FEATURE RENDERING CREDIT: BRR ARCHITECTURE
Ora Reynolds on Hunt Midwest’s aggressive growth
Ora Reynolds is president at Hunt Midwest.
Today, when you look at the professional day-to-day of Ora Reynolds, you’d never guess she stepped into her job by answering a newspaper ad – but that’s exactly what she did. As president of Hunt Midwest, a sister company to the Kansas City Chiefs owned by the Hunt family, Reynolds spends her days expanding the residential development side of the business and spreading the word about Hunt Midwest’s evolving identity as one of the region’s top real estate companies.
“We understand that our brand means a lot, so we’re trying to take some things we used to do and make them more visible,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds has been with Hunt Midwest since its early days as essentially three companies: a mining company, an entertainment company, and a real estate company. Since then, Hunt Midwest has sold off its mining and entertainment counterparts and has focused on its industrial/commercial and residential development.
In recent years, that’s meant expanding the residential component to encompass a person’s entire life cycle. Hunt Midwest in recent years began developing multifamily projects as well as larger, single-family home communities with heavy amenities for multiple lifestyles.
Hunt Midwest is providing capital and construction management for its boutique luxury apartment project, Mission 106 at Mission Farms. The 139-unit includes 7 townhomes and is a joint venture between ePartment Communities LLC and master developer Doug Weltner.
“We like to do larger [projects] because there are more barriers to entry,” Reynolds said. “Not everyone has the people and financial resources to build a 1,500-home community with neighborhood services, so that gives us a competitive advantage.”
Reynolds says she sees a big opportunity in a new, widening market created by millennials’ shifting lifestyle patterns. She says statistics show that more than 50 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds and 41 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds are still living with their parents. They’re also delaying obtaining full-time jobs, and need the geographic flexibility an apartment offers, and are waiting longer to get married.
In 2010, Hunt Midwest launched a joint venture with Principal Senior Housing to invest $32 million into starting a senior living platform in Kansas City. Since then, that investment has doubled to $65 million.
“Those patterns have moved the cycle for a homebuyer out, and it’s created a wider swath of apartment people,” Reynolds said. “It’s all about household formation and job creation, and that’s what we think is really feeding the apartment market right now.”
With a proven multifamily concept, Hunt Midwest ownership in recent years began to wonder: “What’s next?” With many of its communities master-planned for additional uses like senior living, the company decided to form a joint venture with Principal Senior Living in 2010. From the first initial project came the decision to build a $32 million, four-project platform in Kansas City. Today, Hunt Midwest now has four senior living communities up and running and four more under construction or design – a $65 million investment.
“That’s been really exciting because it takes our single-family buyer at all their life cycles, then moves us into when someone needs assisted living or memory care,” Reynolds said.
And that’s only the residential piece of the puzzle for Hunt Midwest. In its industrial/commercial division, the firm is having its best year ever. Its sprawling 1,100-acre Subtropolis, the world’s largest underground business park, now leases 6 million worth of space to a plethora of companies. In 2014 alone, Hunt Midwest added 1 million square feet – the most ever added in a year – including a 475,000-square-foot build-to-suit central distribution facility for a Denver-based e-commerce company, Food Service Warehouse.
SubTropolis became home to Food Service Warehouse in 2014, Hunt Midwest’s largest build-to-suit in the market. The 475,000-square-foot facility has made the underground business park its central distribution facility for all of its e-fulfillment needs.
On its surface, Hunt Midwest is also benefitting from its proximity to the Ford Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Mo., and has become home to Automotive Alley, where Ford Transit vans are kept before they’re outfitted.
SubTropolis Technology Center also opened in 2014 as the first data center in the underground park. It’s anchored by LightEdge Solutions and currently houses four fiber carriers.
Subtropolis Tech Center opened in 2014 and houses four fiber carriers.
As if that wasn’t enough, Hunt Midwest is also looking at opportunities in the 15,000-acre Twin Creeks area, where it’s contributed $16 million to a $34 million effort to get the area sewered. With 5 people per acre, the area could potentially house 75,000 new residents over time.
Hunt Midwest owns 300 acres in that area, where it’s currently planning Park Place North, a development that will consist of a full range of housing from single-family homes through senior living facilities.
“In 1993, we opened our fist community in the Shoal Creek area, where we put in about 2,000 homes. There, we went in with homes and the retail followed those rooftops,” Reynolds said. “Here, it’s going to be the reverse, but we hope we can do what was done in the Liberty/Shoal Creek area on the Platte County side.”
As much as the company has expanded in recent years, Reynolds says Hunt Midwest must be cautious in its investments.
“We get to be entrepreneurial, but there’s a safety net,” she said. “We are stewards of the Hunt name, and we never can do anything that would risk that, so we tend to be more conservative when we’re looking at projects we can’t control what we think are the important pieces. We won’t get involved unless we think we can control that reputation we have.”
So what does Reynolds consider the biggest reason for Hunt Midwest’s success?
“I prefer to use what I call a ‘rifle approach’ to closing deals as opposed to a ‘shotgun approach.’ You can run around and look at a variety of deals where you don’t have the expertise, or you don’t know how you’re going to get to the end, so I like to go after projects that fit our expertise and where we want to go,” she said. “I learned a long time ago that you have this business plan, and you’re trying to get there, and you may not get there exactly the way you thought you’d thought you would – but as long as you get there, it’s okay.”