He quietly built an empire

One of Southern California's largest office landlords, Dan Emmett, apparently missed all the memos from Donald Trump about how to act like a real estate mogul.

Although his company owns one of the most desirable office towers in the region, Emmett's personal office is blocks away in a Santa Monica low-rise. On his utilitarian desk, homemade paper signs taped to boxes say "in" and "out."

Notoriously press shy, the 68-year-old Emmett is so little known that people often assume his first name is Douglas because the company he co-founded in 1971 with Jon Douglas is called Douglas Emmett Inc. Each of them put up $7,500 to start developing apartment houses on the Westside.

"I get called Doug all the time," Emmett said.

Today Douglas Emmett is a public company with more than $6 billion in assets including the tallest building in Santa Monica, which consistently commands some of the highest office rental rates in the region and has few vacancies.

"We bought it during a recession," Emmett explained, as if the purchase might be considered extravagant because "trophy properties usually trade at a premium."

Buying real estate at the right time sounds simple enough, but Emmett has a special knack for it, said Douglas, who is no longer involved in daily operations of the company. "The guy has great intuition and great judgment."

Because profits were hard to come by in the early years, Douglas started a residential real estate brokerage on the side "to get some cash we could live on," he said. By the time the partners sold it in 1997, Jon Douglas Co. was one of the biggest brokerages in the country.

Meanwhile Emmett, as chairman of Douglas Emmett, kept a low profile while acquiring buildings in desirable locations, especially the Westside.

Most of them are offices the company leases to small white-collar businesses, but Douglas Emmett also owns a handful of prime oceanfront apartment buildings in Santa Monica and Hawaii, along with the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

The storied mall celebrated in pop culture as the lair of the San Fernando "Valley Girl" was renovated by Douglas Emmett in the late 1990s and turned into a combined office, shopping and entertainment complex.

In recent months, waves of news about the housing downturn, job losses and ongoing credit crunch have begun to depress the commercial real estate sector. PricewaterhouseCoopers last week reported that employment cutbacks were beginning to have an effect on office space demand in several markets, and some analysts are forecasting declines in commercial real estate values of 20% or more.