One of home building's most successful corporate turnaround architects through the thick and thin of 25 years of housing cycles from the mid-1980s through the first decade of the 2000s--former Ryland chief executive officer R. Chad Dreier--passed away this past Saturday, Dec. 29. He was 70.
Too young, many will say.
Dreier will be remembered by team members, competitors, and partners as an almost peerless home building finance and capital access expert, and a trusted manager among entrepreneurial divisional and regional operators. In late 1993, he won quick regard as "the right guy at the right time" for Ryland Homes, which had gone off the strategic rails by forgetting its roots as a boot-straps style enterprise whose operational excellence and canny handling of capital land investments had jettisoned the company to a top 5 position among home builders at the time.
As careful, precise, and disciplined as he was known to be working on spreadsheets and running weekly land strategy meetings, and internal rates of return on land investments, and moving his firm's debt from a B- to an A rating, Chad Dreier put enormous focus on the human side of running Ryland's sprawling 15-state, 40-plus market footprint.
He was one of the first public home building company strategists to emphasize to me, "we're a people business after all," and to know exactly what he meant by that. That trust, confidence, and support through times of uncertainty, doubt, and risk are part of what makes home building companies resilient and lasting.
He knew that knowing the names of each of his divisions' associates, and in many, many cases, their family member names, their schools, and their birthdays, their interests and milestones, was a critical to the business culture he wanted to restore to Ryland, which eventually merged with Standard Pacific to become CalAtlantic, and was bought by Lennar in 2017.
He knew that playing as a top 3 or 4 home builder in its operational market footprints could work as a sweet spot for margins, and a circuit-breaker against overpaying for local land positions just to gain marketshare.
He knew, too, that in spite of what two prior Ryland ceos had professed as acceptable, people who bought new homes wanted minimum 8-foot ceilings, and as a tall man, he could immediately tell the difference and insisted it become a Ryland standard.
After graduating from Loyola Marymount University in 1969 [he served as LMU Chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1998-2011], and a commission in the Air Force, Chad worked at what is now Ernst & Young, an accounting firm, until the mid '70s, when he ended up in real estate. He became a rising star at Kaufman & Broad, ultimately ascending to Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President.
But given that he was two years junior to a relatively young CEO Bruce Karatz, Dreier chose to move on, accepting the challenge, in late 1993, of putting a wayward enterprise back on track.
The company's success came with some changes to its operations. Most visibly, Dreier altered the way the company purchased land, moving away from an option-only model. Despite the shifts, he kept to the company's core philosophy, remaining focused on maintaining production discipline, a low-risk land strategy, and a people-first corporate philosophy.
In a March 2007 BIG BUILDER article celebrating the company's 40th anniversary, some of Ryland's long-time employees talked about Dreier's influence on the company.
Maurice Simpkins, former president of the company's Baltimore division and a 35-year Ryland veteran, said, "Chad [Dreier] brought us into the modern era of home building."
To that, John Meade, the current Baltimore division president and a 27-year Ryland veteran, added, "I think Chad Dreier is a very dynamic personality... He's the guy who walks in a room and lights it up. There's a bond between employees and Chad. [We] saw him join the company at a very tough time and watched him stick by his ideas and strategies. That was a huge challenge, and it paid off for him. In the end, he was right."
Toward the end of his career as CEO of Ryland, as housing hurdled into the abyss of the mortgage meltdown, a foreclosure crisis, and a new home sales depression not seen in three generations, Dreier drew on principles, values, and character that defined his very first moments at the helm of Ryland, which was the message, "things will get better."
It's easy to say and hard to do, but that's what leadership and guidance and focus are all about.
Chad Dreier's energies and passions, his wry, bad-accountant-joke wit, and his personal, hands-on operational style touched and galvanized many of those around him, and he clearly led, guided, and focused in ways that raised his teammates' game. For him, home building was not only a business but a passion, a science--but not rocket science--of motivating people to do things that are "easy to say and hard to do."
Too young. He will be missed.