Issaquah developer "Skip" Rowley turns company over to daughter Kari Magill

Expect to be corrected if you say "retirement" around Skip Rowley.

He's not retiring, the Issaquah developer insists. He's "in transition."

This month Rowley, 67, stepped down as chief executive of Rowley Properties, the family-owned company that built much of Issaquah and still owns a big chunk of it.

His daughter, Kari Magill, assumed the CEO title and day-to-day management responsibilities. She's been with the company 16 years, most recently as chief operating officer.

Rowley remains its chairman. He says he'll continue to come to the office every day, help chart the company's future and remain active in the civic, philanthropic and political ventures that have made him one of the region's best-known business leaders.

"I'll continue to do the things I've been doing — at a more leisurely pace," Rowley says.

George Rowley Jr. — everyone calls him Skip — grew up in Bellevue and lives in Sammamish. But few developers are as closely identified with a single city as Rowley is with Issaquah. His father began building houses there in the 1950s, when the city had fewer than 1,000 residents.

Now, as Rowley and Magill settle into their new roles, they are focusing much of their attention on redeveloping some of the property the company first developed decades ago. It's an indicator of both the firm's longevity and Issaquah's growth.

Mixed-use development

Hyla Crossing, 54 acres bordering Interstate 90 at Issaquah's western edge, is first on their list. Rowley Properties covered much of it with one-story, concrete-block mini-warehouses and storage units in the 1970s. Plans to transform it into a corporate campus a decade ago derailed during the dot-com bust.

Now Magill and Rowley envision mixed-use development there: offices, apartments or condos, perhaps retail, on a scale larger than anything the company has done before. They say a Hilton Garden Inn and a three-story office building, both completed in the past 18 months, are signs of what's to come.

They hope to persuade the city to let them build taller buildings, at greater densities. Rowley says it's in keeping with the region's plans for managing growth. Suburban commercial centers will have to get more urban, he says.

But he says he also hopes fast-growing Issaquah doesn't lose its small-town, family feel. "When I walk down Front Street, I still probably know about one in every three people I see," he says.

Rowley was 13 when his father bought a square mile of forest on the slopes of Issaquah's Squak Mountain and began building homes in 1954. Sales were slow at first, Rowley remembers. "People would come out to look at a house and think they were on top of Snoqualmie Pass."

Young Skip tagged along when his father attended city-council and service-club meetings. "I got to meet the town," Rowley says, "and I liked them. I still do."

Over the years the company slowly accumulated a sizable property portfolio and held onto most of it. Rowley Senior bought the Hyla Crossing property, then a dairy farm, in 1962.

Today Rowley Properties owns 38 mostly smaller office and commercial buildings, an 85-unit apartment complex, 750 storage units and 6.5 acres of RV storage space in Issaquah and North Bend, as well as 20 vacant acres and 12 acres it has leased to other companies to develop.

Altogether, the company collects rent from 1,600 individuals and firms.

"We don't sell, and that makes us different," Rowley says. "Some of our buildings we've owned for 35 or 40 years."

The change at the top won't change the company's longterm perspective, Magill vows: "We like to have a lot of say in what goes on on our property."

Role as civic leader

That long-term view also has pushed her father into what amounts to a second career as a civic leader and player in state and regional politics.

Rowley sits on the boards of Overlake Hospital Medical Center and a nonprofit that is raising money to build an Eastside performing-arts center in Bellevue. He's a big backer of Issaquah parks and schools. He helped build the city's popular Village Theatre.

"He's one of those people in the private sector who really makes things happen in the town. If a city doesn't have them, it really suffers," says Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman, a high-school classmate of Rowley's.

"Without him, [Issaquah] would be a whole different town."

Rowley has donated generously to the Republican Party and GOP candidates. He helped bankroll a measure on this fall's ballot, championed mostly by Republicans, that would make county offices nonpartisan.

He usually has been at the table when government, business, labor and environmental leaders have convened to search for solutions to the region's transportation troubles. He's a fan of more and better roads, a skeptic of light rail.

In retirement — oops, transition — Rowley intends to help push for a mostly elected commission that would have broad jurisdiction over regional transportation policy.

And he plans to maintain and strengthen the ties with lenders and government officials likely to become even more important as Rowley Properties moves up to the big leagues.

Work won't begin soon

Rowley and Magill figure Hyla Crossing will be redeveloped in five or six phases. The first phase could cost $75 million to $100 million, Rowley says. That means the company is likely to turn, for the first time, to pension funds, insurance companies and other large institutional investors for capital.

But nothing will be built before 2010 at the earliest. "Hopefully, by then, somebody will have some money [to lend]," Rowley says. "Now's a good time to be planning."

Rowley Properties has hired consultants to start developing a new master plan for Hyla Crossing. Magill and Rowley say the property's natural setting, including restored Tibbetts Creek, will be a major focus.

The company also is participating in the city's update of its land-use plan for central Issaquah, expected to conclude late next year.

Rowley's talk of greater density and taller buildings is likely to get a mixed reception in Issaquah, Mayor Ava Frisinger says.

"Our policymakers appear to have embraced the sentiment that there needs to be more density in urban areas for us to be sustainable," she says. "On the other hand, I know for a fact that there are some people who don't want anything taller than four stories, or maybe two stories."

For Rowley Properties, Hyla Crossing may be just the beginning. It's also starting to look at redevelopment possibilities for Rowley Center, another 1970s, single-story commercial development on the other side of Highway 900.

"Really," Rowley says, "just about all the property we own is subject to redevelopment now."

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com