Tops in business parks.

• Author: Dunlap, Phil
• Position: Merger of Duke Realty Investments and Weeks Corp.

Duke-Weeks merger creates the largest mixed office/industrial real-estate company in the U.S.

Of the more than 200 real-estate investment trusts across the nation, only two have reported 14 straight quarters of double-digit per-share growth in funds from operations, the industry equivalent of net earnings. Take those two companies and merge them into one highly successful enterprise and you have Duke-Weeks Realty Corp. of Indianapolis.

With that recent merger between Duke Realty Investments in Indianapolis and Weeks Corp. of Atlanta, Indiana became the home of the largest mixed office/industrial real-estate company in the United States, with a market capitalization of $5.5 billion. Duke-Weeks can claim ownership of 101 million square feet of property, with 920 buildings in 16 states from Minneapolis to Miami, from Dallas to the East Coast.

Combining the two companies seemed a natural course to take. Weeks is strong in the Sunbelt, whereas Duke has covered the Midwest quite successfully. "We can now fully exploit our combined strengths and market dominance," says Thomas Hefner, former chief of Duke Realty Investments and the new chairman and CEO of Duke-Weeks. "Currently, our $790 million development pipeline spans 85 projects, 15 cities and countless submarkets. Going forward, look for very strong momentum from our development machine."

How do two such powerful companies go about getting together? "We started looking at other public companies about 18 months ago," says Gene Zink, CFO, Duke-Weeks Realty Corp. "We sat in the conference room with eight or nine different companies, just talking strategies, determining...