernizing their processes solely as their revenue margins allowed. Compass, alternatively, raised heaps of cash from enterprise capital buyers and spent it to develop aggressively with out worrying about revenue within the close to time period. Reffkin borrowed the land seize technique employed by the likes of Uber, during which a personal firm can face up to heavy losses for years so long as it could possibly persuade buyers to maintain giving it cash. That’s performed by promising that its expertise will show transformative and by amassing a larger and larger share of the market every quarter. As soon as the corporate grows massive sufficient, the speculation goes, economies of scale (or maybe simply monopoly energy) will enable it to chop prices or elevate costs to achieve profitability.
Compass discovered its footing in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and several other different, largely coastal, areas, earlier than increasing to Dallas–Fort Value. Reffkin’s start-up raised $400 million in late 2018 and introduced plans to enter different fast-growing metropolitan areas, together with Austin and Houston. A lot as WeWork’s Adam Neumann advised the world his agency was essentially reinventing the workplace, Reffkin positioned Compass because the inevitable way forward for residential actual property gross sales. He spouted catchy enterprise aphorisms meant to outline a greater method of working. “No is the killer of desires,” he appreciated to say. “No is the killer of nice concepts.” He additionally set an aggressive purpose: within the high twenty U.S. cities, 20 % market share by 2020.
Compass started poaching Dallas brokers by providing beneficiant commissions, signing bonuses, and the magic of expertise. Among the many first targets was Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s, a long-established agency run by Robbie Briggs that was nearer to Allie Beth’s in measurement and clientele than some other. Over the course of a number of months in 2018, about 100 Briggs Freeman brokers, about 20 % of its gross sales power, left for Compass. Amongst them had been the corporate’s gross sales supervisor, Bryan Pacholski, and star agent Amy Detwiler. “Poor Briggs,” says Allie Beth. “I really really feel sorry for Robbie. I actually do.”
“All people type of felt dangerous for Robbie,” remembers Sweet Evans, “however what occurred to him additionally woke everybody up.” Going digital was about discovering consumers not only for the $2 million properties, the essential unit of Highland Park actual property, however for the rarer $30 million estates. “You wish to discover some near-billionaire’s consideration for that,” says Evans. “You don’t try this by placing a narrative within the Dallas Morning Information. The man you need is off mountaineering someplace after which hopping in his jet and going to the automobile present in Pebble Seaside. He’s on his telephone. He understands the tax advantages of getting a house in Texas.” You discover anyone like that—anyone who won’t even dwell right here but—by the type of digital advertising prowess that Compass was promising.
Mike DelPrete, an actual property–tech business analyst and scholar in residence on the College of Colorado Boulder, has studied the rise of Compass in depth and compares the agency to the New York Yankees or the Spanish soccer workforce Actual Madrid—organizations that win by merely shopping for the perfect expertise. And naturally, should you had been raiding the Dallas high-end actual property marketplace for all-star gamers, you’d buy groceries at Allie Beth Allman & Associates. “Compass tried to destroy me,” Allie Beth remembers. This was earlier than it had even raided Briggs Freeman.
Amongst these focused on Allie Beth’s workforce was a younger former TCU baseball participant named Keith Conlon, whom Compass supplied almost double his pay. What Compass didn’t understand was that, like so many in Highland Park, Conlon had ties to Allie Beth that went deep. After Conlon’s minor-league baseball profession fizzled, Pierce had taken him on in a type of mentorship. Now Allie Beth, who admired Conlon’s “excessive morals,” was educating him all the things she knew about actual property, grooming him to take over as CEO and president. Neither of her daughters had determined to enter the enterprise—Amy was settled in Washington, and Margaret was elevating a household—so Conlon had develop into one thing just like the son she and Pierce by no means had. He was inheriting the keys to Allie Beth’s kingdom and was not about to desert that for a elevate.
Even so, Allie Beth knew she wanted a wider technique to face up to a full Compass raid in 2018. Three years earlier, she’d once more bought her firm, this time to a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway referred to as Residence Companies of America. The backing of Buffett theoretically gave her entry to among the world’s deepest pockets, however in actuality the Omaha billionaire’s companies have by no means operated that method; Buffett’s success depends on his well-known thriftiness and prolonged time horizons. So merely outspending Compass was out of the query.
One agent who was granted beneficiant Compass inventory choices advised Allie Beth, “I’ll by no means have one other probability to personal a part of an organization like this.” Allie Beth misplaced that one. However when one in every of her high sellers was supplied a bundle price greater than one million {dollars}—together with inventory, money, and free promoting—she discovered her pitch. After mentioning that inventory in an organization that had but to show a revenue was probably nugatory, she would patiently clarify that relationships had been price so much—“in Highland Park particularly,” she says now. “Our involvement in the neighborhood is one thing that simply doesn’t occur in a single day. They don’t have that over there [at Compass].” Then she’d show it. “Somebody would name me and say they wish to record their home, and I’d name an agent and say, ‘Why don’t you’re taking this one?’ I gave out a variety of referrals that 12 months.”
Giving out referrals is commonplace apply amongst skilled actual property
brokers, who usually take a reduce of the ensuing sale whereas getting their subordinates to do the actual work. However a referral from Allie Beth is one thing else. “It’s an opportunity to work alongside the most effective that ever did it,” explains Conlon. “That’s an enormous enticement even for high brokers.” As a method of countering Compass’s truckful of cash, it was a daring technique—not in its flash however in its whole lack thereof. Allie Beth was successfully reminding people that she quietly held a profitable hand. And she or he was arguing that every one the guarantees of digital advertising and precision focusing on had been a foul proxy for what she, the queen, already had: a fame.
Amazingly, it kind of labored. Allie Beth Allman & Associates misplaced about 35 brokers to Compass that 12 months and the following—a 3rd of what Briggs-Freeman had misplaced. “They couldn’t get my brokers,” Allie Beth says. However then she betrays a uncommon crack within the facade, her normal straightforward twang tensing up as she describes the gauntlet she ran throughout that interval. “I labored tougher these two years than I’ve ever labored,” she says. “It’s onerous to compete with anyone who’s not enjoying by the identical guidelines.”
The scenario resembled what occurred to private-driver companies when Uber confirmed up and undercut that business. However as any late-stage investor in Uber was studying all too nicely proper about then, the tech start-up technique of aggressively flooding the zone with money with no line of sight towards profitability wasn’t essentially a great long-term guess—even when no person knew but how that might play out for Compass. It will require greater than gobs of enterprise capital to take down Allie Beth Allman.
The proprietor of Bistro 31, Alberto Lombardi—three-piece swimsuit, theatrically tufted silk pocket sq.—comes over to greet the trio of Jacobs girls as they linger over a lunch discussing the previous few years’ journey. Doris, at 88, speaks softly, with a slight tremble in her voice, and wears a crimson blazer not in contrast to Allie Beth’s. Teffy and Kim flank her on the desk, repeating issues she doesn’t fairly hear and gently operating interference after they fear she’s beginning to say one thing too frank within the presence of a reporter. “I’ll do what I need,” Doris snaps again at one level after one in every of her daughters admonishes her.
Doris by no means actually discovered to make use of a pc. She retains an encyclopedic data of Highland Park houses filed away in her mind—when a home was constructed, who constructed it, what block it’s on, who has owned it, what they paid, why they bought. It’s helped her promote greater than $1 billion of actual property below the Allie Beth banner. Equally necessary was that the Jacobses lengthy operated as a household enterprise, with Teffy and Kim rounding out the gross sales power and Jack bringing his many years of entrepreneurial expertise to structuring offers within the background.
So when Jack died from pancreatic most cancers at age 82, in June 2018, the enterprise cratered. Doris had been Allie Beth’s high vendor for 13 consecutive years, beginning in 2004. Lately, a brand new crop of superagents similar to Erin Mathews, the corporate’s resident fashionista—whose angular white-blond bob mirrors Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s iconic coiffure—and Alex Perry, the grandson of three-time Wimbledon champ Fred Perry, had been nipping at her heels. Now, paralyzed by grief, Doris might hardly work. Her gross sales had been in free fall. “She was so misplaced with out Jack,” says Allie Beth.
“Y’all must get in your curler skates, since you’re going to be so busy, you’re not going to know what to do,” Allie Beth advised the troops early within the pandemic.
Doris and the women had been approached by Compass to defect, however they didn’t go—Allie Beth Allman was merely their skilled house, despite the fact that Doris had cashed in her possession stake when the corporate bought to Warren Buffett. However now, with Doris at her most susceptible, her loyalty was being examined. A few her most prized prospects ended up within the arms of Allie Beth Allman & Associates colleagues, high-profile brokers whose names no person will utter on the document. Whereas formal illustration contracts sometimes final solely six months, high brokers similar to Doris are likely to have long-standing relationships with necessary purchasers that the tight neighborhood of direct-competitor brokers respect as hers. Some present of deference can be applicable if one had been to tackle such a consumer—even a easy courtesy name. No such factor had occurred, and Doris felt like she was being written off.
She, Teffy, and Kim had been nonetheless attempting to rebuild their enterprise when COVID-19 put much more distance between Doris and her purchasers. The virus additionally accelerated the migration of out-of-staters to Texas. “Y’all must get in your curler skates, since you’re going to be so busy, you’re not going to know what to do,” Allie Beth advised the troops over Zoom sooner or later early within the pandemic. She’d sensed “doom and gloom” and aimed to quash it. Folks didn’t have something to do however have a look at homes, she figured. And certain sufficient, 2021 changed into the perfect 12 months within the firm’s historical past, with $3.8 billion in gross sales.
Citywide, the worth of a single-family house in Dallas jumped greater than 50 % in simply 5 years, from 2017 till 2022. It was a madcap run-up that coincided with the arrival of document numbers of newcomers from the coasts, following myriad company relocations and expansions to North Texas—
Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs, Toyota. That surge in demand led to low housing stock, shortages of labor and building supplies, and
record-high house costs. The variety of Dallas–Fort Value luxury-home gross sales, outlined as these costing greater than $1 million, jumped about 70 % in 2021 alone, in response to Texas A&M’s Texas Actual Property Analysis Middle. In Highland Park, the median house value by that fall approached $3 million.
All of which led, in flip, to a different large shot brokerage coming to Dallas with designs on raiding the expertise pool: Douglas Elliman, which had made its fame promoting among the glitziest properties in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The agency grew to become nationally well-known when one in every of its high brokers landed a gig because the star of Million Dollar Listing New York, a reality-TV present on Bravo.
Whereas Compass wooed brokers with the magic of expertise, Elliman’s pitch relied on enjoying up its glamorous fame, its ties to showbiz, and the promise of first dibs on the nation’s most coveted consumers: these fleeing California and New York, in addition to worldwide consumers from London and past. The CEO of its Texas operation, Jacob Sudhoff, was a Corpus Christi native who’d rocketed to actual property riches in Houston after getting his begin within the enterprise on the age of sixteen.
One of many early brokers Sudhoff lured to Elliman was a person of Indian descent named Andy Anand, who had grown up in Toronto and moved to the state to play soccer on the College of North Texas. As a member of the Sikh religion, Anand wears his hair lengthy and tucks it up into a sublime turban, generally known as a pagri. “Once I met Andy, he was carrying a baseball cap, attempting to cover his heritage,” remembers Sudhoff, who suggested him to put on the turban proudly—however with designer fits—the higher to attach with town’s newly booming inhabitants of well-to-do South Asians. Once they later discovered that the turban was appearing as a aggressive drawback in a single potential deal, they paired Anand with Breah Brown, a white former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, who stood in as his entrance lady. “Andy didn’t care about being the face of something,” Sudhoff says. “He cares about cash.”
That was in 2021. A number of months later, in April 2022, Keith Conlon received a name from Doris late at night time on Easter Sunday—late sufficient that he was in mattress and he or she left a message asking him to name on his strategy to the workplace the following day. When he referred to as her again, she dropped a bombshell.
“I used to be simply letting you understand we’re going to Douglas Elliman,” she stated.
“Did you permit Allie Beth a message too?” he requested, gobsmacked.
“I hoped you could possibly inform her,” she stated.
It was unthinkable to Conlon that forty years of shut friendship and enterprise partnership might finish so abruptly. “She by no means even got here and tried to barter,” he remembers. “She simply referred to as up sooner or later and stated, ‘I’m out.’ It was wild.”
Sweet Evans ran a breathless merchandise on her weblog concerning the queen of Beverly Drive splitting from the queen of Highland Park. It started by noting that “promoting actual property could look straightforward, but it surely’s one of many hardest, most brutal, and sometimes the loneliest occupations on the market. You eat what you kill, you compete with sharks on an hourly foundation, you’re rejected 24/7, and also you run your personal enterprise as an unbiased contractor.” And Doris, the merchandise concluded, is “one of many hardest-working brokers God has ever created.”
With Jack gone, Doris knew that sustaining the household enterprise was more and more going to fall to Teffy and Kim. Elliman supplied a possibility to construct a model across the Jacobs identify, with Doris formally a workforce chief and her daughters below her, plus tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in free promoting—although nothing near the extravagant provides Compass had been making three years earlier. Maybe the best enticement to go to Elliman was the sense that it was new and glossy, in a metropolis the place these are prized virtues.
The information stung Allie Beth. In her eighties and susceptible to COVID, she had spent a lot of the pandemic holding her distance from the workplace and, worse, from her purchasers. She’d handed day-to-day management to Conlon, solely to observe the agency come below assault not as soon as however twice from newcomers available in the market. Her previous good friend Jack had died. And now this surprising information from her stalwart enterprise associate. “I’ve been together with her from day one—it’s heartbreaking for me,” she advised me not lengthy after the announcement. “However, you understand, we’ll make it, with or with out her.”
On high of all of it, her beloved Pierce was struggling together with his well being after a prognosis of the neurological dysfunction hydrocephalus. The place as soon as the couple had delighted in charming guests with their tales, effortlessly passing the narrative backwards and forwards like two sides of 1 mind, Allie Beth now needed to be selective about who might even come to see her ailing husband. Extra usually, the Allmans didn’t see anybody, remaining confined to the penthouse, the place Allie Beth grew to become Pierce’s doting caregiver.
On a Tuesday early final December, an unmarked black SUV with dark-tinted home windows sat outdoors the neo-Gothic Highland Park United Methodist Church, as two Secret Service brokers with earpieces stood by. Contained in the church, almost one thousand mourners—a roll name of Highland Park luminaries—filed quietly to their seats to await the funeral of Pierce Morriss Allman. Allie Beth sat within the entrance row, flanked by her daughters and their households. Troy Aikman was there; so had been Jason and Brill Garrett. There was Laura Bush too, although George W. was out of city. (“The Bushes had been the primary individuals who got here to see me after Pierce died,” Allie Beth would inform me later.)
The eight months since Doris had introduced she was leaving had been a curler coaster. Within the spring of 2022, house gross sales continued climbing to beforehand unimagined heights. However by that summer season, with inflation likewise rising, the Fed launched an aggressive marketing campaign of interest-rate hikes, successfully throwing a bucket of chilly water on house consumers who’d grown used to straightforward cash. In neighborhoods similar to Highland Park and Preston Hole, the impact could not have been fairly as pronounced, as a result of ultrawealthy consumers are likely to pay money moderately than use conventional financial institution financing. Nonetheless, even when these consumers shut a take care of money, they have a tendency to make use of debt of some type within the background, as a result of amassing the debt is cheaper than forgoing potential funding beneficial properties on their money elsewhere. What’s extra, even in Highland Park, lots of the smaller houses—mere four-thousand-square-foot mansions, not sprawling estates—fall in a value vary that is smart for normal previous mortgages.
In Dallas’s premium neighborhoods, the variety of houses on the market plummeted whereas the typical value shot by the ceiling—particularly as a result of fewer of the extra modest houses had been promoting, leaving a disproportionate variety of the wildly costly ones. By December 2022, whereas the general market was reeling, the median itemizing value in Highland Park approached $5 million—greater than double the determine from only a 12 months earlier. That, after all, is a market tailored for the likes of Allie Beth Allman and Doris Jacobs.
The difficulty was that they had been each preoccupied. As Allie Beth had contended with Pierce’s declining well being over the course of the 12 months, Doris hadn’t discovered Douglas Elliman to be the house she’d hoped it will be. Greater than something, it wasn’t a great tradition match. It was brash, versus the quiet confidence of Allie Beth Allman & Associates. It was the distinction between getting loaded upstairs on the Park Home and lunching at Café Pacific.
Someday that July, an agent referred to as Allie Beth to say she’d been talking with Doris. “Allie Beth, Doris is depressing,” she stated. “It is advisable name her.” For many years, Doris had popped into Allie Beth’s workplace each time she was feeling down, and her previous good friend would buck her up with a number of calm phrases of encouragement. “She didn’t have me these two years [during COVID], so she thought I didn’t love her,” Allie Beth says. “The corporate she went to only catered to her—they gave her some consideration.” The grasp networker realized she had uncared for one in every of her closest pals.
That afternoon Doris, Teffy, and Kim went to Allie Beth’s apartment, and so they talked for hours. Allie Beth defined that caring for Pierce had been an isolating expertise, on high of the COVID isolation everybody was going by. She emphasised that Keith Conlon was firmly answerable for the day-to-day operations now, and he or she hardly ever went to the workplace. “I’m very sorry if I harm your emotions,” she stated. “You had been one in every of my first brokers. You’re glued to my firm, and I simply need to have you ever.”
“She got here again to me,” Doris advised me later.
Simply three months after they’d left the agency, Doris, Teffy, and Kim returned to Allie Beth Allman & Associates, this time formally as a workforce. Sweet’s Dust ran an merchandise that quoted Doris saying she “simply couldn’t depart” Allie Beth. “It was like leaving house.”
Pierce entered hospice in November, and the Jacobs trio spent a variety of time with Allie Beth and her household within the weeks main as much as his loss of life. On the funeral, they had been sitting a number of rows behind Allie Beth, close to the entrance of the cross-shaped sanctuary. The Reverend S. M. Wright II, a pastor from South Dallas and son of a legendary civil rights chief, learn the Lord’s Prayer. Pierce had served on the board of a basis established in Wright’s father’s identify to serve underprivileged households. A succession of audio system talked concerning the values the Allmans represented over their 59 years collectively. Pierce was a patriot and a person of self-discipline and manners who was keen to grasp others’ views. He discovered to slalom water-ski at age seventy. He learn the newspaper out loud to Allie Beth each morning.
After the service, the SMU Mustang Band—“the perfect dressed band within the land”—appeared simply outdoors the doorways of a reception corridor on the church grounds of their full crimson, white, and blue regalia. They performed the “SMU Loyalty Tune”—whose lyrics Pierce wrote for them again in mid-sixties—as visitors filed in to hitch a receiving line and greet Allie Beth. On the entrance, alone, in sturdy heels and an immaculately tailor-made black gown, she supplied a agency handshake, a quiet smile, and some phrases to every visitor, as if she had been there to consolation them. She stood there for 3 hours.
If there have been any doubt about whether or not Doris was really again in motion coming into this 12 months, the Doris Jacobs Group web site argues to place that to relaxation. Subsequent to an image of Doris in a sensible crimson jacket, a brief blurb about her companies begins, in daring, “Doris Jacobs is the solely identify to know in Dallas actual property.”
She bought a $15 million home late final December to a few from California. They’d already purchased so much to construct on, as a result of the home they actually wished wasn’t on the market—however then Doris heard by the Masters of Residential Actual Property that it was developing as a pocket itemizing and gave the hopeful consumers a hoop. They put in a proposal that night time.
It was amongst three $14 million–plus offers that month at Allie Beth Allman & Associates—one of many different two having been made by Allie Beth herself. The agency additionally has the itemizing for the Crespi-Hicks property, which got here up on the market once more this spring. However this time one other agent, an in depth good friend of the proprietor, is dealing with the deal, with Allie Beth advising.
Allie Beth doesn’t dwell on her offers, however she does discover time to dwell on Compass. “I simply really feel sorry for the individuals who went over there pondering they had been going to be wealthy,” she says, “as a result of the inventory is in horrible form.” Certainly, when the corporate went public in April 2021, its inventory debuted at simply over $20 after which started a gentle slide as inflation picked up, rates of interest rose, and concern mounted that Compass had managed to lose cash within the hottest market anybody might keep in mind. The inventory value has hovered at below $5 since final June, rendering these agent incentive packages nearly nugatory. Mike DelPrete, the actual property business analyst, wrote that the enterprise can be “unsustainable” with out extreme price slicing.
Allie Beth avoids utilizing Compass founder Robert Reffkin’s identify. “I’d inform my brokers the man, the founder, he was just like the Music Man,” she says, unable to cease herself from gloating a bit. “He got here into city, blew his whistle, and stated, ‘I’m simply great. You’re all gonna be wealthy!’ However you can not pay out that type of cash and get a return when it’s too good to be true.”
Allie Beth doesn’t dwell on her offers, however she does discover time to dwell on Compass. “I simply really feel sorry for the individuals who went over there pondering they had been going to
be wealthy,” she says.
Compass’s Bryan Pacholski factors out that the corporate has nonetheless grown into the most important brokerage nationwide and in Texas, with greater than eight hundred brokers in Dallas–Fort Value. “Over one thousand brokers have come to Compass since August 2022 for no money sign-on bonuses or inventory,” he provides. And the agency has managed to amass a large market share in Dallas, notably on the excessive finish. By final summer season, when its inventory value lastly stopped sliding, it was second solely to Allie Beth Allman & Associates in nearly each measurement of Dallas-area luxurious gross sales. In among the extra mass-luxury measures—similar to variety of gross sales above $2 million in all of Dallas County—Compass was even dangerously near passing Allie Beth. However within the kingdom of Highland Park, Allie Beth’s lead remained far larger—34 % of the market to Compass’s 21 %. If Compass can grasp on to the highest brokers it lured over, it should stay a power in Dallas.
The identical can’t be stated of Douglas Elliman, which, on the finish of final 12 months, had a bit of greater than 2 % of the Park Cities market. Douglas Newby, who’s watched the brokerage battles up shut for many years, isn’t shocked. “I’ve seen different firms and folks come to Dallas from California or New York pondering they’d wow everybody as a result of they had been large in L.A. and find yourself being just about ignored,” he says. “Folks suppose, ‘What’s so large about an L.A. agent? Everyone seems to be leaving L.A. anyway. If they will’t hold their purchasers there, what are they contributing right here?’ ”
It’s not that Dallas society is a stuffy membership that shuns outsiders, he believes, however moderately that folks right here sniff out and reject coastal elitism. “I can’t emphasize sufficient that Dallas is just not an old-school, uncrackable, inbred atmosphere,” Newby says. “That is probably the most open metropolis within the nation. You’ve third- and fourth-generation necessary households, and also you even have new wealth, and you’ve got individuals shifting right here. They could get pleasure from going to New York for the museums and tradition, and so they may need a trip house in Santa Barbara or Malibu. However no person that’s in search of out Dallas lives in awe of L.A. They don’t seem to be impressed.”
All of which leaves Allie Beth nonetheless firmly answerable for the Dallas luxurious market. “She’s the Energizer bunny,” as Sweet Evans places it. Allie Beth, greater than anybody, is aware of tips on how to deal with an financial downturn; it’s how she received her begin, method again within the days of the financial savings and mortgage disaster. And in any case, even with the slowdown of 2022 and the looming chance of a recession in 2023, Dallas–Fort Value stays one of many strongest actual property markets within the nation.
“It’s actually my outlet since my husband died,” Allie Beth says of her work. “I’m so fortunate to have one thing that I like that I can get again to. I hope I die exhibiting a home.”
Someday, after all, another person will occupy her throne. One identify that fuels a variety of hypothesis is Amy Detwiler, the Briggs-Freeman defector to Compass who impressed others to comply with. Perhaps Teffy and Kim Jacobs will emerge from their mom’s shadow, or possibly Allie Beth’s handpicked successor as CEO, Keith Conlon, will develop right into a dominant power in his personal proper.
Or maybe the following Allie Beth will look completely totally different and produce a completely contemporary perspective—somebody like Elliman’s Andy Anand, whose gross sales quantity at present is nowhere close to that of the business giants however who represents adjustments available in the market that the prevailing social order won’t even but acknowledge. Anand bought his first Highland Park property, a $6 million house, to a pair of Pakistani American docs, in November.
Allie Beth thinks the brand new Allie Beth has but to emerge—that it’ll be anyone who strikes out on their very own, “anyone who builds an organization,” she says. “It must be.” There are many nice salespeople in Dallas. However Allie Beth was at all times greater than that. As Doris Jacobs is perhaps the primary to attest, it’s one factor to be the highest vendor, the queen of Beverly Drive, the identify to know. It’s one other factor to be Allie Beth Allman.
This text initially appeared within the August 2023 challenge of Texas Month-to-month with the headline “The Queen of Highland Park.” Subscribe today.