Shopping Center for Money

If shopping centers can sell every thing from groceries to garden tools, why not create a similar center whose stock in trade is money? So reasoned David H. Murdock, a shrewd and restless Arizona real estate developer. As one of Arizona's leading millionaires, Murdock, 41, was in a position to answer his own question, and this week in Phoenix he opens the first financial shopping center in the U.S.

In a $7,000,000 complex--including a ten-story curved glass building, the first of two similar structures--Murdock has already installed a bank, a savings and loan company, an insurance agency, a title company and a stock broker, all of which have access to a Univac 1107 computer that will process their accounts. Murdock also hopes to have a finance company, a mortgage banking firm, a factoring company and other financial services in the center, so that a typical "shopper" theoretically would be able to settle all his financial affairs on a single trip.

Merger Made. Looking at the weakening real estate market a few years ago, Murdock figured that it was time to move some of his money into broader areas. "We've learned something from the Zeckendorf experience," he says, referring to the financial woes of Manhattan's William Zeckendorf. When he wanted a bank tenant for one of his new buildings, Murdock went out and formed his own bank. In 1962 he walked into the board meeting of Central Investment Co., a holding company whose directors were feuding, and bought a major interest on the spot. He acquired two more banks and a title company, then merged them to create the Financial Corp. of Arizona, in which he holds 30% of the stock. Under his direction, the company's assets have risen from $62 million in 1962 to $106 million.

To help manage his expanding empire, Murdock, who left school in the tenth grade, has drawn together a young, hard-driving team of college-trained experts in business and finance. His success formula is the developer's old reliable--tax-sheltered earnings, good credit and luck. He depreciates his buildings as fast as he can, borrows against the rising values of his property in the fast-growing Southwest.

Resolution Kept. Murdock has by no means laid aside the silver-plated shovel he uses for all his ground-breaking ceremonies, even though Phoenix is temporarily overbuilt. He has developed 552 million worth of real estate since 1960, and recently he met with Transamerica Corp. officials who are interested in building a new apartment-hotel-shopping complex in Phoenix. With all this activity, he has hardly had time to revise the New Year's resolution he made in 1961: to make his company, then valued at $25 million, a $100 million enterprise within five years. He has already surpassed that goal, now controls assets worth about $150 million.

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