In 1992, developers Rick Hartley and David Vey paid just $1.7 million for the roughly 150 acres of then-partially developed land that straddled Bluebonnet Boulevard between Perkins and Highland roads.
As Business Report details in its new cover story, infrastructure work had been completed years earlier on the property, known as the Bluebonnet Ridge Subdivision. But the original developer, Carl Clayton, had run into financial problems in the late 1980s and the vast, valuable property had ended up with the Resolution Trust Corporation, the agency created in the wake of the Savings and Loan Crisis to dispose of the assets of failed S&Ls.
Hartley and Vey knew a good deal when they saw one. In two separate transactions that year, they acquired the property from the RTC for what amounted to about 25 cents per square foot—a steal, even by 1992 standards.
Developer Hardy Swyers remembers it all very well. He’d long had his eye on two small lots in Bluebonnet Ridge, and after Hartley and Vey closed on their acquisition he approached them about buying the parcels. They agreed to sell them to him for $350,000.
It wasn’t a bad deal for Swyers, but it was a great one for Hartley and Vey, who got roughly four times, on a per square foot basis, what they’d paid for the land just a few weeks earlier. Swyers still marvels at the ROI they were able to realize so soon after their killer acquisition.
“From that one deal, they got back a quarter of their investment in about two weeks,” Swyers says. “That’s just how they did stuff. Everybody else in real estate back then, except Mike Wampold, was broke. But Hartley and Vey were in a position to do things. They were very smart and very successful.”
A quarter of a century later, Hartley and Vey, both now in their early 60s, no longer dominate the local real estate scene. In fact, few residents of the nearly two dozen subdivisions they developed in the 1980s and 1990s probably know who the developers are or realize the considerable influence they had shaping the footprint of southeast Baton Rouge. But the partners made a considerable mark on what would become one of Baton Rouge’s most desirable areas to live, and built a reputation as one of the most successful development teams in the process.
But for all their high profile, successes, Hartley and Vey—who branded themselves as the singular Hartley Vey, even though they always maintained individual interests and, even, separate offices—have always been somewhat elusive. In recent years they have become even more so.
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