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The 25 Million Dollar Man
Strategic and visionary thinking have enabled real-estate expert Jay Shidler to give a landmark $25 million to the renamed Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Since founding The Shidler Group in Honolulu in 1971, the UH graduate has acquired and managed more than 2,000 properties in 40 states and has founded more than 20 companies, both public and private. He does more than $3 billion in acquisitions a year.
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| THE WINNAH: UH Board of Regents Chair Kitty Lagaretta, Shidler College of Business Dean Vance Roley, Jay Shidler and UH Manoa Chancellor Denise Konan celebrate Shidler’s $25 million gift. photo: Cory Lum |
“Honolulu is now on the radar screen as a hot market and it’s going to be noted as a super hot market” says Shidler. “I would expect that we would acquire at least one significant building a year for the next couple of years in Honolulu.”
The Shidler Group looks smart as the owner of 10 percent of Honolulu’s office inventory, having started its current buying spree with the Pan Am Building and Davies Pacific Center in 2003, when the market wasn’t so great. Now, Shidler says chances are pretty good that Honolulu office rents will go up by a dollar a year over the next year. Over the next three years, Shidler expects development announcements for up to three new downtown office buildings, which would reverse more than a decade of quiet there.
He’s got a longer horizon for his gift to the university. Shidler says, “My opinion is to be a great state you need a great university and a great university always has a great business school. A great business school provides the commercial leadership of the community five or ten years after the gal or guy graduates. Visiting faculty can also provide a valuable resource for our local executives and I think that’s what I envision happening.”
- Kelli Abe Trifonovitch
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THE LIGHTER SIDE OF PLANNING Comments by Mike Foley, Maui’s planning director, on Maui’s critically overburdened infrastructure. He made these statements to about 200 people at an annual meeting of county planners on Oahu in August. • On Maui’s success working with state Department of Transportation on its infrastructure woes: • On his immediate plans to deal with workforce shortages on Maui: • On Lahaina, the island’s worst traffic area: • On the benefits of persevering through several hours of county planners talking about their infrastructure inadequacies: -Scott Radway |
The Bounty of Dog
when we ran the cover story about duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman in our June issue, we expected some crossover readership. Sure, it was a business story, but as A&E’s top-rated show, we expected some new readers based solely on the show’s popularity. But then a guy from Virginia called us to see if we had any magazines in stock after an eBay auction for the Dog issue started getting pricey.
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There were people on eBay bidding well over the $3 rack price for the issue. The tops was an eBay user from Germany, who, on June 11, paid $46.88 for the magazine. Other copies went for about $25, some for about $10 each. We sent a few emails to the seller, who goes by the handle Blowtorchfn, but received no response. It appears he would like to keep a low profile. Maybe Blowtorch also doesn’t want his customers to know they could have called us and gotten the issue for three bucks.
As we examined the sales history of Blowtorch, we found he had some other interesting transactions. Not only was Blowtorch selling our Dog issue, he, or she, was hawking A&E’s full-page ads for the Dog wedding episode, which ran in The Honolulu Advertiser (one fetched $4.99) and a story about Dog in Midweek (one went for $3.99).
Perhaps eBay sales should be considered next time people debate the value of Dog to the economy.
He’s certainly given Blowtorch some extra spending money.
-Scott Radway
 Hawaii Business defines often-spoken words, new and old, to help you make sense of what’s being said. |
Frying spam: -Lisa Ro |
Where We’re Growing
Oahu might be the most populated island in the chain, but it’s not the fastest growing. In fact, it comes dead last in percentage growth, according to U.S. Census estimates from 2000 to 2005.
| 2005 POP EST. | POP GROWTH ‘00-05 | % GROWTH ‘00-05 | |
| STATE |
1,275,200
|
63,700
|
5.3%
|
| BIG ISLAND |
167,300
|
18,600
|
12.5%
|
| MAUI |
139,900
|
11,800
|
9.2%
|
| KAUAI |
62,600
|
4,200
|
7.1%
|
| OAHU |
905,300
|
29,100
|
3.3%
|
Sun of a Gun
Local entrepreneur Darren Kimura has another bright idea. The founder of Energy Industries (EI), a national provider of energy services, has pumped $800,000 of the company’s money into Sopogy, a startup that has developed a proprietary solar technology best suited for coastal climates with high humidity. Places like Hawaii.
In fact, at the time of this writing, Kimura was on track to close a $1.5 million round of funding and gearing up for an October groundbreaking on a demonstration project at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA) in Kona. Sopogy’s specially-designed panels capture solar heat and focus that energy into a tube of heat-transfer fluid. The super-heated fluid passes through a turbine to produce electricity. The process can also create other products, such as drinking water, hot water, air conditioning, steam and hydrogen.
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| HOT STUFF: Sopogy’s solar collectors are designed differently than these panels in the Mojave Desert, because Sopogy’s will be used in tropical climates. photo courtesy Darren Kimura |
Investors have taken notice.
“We’ve had so much interest from [Silicon] Valley, it’s been absurd,” says Kimura. “We’ve had term sheets worth millions of dollars, but they also want you to move to the valley.” So, he hasn’t signed them. Kimura is passionate about keeping Sopogy in Hawaii, for now. For the future, he intends to follow the sun.
Kimura notes that one of the the largest IPO of 2005 was a solar company called Suntech Power Holdings (NYSE: STP), and the man who took it public “is now the richest man in China.”
-Kelli Abe Trifonovitch
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