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Conservative philosophy has served
real estate company for 100 years
Virginia Business
March 2006
Conservative philosophy has served
real estate company for 100 years
Only a select group of companies
become centenarians — and rarely are those companies
family owned. But in January, Geo. H. Rucker Realty
Corp., a quiet, conservative commercial and residential
developer based in Oakton, blew out the candles on
100 years of business success and family continuity. "It’s
a pretty significant milestone," says Michael
Rucker, a family member who is chairman of the board
of directors. "And we plan to keep on going."
Despite its roots in a bygone era,
Rucker Realty knows how to compete in the modern market.
The company holds commercial leases on warehouses,
shopping centers, office buildings and fast-food restaurants.
It also owns several prime chunks of real estate in
the Washington area that it is continuing to develop.
With annual revenue of more than $15 million but only
six employees, the company is "ultraconservative,
by most standards," says CEO Richard Wolff.
When Rucker Realty buys a property,
it has the resources to hold it "until we think
we’ve got the right formula for its development," says
Wolff, who notes that the company portfolio includes
land that has remained undeveloped for nearly 20 years. "We
tend not to leverage our properties more than 50 percent
on average, so when market downturns occur, as happened
in the early 1990s, we’re able to withstand them
while other developers go out of business."
Started in 1906 by George Rucker
and Ashton Jones, Rucker Realty was instrumental in
the development of early real estate projects in Arlington,
including Ashton Heights, Lee Heights, Country Club
Hills, Woodlawn Village and the Westover Shopping Center.
The company also built several significant Arlington
landmarks, such as the Rucker and Jones buildings.
Current projects include construction
of a 200,000-acre shopping center adjacent to Austin
Ridge, a residential community in Stafford County that
Rucker Realty developed in the early 1990s, and redevelopment
of University Mall in Fairfax, which the company built
in the 1970s.
Rucker Realty is owned entirely by
third-, fourth- and fifth-generation members of the
Rucker and Jones families. The firm’s goal is
to remain the same deliberate, conservative company
it has always been. "We don’t specialize
in any one area of real estate," Wolff says. "Our
philosophy is: If we see something that makes business
sense, we go and do it. That works for us."
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