For whom bell tolls: real-estate mogul Steve Bell still puts in 15-hour days for his company and investors because he thinks it's "neat.".

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: FEATURE

In a conference room at his company's headquarters, a gray-haired man whose 59-year-old physique is beginning to assume the contours of a pear fishes in his pocket for a crumpled Burger King receipt. He points with pride to the senior-citizen discount on his lunch. "I was glad to get that 47 cents."

Steve Bell wheels and deals, but he's no slickster. He peppers his conversations with the word neat. "It was a neat opportunity," he says of buying a Burlington shopping mall in the early '90s, a watershed for his company. As for why he's in real estate: "I just thought that being involved in the ownership and management of investment properties would be a neat career." But details of deals stick in his mind like flypaper: He counts at least 500 since starting his company in 1976.

Greensboro-based Steven D. Bell & Co. owns and manages two-dozen shopping centers and other commercial properties--about 3.5 million square feet--18,000 apartments and 11 retirement homes in eight states. Its portfolio is worth $1.7 billion. The 675-employee company bought and sold $550 million of real estate in 2004--its most active year ever. Among those deals was one for its first skyscraper, the 21-story Wachovia Tower in Greensboro, for which Bell agreed to pay $36 million. He's mogul material.

But moguls usually don't lunch at restaurants with drive-through windows, show up on their neighbors' doorsteps toting bags of produce from their backyard gardens or shag on the dance floor with all the swaying grace of the Geico gecko doing The Robot. Bell is the anti-Trump. What's missing is more than the brashness, bad hair and TV contract. He's a walking contradiction who works 15-hour days on nine-digit deals while keeping track of his spare change, a guy who relishes the time he spends both at Atlantic Beach and across the Atlantic Ocean on African safaris--he has been to Africa three times and is going again in October. His name graces nothing as splendid as Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal casino resort, but he has hit the jackpot with properties that are heavier on function than flash.

Bell might be the unlikeliest deal king in North Carolina, and who better than himself to put that in perspective. A while back, he was walking from his car to his office when he spotted a penny on the ground. It was muddy, but he popped it in his pocket anyway. "I thought if I ever get so much money that I don't care about pennies, then maybe my values are changing."

He has played cards more than 20 years with the same group of guys at Greensboro Country Club--losing, he admits, more than he has won. He prefers playing a hunch when he can perform due diligence on it. But even then, he won't bet the farm. "The real-estate business is a gamble, period," says Ed Harrington, the company's president. "Steve is as risk-averse as you can be in this business." To understand the man, dissect one of his deals.

It's an overcast Sunday afternoon. Rain has begun to fall. At Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, autograph hounds troll the course at the Jimmy V Classic charity golf tournament. Nearby at Cornerstone Shopping Center...