The developer
Dan Rigney
He has been building housing since 1975. Seven companies, three generations of one family, and every seat in the work: the owner putting up his own money, and the officer deciding whether someone else deserved theirs.
Most developers have one story. They built a thing, then they built a bigger thing. Dan Rigney has three, and the second one is the reason the third works.
The first is a family homebuilder in the San Fernando Valley that put up twenty-one projects in sixteen years. The second is twenty-one years spent finishing other people’s half-built projects, first for a bank, then for a county, then after an earthquake, then for one of the largest tax-credit investors in the country. The third started in 2018, when he went back to building his own work, in Texas, with his wife and his son in the business.
A developer who has only ever been a developer has never had to read a contractor’s draw request looking for the lie in it. He spent fourteen years doing exactly that, which is a strange qualification for a homebuilder and the most useful one he has.
1975 to 1991 · Woodland Hills, California
A family homebuilder in the San Fernando Valley
942units$159,466,000built
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 in Van Nuys, Ventura County and Riverside.
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
The end of the 1980s
What the company said about itself, in its own words
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
1991 to 1998 · The turn
The decade he became the person you call when it goes wrong
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.
1998 to 2012 · AIG-SunAmerica Housing Partners
Fourteen years on the other side of the table
6,706Total Workouts Completed$387,650,000built
AIG-SunAmerica Housing Partners 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 Brisben portfolio: an Ohio developer that had built a hundred and five projects with SunAmerica since 1994 agreed to a workout in 2001 with twenty-one developments unfinished, ranging from untouched ground to ninety percent complete, across ten states. The construction was completed 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
2014 to 2018 · Texas
Building a general contractor from nothing, again
741units$82,470,000built
He moved to Texas in 2014 to build a 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
2018 to today · Round Rock, Texas
His own shop, with the family in it
754units$77,220,000built
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
Meadow Oaks, North Ranch, photographed in June 2026.
Thirty townhome condominiums, handed over in 1984. Forty-two years on, the monument still carries its brass lettering and the planting along the private drive has grown into a canopy. It is the oldest project on this site and the best-looking one, which is the only test of a builder that takes four decades to run.
The firm
Who runs it
Two Rigneys were in the business in the 1980s. A third is in it now. The fourth seat belongs to the person who has kept the books on eight hundred partnerships.
Dan Rigney
Principal Managing Member
Fifty-one years in residential development across California, Nevada and Texas. Builder, developer, land developer, general contractor, executive director of a county housing corporation, division manager, and senior construction officer at a national tax-credit investor.
F. Daniel Rigney, Jr.
Jamie Rigney
Managing Member
Runs day-to-day operations, building completion and unit turnover, and serves as project manager over the finish and punch process across every development. She held Rigney Development’s real estate broker’s licence in the 1980s and ran its marketing, sales and homebuyer turnover programmes.
MA, Education Administration, California State University Northridge
Rose Dillon
Chief Financial Officer
Twenty-five years in real estate accounting, partnerships and tax. She joined Gardner Capital Construction as Corporate Controller in 2017 and has managed accounting, reporting and tax across more than a hundred real estate projects and eight hundred partnerships, covering 35,000 units in seven states.
CPA since 1999 · BBA, University of Houston-Downtown
Jonathan Rigney
Development
The third generation of the family in residential development. Field project manager on the Hidalgo County Housing Authority rehabilitation in McAllen, and now an analyst on project modelling, planning and entitlement, with time in purchasing and field operations.
BS and MRED, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University
Seven companies, and what each one built
- 1975-1991Rigney DevelopmentPresident/CEO – Owner942 units · $159M
- 1992-1993Los Angeles County Housing Development CorporationExecutive Director210 units · $27M
- 1994-1996Project West ConstructionSenior Projects Manager — Earthquake Rehabilitation Projects784 units · $39M
- 1997-1998Paragon Homes Las Vegas DivisionSouthern Nevada Division Manager515 units · $119M
- 1998-2012AIG-SunAmerica Housing PartnersSenior VP Construction Services6,706 units · $388M
- 2014-2018Gardner Capital Construction, LLCSenior Vice President, Construction741 units · $82M
- 2018-PresentRGC Residential GroupOwner – CEO754 units · $77M
