Tim Warren Jr.

When the first bomb went off at the Boston Marathon in 2013, Scott Auen was standing on the corner of Boylston and Hereford streets waiting for his wife to finish the race. Auen had run Boston before, but that year he wasn’t. Neither was his running buddy Tim Warren Jr., with whom he’d trained for several marathons. After the second bomb went off, Auen, who is executive vice president of lending at Worcester’s Cornerstone Bank, navigated the chaos and finally found his wife. When they couldn’t figure a way out of the city, Auen called Warren for a ride home.

“He was the first person I thought of. I knew Tim would do it in a heartbeat. I knew Tim would drop whatever he was doing,” Auen said.

Warren, who is 76, has brought that same loyalty to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, since joining his family’s business in 1973 as a mail room employee. Over those 50 years, he has set the company up for success as a trusted real estate data source while stewarding its flagship industry newspapers into the digital age, effectively overseeing the company’s transformation from black and white to technicolor.

Now, the final weeks of 2023 are also the final weeks of a years-long tapering of his responsibility for the company’s daily operations. He remains a shareholder and chairman of the board of directors, where he plans to stay informed about the business at a high level.

“Members of family businesses often never truly retire,” The Warren Group’s Associate Publisher Cassidy Norton noted in an email. “So he’s never going to fully disappear.”

Leader of a Company Family

When Linnea Blair started at The Warren Group as a temporary receptionist in 1994, she quickly understood that Warren family members’ presence was integral to the company’s sensibility. Warren’s father, Tim Warren Sr., was gregarious and took an interest in The Warren Group’s employees. The company was expanding and needed a human resources department. Blair stepped in, eventually becoming human resources manager. She retired in 2021.

By 1994, the company was headquartered on South Street in Boston’s Leather District in “this warren of crazy little offices with a different color of carpet in each area, sort of joined together with duct tape,” Blair said. “It was a funky sort of place.”

As Warren took over more responsibility, he “had an aesthetic sense, so we moved to the new office” on Summer Street across the Fort Point Channel, about a year later Blair said. “It looked very, very nice.”

What kept Blair at The Warren Group was its culture, the sense that the company started by Warren’s great-grandfather Willard over 100 years ago was a “work home” for employees, a decidedly non-corporate environment where they felt as cared about as family members – in the best sense of kin. Blair understood that leadership supported the kinds of pro-staff HR initiatives her previous workplaces had lacked.

“They didn’t have all the money in the world, but these people wanted to do the best for their employees,” Blair said.

Doing right by employees has been a pillar of the Warren family ethic since the beginning.

“It’s really been about family accountability” embodied by transparency and loyalty, The Warren Group CEO David Lovins said.

“Obviously it’s a business and… you’re trying to make money,” said Warren’s younger brother Peter, a member of the company’s board of directors.

But the bottom line has never been so important “that people aren’t treated well,” he added. “That’s never been the case in our family business.”

That value grew from the “atmosphere of tolerance and respect for others” in which Warren grew up, his wife Sarah Wentworth said via email. “His grandparents and great-grandparents were Unitarians and Philadelphia Quakers.”

Tim Warren Sr. and his wife Phyllis raised Tim, Peter and their sister Betsy in Concord. Tim Sr. joined The Warren Group in the mid-1940s and sometimes took his three children to work with him. There, the young Warrens watched as Banker & Tradesman, its Connecticut-focused sister newspaper The Commercial Record and other publications were pasted up for publication. While the opportunity to join the family business was clear, “Dad did not impose it as an expectation or requirement,” Peter said. In the end, Betsy and Peter chose different professional paths.

A ‘Shy’ Big-Data Visionary

Warren wasn’t an obvious fit for the family business. Unlike his father, “he was kind of shy,” Peter said. He majored in math at Bowdoin College and quickly realized that his first job out of college, teaching high school math, wasn’t for him. He spent the next few years taking road trips and backpacking. He worked odd jobs, including at Glacier National Park. “At that point, he was searching,” Peter said.

It wasn’t until he was seriously injured at Glacier that Warren joined the family business in 1973. “And he was very good at it, very motivated by it,” Peter said. Though reserved, Warren brought his own strength to the family business – his analytical nature. “He was sort of a natural fit for business,” Peter said.

Unexpectedly, yet fittingly, Warren had found his own work home at The Warren Group.

He took on increasing responsibility and became president of The Warren Group in 1988. A year earlier, he had bought the company’s first computer.

At that time, to create the Banker & Tradesman transactions section, staff would cut out transaction information from the registries of deeds – “Computer, green-line printouts,” said Alan Pasnik, who joined the company in 1985 and retired in 2016. A pool of typists would then reformat the information using electric typewriters and paste it onto boards for printing.

“At the end of the weekly production run, all those boards and makeup would be thrown away” and the data was lost, Pasnik said. Only by gathering copies of Banker & Tradesman could someone easily chart weeks- or months-long housing market trends.

“Tim and I came up with the idea of trying to capture all of those keystrokes,” Pasnik said. They wrote a program to record typists’ work and transfer it into “what were very primitive PCs at the time,” Pasnik said.

Every week, they shifted the new data into a larger database. They also merged the sales information with property data from municipalities, planting the seeds for what would become The Warren Group’s huge database of real estate sales and mortgage transactions.

“And then we had incredibly valuable data that we could sell,” Pasnik said.

Warren’s “sights were on big data back in 1987,” Lovins reflected, adding that thanks to the fledgling database, The Warren Group began building relationships with large companies starting in the 1990s, allowing it to grow beyond New England. Technology had created an opportunity.

An Inquisitive Questioner

With the advent and rise of the internet about a decade later, technology instead presented a threat to one of The Warren Group’s most beloved assets: its newspapers.

“At heart, all of them are newspaper guys,” Norton, Banker & Tradesman’s associate publisher, said of the Warren family. “They see it as their legacy.”

Warren was no exception.

“Tim was passionate about the newspapers,” Lovins said, emphasizing the adjective.

As flagging ad sales and subscription rates plagued the media industry, “there was never any thought of not publishing the paper,” said Steve Sousa, executive vice president of the Massachusetts Board of Real Estate Appraisers.

Sousa worked at The Warren Group from 2000 until 2005, as associate publisher.

“It was at that point in time when we started first to venture into online publishing,” he said.

Warren wanted to keep Banker & Tradesman and The Commercial Record in print and have them online. He wondered if going digital would increase the papers’ reach – modernizing this part of his family’s company felt as crucial as collecting and digitizing their data. And the growing data business created the income needed to buttress the beloved, niche newspapers, even as those papers’ devoted subscribers make sure they are financially self-sustaining today.

This digital transformation unfolded against the backdrop of the steady Warren family presence. Although he worked in his office, Warren joined employees in the lunchroom. People felt his interest in them at work and beyond. For Sousa’s part, he was never afraid of failing with Warren, whose philosophy seemed to be, “When something doesn’t go quite right, it’s an opportunity to learn,” Sousa said. “He was smart and asked good questions.”

In fact, asking questions is one of Warren’s defining habits. He wants to be honest and transparent – to understand things deeply, to know others and to be known. Lovins and Pasnik said that openness and honesty define their relationships with him. Warren brings up any topic that grabs his curiosity, asking more than most people would and answering with little filter, Lovins said, in the spirit of “let’s just talk about life.”

No Risky Business

People interviewed for this story described Warren as reliable, with a methodical approach to work.

“I’m not a risky-business person. Tim’s not a risky-business person,” Lovins, the CEO, said. “Tim hasn’t shocked me over the years. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

Even so, the spirit that compelled him to youthful seeking and adventure lives on. Warren and his brother backpacked together, venturing to places such as Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Pasnik, the database co-creator, hiked and whitewater kayaked with Warren, and he fondly remembers biking in the desert together. “We had quite a few adventures,” Pasnik said.

Even Warren’s marriage began with a streak of rebellion: He and Wentworth eloped to the Heart of Reno Wedding Chapel in 1980.

Auen, the marathoner, first met Warren around 2008 when the two were on a group run along the Charles River, part of a fundraising group training for a Boston Marathon. Warren had started running in his 50s and began running marathons in his 60s. Auen described Warren as an icon in the lending industry, The Warren Group as a mainstay of the kind of reliable data today’s economy depends on. He also vividly remembers meeting Warren for the first time: “He looked kind of like a goofy runner.”

Although Auen typically keeps to himself during group runs, the two talked the entire 10 miles, Auen engaged by Warren’s wit and humor; Warren made fellow runners laugh even on their worst days. They became friends.

“It’s always fun to be around Tim,” Auen said.

Yet in the early 2000s, Warren had hired a consultant to provide feedback on his work performance.

“I think he wanted to figure out what his style was and what he could correct and how he could set the company up for the future so that it was more profitable, and what his exit strategy might look like,” said Lovins.

The consultant shared “…a general feeling that the company couldn’t grow with me managing the way that I had been,” Warren told Banker & Tradesman last year. “I wanted too much control, I wanted to review everything and make all the decisions.”

He craved the nitty-gritty details and wants to make sure all the “i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed,” Lovins said. “It could be considered micromanagement.”

‘What a Brave Thing You’ve Done’

With that input, Warren planned for the company’s next steps, in which he would gradually shift day-to-day responsibilities over to Lovins, who became president and COO in 2004 and CEO last year.

Creating company transformation from tough feedback grew employees’ respect for Warren. “It reflects the kind of culture and desire for the company to succeed and grow,” Sousa said.

“After a few months of David’s being here, I had the same feeling that, ‘Oh my gosh, what a brave and good and wonderful thing you’ve done, Tim, to realize your shortcomings and find a person to slip in who had your same ethos,’” Blair said.

Over the past 20 years, Warren has taken on a more strategic role, maintaining relationships with key customers and handling public relations.

Despite his shy demeanor, “You put him up on a platform with some PowerPoints and a microphone, and his bow tie, and Tim is a very effective communicator and representative of The Warren Group,” Sousa said.

He’s also delved deeper into the non-business aspects of his life, including vegetable gardening, traveling and going to the gym – where he solicits business advice as he gets to know people. Warren continues training for marathons despite ailments and setbacks.

“I don’t know what the driving force was for him to start [running], but it kind of speaks to his character, his adventurous spirit, his tenacity. I think when Tim puts his mind to something, he’s all in,” Auen said.

It’s easy to imagine that in his early days at The Warren Group, Warren was all in, discerning how to cultivate a presence that – even if less gregarious as his father’s – fostered strong work relationships and a “happy work environment,” his brother Peter said. “A lot of people have been quite loyal because of the way they’ve been treated in the business.”

With Warren on the verge of edging further into not-quite-retirement, Pasnik was one of them.

“Tim has more personal integrity than any five people collectively that I know, and his father was the same way,” he said. “This is a genuine person. This is what you want to fill the world with.”