2021 NMHC Top 25 Builders

Despite the trials and tribulations of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation’s largest apartment builders were able to keep pace in 2020—and some have grown by leaps and bounds.

Summit Contracting Group remains at the top of the NMHC Top 25 list, with 9,159 units started in 2020, while Alliance Residential remains in second place with 7,728 units started last year. The NRP Group rises from sixth to third with 6,726 unit starts.

Mill Creek Residential has moved three spots to fifth, with 5,661 units started in 2020. MFE spoke with Charles “Chip” Bay, one of the founding partners of Mill Creek Residential and chief construction officer, about the company, its new venture, and its plans for 2021 and beyond.

MFE: Can you tell us about Mill Creek and its activity within the past year?

Bay: Last year we started over 5,000 new homes, and this coming year we should do better than that. We think we’ll do 6,000 new-home starts this year. We’ve also just started a build-to-rent company—single-family rentals and townhomes. We’ve started that in the Southeast, and we’ll be moving into the Southwest shortly as well. That’s one of our new initiatives for 2021.

MFE: What were Mill Creek’s greatest successes in 2020?

Bay: Well, making it to 2021. We came very close to meeting our business plan in terms of starts. We were fortunate that early in the year, right as the pandemic was breaking, we were at a town hall meeting where the entire leadership of the company was together—about 150 of us. Most of the developers and the construction folks were in one room, and we said, “Look guys, we don’t know what we’re getting into, we don’t know what’s coming, do the best you can, but when in doubt do the right thing.”

We were able to get that message to everybody at one time, and they went back to their offices—or back to their homes as the case may be—and we were able to execute on our construction pipeline. We had over 30 projects underway at that point. And we were able to continue to develop our land pipeline, so that our pipeline right now is as robust as it’s ever been. We were able to keep our people safe, keep our teams together, keep our projects safe, and keep the company moving forward in an unprecedented environment.

MFE: How did Mill Creek handle the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Bay: First and foremost, we established our No. 1 priority, which was keeping our folks safe and keeping our subcontractors safe. And then the next step was keeping our projects open, keeping our communities open, taking care of our residents, and meeting their needs. And that emphasis started from the top and worked all the way down. The performance of our people during this pandemic, it’s been one of the highlights of my career to see people trying to do the right thing and making the best of what was a very difficult situation. We tried to react quickly, make decisions, keep people safe, keep things moving forward.

MFE: Could you tell us more about Mill Creek’s single-family rental operations?

Bay: In 2018, we conducted a strategic business meeting and in the course of that identified some other businesses we might be interested in in the future. One of those was single-family rental, or build to rent, and we decided last summer that now was the time to get into the business. We identified Callum Parrott to take on the build-to-rent program, and Callum has been building the construction and development teams. Our intention is to start in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida and then sometime this year, maybe next quarter, focus on Phoenix and Texas and the Southwest for the build-to-rent program.

We will have [build-to-rent] teams co-located with our multifamily teams, and there’s some synergies there in terms of pursuing land and resources that we could share in that effort. Our intention is to get to a point where we can do 1,000 starts a year in each of those five offices. And over time, within five years, we’d like to have 10,000 homes under roof as we ramp up.

We think it’s a great time to be in the business. We bring a core competency that a lot of other firms in the business don’t have, and that’s a professional property management company that has been managing apartment homes year in and year out as a team. And now we’ll take those resources and experience and bring them into the single-family rental business. No one else has that competitive advantage, in our view.

MFE: What are Mill Creek’s goals for 2021? How do you plan to meet them?

Bay: Our intention is to continue to grow the company. I mentioned last year we did over 5,000 starts. This year we will start almost 6,000. We think next year we’ll be pushing over 7,000 new starts. Not counting the single-family, which will hopefully be about 1,000 or so. We are in a growth mode; we think there are some real opportunities in the market, and the way we’re going to execute on that is by taking the resources and offices we currently have and supplement them. There’s an opportunity to get some growth personnel wise, add some good talent, and push each of the offices to the next level in terms of output and performance.