Martin (Mickey) Smith III is Chairman of Martin Smith Inc, a Seattle commercial real estate investment company specializing in landmark office buildings. Smith's father, H. Martin Smith Jr., established the company in 1974. Mickey quit the University of Washington in 1976 to work with his dad, and together they built one of the city’s largest property management firms. Smith, who also serves as Director of the Matthew G. Norton Company, a Seattle real estate investment and management company, has had a hand in owning and managing approximately 1 million square feet of office space in downtown Seattle. In this two-part interview with HistoryLink's Casey McNerthney, he discusses his family’s rich history in Seattle – including family connections to Doc Maynard, Ivar Haglund, former Seattle Mayor Leonard Smith, and, most important, Henry Broderick, the famed civic leader and president of Seattle's largest real estate firm. This People's History, abridged for length, is from an interview conducted June 20, 2024, at Smith's office in Pioneer Square.
Alki Beginnings
Casey McNerthney: It was your great-grandfather who had 300 acres on Alki?
Martin (Mickey) Smith III: I think it was my great-great-grandfather who had 300 acres on Alki and his name was Hans Martin Hansen. And he bought the property from Doc Maynard, which is an old Seattle family that you might've heard of. I don't remember the year that that happened. And it was, I think 320 acres, and I know they added another a hundred acres sometime later. And they had a big dairy farm on the property. There were only two families living on the property in those days. They ended up building a hotel out there called the Stockade Hotel, which was a big, beautiful log cabin-style hotel that people from Seattle would come and spend the weekend. And that hotel has since burned down, but there's still a remnant there. There's a log cabin restaurant out there on Alki Point that was part of the project at one point. I don't know how it fit in, but that's the only piece that's left ...
I understand that Hans Martin Hansen was the first lighthouse keeper for the lighthouse out there. In fact, before the lighthouse was built, he used to take a lantern out and leave it on the point at night, and then finally the Coast Guard or whoever was in charge of lighthouses around the country realized, that's probably a good place so they built the lighthouse. And he and another family were entrusted with the job of making sure that it was lit every night and put out in the morning. And so that was a big part of the history of our family on Alki Point ...
The 300-plus acres that they had, they lost all of it during the Depression because they were unable to pay their real estate taxes except for two city lots. And those two city lots is where my grandfather raised his family. That's where my father was born. And he had a house on one of the lots and a garden on the other lot, and I used to go out there as a young child in the summer and help them work in their garden and mow their lawn, et cetera. And I spent many, many hours with my grandfather talking about what life in West Seattle [was like] and how it was when he was growing up.
He was actually born in Houghton, which is a little town right outside of Kirkland, but then he moved out to Alki Point when he was a young child and he lived in the Stockade Hotel for a while, but he also was an avid beachcomber and he claimed that he interacted with the Indians that would come along on the shores. And in fact, in my grandfather's later years, he became an avid carver ... Ivar Haglund was a cousin of my grandfather's, and the two of them were very mischievous ... In the later years, my father and Ivar became very good friends, and we became partners in real estate, and Ivar was on the board of Martin Smith when it first started as a company. The two of them owned the Smith Tower together ...
A little sidebar is my wife, whose name is Patricia, comes from a family also from West Seattle, the Doty, D-O-T-Y family. Her grandfather was a teacher at West Seattle High School and was the football coach and the baseball coach and the golf coach, and many, many people knew him as Coach Doty. And so my mother-in-law was a West Seattleite as well ... I'm talking about the West Seattle part of the Smith family, but the name Smith came from another side. My father's great-great-great-grandfather, who was a gentleman named Leonard P. Smith. Leonard P. Smith came to Seattle in the 1860s, and he was amongst other things, mayor of Seattle ... And he also was a jeweler, and he had Seattle's first jewelry store is what I was told ... Again, I can't prove that, but he had an early jewelry story in Seattle. And that was at the time of the Gold Rush, so it was a big deal with gold coming in.
Role Models
CM: What are some of the biggest influences from (your father) that have guided you?
MS: My father, aside from being smart and hardworking, he had integrity. He really had a huge amount of integrity, and his word was his bond. And you knew when you shook hands with him that you had a deal. He would never, ever not do what he said he would do. I watched him when I got involved in the business, and we'll get into that a little later, the history of that, people trusted him. They knew that he was the kind of guy that if he said he was going to do something, he did it. And believe me, the real estate industry is not famous for people like that ...
He was always the first guy in the office in the morning, and he was one of the last to leave. He was extremely loyal to all kinds of people. Because of his background, he was working with a lot of the heads of companies, big name people in Seattle, but he also had love and affection for everyone that was in his industry, from his tenants to the contractors that worked in his buildings, to the janitors that cleaned his buildings, and they all knew it. And he treated everybody the same. And I learned that from him as well, that it had no bearing on their social status or their income or their race or anything. Once you got to know him, he was extremely loyal to him, and they were friends more than they were business associates. And I learned a lot of that from him ...
When he went to the University of Washington, he (played sports). I think they saw him and said, "Hey, this guy looks like he could be an athlete." And so they recruited him and he played football. He was a wrestler, and he threw the shot put, and he was a nine letterman – nine letters at the University of Washington in three different sports, so that's pretty incredible ... I think that's where he learned about being a team member and teammate ... And then the war happened, and it obviously changed his life drastically.
He came back and finished school and the way he ended up getting into the real estate business, he was a member of the Fiji House [Phi Gamma Delta] at the University of Washington. And when he was graduating, a gentleman by the name of Henry Broderick came to the Fiji House looking to hire some people. And my dad sat in on this meeting and Mr. Broderick talked to them about the real estate business and property management, et cetera. And my dad said it sounded pretty good. He really didn't know what it was, but it sounded good, and it was a job, and they offered him a job. And my dad came home and told his girlfriend, my mother, about the fact that he had just taken a new job, and she asked him, "Well, what's the salary?" He says, "I have no idea. I forgot to ask."
CM: Wow. What a great chance meeting.
MS: Yep, exactly. True ... Henry Broderick Incorporated was a company obviously owned and started by Henry Broderick, but it specialized in a lot of things. Number one, where my father was focused was commercial real estate, which included sales, leasing and property management. And then there was also residential real estate where they would help ... They sold houses and they then also had a big insurance group that sold insurance, so it was a pretty big company for Seattle at that time, dealing in those markets. In 1968, I think it was ... Well, by the mid-'60s, my dad had worked himself up to becoming one of six partners at Henry Broderick, and my dad was in charge of commercial property management. He ran buildings for other owners who would hire Henry Broderick to manage their buildings. And at that time, Seattle was definitely not on a national or international investment target. It was mostly local families that owned buildings, and those families would hire Henry Broderick to manage the buildings and lease them. And that's what my father was in charge of.
In the mid-'60s or late-'60s, Henry Broderick sold to what was then Coldwell Banker and Coldwell Banker was owned by Allstate Insurance Company at that time. And my dad went from being a partner to an employee of this company that Coldwell Banker was based in Los Angeles, and they had a rule that if you were related to somebody in the company, you couldn't go to work there. In other words, I would not have been able to go to work for Coldwell Banker because my dad worked there. And my dad, after about three or four years, my dad realized that he didn't want to continue working for Coldwell Banker because he didn't have the input he wanted at the top level of the company, strategic decisions, what they should be focused on ... They released him (from his non-compete clause) and he started Martin Smith Management Company, I think in 1973 is when he did that, which was the year I graduated from high school.
CM: At Mercer Island?
MS: At Mercer Island, that's right. And then he proceeded to build up the property management business, and we'll go backwards a little bit and forwards, I was just getting out of high school, going into college. I was convinced I was going to play in the NBA because I was a pretty good high school basketball player.
CM: For Ed Pepple?
MS: Yeah. I played for Ed Pepple, which was a great part of my life, but I then was a walk-on at the University of Washington playing for Marv Harshman. But at the beginning of my sophomore year, I came to the realization that I might not make the NBA since I was having a hard time making the varsity at the University of Washington ... And so I decided that I was going to quit basketball, which was a very difficult decision for me but at that time, my dad had started his new business. It was he and a secretary, and he needed somebody to come to work for him. And I did. I was available because I had hung up my basketball shoes, but my college schedule was set that I'd go to school in the morning and I'd go to basketball practice in the afternoons, so instead of going to basketball practice, I went to work for my dad in the afternoons. And after about a year of that, I realized I was learning way more in the afternoons than I was in the morning. And so by the time I was a junior at the University of Washington, I decided to hang up my college and go to work full time. I always said I would come back and finish some day, and I haven't.
CM: You've done quite well.
MS: I giggle about it because there's another well-known gentleman in Seattle who's the same age who did the same thing, didn't finish college, but has been fairly successful by the name of Bill Gates, so I think I'm okay.
CM: You're in good company.
MS: Exactly. And my brother, Greg, who's six years younger than me, exact same thing ... I learned every day, and I learned from so many great people that I was exposed to, not just my dad, but the engineers in the buildings would take the time to explain to me what they were doing and how to repair things and why it should cost X, Y, or Z. I learned who the good contractors were to do work in the buildings, but those people, because of their relationship with my dad, took me under their wings and explained to me what they do, how they do it. And to this day, that's invaluable because I understand way more about what motivates the air conditioning, maintenance contractors or the tenant improvement contractors or the elevator contractors. I've been in the trenches with those people since I was a very young man.
Early Days in Business
CM: Can you go through where that first office was?
MS: The first office was in the Dexter Horton Building. We managed the Dexter Horton Building for a company that was out of New York, which was like a foreign country to me, some really great old Jewish men. The one who I recall the most, there was a gentleman named Harry Ball, and Harry was the world's greatest guy. He had come to Seattle and my dad used to tell the story there was some work that needed to be done to the Dexter Horton Building to bring it up to current fire code, this was in the early '70s … The fire department comes into the meeting and Harry immediately pulls out his wallet full of a hundred dollars bills and starts trying to give money to the fire marshal to buy him off, to explain, we don't want to do this work, but would it be okay? And my dad (said), "No, that's not how we do business in Seattle." But it was a good experience to watch all that happen ...
We went from a three people office to probably a 40-person office by the early '80s. And we grew pretty fast ... And then there was another gentleman who was in charge of the residential division. The first account we had residentially, I think was the Sixty-01 apartment complex in Redmond, which was a giant apartment complex, a number of buildings that had gone into receivership. And they had hired my dad as a receiver. My dad was very well known in Seattle and did a lot of receivership work for the courts ...
The Dexter Horton Building never went into receivership, but it was sold three or four times during the time we managed it. It was in the late '70s, it was sold to a gentleman named Byron Meyer, who was a San Francisco real estate investor who I then ran the building for. Mr. Meyer became a very good friend of mine. He was a really smart man who taught me a ton about the real estate business and how to do it and how not to do it, again. And I helped him buy and sell probably 10 different properties in and around Seattle over the years of my experience with him. He was also an avid and very famous art collector in San Francisco, and I went to New York with him several times and got exposed to the art world in New York, which would never have happened had I not had the relationship. And it was a great experience ... He was like another father to me in a lot of ways. Obviously, he wouldn't replace my father, but he and I traveled a lot and I really enjoyed my time with him. But it was a good example of how you mix business and pleasure and your business becomes your life. And that Mr. Meyer is a perfect example of that ...
I think it was the year 2000, we sold our third-party property management business, Martin Smith Inc., which I'm going to go back on that one also and give you a little bit of history of how that evolved. But once we sold the third-party property management business, I lost contact with a lot of clients because I didn't manage their buildings for them anymore. I just managed my own buildings after I did that. But back to when we started in the '70s, we grew the business both in the commercial side and the residential side as an estate planning tool. My dad sold Martin Smith Inc. to my brother Greg and myself in probably '82, '83. And the first thing Greg and I did was sell the residential management business because neither one of us had any interest in it, and it was sold to the William A. Bain and Associates. I don't know if you know that name. William Bain was one of my dad's partners at Henry Broderick ... And he ran the residential management group, so it was a perfect fit.
Growing Along With Seattle
MS: And so Martin Smith went from a full-service property management to just commercial property management. Greg and I focused on the commercial property management business, and we were quite successful in building that business up to the point where by the mid-'90s, we were seeing how much money we were helping our clients make. And we saw if you could put money together, buy a property and run it properly, it's worth a lot more later than it was when you started. And so we started putting groups together to buy properties, and we bought a number of properties in the early '90s. By the end of the '90s, we came to the realization we had grown the property management business. I think we had 185 employees, and we were managing about 9 million square feet, which is a big amount of space for 65 different owners, so it was a very complicated business.
CM: A lot of relationships.
MS: Yes, a lot of relationships. And as the figureheads, both Greg and I had to manage these relationships and then make sure the buildings were properly managed, et cetera. But at the same time, we had bought some buildings ourselves, and we were coming to the conclusion we were making more money off the buildings that we had bought than we were on the property management side of the business, so we decided to sell off the property management side of the business, the third-party property management side of the business, and just keep the buildings that we owned. We would continue to manage those, but with a very much smaller group of people. We were very fortunate in 2000, we sold the business to Kidder Mathews, and that was really the start of their significant property management group. And I think we went from 185 employees down to 42 employees, which was a significant event in our lives ...
About nine months after we sold the business, the dot com bubble burst and our sales suddenly looked like a genius move. But it was all timing. It was all luck.
CM: And that's one thing about Seattle too, that I'm sure you know real well, is that for as big of a city it is, there are still elements of a small town.
MS: Absolutely. But it's a much bigger city now than it was back when I'm talking about it ... Back then, everybody knew everybody. And now, I don't know this as a fact, but most of the property in Seattle is no longer locally owned. It's property that's owned by big national investment firms or foreign investors or you name it. But it used to be that there were like 10 families that controlled most of the real estate in Seattle. That certainly is no longer the case.
CM: Is that shift over the last 30 years or the last 10 years?
MS: The last 30 years it's been happening, and I say this a lot, my dad was an expert in the art of real estate, but not in the science of real estate. And one of the things that I learned when we started growing our property management business, a lot of our clients were big institutions who were investing money in Seattle. And once they buy a building and they hired us to run it, they would explain their process for evaluating properties and how they would evaluate leases and present value analysis and all these scientific approaches, which my dad had no concept about those kind of things. His was make the best deal you can and things will work out kind of an approach, which believe me, even today, there's an art and a science, which real estate, and you got to balance them.
If all you do is you do the science, you don't succeed. And if all you do is you do the art, you don't succeed. It's a blend of those two factors, and that's where I think we're really good at what we do today because we understand both sides of that coin. And it's still all about relationships. There's no question about it, but you also have to be able to prove your point with your calculator.
Remembering Henry Broderick
CM: When HB met your dad at the Fiji House, what was your dad's recollection of that meeting? And can you go over that and how important that chance meeting was and also how HB's focus on the art of it and the relationships might've guided your family?
MS: Well, HB was somebody I didn't know. I met him numerous times as a young man or as a kid. I remember him coming over to our house socializing. HB never had any children. And so my dad was sort of an adopted son. He wasn't, but that was kind of the relationship. But when there were events at my house, HB would come, and I remember him playing his harmonica. He was a great harmonica player, and all the adults would sit around and sing and he would be playing the harmonica. And my dad and HB had a huge amount of respect for each other. And I think HB loved watching my dad succeed in the business and his family grow up, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't remember anything about that first meeting, nor did my dad ever really talk about it. All he did was extol the virtues of HB's way of running businesses and relationships, et cetera, time and time again ...
HB was a real character according to my dad. Their offices were in what now is called the Broderick Building, but it's the building at 2nd and Cherry, I think it was called the Bailey Building back in those days ... But the Bailey Building was where Henry Broderick's offices were, and they were on the corner, which was formerly – most recently, a Starbucks on the corner. And HB would sit in a beautiful office located in the back of that corner space. And then there was 10 guys sitting out front at desks. One of those 10 guys was my dad.
And one of HB's jobs outside of running Henry Broderick was, he was a parole officer. And so he knew a lot of parolees in and around Seattle, and they knew him and respected him. And they would walk into the office often and often they were inebriated, and they'd come in trying to get him to loan them $5 or a dollar or whatever it is. But HB always made time for these guys, and he would sit with them and talk with them. And my dad watched that carefully and learned a lot from him. But I know that my dad liked to say that HB would tell them, "I'll give you the money if you can tell me a joke that I haven't heard before." And that was the kind of guy HB would be with those type of people. And he was a great ... He cared about them and tried to help them as much as he could. And that was a part of HB. I don't think most people knew ...
HB was also very good friends with Joe Gottstein. Joe Gottstein was the founder of Longacres Racetrack. And in fact, my desk at my home today was Henry Broderick's desk. Henry Broderick gave it to my dad, and my dad gave it to me. But Henry Broderick got it from Joe Gottstein. At some point, Joe and Henry traded desks ... I have this beautiful old desk sitting in my home office that used to be Joe Gottstein's desk, which is kind of a cool story.
CM: What a treasure.
MS: It is a treasure ... I remember meeting Joshua Green Sr. that Joshua and Henry Broderick were compatriots and from the same time. And when I was young, you could see them walking down the street and they always had their white colored shirts buttoned up. And it's almost like they had a top hat, and a cane. They didn't, but that's what it felt like. And I remember meeting Mr. Green numerous times. I also met his son numerous times. But to meet those type of people in real life, even though I didn't know them, was a treat.
Mercer Islander
CM: Well, that's still pretty remarkable to have that connection. … Now, how did your family get to Mercer Island?
MS: I don't know the story to that, but I will tell you, my dad, once he got his job at Henry Broderick, graduated from school, he rented a house down on Lake Washington in Laurelhurst – it was somebody's little cabin on the beach in front of their big mansion. And then my mother got pregnant and my sister was born and they needed a new place, and somehow they ended up on Mercer Island ... I mentioned Bill Bain earlier of William A. Bain and Associates. Bill was my dad's partner at Henry Broderick. He lived on Mercer Island. And the house that we bought or that my parents bought before I was born was probably two blocks from the Bain's house, so that's part of some connection, but I don't know that as a fact ...
I was born in 1955 on Mercer Island. I think they've moved to Mercer Island in '54, if my memory is correct. And an interesting tidbit on my dad, he became a very big part of the life of Mercer Island because I've watched Mercer Island develop. I've lived there my whole life, and there aren't a lot of people that have, but there are some. I met my wife in Mercer Island in seventh grade math class. … But my dad went on, he became part of the Mercer Island school board, and he, at one point when he was on the school board, he had a child in kindergarten, grade school, junior high and high school, so there were four of us spread out. And so as a school board member, he would always say, "I got kids all through the system and I know what's going on."
CM: Can you walk through what your experience was like growing up on Mercer Island?
MS: Sure. It was an idyllic place to grow up because of its natural borders. As a kid, I was allowed to go anywhere except off the island, and the only way to get off the island is go on the freeway. And so I never went off the island ... When I graduated from high school on Mercer Island, my class was the largest graduating class ever from Mercer Island. It wasn't like Mercer Island's grown a ton since, it's just changed. But I had a great childhood. I remember leaving the house in the morning, kissing my mom goodbye, and she'd say, "Dinner's at 6:00, let me know where you are." And I'm gone. And that's the kind of life that I had ...
And I have so many good friends that I still consider good friends that I grew up with on Mercer Island. They aren't all on Mercer Island still. And times that I could tell you where we used to sneak down in early, early morning to go fishing off people's docks that weren't our docks, but they would catch us and let us stay. Nobody was like, "Get out of here." But it was just a great place to grow up, I can tell you. It was as close to Leave it to Beaver as you can get ... But Mercer Island is a great place to still live. The only thing is it's gotten too expensive. And so I think part of the reason why the schools started to shrink is young families couldn't afford to move there. And so it became slowly but surely older people that live there that didn't have young children. And so the school population shrank. Now it's come back a little bit, but still multi-million-dollar homes are difficult for people who are starting families. There are always exceptions to the rule, but that's basically what's gone on.
CM: The seventh grade math class where you met your wife, walk me through that.
MS: Well, I'm going to use the example of my dad meeting Henry Broderick by chance. Having my wife in my seventh grade math class was probably one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me, if not the greatest thing in my life. I walked into class and she and I were the only two that had braces. And so we sort of had a connection because we had braces, and obviously it wasn't day one, but over a period of a month or two, I got to know her and became infatuated with her. And we became boyfriend and girlfriend that year, and we were pretty serious for being in seventh grade. We were 12 years old, I think, and we broke into a church once on Mercer Island, probably as 14-year-olds, and got married just by ourselves.
But there were a couple of times where we broke up and I was in high school, a little full of myself, and probably wasn't the world's greatest person to have a girlfriend. But that didn't last long because I realized that was a big mistake. And during my senior year, we reunited and we've been together ever since. And it's just been a great, great love story, if I can use that term, but it is. The reason that it's fresh in my mind is yesterday was my 48th wedding anniversary, and she and I had the wonderful romantic dinner and talked a lot about our past and how lucky we are. And it is, it's just luck because how do you meet that person when you're 12 years old and know it? And I can't say that I knew it. If my grandson tells me that he's 12 years old and he met his future wife, I'd say, "Oh yeah, right." But sometimes it works out and it did for me, so I'm very fortunate.
CM: How did people start calling you Mickey?
MS: That's a good question, and I will give you the answer, but I don't know the next question and that is Mickey was my grandfather's nickname. Hans Martin Smith Sr. was Mickey as a kid, and then he became Bud as he got older. And for some reason they started calling me Mickey when I was a little kid, well before I was even aware, so I've always been Mickey. And so it's not been my favorite name, but it is me. And so that's fine with me. And I have a son, Hans Martin Smith IV, who goes by the name of Hans. Then I have a grandson, Hans Martin Smith V, who goes by Quin as in quintuplets ...
I'll give you a quick summary. Hans Martin Smith IV, Hans, is my oldest son and he has two boys, Hans Martin Smith V, Quin, and Eldon Smith. Hans is married to a woman named Sarah Shrock, and Sarah's grandfather was Eldon, so that's when the name Eldon came from, my grandson. They live in Twisp, Washington ... Hans just became the mayor of Twisp ... And then Ryan Smith is my younger son. Ryan works here. Ryan is the president of Martin Smith Inc, and he lives about 400 yards from me on Mercer Island with his two kids, Tommy Smith and Riley Smith. Tommy's 16. Riley's 13. And they're wonderful. It's nice to have them that close. I see them often and I feel very lucky that they can be as close. I miss seeing my other grandchildren, but I see them quite a bit, so it works out pretty good.
CM: There is something really cool about being able to grow up and work and have the same experiences where you did for decades.
MS: I'm a rare commodity in that I live a block and a half from where I was born. I've worked in this business my whole life, and so some would say, "God, that's boring." It hasn't been boring for me ... I like to bring back the ideas that I see and learn when I travel to the cities [like Hong Kong, New York and London] back to this city, because Seattle really went from a big town to a medium-sized city in my lifetime. And it is a world-class city for a lot of reasons, not population wise, it's not huge, which is fine, but I just think that we're so lucky, or I was so lucky to be born in Seattle out of all the places that we could have been born.
You look at all the wonderful companies that have started here and the amount of really smart people that choose to live here come from all over the world to live here. And they come because there are great companies that they come to work for, like Microsoft or Amazon or Nordstrom or Starbucks or Costco, Boeing. The list is a very long list. For a medium-sized city, this city has some really great companies that most people can't claim that. And so as a real estate person, I am so lucky that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft here, or that Amazon was started here or as I said the Nordstroms, every one of them, Howard Schultz, it is what has made this city great. And sure the city's gone through lots of pain and agony. COVID has been disastrous. The political climate changed, but it's swinging back now. And so I think we have a good future ahead of us, but I really feel lucky to be here.
Next: In Part 2, Smith leads a tour of historic downtown Seattle buildings
