Geis brothers build foothold in Cleveland, bringing their family business from the suburbs to the city (slideshow)

In February, the Geis Cos. paid $27 million for the former Ameritrust complex, a vacant cluster of buildings and the site of the county's future offices at East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue. Now Fred, who is 54, and Greg, 45, are staking their reputation and their well-burnished family name on a property that other developers have struggled, and failed, to revive.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Erwin and Katherine Geis found the American dream in Northeast Ohio, where they arrived from Germany in the 1960s with suitcases, empty pockets and a hunger for something different.

Nearly 50 years later, the Geis name hangs on a construction fence at one of downtown Cleveland's most important intersections, where their sons are building a new government headquarters for Cuyahoga County and tackling one of the city's largest redevelopment projects.

Born nearly a decade apart in different countries, Fred and Greg Geis couldn't be more similar - or different. When one speaks, you hear the other's voice. Each provocative story is followed by one that seems more improbable, in a game of good-natured one-upsmanship that masks the fierce competition between them.

Their father, who developed industrial parks across the region, died in 2002. Their mother, the financial linchpin of the family business, died in January, as the brothers were waiting for Cuyahoga County Council to bless the headquarters deal.

With their parents gone, the brothers could have separated, as some friends and business associates expected. Instead, they drew together, committing to a downtown push that will require Fred's political savvy and Greg's drive, Fred's nuance and Greg's quick thinking, Fred's affability and Greg's intensity.

In February, the Geis Cos. paid $27 million for the former Ameritrust complex, a vacant cluster of buildings and the site of the county's future offices at East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue. Now Fred, who is 54, and Greg, 45, are staking their reputation and their well-burnished family name on a property that other developers have struggled, and failed, to revive.

"If they were born 100 years ago, they would have been out looking for Dr. Livingston," says William Miele, a family friend and a real estate broker with the Ostendorf-Morris Co. in Cleveland. "They would have been scaling Annapurna or with Hillary at Mount Everest. They would have been big-game hunters with Teddy Roosevelt. These are guys seeking adventure. They love the extraordinary."

From the start, a one-stop shop

"Back in those days, the family dynamic was stressed, to say the least. There was a lot of screaming going on at the Geis Cos. We were a much smaller company then. There were maybe 12 or 14 people company-wide, and four of them were Geises." - Greg Geis

Greg sits at his father's old desk, a heavy, industrial block of furniture with a steel-delivery schedule from 1983 still attached to one pull-out shelf. His office is dark, facing inward to the co-workers he considers an extension of his family.

Next door, the walls of Fred's office are a vivid red. Chandeliers sparkle. The windows look over a lake and lush trees just west of Aurora-Hudson Road in Streetsboro, the Portage County suburb where the Geis Cos. moved in 1996.

From childhood, Greg, the younger son, focused on the family business. Fred, the older brother, wanted to escape.

"For me, it was no choice," Fred says. "You had to come to the company. With Greg, he had choices and chose to come here. ... My idea of a family business was going to work every summer picking weeds and mowing lawns and [my father] yelling and screaming at me. Greg's idea of a family business was him coming to this office."

Fred was born in Canada, where his parents lived for several years before returning to Germany, then moving to Northeast Ohio. Greg, the family's third child, was born in 1967.

That year, Erwin constructed a single-story building in Macedonia to house tenants including Geis Tool & Die, a business started by his machinist brother in a Walton Hills basement. The tool and die shop never moved in, though, and Erwin found himself in the real estate industry - filling that first building, then replicating the formula along Highland Road.

Erwin dreamed up the projects, endeared himself to real estate brokers and charmed tenants. Katherine, called Katy by her friends, managed the finances, pinched pennies and encouraged restraint. When business was slow, Erwin kept construction workers employed by renovating the family's house in Sagamore Hills, overlooking the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

From the start, the company that became Geis Construction positioned itself as a one-stop shop. Erwin would provide the land, find the financing, design the project and construct the buildings. He was willing to be a landlord, a partner or a seller, depending on what the client wanted. By offering all those services within one company, Geis could control its costs and still make a profit.

"You would walk into his office, and he'd bring out this book that had to be three or four inches thick," Bill West, the chairman of Ostendorf-Morris and a close friend of the family, says of Erwin. "Everybody that he had built a building for, he would get to sign a letter saying he was the greatest guy in the world. ... If you ever had a problem with a building that Erwin built, he'd go back and fix the darn thing, whatever it was, at his cost. He was a man of reputation."

The couple spent cash on what they needed and reinvested the rest of their money in the business - a philosophy they passed to Fred and Greg, who are cautious about real estate borrowing and avoid the personal debt that so many developers thrive on.

In late 2007, five years after their father died, the brothers sold a portfolio of the family's industrial properties for just over $50 million. Fred and Greg won't discuss how much money they made from the sale, but they followed their parents' example and plowed the cash into the company.

"I think their equity position was probably close to 50 percent," Miele, of Ostendorf-Morris, said. "So give them $25 million. That's pretty good seed money. That's nothing for Bill Gates, but in little Cleveland, Ohio, that allowed them to do a lot."

The sale, as the nation unknowingly slipped into a recession and real estate values teetered, couldn't have happened at a better time. More than a transaction, it was a turning point - a shedding of history that fueled the reinvention of the family business.

A free spirit forced into the family business

"If somebody doesn't like one of us, they're going to like the other. As long as we know how to divide and conquer, it's not such a bad deal to be so different." - Fred Geis

Father Michael Surufka flicks water onto Fred, who jokes that he needs a blessing as much as his building does.

It's a chilly February day and the restaurant at the Agora complex is dark, without a tenant. Fred doesn't know what he'll do with the cavernous theater, a Cleveland rock landmark and money pit. At least there's the office building, where startups, tech companies and the city's newest radio station are settling in, drawn by the property's history and the cheap rent.

"My mom always blessed everything she owned," Fred says. "Let's get all the sins out of the Cleveland property. It's like an environmental cleanup."

Treading into urban territory his parents never would have touched, Fred is hedging his risks with a touch of immigrant religion. In Midtown, where he built a speculative office-and-flex building at the height of the recession, he buried St. Joseph statues for good luck and asked Father Mike to bless the property. Three years later, the building is 80 percent leased. And Geis is breaking even, leaning toward profitable, in Midtown.

Taller than his brother and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a deep tan, Fred can be intimidating. Business associates have seen him throw things in meetings, and he admits he has a bad temper - one that few people see.

But his smile lines are more striking than his stature. Relaxed after a few interviews, he slips and throws out the occasional curse word, followed by a laugh, a grin and an apology. During a day of meetings and property tours in Cleveland, he shifts seamlessly from tossing around off-color jokes with a construction crew to chatting with lenders and business executives at a meet-and-greet event.

"Fred's probably one of those guys who you meet for the first time, and you think he's one of the nicest guys you've ever met," says Rico Pietro, a broker with Cresco Real Estate in Independence. "You leave your first meeting with Greg and think, 'Wow, I don't know if I love him or hate him.'"

Erwin loved books, newspapers and classical music, but his appreciation for learning emphasized self-education, not the classroom. Fred recalls working at Brandywine ski lodge past midnight on school nights as a teenager. At 16, he dropped out of high school.

At 21, he received an equivalency degree and enrolled in construction-management school outside of Boston. In those early years, he married, twice. He got divorced, twice.

A free spirit who felt forced into the family business, Fred crept away several times. In the 1990s, he took over his father's stake in Dutton Contractors, a separate company. But Fred returned to the fold in 1996, leaving Dutton as his father's health deteriorated.

In 2008, after the portfolio sale, he took a year off to ride motorcycles with his son, Ethan. While Fred was gone, Greg restructured the business, splitting it into four operating companies - architecture, construction, development and property management, all led by longtime employees.

That move freed the brothers to follow their passions. Greg focused on the Geis brand and growth prospects for the companies. Fred, seeking distance and a challenge, dove into the city.

He and several partners took on the MidTown Tech Park, a new, speculative office building on a blighted corridor where the only apparent assets were cheap land, the new Euclid Corridor road project and the Italian grocer next door.

His mother worried. Friends thought he was risking too much.

"I really wanted people to think we were kind of crazy," Fred says, "because people don't imitate you when they think you're crazy."

A public-private partnership with the city, Cuyahoga County and the state, the MidTown Tech Park was a new urban experiment for Geis. Then the companies picked up two nearby Euclid Avenue buildings and started filling them with offices and medical tenants. Those redevelopment deals gave Geis and its contractors experience with environmental clean-up and rehabilitation - keys to urban projects.

"I kept telling him, just make sure you don't lose too much money down there so we can afford to use the suburbs to pay it off," Greg says. "But, frankly, he proved me wrong. And I got the fever."

At the Agora, the Geis development company stepped in to remake the property with a neighborhood nonprofit. Then Fred and two partners won control of the Avenue District condominium tower, a broken Cleveland project now repositioned as apartments commanding some of downtown's highest rents.

Fred and his fiance, Kris Monaco, recently moved into a two-story Avenue District penthouse they purchased and remade. It's a sharp departure from Fred's longtime home, a former Auburn Township party center he bought out of foreclosure more than 25 years ago.

Walking through that house, where he decorated one room each year, reminds him of who he's been. The downtown penthouse, the first home he's designed and built for himself, might be who he has become, or wants to be. Monaco brightened the space with bursts of purple. A hand-hewn wood table from California sits in the kitchen. The walls of the downstairs bathroom sparkle with Swarovski crystals.

The couple had their choice of penthouses, including a few with views of Lake Erie. Instead, they picked one that faces downtown, looking toward the city where the Geis family is staking its claim.

'Born and bred to be a construction worker'

"It wasn't until after our father died that Fred and I both realized, what the hell are we fighting each other for? Fight the world." - Greg Geis

To instill an old-world work ethic in his children, Greg turned a former dairy farm in Streetsboro into a working cattle ranch. His sons and daughter, now teenagers, were 10, 7 and 5 years old. It wasn't the 1960s anymore, and he couldn't lug the next generation to a construction site like Erwin did.

"One morning my wife couldn't get out of bed anymore from shoveling cow shit all day," Greg says. "I thought, 'This is crazy! What am I doing, trying to teach my kids how to work by killing my wife.'"

The Salvation Army got the cows - 28,000 pounds of meat. Greg's family got a brief respite.

Unlike Fred, who wears tailored suits with his name stitched into the lining, Greg prefers long-sleeved T-shirts, jeans and skateboard-style sneakers. He's smaller, more wiry than his brother.

Where Fred works out at a downtown gym in the mornings, Greg vents energy by cooking for his family and his coworkers. While Fred says business stops the minute alcohol touches his lips, Greg says he does his best work in a casual setting, over a few beers or Crown Royal on the rocks.

When Fred sits through a meeting like there's nowhere he'd rather be, Greg ducks in and out, checking on the progress of deals, grabbing a cigarette and returning with a baseball bat that he holds throughout the interview. The bat, a Louisville Slugger, was a 40th birthday present. He started carrying it around in an attempt to get his range of motion back after he broke his shoulder.

The shoulder-breaking incident occurred in Germany. He got beat up. He won't say more.

"Greg and Fred both, the shock value is there," says Rico Pietro, the Cresco real estate broker who befriended Greg after a cold call several years ago. "I think that a lot of the things they do are just to see what people's reactions are, more than anything else. It's tempered chaos."

Business associates say Greg doesn't like many people. The few he does like - and his family - have his unfailing loyalty.

"I do absolutely nothing but work and spend time with my family," he says of his wife, Patty, and his children, Gregory, Conrad and Alexandra.

Like his brother, Greg followed a checkered academic path. Asked to leave public school, he landed at the Old Trail School in Bath in fourth grade. He survived until eighth grade when, as he tells it, he was kicked out on his birthday.

"I didn't take any shit from anybody," he says. "I was a construction worker. I was born and bred to be a construction worker. I just didn't fit in there."

At Nordonia High School, he was held back after skipping more than 130 days of his freshman year. He took classes at Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga Community College, but he never graduated.

He doesn't care. It is, and was, about the family and the business.

At his first full-time job, a yearlong stint working at Dutton Contractors, Greg occupied a tiny office with a closet full of deer heads and hunting trophies preserved by one of Erwin's business partners. On his first day, Greg set a $10 million annual sales target. Before he left, the company surpassed that goal.

At Geis Construction, Greg became a salesman. His proudest moment was working with his father on a handshake deal with Sterilite Corp., which wanted a 2.3 million square-foot plastics manufacturing facility in Massillion.

But when Sterilite chairman Albert Stone asked Geis to replicate the building in Texas, the family wasn't ready to step outside Ohio. Sterlite moved on, working with another developer on a handful of projects. And Greg learned a lesson: "No is never the answer."

Now Geis Construction draws 60 percent of its annual revenues from work in other states, for repeat clients including A. Duie Pyle, a trucking company, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, which supplies lab equipment and other products to hospitals and the biomedical industry.

The construction business builds 1.5 million to 2 million square feet of real estate each year, while the Geis architecture firm works on more than 2 million square feet of projects. Geis Properties, which nearly disappeared after the brothers sold the family portfolio in 2007, has rebounded and now manages 5.1 million square feet of buildings - much of that owned by other companies.

During the recession, the Geis Cos. saw narrow gains, at times. But they stayed profitable. Since 2008, Greg and Fred have lived off their savings, forgoing paychecks so they can pay employees.

As other building owners defaulted, handed over the keys or asked lenders for a break, the brothers never missed a payment or walked away from a property. When they needed to, they bought out partners - leading to their new reluctance to enter equal partnerships with anyone outside the Geis Cos. family.

Greg goes to sleep at 11 p.m. Each morning, he wakes up at 3. By sunrise, he's several hours into the workday. During the last six months, he's ventured downtown, into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable world of politicking and schmoozing.

Networking, he says, is idle time - something that clashes with the ticking clock in his head. That clock started on a summer night in 1983, when Fred and Greg's sister, Katherine, died after her Porsche skidded into a utility pole. She survived the crash but was injured when a live wire fell on the car.

Her death, at 18, devastated her parents and left scars that her brothers rarely discuss.

"At best, I've got 163,000 hours left of my life expectancy," Greg says. "I don't want to waste them. A lot of people burn time. I don't have time to burn."

County headquarters another first for Geis

"Am I cocky about it? Yes. But I'm cocky about it because I know we're right. I just know it in my bones." - Greg Geis

In early February, Geis Properties took the Ameritrust complex out of Cuyahoga County's hands after eight years of stagnation. Two months later, contractors started razing a pair of low-rise office buildings at Prospect Avenue and East Ninth Street, creating a site for the county's new headquarters.

When Geis swooped in late last year with the winning bid for the property and the county project, the real estate community was shocked. Most onlookers were betting on an existing building, not new construction. And the audacity of the proposal - making the county's new home the anchor for a corner long associated with government waste and mismanagement - was striking.

The charm of the deal rested, in part, on price. By tailoring lease terms for the new headquarters so that Geis could afford to pay $27 million up-front, the county could boast that it received more than a previous administration paid for the property. And Geis, after five years of building credibility in Cleveland, could swoop in and steal a tenant that other landlords thought was a sure thing.

Fred says chasing Ameritrust was a natural step, after building a $50 million-plus foothold in Midtown. Greg, who once scoffed at Fred's interest in the city, says he pursued the project because he could. Because he knew he would win.

Either way, it was a competition - one that seemed, at times, as much fraternal as external.

"Greg is gonna go into this thing kicking and scratching with everything he's got," says Fred, who has deeper pockets than his younger brother but is playing "a support role" in the project.

The county headquarters, an eight-story office building in the heart of downtown, is another first for Geis. So is Ameritrust, a group of historic buildings and parking garages that Greg is calling "The M on 9th." He won't share many details about the redevelopment. But the renovated complex is set to include a hotel, called "The Metropolitan;" high-end apartments; offices; retail and other public uses.

For 40 years, the Geis family avoided the city. Erwin saw politicians waiting with their hands out. But the county's government structure changed. And the Geis Cos. changed, shaking off their comfortable industrial trappings in favor of more diverse, high-profile investments.

"[Greg's] very smart, a guy who is three steps ahead at all times and knows how to put together a deal pretty much instantaneously," says Mark Vogel, a mortgage banker with RiverCore Capital who worked on financing for the county deal. "I think he has very good instincts about people. That's one thing about Greg - he is always looking to do what's right for the client. He's not looking to line his pockets with money."

Fred hasn't sold his suburban house, but he's living downtown. Greg won't sell his farm, his parents' home or his condo in Bratenahl, just east of the city. But he's sketching out his apartment at the M.

Skeptics question whether Geis can deliver the headquarters building by July 2014, the date specified by the county. Suburban mayors who have watched Geis projects say there's no reason to doubt.

Greg hopes to redevelop the entire Ameritrust complex at once. He's impatient, though. Putting the money together is taking longer than he expected. And Geis is navigating the tricky territory of remaking historic properties that, because of their location, significance and funding sources, will see a huge amount of scrutiny.

"I wouldn't bet against them, at this point," says Ryan Terrano of Huntington Bank, which provided Geis with acquisition financing for Ameritrust and has worked with the family for decades. "I know these guys well, and I know that they will do whatever it takes to move this forward. This is the part of the business that they're very good at. They're good at establishing budgets. They're good at establishing timelines. They're good at building relationships with tenants."

Fred and Greg talk about glass ceilings - the ones they've had to break to be seen as more than East Side industrial builders. With their family name in the window of the historic Rotunda at Ameritrust, an option to lease city-owned waterfront land and build offices near Burke Lakefront Airport and a downtown outpost at the 323 Lakeside office building they bought last year, the brothers no longer see limits.

Still, they're reaching outside the Geis family to fill holes. They hired an outside design firm and engineering firm to help with the county project. And they brought in a hospitality consultant and a historic-preservation expert to work on the M.

That's the Geis formula: Learn how to do something. Perfect it. Then multiply with German efficiency.

Family legacy at stake

"I know it seems like there's a lot of random things going on. But really, there's a plan to all of this, quite frankly." - Fred Geis

After years of conflict and the occasional fistfight, the Geis brothers appear to have found peace. Greg remains brash, provocative. At moments, Fred looks mournful, like there's still something missing. But the pair is linked, irrevocably, by blood and business.

Greg might be leading the push downtown, but Fred says it will take everything both of them have - money, creativity and drive - to make the M a success.

It's not just their image, or wallets, riding on the project.

It's the legacy of a family business that might, someday, be passed to a third generation. Fred says he won't push his son, now in college, into real estate. But Greg's children have worked summers at the Geis Cos., and it's obvious that their father hopes they catch his fervor.

"I look at myself as a steward of the organization," Greg says. "I may currently be an owner, but this is much bigger than me or Fred. We were given a beautiful gift of an impeccable reputation and a good work ethic, and I plan on using that as long as I can."

Erwin Geis put a flagpole, and an American flag, in front of every building he finished.

The company still raises those flags and replaces them when a tenant's pennant looks tattered. Stars and stripes abound at the Erwin Geis Industrial Park in Twinsburg Township, where a patch of greenery dedicated to the immigrant entrepreneur is nestled among the manufacturing plants and distribution centers along Bavaria Road.

Twenty-eight miles away, in the center of a city where Erwin never worked, the Geis name adorns a work site at East Ninth Street and Prospect Avenue. So does an American flag.