Hal C. Ball graduated from Amherst College with honors in 1984 and joined Hilliker Corporation in 1985, the year it was founded. Over the course of his career, Mr. Ball has completed over 800 separate transactions, including sales of major retail centers, office towers, and industrial facilities. He continually nurtures a unique ability and passion for the art of commercial real estate transactions.
Mr. Ball led a team that represented the St. Louis Public Schools and the St. Louis Archdiocese, which sold over 50 institutional facilities in the St. Louis region over four years.
Over his career, he has purchased (and sold) a variety of office, retail and industrial properties for his own portfolio. With this perspective, he’s personally familiar with the challenges faced by his St. Louis clients, as well as the solutions available to them.
In particular, he is proud of a 2017 transaction, in which he brokered the sale of a 132,000-square-foot industrial space under unique circumstances. Representing both the building’s owner and buyer (an Italian plastics manufacturer), the sale of the building included many complexities for Ball to manage: state subsidies, building re-purposing and re-zoning, railway issues, metric conversion, Italian to English translation, and partial demolition of the structure. The deal was successful, establishing the Italian company in the US for the first time. Additionally, it brought several new manufacturing jobs to the St. Louis area.
Mr. Ball has been as a member of the St. Louis chapter of SIOR since 2000 and served as its president in 2010. In 2008, he was voted St. Louis Commercial Realtor of the Year and is consistently designated a Power Broker by CoStar. In 2016, he was awarded the Largest Retail Sale Award by the St. Louis Commercial Board of Realtors.
He serves the St. Louis area as a board member of Citizen’s National Bank in Maplewood, as a volunteer group captain for the Fair St. Louis Parade (since 1999), as a member of the Rossman School Advisory Board, and as part of the St. Louis Regional Freightway Committee.
Three guiding principles drive Hal in serving his clients:
- Happiness, bringing an optimistic outlook to every situation.
- Honesty, believing business should always be conducted with integrity.
- Knowledge, understanding that an informed and competent broker can find solutions for clients, even in the most difficult of situations.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Mr. Ball is married with three children.