Bill Levitt, Joseph Eichler, Leonard Miller, Ray Ellison, Kevork Hovnanian, Ed Ryan, Isaac Heimbinder, Bob Strudler, David Hill, Barry Berkus, Corky McMillin, Arthur Rutenberg. These are just a few of single-family housing’s icons, enormously influential, and forever inspiring. But alas, no longer with us to celebrate.
We started BUILDER’s Hall of Fame in 2008, with an eye to celebrating our business and leadership icons while they’re still with us.
We’ve welcomed just five individuals in the past eight years: Ryland Homes founder Jim Ryan, PulteGroup founder Bill Pulte, William Lyon Homes founder General William Lyon, Standard Pacific Homes co-founder Ron Foell, and this evening, at the Housing Leadership Summit in Dana Point, Calif., we have the honor of welcoming two gentlemen who can stand toe-to-toe proudly among our business community’s most impactful, important, and yes, inspiring individuals, living or passed-on.
They’re Bob and Bruce Toll, founders–50 years ago this summer–of Toll Brothers Homes. Yes, 50 years ago, there was no such thing as America’s Luxury Home Builder. The year was 1967, aka the Summer of Love.
Back then, young people would lounge around, burn incense (and draft cards), and smoke marijuana. Legions of them would cling to that ritual for years thereafter, before they evolved from flower children into the most well-educated, highest-earning generation ever in the history of anywhere.
Many of them are Toll Brothers’ best customers today; more aspire to be. Bob and Bruce Toll, who were already working in the family business during that era, did not share the interest of their contemporaries in buying pot. They wanted to buy lots. Home lots. At $1,500 a pop. Their father, Albert, did not approve. In late 1966, the first time 25-year-old Bob approached his dad about taking down two residential lots that Al Toll’s real estate development partnership was shepherding through approvals in Philadelphia’s Chester County, Penn., environs, Toll senior said, flat out, “no.”
Albert Toll had made it the hard way in residential and commercial land development, and he’d taken considerable pains to prepare his elder son for more, for better. Al had two brothers, four-time U.S. congressman Herman, and Joe, who ran hotels in Atlantic City.
Like Al, they had come to the United States in the early 1900s from Kiev, Ukraine. Unlike Al, they’d studied and practiced law. Although he’d acquitted himself admirably and successfully as a real estate developer and builder–doing apartments and commercial projects–through the 1950s, Al wanted his son Bob to be an attorney. He and his wife Sylvia sent Bob to Cornell University to do his undergraduate work and to the University of Pennsylvania to study law. He was confident in his son’s future, especially since Bob loved law school.
But, then stuff happened. Although he loved studying law, Bob didn’t love being a lawyer. No more than a few months into his first job at the Philly firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr, and Solis, Bob Toll decided the legal profession was not for him.
He’d been doing some entitlement work on the two lots his father’s company was to develop, and he’d obtained approval for an access road. He’d also decided that he wanted to develop those lots. That’s when Al said no. So, Bob did what any respectable child of his generation would do in a clash with a parent. He went to the parent’s partner, whom he enlisted in a campaign of persuasion. The partner agreed. At the time, brother Bruce, who’d finished his undergraduate work in accounting at the University of Miami, said he wanted in on the deal. With two sons, a lawyer and an accountant, no less, and a partner lobbying him, Al relented and came through with money, lot deals, connections and access to their first bank loans. Toll Brothers was thus born.
“We built two homes. Instead of selling them, we used them as samples for the ground down the street,” says Bob Toll, who is now 76. This was news to their bankers. “We showed up with contracts at the bank, and they said, ‘You know, you’re only supposed to be building two houses,'” he explains. “And I said to them, ‘Yes, but I have 20 contracts for homes people want to buy down the road.'”
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, 50 years later, Toll Brothers is America’s Luxury Home Builder, and that means something … not only in single-family homes, but in an increasingly important City Living, Active Living Apartment Living, Campus Living, with an average selling price in 2016 of $848,000, total housing revenues of $5.3 billion, owned-controlled lots of 47,800, and now a T-Select brand position to introduce young adults to Toll’s homeownership lifestyle.
For three years in a row, Toll Brothers has been ranked the #1 Home Builder Worldwide on the FORTUNE Magazine “World’s Most Admired Companies®” list. The Company was named one of America’s Most Trusted® Home Builders by Lifestory Research. Toll Brothers was also honored in 2014 as national Builder of the Year by BUILDER magazine.
Fitting that we should be celebrating Bob and Bruce at HLS at the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel, which was founded as a hotel company in the early 1900s, by Albert Keller. Keller transformed hotel experiences into what we delight in here at this venue–luxury, privacy, gourmet dining, fresh flowers, all the touches for a great experience.
Bob and Bruce have made their name synonymous with all that delight and experience in living. Bob’s dream is to put Toll Brothers right up their with Ritz Carlton, the Four Seasons, and all the world’s most powerful luxury brand names.
And it came down in major part to Robert I. Toll’s unique amalgam of leadership qualities—razor sharp focus, a passion for minutia and questions, the thrill of the deal, and a strong measure of humor in the mix.
A good number of you here share one or more of those same qualities that set you apart. We at BUILDER welcome to Bob and Bruce Toll, into our Hall of Fame. We know there are many home building company leaders who aspire to do, and achieve, and be, and mean what the Tolls have done, accomplished, and meant to home building’s very noble business community.
