June 23 1946
The Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Missouri, Sunday, June 23, 1946
Alexander Bisno in a Smiling Pose…He discovered Kansas City Apartment Hotels in 1941 and Promptly Pounced.
Alexander Bisno 'Discovered' Kansas City Hotels in 1941
Dealing for Equities in Apartment Properties Valued at 6 Million Dollars, the Chicago Broker Became a Symbol for the 1946 Landlord.
Meet Alexander Bisno of the broad shoulders and equally broad smile, who imported a Chicago technique to the Kansas City rental field. Mr. Bisno's shoulders carry quite a load. His deals have brought his clients, with Bisno himself participating, into control of Kansas City property valued at 6 million dollars.
The Bisno smile here shown is a bit of a camera smirk, because the smart man from Chicago doesn't smile unduly. He doesn't look normally as if he had just had a soul-satisfying breakfast of tenant woes. Bisno is not obsequious, but a factual talking man, unevasive, and one's opinion of his intelligence improves on interview.
Could Smell Inflation.
Bisno is said to have been no great shucks in the Chicago real estate field up to four or five years ago, but something clicked then. He began to trade around in apartment equities and he developed or assembled a clientele that could smell inflation and plan for it with zest if not outright enthusiasm.
In the process of taking over 6 million dollars in rental property, Bisno has had two outright clashes with Kansas City tenants, and in neither case could the tenants claim even a moral victory.
Bisno four years ago shook the dowagers and social elect out of Brookside, a family hotel of sedate character. He was aided by an army need for cadet housing, but the program of bisecting suites was carried out after the military left.
The Brookside colony was scattered among the Woodlea hotel and similar refuges of decorum and there was no great public anguish, the ousted characters being so definitely upper bracket.
Tenants Blunt in Past.
Nor will the rent skyrocket of the Railway Exchange tenancy go down in the literature of anguish. The Burlington railroad is no Little Nell. In fact it is recalled that on least expiration dates the tenants in the Railway Exchange building have talked plenty blunt in years past, conditions being what they were at Seventh and Walnut.
It would take more than memories of the Brookside and the shifting of the Burlington freight offices to make Mr. Bisno the rental wolf from Chicago.
Bisno is not a popular name in these parts. One would think that Mr. Bisno owns, controls or was the instigating broker in every instance where apartment equities were acquired at speculative figures, on small down payments, all this in calculating anticipation the country would lose in the inevitable post-war battle with inflation.
Actually, there were a lot of thin-equity buyers not on Mr. Bisno's lists. And landlords he does not know, and perhaps wouldn't like skimp their thinly margined hotels to get by to the happy day of the squeeze-to-come.
But in Kansas City Bisno roared in so dramatically with the old Brookside that his “discovery” of Kansas City is held to be the mark between two apartment epochs, that decade when the old owners were giving up their apartment hotels to the mortgage investors, and a new decade when a fresh crop of operators came to exploit 100 percent occupancy.
Bisno is 49 years old. His first deal here was for the Georgian Court apartments in 1941. The Brookside came a few months later. Bisno looked over Kansas City, decided he would have no competition from local buyers if he came in with Chicago money to bid on apartment hotels.
Now, whatever happens in rent ceilings, Bisno says he made no mistake…Since the war's ending, Kansas City as he appraises it, “has shown more industrial brawn and muscle than any comparable city”…That's a nice thing to say—and Mr. Bisno is his own best public relations man in various encounters.
“I don't particularly care for Bisno,” said a Kansas City broker yesterday. “I think we would be better off if he stayed in Chicago, considering his methods and his objectives, but the fellow, definitely, has a million-dollar personality.”
