Dan Rigney

Rigney Development Group built twenty-one projects in sixteen years out of an office on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. It started with twenty single-family homes in Chatsworth in 1975 and ended with a two-hundred-and-forty-four-unit workout in Encino in 1991, and in between it built almost everything a builder can build: apartment buildings in Panorama City and Winnetka, semi-custom homes in Northridge, four business parks and an office building in Chatsworth and Agoura Hills, a sixty-five acre land development in Granada Hills, and townhome communities across Los Angeles, Ventura and Riverside counties.

The financing is the part that reads differently now. These were joint ventures with savings and loan institutions, with the landowners themselves, and with Reg D syndication pools. A builder working that way is raising the money and building the product and selling the homes, which means the same person carries the capital risk and the construction risk and the sales risk at once. Fifty years later, at Old Settlers, the arrangement is the same one.

Jamie Rigney was in the business then too. She held the company’s real estate broker’s licence through the 1980s and ran its marketing and sales programmes and its homebuyer turnover. She is a Managing Member of the firm today and runs completions and unit turnover, which is the same end of the job, forty years on.

Twenty-one rows, $159,466,000, in the 1975 to 1991 section of the record

Rigney Development Group printed a corporate brochure at the end of the 1980s. It is a deep blue book with an embossed R and the Ventura Boulevard address on the back, and in place of a founder’s letter it runs as an unattributed conversation between people in the firm, set beside photographs of the houses they had just finished: Cozycroft Estates, Vanalden Estates, Victoria Park, Country Club Terrace, The Cape.

It is worth reading because it is the only document in the archive where the company talks rather than tabulates. It is proud of selling one project out in less than six active weeks at a dollar volume over $22,000,000. It is prouder of getting its plans approved as originally designed, which it says saves the time and the money that redrawing costs. And near the end, closing the argument, it makes the promise a builder is most often tempted to break.

We build no ‘cheap’ homes — every home at every price is a quality product.

The Rigney Development Group corporate brochure, quoting him

We built a luxury product in an area some said wouldn’t support it, but we’d read it right and sold over $8.5 million worth of homes in under two weeks.

The same brochure, on Country Club Terrace

The Rigney Development Group brochure, in the client archive

The family era does not end with a sale or a retirement. It ends with The Oaks Townhomes in Encino in 1991: two hundred and forty-four units, taken over for Independence Bank, at $26,000,000. Somebody else had started it and could not finish it, and the bank needed a builder it could hand the keys to.

That job set the shape of the next twenty years. In 1992 he became the first Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Housing Development Corporation, standing up a county housing entity from nothing and running its first Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments. In 1994, after the Northridge earthquake, he spent three years on structural repairs to six damaged multifamily properties, seven hundred and eighty-four units, most of them occupied while the work went on. In 1997 a Santa Monica homebuilder handed him a Las Vegas division that was not working, and he rebuilt its policies and its scheduling, developed more than a thousand lots and built over five hundred homes in two years.

Three different employers, three different problems, one common brief: something is broken and it is already under construction.

The three eras between 1992 and 1998 in the record

AIG Affordable Housing was one of the country’s largest investors in low income housing tax credits, and he ran its construction services desk for fourteen years. The firm partnered in more than a hundred multifamily developments a year. His desk carried the construction draw and funding operations behind them, which means he was the person deciding whether a developer’s draw request matched what was actually built.

Over that span the firm climbed from twenty-fifth to second on the National Multifamily Housing Council’s list of the fifty largest apartment owners in the United States. We use the rank rather than a unit count, because the rank is published every year by an independent body and the unit counts in circulation measure different things.

The workouts are the part that matters here, and they are the reason the earlier decade reads as preparation. When a developer or a contractor failed mid-build, the investor’s money was already in the ground and somebody had to finish the job. He completed $387,650,000 of them. The largest was the national portfolio of an Ohio developer that had built a hundred and five projects with AIG Affordable Housing since 1994. In 2001 it agreed to a workout with twenty-one developments unfinished across ten states, from untouched ground to ninety percent complete. He completed the construction inside the $256,000,000 budget.

A developer who has only ever been a developer has never read a draw request looking for the lie in it. He spent fourteen years doing exactly that.

Total workouts completed, 6,706 units and $387,650,000, in the record

He moved to Texas and was recruited to build the general contracting arm for Gardner Capital from a standing start: bonding capacity, a subcontractor base, and a book of work. In four years it delivered seven multifamily and senior communities across the state, seven hundred and forty-one units and $82,470,000 of construction, in Corpus Christi, Alton, Sugar Land, Euless and Melissa.

Two of them ran in the same small town at once. Provision at Melissa and Gala at Melissa were built concurrently, a hundred and twenty conventional units and ninety-three senior units, sharing one labour pool and one building department. Two more were in Corpus Christi, the second one larger than the first, which is what a repeat award looks like.

This is the stretch that most of the photography on this site comes from, and it is nearly all construction photography, because on every one of these projects building it was the job.

Seven rows, 741 units, $82,470,000, in the 2014 to 2018 section

RGC is three companies under one roof: a developer, a builder, and a general contractor. Holding all three is unusual, and it is the arrangement Rigney Development had in 1975. He has come back to the seat he started in, carrying the twenty-seven years in between.

The work since 2018 runs to seven hundred and fifty-four homes and $77,220,000. The Place @ Mays Crossing was acquired, entitled and designed, then sold to another developer. Memorial Apartments in McAllen was a rehabilitation for the Hidalgo County Housing Authority. Old Settlers in Round Rock is seventy-two for-sale townhomes now under construction, and Pepper Creek Crossing in Temple is a hundred and ninety-two more.

Jonathan Rigney is the third generation of the family in residential development. He was the field project manager on the McAllen rehabilitation, and he works on project modelling and takes projects through planning and entitlement. He holds an undergraduate degree and a master’s in Real Estate Development from Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School of Business.

Four rows, 754 homes, $77,220,000, derived in the current section of the record