Northill.

• Author: McKenna, Lynne
• Position: Northill Corp. - Profile - Company profile

The Fort Wayne office of Northill Corp. only looks formal-green-and-cream marble floors, contemporary furniture and views overlooking a pond and trees. its employees, though, some 250 of them, often stroll through in shirt sleeves instead of three-piece suits.

The lack of pretension starts at the top. On a summer day, Northill's president, Thomas J. Eckrich, is likely to show up in the headquarters of the company he owns wearing a mesh-knit shirt and, perhaps, cowboy boots. But the casual approach stops with dress. There's nothing casual about this developer's growth. Best-known in northeastern Indiana for two projects-a premier apartment complex, Canterbury Green, and Fort Wayne's most luxurious housing development, Sycamore Hills-Northill is spreading its wings. in his southwest Fort Wayne office (in an office complex Northill is building), Eckrich talks of building more golf-residential developments, three or four new apartment communities a year and possible commercial projects. This conversation might seem a little incongruous in a year during which the national business press has been full of real-estate gloom-and-doom.

We stay the hell away from places that got overbuilt,' Eckrich declares. There are no Northill projects in Texas outside the state capital of Austin. Eckrich has no interest in going into California, where the rate of growthand the costs involved-deter him. The firm also has had no problems finding money. Northill's track record has kept lenders interested, Eckrich says, even as banking regulators started looking hard at many real-estate loans.

Eckrich, now 52, started building apartments 20 years ago. For the 10 years followis graduation from Notre Dame University, he worked in production and marketing for the Peter Eckrich & Sons meat-processing company, then owned by his family. Eckrich has said he knew a lot more about bologna than real estate when he founded Northill.

The Fort Wayne native got his start in real estate by working with an established developer, Harold Palmer. The pair knew enough about the city to pick a prime spot for an upscale apartment development. They selected a site on the fast-growing northeast side, adjacent to the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne and a few minutes from U.S. 30, for Canterbury Green, a 2000-unit luxury apartment complex. With a nine-hole golf course, washers and dryers in every apartment and wood-burning fireplaces in many, the complex became and still...