Mr. Neary is a serial entrepreneur opening his first business while attending the University of Texas. While attending law school, he opened Rhett Butler’s – a high end prime rib and lobster restaurant. Rhett’s was sold in 1974 and in 1975, the gain was redeployed to On Your Mark, an early entrant into the athletic shoe store business. After four stores were open in Simon malls, Melvin personally invested in the company and it grew exponentially, and was sold to Foot Locker in 1979, giving them an entrée into Texas.

Melvin then offered Michael as position with Melvin Simon and Associates as his “monkey boy”. After three years of sitting in on every meeting with Melvin, Simon made a very substantial investment in Dimension Companies, allowing Michael to enter the real estate business. Dimension grew substantially building 3,000 + apartments for Balcor; several Embassy Suite Hotels; developed over 4 MM square feet of shopping centers, including mall development partnerships with Simon, Homart and Paul Broadhead. Dimension made the first Home Depot lease in Texas and did the first Cinemark lease. Dimension also formed several real estate service entities including Saratoga Capital, Broadhurst Company, and Dimension Management Services, providing capital market work (both debt and equity), office leasing, and property management. Home office staff was 125+ people.

In addition to real estate, during the 1980’s Dimension began in “activist investing” partnering with Drexel Burnham, Belzberg family, Bear Stearns, Jeffries, and Icahn Enterprises. Significant investments included Aloha Airlines, Southland Financial Corporation, MasterLock, and Southland Corporation among others.

When the Texas banks collapsed in the late 1980’s Dimension regrouped and formed a venture with Alan Paulson and raised over $100 MM from Vintage Club members to acquire distressed RTC assets. These assets were leased, refinanced, and sold in the late 1990’s, generating enough capital to revitalize our development program in early 2,000. IRR on this platform was in excess of 50%. Dimension then began developing master planned communities in California, Texas and Florida – selling lots to national and major regional homebuilders.

Anticipating the 2008 financial crisis we liquidated 90% of our assets in 2007, keeping only Shadowrock Town Houses, a $25MM project in the Roaring Fork Valley (Aspen) and several major development tracts in Austin. Dimension has a number of new initiatives. After dodging that bullet, we have developed over 10,000 lots in the Greater Austin area. In addition, we formed Sentinel Title Company and invested in mLogica, a very interesting technology company.