Wood Partners Makes Top Leadership Changes

By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor

Atlanta–Wood Partners LLC, a major national multifamily development specialist, is making a number of changes to its upper management, including a new chairman of the board of directors, and a new president, who will also be chief financial officer. The company will also have two new board members later this year.

Ryan Dearborn

Joseph Keough

Jerry Durkin, a Wood Partners founder and chairman of the company’s board of directors, will step down as chairman but remain on the board. CEO Ryan Dearborn will assume the additional role of chairman, while Joseph Keough will become president and CFO.

Wood Partners founders Leonard Wood and Jim Simpson will step down from the board of directors at varying points in 2014, making room for central region development director Patrick Trask and western region development director Frank Middleton to join the board. General counsel Sean Reynolds will join the company’s investment committee.

Patrick Trask

Sean Reynolds

Frank Middleton

Middleton, who joined Wood Partners in 2005, expanded the company’s West Coast presence by opening an office in northern California in 2008 and in Seattle in 2010. Trask moved to Houston in 2001 to help open Wood Partners’ Texas division. He’s been a principal in the finance and development of more than 35 multifamily projects totaling more than 10,000 units. He now oversees the Wood offices in Texas, Colorado, Chicago and Arizona.

The year the company plans to pursue more than $1 billion in new development nationwide. According to Dearborn, that level of production is consistent with the past two years for the company, which has been quite busy developing new multifamily properties. The company currently owns 77 properties with a combined total of more than 20,000 units.