Chris Kitchen

Richard and Lisa Baker attend the plaque dedication for the Baker Program in Real Estate Oct. 23.

Starting out as a modest high school student and running a catering business as a teen, Richard Baker '88, a classic American success story in real estate, told the story of his career and family business Oct. 23 as part of the Cornell Real Estate Distinguished Speaker Series.

Baker and his wife, Lisa, earlier this year gave $11 million to Cornell's Program in Real Estate, now the Baker Program in Real Estate.

Richard Baker is the governor and chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, the world's oldest trading company, which operates Lord & Taylor, The Bay, Home Outfitters and Top Shop Canada. He's also a member of the advisory boards of the School of Hotel Administration and the Baker Program in Real Estate, which is housed in the Hotel School and the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

In high school, "I was a very mediocre student -- dead in the middle of [the] class," said Baker. After high school, he attended cooking school in Paris and then started a catering business. Soon thereafter he joined the family real estate business, which his maternal grandfather, Loomis Grossman, had started in 1932, taking it to new heights.

Grossman began as a "traditional New York City wheeler dealer," Baker said. "He was an expert in this narrow particular area" -- the Upper West Side. By predicting the timing of demand and supply levels, Grossman would bag the most lucrative deals at the lowest prices.

"He did this over and over and over," said Baker, whose father, Robert Baker, soon joined Grossman, his father-in-law, in the business.

In the 1960s, Grossman pioneered the idea of shopping centers -- one-stop shops for all family and business needs. Buying up 20-acre parcels of land from farmers near busy intersections, the two soon were building shopping centers all over the country in collaboration with large retailers.

After Richard Baker graduated from the School of Hotel Administration, his father urged him to join the family real estate business.

Baker credited his father for mentoring him, but also for giving him enough freedom to chart his own route in business. As a result, the younger Baker's astute business sense led him to recognize the immense value of the real estate that his family owned upon which the shopping centers sat. In the '90s, when many retailers began to go bankrupt, he started selling the shopping centers his father and grandfather had built to Wal-Mart, bringing that company to the eastern United States.

"We made a lot of money on those deals. We went deal after deal after deal for the next 10 years," said Baker.

In 2005, he took over Lord & Taylor from Macy's for $1.2 billion; in 2008, the investment arm of his business bought the Hudson's Bay Company.

This week, Baker said that he is taking the Hudson's Bay Company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, adding another historic milestone to the company's timeline.

Umang Prabhakar '13 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.