Steve Selig takes the lessons life tries to teach him to heart.
Humility, for example, was instilled during Selig’s time working in Jimmy Carter’s presidential administration. As a deputy assistant to Carter in the late 1970s, he toured then-top secret nuclear fallout bunkers in West Virginia only to find a lesson staring him in the face.
“There were cots for each person of importance with their name on it for indispensable personnel,” Selig said, listing off government departments. “I was looking for my name, and I didn’t have one. I was dispensable. That’ll make you humble.”
Selig said the wisdom taught through life experiences — both good and bad — has played an invaluable role in molding his career. Through politics, music, volunteer work and his family’s business, Selig has used what he learned to help shape Atlanta. Along the way, he’s earned status as one of the city’s most respected leaders and real estate developers.
“He’s a legend in business,” said Chris Ahrenkiel, a former Selig executive who is now managing principal in Atlanta for real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield. “But he’s also a legend in many other facets.”
Now 82, Selig says it’s time to pass along what he’s learned and hand over the reins of his family’s namesake company Selig Enterprises to the next generation.
“I’ve had a very good run from my White House days to the rock n’ roll business to the national Jewish community and to the civic (work) here in Atlanta,” Selig said, adding that, “It just feels like the right time.”
Credit: Courtesy of Selig Enterprises
Credit: Courtesy of Selig Enterprises
Selig’s daughter, Mindy Selig, and his nephew, Greg Lewis, will assume the roles of co-CEOs starting Jan. 1. The elder Selig, who has held the company’s top leadership position since 1986, will remain as chairman and co-owner alongside his sister, Cathy Selig.
Over the past four decades, Steve Selig has left his fingerprints on Atlanta as the city matured into the Capital of the South. The company holds one of the Southeast’s most prolific real estate portfolios, spanning more than 15 million square feet and housing 1,200 business tenants.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Many of those spaces are Atlanta icons, housing stalwart restaurants including Silver Skillet and Manuel’s Tavern. The developer has also made new skyline additions such as the Google-branded tower at 1105 West Peachtree St. in Midtown. Large mixed-use projects in Sandy Springs and LaGrange also extend the company’s influence outside Atlanta’s core.
Through the decades and change to come, the family holds certain mantras to steady the course. One saying Selig said he has seen play out across his life is plastered on a wall in the company’s headquarters, a quote from his mother Caroline Massell Selig.
“You can never do wrong by doing right.”
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Behind the scenes
The history of the Selig family runs deep in Atlanta and intersects with another well-known lineage in the city.
At the turn of the 19th Century, the Seligs and Massells arrived in Atlanta after immigration from Germany and Lithuania. The families founded chemical and real estate companies.
Massell Properties formed in 1918 but would rebrand as Selig Enterprises following the marriage of Steve Selig’s parents. Born in 1943, he was raised within the family business, but took his own path while attending the University of Georgia.
While his cousin Sam Massell was amid his term as Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, Selig served three years as UGA’s student secretary-treasurer. But when he ran for student class president his senior year, he learned something about political influence through defeat.
“That’s when I realized I wanted to be behind the scenes,” he said. “I did not want to be the candidate — I wanted to be the person helping the candidate.”
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
That led him to Carter’s orbit, serving four years as effectively the president’s chief liaison with the business community. He also helped lead Carter’s 1980 reelection campaign, which was another informative defeat.
Selig helped manage concert fundraisers for Carter, rubbing elbows with the likes of Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight and the Allman Brothers. Selig later helped take the network he cultivated back to Atlanta and co-founded a music promotions company that morphed into what is now Live Nation.
Through those efforts, he’s credited with helping to bring Music Midtown and the Chastain Summer Concert Series to Atlanta.
Prudent and patient
Selig unexpectedly became president of the family company in 1986 when his father, Simon “Slick” Selig, died in a car crash.
Many lessons passed down from father to son have stuck, especially when it comes to real estate strategy.
“We don’t sell things,” Steve Selig said. “We are long-term holders, and we hope to hold them long enough to develop.”
The company’s buy-and-hold philosophy was made possible because Selig Enterprises had diversified income streams, ranging from tenants’ rents for industrial, residential, office and retail properties to parking payments from subsidiary AAA Parking.
“If one segment is not doing well in the economy, unlike some other companies, we have the rest of the company to lean on,” Selig said. “ … Our diversification gives me patience.”
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
That conservative approach, while stable, has evolved over the decades.
Steve Selig remembers when his son, Scott Selig, approached him with ideas of assembling Midtown property for high-rise development and buying abandoned Westside warehouses for mixed-use conversion. Steve ultimately gave the greenlight, believing in his son’s pitches, and they paid off handsomely.
The former led to skyscraper developments at 12th & Midtown and 1105 W. Peachtree St., which is now anchored by Google. The latter is the Works, the first phase of an 80-acre development that acts as a center of gravity in West Midtown.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Scott Selig, who was poised to become his father’s successor, died of cancer in 2017 when he was 47, devastating the tight-knit family. But his real estate outlook is a perspective now burned within his father’s psyche.
The development landscape has been challenging since the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw construction costs balloon, interest rates rise and office demand plummet. Ahrenkiel, who oversaw Selig’s office leasing and development for nearly eight years, said that even when times get tough, Selig is known as a company that prioritizes its employees.
“In the Great Recession, when everybody was laying people off, not Steve,” Ahrenkiel said. “The loyalty he has to his employees, and then in return they have to him, is unmatched.”
But Selig’s buy-and-hold strategy means the company has 10 sites around Atlanta primed for development or redevelopment when conditions are right.
Ansley Mall, one of Selig’s retail projects, could be the first ready for action. The backside of the 16-acre property off Piedmont Avenue abuts the Beltline, turning a back door into a new entryway on the closest thing Atlanta has to oceanfront property. A pedestrian bridge accompanying restaurant Lewis Barbecue now connects Ansley Mall to the Beltline, but more may be coming.
“I think we’re getting ready to spruce it up a little bit — maybe more than just a little bit,” Selig said. “We’re going to improve it.”
Selig’s step back within the company comes at the full trust of his co-successors. But he also isn’t the type to retire and divorce himself completely form the work he’s cultivated his whole life.
“My life is like a five-legged stool, and each one of those legs is important: My family, friends, faith, community and business,” he said. “When one of those legs is not together, my life is wobbly.”
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