Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The Michael Hatfield Remax team presents real estate and more.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Bay Area real Estate is different than all of America. And why? What's up with buyers? What's on sellers'minds? How is the market? And much, much more.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Now here's your host, Michael Hatfield. Good morning. My special guest today is a man who I've known and respect, vector for many decades, prominent in our community. He has come from humble beginnings and through considerable hard work and a whole lot of talent, has created several successful businesses. His first business was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Marty and his brother were the proprietors of the sawmill. Through investing in commercial real estate, he now holds ownership interest in many wellkept and attractive office buildings. And for moments when he has slack time, he devotes it to his first love, his girls, grandchildren, and, oh, yes, Arabian horses. Extend a warm welcome to the founder, and some of us still have their furniture. The sawmill founder of Sherman Properties and owner of the Sherman Arabian Horse Ranch, my handsome, good friend, Marty Sherman. Good morning, Marty.
[00:01:15] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me on your show. It's really appreciated.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: It's my pleasure, Marty. We've been acquainted for an awful long time, a lot of years. And one of my observations with you is that when you greet people, you have this unbelievable way of making that person believe that they're the only person in the world. You listen with interest, with a smile on your face. And I have to tell you, I've observed that, and I actually have copied it a few times trying to get that talent going, too. Would you say that that has contributed to your success over the number of years of business as well as other?
[00:01:59] Speaker C: Well, first off, thank you so much for the compliment.
I just like people. I just like people. And if I'm on the sidewalk and walk by somebody, I smile and say hello, it's just me. Because people are the answer to everything.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Even if you don't like them, you still smile at them.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: If I don't like them, I don't walk on that sidewalk.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Well, many of us today still have that awesome sawmill furniture in our homes, that solid oak furniture. And I still have the solid oak sawmill desk that I bought back in, what was it, the 1980s? Dates me a little bit. How did you ever get started in the furniture business?
[00:02:47] Speaker C: My dad, my family, my mom and my dad were in the wholesale beauty and barbershop supply business, and it was a dog business. They worked so hard.
And somehow when I started working there when I was 17, I just thought, hey, my parents are really something to do this and put up with everything that they put up with with slim margins et cetera. And my dad passed away early on and my mom said to me and my brother boys don't let this business do to you what it did to your dad.
So it wasn't too long before we changed our direction.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: So did your whole family work alongside you back then as they do today? I mean was it towards the later years of the sawmill when you recognized that hey, family is so incredibly important and to be able to work alongside your family trust what they do it was just so important.
Did you recognize that? And then when you developed the desire to own the commercial buildings that you transferred that work ethic of your family to buying commercial buildings?
[00:04:13] Speaker C: Well when I was very young when my dad passed I can't remember exactly what it was but I just had so much respect for my parents because they worked together. My mom took care of the books.
My dad would wait on customers et cetera.
I was young. 1718 Somewhere in there, maybe even a little younger and I saw the stress that my folks went through. I'm not going to say that they didn't make a reasonable living because they did just fine. They raised me, my sister and my younger brother Ronnie and my mom said, I remember her very distinctly. Marty, don't let this business do to you what it did to dad.
And I could see that. I could see the different things happening day after day. So my brother and I just decided to go a different course. That's the Bottom line.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: And there became the sawmill and I think you had like five locations at the time. Seemed like there were five that I recall back from doing business back in the day.
[00:05:29] Speaker C: We originally started in the same building in Oakland that our folks had their business in. It was a waning business. It was a wholesale beauty and barbershop supply business which there isn't a business like that anymore. They used to sell beauty and barbershop equipment and supplies and we knew the owner of the building and when we sold out the merchandise from the beauty supply business we just stayed there and we started in the furniture. There it goes.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Now I recall when we were both much younger seeing you on television riding this beautiful Arabian. I think his name was George. Would you credit George for making you popular or would you credit you for making George the Arabian popular?
[00:06:24] Speaker C: I think that horse today is probably much more popular than I am or mean. It was dominant because everybody remembered that horse. I'll give you a quick story how that happened.
We had a guy doing some television work for us and we were up in the Oakland Hills doing a film with some furniture in the picture. And a little, young girl, a young, young, little girl came up to me and she, you, could you use my horse? Could you use him in your commercial? And I said, where's your horse, honey? And we were up in the Oakland Hills and I told her, Go get your horse. She told me it was there in a stall somewhere. I said, well, go get your horse and we'll put him in the commercial. We wound up with a horse in the commercial, a donkey in the commercial, and some goats and just different animals. And that horse thing just stuck. It was either the horse or the little girl that stuck, but it stuck and it just became the way we presented.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Know, I've heard the Arabians are quite a breed. They were the preferred horse of George Washington, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte. Apparently this breed impressed even the top historical figures. And I guess it's been around since, what, 4500 years or so.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: I think it's the first breed there was. I think it's the first breed there was.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: And the Bedouin tribe was the actual responsible party for bringing the Arabian into existence and making them to where that they would cooperate with man. That was one of their main things, is to get a horse that would cooperate instead of throwing you off and running you under a tree and knocking you off. Right.
[00:08:25] Speaker C: The Bedouins saw the horse as unquestionably their very best friend. It was extremely important to those folks. And still today, it's their pride and joy.
It came from the Arabian. Yeah. Wow.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Well, we are talking with one of the most known and prominent horse breeders in the area with Sherman Ranch. This is Marty Sherman and I got a couple more questions on these horses before we start talking a little bit about real know. Different breeds are known for different traits and like thoroughbreds are known for athletic ability and agility in racing. While some traits that you recognize in the Arabian breed, you don't really rope and ride cowboy, compete on Arabian, do you?
[00:09:26] Speaker C: Well, some people do. That's not what we do. There's a few little things about an Arabian horse that come from their original upbringing. Number one, they have longer eyelashes than the other horses do, not to where you could see it, you have to understand it. But that was to keep the dust out of their eyes out in the Arabian desert. Wow.
And they have one less vertebrae than the other horse breeds do. So they're a little shorter backed, which makes them a little tougher to an extent.
But every horse of any breed has its own characteristics, and that's why they wind up doing what they're doing. The Arabian horse is predominantly a pleasure horse today, and it's shown in all kinds of different ways by all kinds of different people. And so what we do may be different than what other people do with the Arabian horse, because you can use them as a cow horse, you can use them as a this or a buggy horse or anything, but they can do just about anything.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: The traits are just amazing. They have a different face to them than a thoroughbred or a quarter horse or any other horse that you would see. They just have different look to them, and they're just so gorgeous. And I do believe that there's one color, the gray and the white color seems to be the predominant color that most people identify as an Arabian horse. Now, you said something before that was very interesting about all Arabians when they're born about their color.
[00:11:34] Speaker C: Well, pretty much all of them are born a brown color. Their coat is born as a brown color. And a horse that is going to be gray could be. We have horses right now that are five years old and haven't totally grayed out yet. It's something that happens over a period of time. And the significance of color is some people like this, some people like that the gray horses are not near as dominant as the bay or the grays or whatever, and they slowly gray out over a period of time.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Well, they're sure know. Occasionally the Sherman ranch puts on a coming out of folds, and I remember going to one that you had just coming out of the period of COVID and there were like thousands of people out there to see these beautiful, beautiful young horses that were very young. They were coming out. It was like a debutante thing for horses. It was incredible. And you had such a nice production. Your family had put that on so beautifully.
People were parked out there along the highway for miles. It was just an unbelievable event that your ranch did, and I can see why you love these horses so much.
[00:13:11] Speaker C: But we would just. First off, I'm not doing the work anymore. I have two great daughters that are. I won't tell you how old they are now.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: I know.
[00:13:23] Speaker C: And I have a couple of two grandsons.
Actually, I have three daughters. I'm sorry. And a granddaughter. And they're the ones that I'm busy with my other business, and my daughters are running the farm, along with my little granddaughter, Peyton, that just turned 19. And, yeah, we throw a big party.
We have a big lunch available for everybody, and we do a baby shower. We show the young new foals that maybe we've showed them, like, when they're three days old, we just bring them out one at a time. And, yeah, the people love it. They're amazed because most people don't get to see this kind of stuff, but it's fun, and we meet a lot of really good folks. And, yeah, we do that. In fact, we're going to do it again this next year. I don't know exactly what the timeline will be.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Sure, we know we'd love to show.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: Up because my daughters are running the show.
It's not me that's making things happen anymore in the horse.
I love it, and I spend a lot of time with my daughters. I go to the shows we show all over the country. And my little granddaughter, Peyton has. She's an exceptional rider, and she's breaking the horses. Now, we don't send them all out to a trainer. Peyton, she gets those horses going, and sometimes we will send them out after they're up and going to show them.
But it's now the girls that are running the show.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: I got know last season on the TV series Yellowstone. I think it was the last season, but I remember seeing this episode where the beginning cowboy Jimmy was charged with collecting the sperm sample from a stallion. And the first time I'd ever done that, and he was under the auspices of a lady veterinarian that was putting the hammer on him a little bit. And, boy, that was a funny scene. Is the collection of the male part of the breeding equation still done that way, or has it changed over the years?
[00:15:58] Speaker C: Oh, it's dramatically changed over the years.
Bring the sire to the mare, and if the mare is ready to breed, the mare will let it all happen. If not, you're going to be doing it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day until. That's a short version of how it works. But things are completely different today. Well, the horses, they don't see each other.
We check the mares to see if they're in, if it's time to breed them, and they're in a different barn than the stallions are. And when the mare is ready to breed, most of the semen. Now, most of the semen comes from somewhere else in the country. If we're not using our own stock.
The semen comes from another part of the country overnight. And when it comes, you have to pick it up at the airport and it comes in a box, and you breed the mare that afternoon. And if you've done everything right, you may not have to breed her again to get her installed.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: So a lot of it is in the confidence of the people that you're working with on the other end that actually put the box on FedEx. You have to have a lot of confidence in those people that they're doing the right thing. If you didn't have confidence, you could get anything. You could end up with any type of horse, and that would be really a problem.
[00:17:35] Speaker C: Well, the people in our business, everybody is very solid, and they know each other. Yeah. So we breed, obviously, to our own stallions, but you have to go outside to make other things happen. So everybody, every horse that you might breed to will bring a different something to the party. And so that has a lot to do with our success because we breed to our own stallions and we breed outside to other people's stallions from all over the country. Wow. And we've had phenomenal success with that over the years, and probably more so in the recent years than in the past. But just fun. And it's fun, and it's exhilarating, and it gives you a great feeling of accomplishment.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Well, that's certainly a great reason to be in such a wonderful business. As you know, I know your brother, an amazing man, Ronnie. He's your younger brother, you call him. He did not quite have the level of interest in horses that you do, though. He loves animals. He raised them on a very large ranch, which Nancy and I sold for him a couple years back. With horses, either you have to have that intense interest or you don't. So let's digress or change gears a little bit. Go into the commercial real estate thing. Your first real business. I know that you had the building from the beauty supply, but your first real purchase of a business was in Oakland. I believe it was the lion van. And moving location several levels high. How did that happen, Marty?
[00:19:31] Speaker C: Well, we were in the old building that we had started in, and we'd been there. We'd been in business two years, approximately. And a couple of young real estate guys came to us and they said, you need more space. You need more of this, you need more of that. We've got a great building for you, and we want to show it to you.
I told them, Ronnie, and I told them, hey, guys. They were young fellas that we knew from the real estate business, and we said, hey, we appreciate your thought, but we have absolutely no money. We're just trying to get this thing going. And they hounded us. They were in our office every third day, and they finally came in and said, well, I'll introduce you to Dr. Lyon, who was. I'm trying to think. He was a medical doctor. I can't remember what he exactly did, but we'll introduce him to you. He wants to meet you. He's dealing with the next door neighbor, but the next door neighbor is chiseling on him, and he just doesn't like those people. And you guys, he'd like you. So I want to introduce you. Can you meet us up at this building? So we met him up at this great big high six or seven story building in Oakland. It was a lion vantage storage building. It was 102 years old, and their family was completely gone. And the building was sitting there empty. And he told us, he says, well, very nice to meet you guys. And I think he asked, how old are you guys? And we told him, and he said, well, I'll tell you my situation.
My mother is gone. She just died a little bit before that. And I'm older now. I don't have any purpose for this building. I want to find a buyer. And we said to him, we just don't have any money.
And he said, well, we can work something out. And the real estate guy said, let Mr. Lyon work something out.
So we wound up buying that building, and we didn't give him any cash down.
We had to do some remodeling to the building, which we have a lot of friends that came and helped.
So we wound up in this big six or seven story building in Oakland that was right on the freeway. Right on the freeway.
And when we moved up there, maybe six months after that, after we had the building in shape, it was an instant success. And that's what started things for us.
And from there, we wound up through a whole bunch of different means, getting our hands on a number of properties.
My brother and I made up our minds we're not going to open a store if we can't get our hands on the real estate, because we knew, 2030 years downstream, that it was really about the real estate, not about the business. Although we had a ball with the business and we loved the customers, and we did extremely well. But we wound up with six buildings around the Bay Area. And most of those we bought under some kind of circumstances where it was somebody that owned a business there. And they were in the later years. And we built a building or two, but we had six buildings all around the Bay area.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Here's a personal gem that I've seen. If we represent buyers of a home, of a house, or of anything, and we can project to the seller that this is really a great buyer. Quite often the seller really wants to put someone in that house or in that building that's going to do something with it. So that's part of the job of a good real estate agent, is take the two young Sherman boys and put them into this building, even though they don't have any money.
The gentleman said, you know what? They'll make good use of this building. And in residential real estate, it's the same kind of thing. If you can convince the seller that the buyers are really great people and they're going to love that house, residential is going to be just absolutely wonderful.
To me, that's the golden lining. It's a fun thing to do, and if you can do it, and I want to just say that I've been to a number of the Sherman properties buildings around the Bay Area. They've always maintained them very nicely done. Even during COVID They didn't have a lot of issues with tenants not paying the rent, because people know that those buildings are well maintained. They have a responsive management team. You can use the term landlord if you wish that. Take care of them. But I mean, you see them all. They have flowers up front and they're always nicely paved. And I had to help Marty put his shoes back on because he's paving a lot in one of his buildings, and he had the shoes that got stuck coming in the door. So I had to help him do it. So I just have to appreciate someone that takes great care of their properties the way that the Sherman properties do.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Well, we take the attitude that, first off, we don't want anything but nice property, good property, a good piece of ground that it's sitting on, and a good location.
When we're hunting property, we look for the location, depending on what purpose we're looking for.
We look for the location. We look for how solid is the property.
We don't really look at the immediate condition because we don't mind going in and doing a lot of things to upgrade the building.
We only look at good stuff. We don't want any secondary stuff. And you, Michael, you were involved in a sale that we made in Danville, California.
It was, once upon a time, an old, old residence. It was very old, and we bought that building and then we brought it back to life. And you're the one that sold it.
A great job, I might add. But we just had a great time with that building. We like to take things that are kind of stuck in the mud.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: And you do such a wonderful job, Marty, I want to thank you so much for being on the show this morning. And it's just been a great, great morning talking with my good friend, Mr. Marty Sherman of Sherman Ranch and Sherman Properties. Hearing from a person who has made it from Ground zero to success, investing in commercial buildings as well as other businesses certainly has given us some important things to consider. If you're interested in leasing, call Ryan at Sherman Properties at 925-788-9698 that's 925-788-9698 and if you're interested in horses, like everyone, it seems like, give a call to Jill Sherman at the Sherman Ranch at 925-216-6316 you're listening to real estate and more. We'll be right back in a moment with our next special gas.
