By ELIZABETH HAYES

Staff Reporter

Stanley Moore knows all about the roller-coaster ride of real estate cycles.

He rode the upward wave of the ’80s, developing more than 10 million square feet of industrial and office space in Los Angeles, mostly in the South Bay.

His firm, Overton, Moore & Associates Inc., threw lavish Christmas parties at the Biltmore Hotel with sit-down dinners and a “band that never stopped.” Up to 500 guests attended the bashes, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

“It was a way of saying thank you to our lenders, investors, suppliers, lawyers and architects,” said Moore. “Everyone would show up at Christmas time. There was great cheer.”

The parties ended abruptly in 1993, with the L.A. economy deep in recession.

“It just seemed inappropriate, given the gallows humor going on. We didn’t want to throw a party when everyone was down at the mouth,” said Moore, 60.

Not that Moore’s company could afford to be partying. Cutbacks in the defense industry, which had been concentrated in the South Bay, hit Overton Moore “unmercifully” hard. Saddled with a $700 million debt load, Gardena-based Overton Moore was forced to slash its staff in half and sell off much of its portfolio.

But unlike many developers that went belly up during that time, Overton Moore survived and remains among the county’s top five developers.

Moore originally got into real estate after going to work for developer Ray Watt (another survivor) in the early ’60s. Moore, a Cleveland native, started out as a ditch-digger, but after it became apparent that construction work was not his forte, he switched to marketing, leasing and sales, while taking business classes at night.

Watt sold his company to Boise Cascade so that he could join the Nixon administration. But four years later, Boise Cascade sold off Watt’s former operation and Moore and his partner, Jon Overton, jumped at the chance to buy it. After Overton suffered a heart attack in the late ’70s, he sold his interest to Moore. (Overton died last year.)

“It was my hope in the late ’70s and early ’80s that we could expand geographically” out of the South Bay, Moore said. He also wanted to expand from industrial buildings to suburban office and mixed-use projects.

Helping to fulfill that wish was the defense buildup taking place. Riding that wave, Overton Moore developed high-tech, high-security labs and offices in El Segundo, Redondo Beach, Cypress, Torrance and elsewhere.

“I didn’t know it was as good as it was,” Moore said of the go-go ’80s. “When we hit the skids, I didn’t know it was as bad as it was.”

The bad times, from the late 1980s through early 1990s, were bad indeed. Real estate values plunged 20 percent to 70 percent as the region shed 500,000 jobs. Demand for office space evaporated.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘This place is a casino going in the wrong direction,’ ” Moore said. “It caused us to consider a serious pause.”

By the late ’80s, Overton Moore had 15 projects underway around the basin, but it started selling completed properties to reduce its debt load.

In the end, the firm restructured its debt, paying creditors 90 cents on the dollar, and thereby avoided bankruptcy, foreclosures and litigation.

It wasn’t easy for Moore to sell off millions of square feet of property he had built.

“I hated to lose every square inch of it,” Moore said. “There’s nothing more stimulating than the creation of these projects from raw land to finished goods, and nothing more disappointing than when they become marginal or fail economically. So you have a kind of bipolar pinball effect as you go through the process (of selling it off).”

Once the recession subsided, Overton Moore found itself facing another obstacle real estate investment trusts. “Competing against them was a challenge,” he said. “Now it’s calmed down,” he added, referring to the REIT pull-back in the past year.

Overton Moore currently has letters of intent to purchase several developable sites, but the deals are not far enough along to provide details. The company currently owns and manages 8 million square feet of space, and it just finished building the $57 million Los Angeles Municipal Court near Los Angeles International Airport. (In all, Overton Moore has developed more than 20 million square feet of space.)

Is Moore worried about another crash? Not really.

“I’m maybe more cautious than a 35-year-old MBA who’s never seen a recession,” he said. “But the economy in Southern California is better off today than 15 years ago. We love the entrepreneurial (spirit).”