Infill, redevelopment work spurs West Haven's growth

When Lou Borrego and Ron Hover launched West Haven Development Group in Reno a couple of years ago, they figured to continue what they'd been doing for a few years.

They'd buy land on the outskirts of town, run it through the entitlements process, chop it up into lots, sell most of them and build a few homes for their own account.

Things didn't turn out that way. Instead, West Haven these days mostly takes on redevelopment or infill projects, finding ways to develop those parcels that others have passed by.

It's building homes on a tightly constrained property in northwest Reno that other builders passed by. It's working to redevelop a downtown office building. It's planning a mixed-use development to replace a boarded-up motel across Virginia Street from the Peppermill.

That work, Borrego says, is infinitely more complicated than scraping sage and cheatgrass off parcels at the edge of town. Infinitely more satisfying, too.

"I love what I do," says West Haven's chief executive officer, who previously worked as chief operating officer of regional homebuilder Landmark Communities.

Not that there aren't headaches sometimes big headaches with infill and redevelopment projects.

West Haven found itself in the eye of a political storm with its deal to buy the Foster Drive site of YMCA of the Sierra and redevelop it into housing.

And even when the politics aren't spilling onto the front page of newspapers, Borrego says, "Everyone around the site of an infill project has some input. There are no easy projects any more."

Other challenges: The costs of redeveloping an existing project generally are higher than those that start with raw land. And sellers of property need to understand current economics and the feasibility of the projects they hope to see West Haven develop.

Those projects increasingly include commercial and office projects as West Haven steps out from residential development. In fact, Borrego says the company has about $12 million in commercial and office projects in its pipeline currently. It plans to hold some in its own portfolio while selling off the rest.

The company also will continue to build a few custom homes annually as the third leg of its business.

But Borrego says it's unlikely the 30-employee firm will grow very large as much of its focus remains on smaller infill and redevelopment projects, many of them in the core of the Reno-Sparks area.