Meet Dan Tatsch, senior vice president of Dallas-based Hillwood, a company created by legendary businessman Ross Perot. Since 2012, Tatsch has commuted to lead Hillwood’s AllianceFlorida at Cecil Commerce Center, the city-owned West Jacksonville industrial park that Hillwood serves as master developer. Among its notable names is the GE Oil & Gas valve-making plant and an Amazon.com fulfillment center.
The poster child for business park development is AllianceTexas. It started as an industrial park. Now you see a full-fledged community. There are industrial buildings and also office buildings, hotels, single-family residential, multifamily residential, retail projects consisting of both small neighborhood strip centers and big power centers, and even medical facilities, including a full-fledged hospital. Long-term, I’d love to see that kind of development occur at AllianceFlorida.
There’s a great labor base out on the Westside. Amazon’s new facility is testament to that. They don’t put a building up unless they’ve thoroughly vetted the labor market. They’re a very discerning judge of labor markets.
We just finished our second speculative building. It’s 407,000 square feet and designed to be split among multiple tenants. Obviously we’d like to do the same thing with this spec building that we did with the building that eventually became GE’s home. We’ve had some door-knockers. We’ve sent out some proposals. We’ve had some property tours. There’s no one that we’ve actually started drafting leases for, but that will come.
Real estate development with large companies, when done properly, is very process-oriented. Having that engineering degree, mind-set and experience helps me bring an order to what can otherwise be a very chaotic process.
Animal rescue, specifically dog rescue, is our passion. My wife and I got involved with a charity called Nowzad, which operates an animal rescue operation in Afghanistan. It was set up to help soldiers who were deployed and had adopted street dogs or cats and wanted to give those animals a permanent home. It’s probably helped bring back 1,000 dogs and cats to live with the soldiers who adopted them during their time in Afghanistan. I try to go twice a year. It’s a real good feeling. Some of our dogs are in Jacksonville. I’m going to look up their owners, and go say hi to those dogs again.
I saw Mr. Perot in the lunchroom today. He comes to the office pretty much every day. You’re as likely as not to see him in the common cafeteria eating lunch. We get to see him on a regular basis. Ross Perot Jr. (chairman of Hillwood) is very engaged. I think Mr. Perot spends most of his time on charitable activities that most of us will probably never even know about. That’s how the man is.