At the time of his loss of life, Mr. Foster — recognized to his legions of real estate brokers as “Wes” — used to be chairman emeritus of the corporate he based with Henry A. “Hank” Long in Fairfax, Va., in 1968.
Long used to be an Air Force veteran. Mr. Foster, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, had served within the Army. They had been each of their 30s and reasonably new to real estate after they mixed their names and ambitions to shape the Long & Foster logo.
At the outset, the 2 males “flipped a coin,” Mr. Foster recalled in an interview with the Washington Business Journal. “He got his name first. I became president. We took off.”
When they started the operation, they hired a unmarried real estate agent.
Long specialised in industrial real estate, Mr. Foster in residential. Mr. Foster purchased out his spouse in 1979 and, over the following 4 many years, constructed the industry into one of the biggest privately held firms within the Washington house and a behemoth of the real estate sector nationally, with operations in loan and agreement services and products, house owner’s insurance coverage and belongings control.
In 2017, Long & Foster used to be bought to HomeServices of America, an associate of Berkshire Hathaway, the keeping corporate headed through billionaire investor Warren Buffett. By then, Long & Foster used to be the country’s biggest unbiased real estate brokerage through gross sales quantity, The Washington Post reported, with 11,000 brokers in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Delaware and North Carolina.
In 2020, in line with the company website, Long & Foster real estate gross sales reached $34.5 billion.
Industry observers credited Mr. Foster with main his corporate via a profitable technology of building that prolonged into the outer reaches of the Washington suburbs.
“If you had to start a brokerage firm … there was no better place in the country to be than Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, when Wes started to expand,” Bill Regardie, the writer of the now-defunct Regardie’s industry mag, stated in an interview. “He founded and ran the most dominant, successful, richest real estate sales firm that Washington has ever seen and that the Mid-Atlantic has ever seen.”
Mr. Foster used to be additionally credited with main the corporate via recessions that periodically buffeted the real estate marketplace and the economic system as an entire.
“I really work toward making a profit, no matter how hard times get,” he instructed The Post in 1995, recalling one downturn when he minimize his wage to 0 to assist take care of the corporate’s margins.
Over the path of his occupation, Mr. Foster witnessed prodigious adjustments in the best way houses are purchased and bought. When he started, brokers maintained hard-copy data of energetic listings of their territory. With no lockboxes to hang from doorknobs, they needed to fetch keys ahead of taking shoppers on a appearing. There had been no web pages similar to Zillow or Redfin the place potential house patrons may peruse homes on their very own.
Mr. Foster stated the recruitment of a success real estate brokers used to be all the time at the core of his industry technique. The supreme agent, in his estimation, possessed each “empathy” and “ego.”
“If you have a lot of empathy and you don’t have ego drive,” he instructed the e-newsletter American Executive in 2005, “you might make a good priest, but you won’t make a good salesperson or sales manager. If you have equal quotients of empathy and ego drive, you’re a good person, but you’re aggressive and you make things happen.”
Mr. Foster grew his corporate’s ranks through wooing brokers clear of competing corporations and conserving those that labored for the smaller brokerages that Long & Foster purchased within the path of its growth. One longtime Long & Foster agent, Gary Ditto, recalled that Mr. Foster at occasions would assist haul bins into a brand new rent’s place of business.
Long & Foster were given its get started in a modest 600-square-foot place of business, however Mr. Foster wound up going to paintings in a sprawling headquarters complicated in Chantilly, Va. The design of the principle development there used to be impressed through the Governor’s (*89*) at Colonial Williamsburg. (Mr. Foster used to be a historical past buff.)
Paul Wesley Foster Jr., the eldest of 4 sons, used to be born in McDonough, Ga., on Nov. 25, 1933. His father labored at a Sears, Roebuck warehouse ahead of running a produce stand. His mom suffered from migraines and melancholy, resulting in what Mr. Foster described as a frightened breakdown.
“She was crying all the time,” Mr. Foster, who additionally suffered from debilitating migraines, instructed The Post in 2004. “That’s when things started for me. I got depressed, too.”
Mr. Foster instructed The Post that “even though we didn’t have anything,” he “wanted to be somebody.” He won a partial soccer scholarship to wait VMI, the place he won a bachelor’s stage in English in 1956.
Mr. Foster served as an artillery officer in Germany ahead of returning to the United States and starting his industry occupation as a salesperson for Kaiser Aluminum. His gross sales rounds offered him to developers, and one of them gave him a task promoting houses. Mr. Foster met Long via that paintings.
From Northern Virginia, they expanded into Maryland in 1974 and D.C. in 1977.
Eleven years into their partnership, the funding company Merrill Lynch made an be offering to shop for Long & Foster. Long used to be vulnerable to simply accept, however Mr. Foster used to be now not but able to promote.
“Hank really wanted to sell to Merrill Lynch, to take that money and for both of us to go be developers,” Mr. Foster instructed The Post in 1988. “I told him, ‘Gosh, I liked this crazy business.’”
After Mr. Foster bought his proportion of the corporate, Long turned into a industrial developer. He died in 2020.
Mr. Foster used to be inducted into the Washington Business Hall of Fame in 2004. Two years later, the soccer stadium at VMI used to be renamed in his honor in reputation of his monetary backing of the renovation of the college’s athletic amenities.
In addition to his stepson, survivors come with Mr. Foster’s spouse, Betty Foster, an artist; son Paul Wesley Foster III, and daughter Amanda Foster Spahr.
Asked to provide an explanation for his aggressive power, Mr. Foster instructed The Post that he used to be “born that way.”
“The excitement of the chase,” he added, “is fun.”