talking business
Richard Shorkey: Independent Owner of the Year
By Emily Landes
Like many young San Franciscans in the early 1970s, Richard Shorkey dreamed of buying a rundown Victorian in the Haight and bringing it back to its former glory. He and his girlfriend found the perfect place on Masonic and Oak streets, a pre-quake fixer with lots of charm, and bought it from the elderly daughters of the original owners. But Shorkey never moved in. Instead he stayed in his rented apartment and fixed up the 6-unit property to rent to others, becoming a landlord while remaining a tenant.
For the next few years, Shorkey bought a new distressed building a year, often working in conjunction with his girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend. “We would always look for the ability to add value,” he recalls. “We were both reasonably handy with tools but we both had other jobs, so we’d work nights and weekends.” They would get off work and head straight to the latest property. Then they would stay at the building, painting, wiring and nailing until the early morning hours. They would go home for a few hours of sleep and then head off to work again. “Looking back at it, I’m not sure how we did it because we were stretched pretty thin,” he adds.
Eventually, both couples broke up. But the two men continued to buy properties together and Shorkey and his former girlfriend (now both happily married to other people) still own their first property together. In fact, he still owns pieces of his first few buildings and wishes he had held on to more of them over the years. Even though he only sold buildings to buy others, Shorkey says he should have “begged, borrowed and stolen money” so that he could have kept them all.
This philosophy only extends to his San Francisco properties, he admits. Whenever he has gone outside the city, to buy properties as close as Oakland and as far as Chico, he says the buildings just weren’t the same. “It wasn’t San Francisco,” he offers by way of an explanation. “Owning here, I really like the buildings. It’s why I was attracted to San Francisco: you look around and it’s beautiful. How can you not like it?”
In fact, Shorkey believes that owners are really just “stewards” attending to the city’s century-old buildings and that landlords must put the same amount of effort and care into their rental properties as they put into their own homes—if not more. “It’s easy to take care of your own house, but if you own rental property, you’ve got to stay on top of it,” he advises. “It’s important to take care of the property, and by taking care of the property you give people a good place to live.”
Perhaps it was this pride in and care for the city’s building stock that endeared Shorkey to the judges of the SFAA’s first Trophy Awards as he was given the award for Independent Owner of the Year. Shorkey says he was “stunned” and “humbled” to even be nominated and was fairly sure he had no chance of winning. “There are a lot of people like me,” he shrugs.
In fact, Shorkey almost didn’t even submit his application for the award. As it turns out, as SFAA was preparing to celebrate its ninetieth birthday by honoring the industry’s best, Shorkey was preparing to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of his mother, and getting ready for the big bash was taking up a lot of his time. He looked over the application a few times, but always put it away because he didn’t think he’d be able to commit to completing it. Finally, he decided it was worth the effort for such an impressive award.
Looking back on it now, Shorkey is “still almost speechless” to have won the award, but he’s also glad that he took the time to sit down and really think about how he felt about his properties and all that he has done and continues to do to care for them. “I spoke from the heart,” he says, which included commending the whole team of people who help him run the properties, including West Coast Property Management, which nominated him for the award.
Even though Shorkey is now semi-retired and leaves the day-to-day maintenance of the buildings to West Coast Property Management, he still comes into the city from his home in San Rafael once a week to check on his properties, and the properties of other independent-owner friends, who have come to entrust him with the care of their buildings. He isn’t checking for anything specific, just making sure that common areas are clean and tidy, trash pick up is running smoothly and small leaks don’t turn into big plumbing emergencies.
For Shorkey, there is nothing worse than an uninvolved and uninterested owner. “Some owners hire a management company and then they wash their hands of it and just wait for the monthly checks to roll in,” he admonishes. “They complain because the water heater goes out and it costs a lot of money to replace because they don’t understand that that’s part of owning the building. I believe the management company is not the captain; I’m the captain. They’re part of the team.”
Shorkey wishes his fellow “captains” got more credit and says so much attention is placed on the big owners that the small guys often get overshadowed. That’s one reason he is so honored that SFAA carved out a special award just for independent owners and hopes that another owner wins the award the next time around. “I think I do a really, really good job, but I don’t think our properties are the best in the city,” he admits. “I can drive around and in 15 minutes I can see 30 properties I’d love to own; they’re so beautiful. So, I’m sure that the people who own those are doing just as good a job, if not better, than I do.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine and Rental Housing. Copyright © 2008 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.