Mike Underwood started as gopher, went on to dig in dirt for decades

Mike Underwood started as a gopher, and during his decades-long career that has included founding a development company, he has overseen a lot of digging in the dirt.

Underwood, who is now partner and co-founder of the Carolinas-based multifamily firm Woodfield Development, got into the real estate business two years after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975. He and his wife had moved to Virginia, and he need to find work.

"I got to Richmond, and I didn't have a job. So I started answering ads, and one of them was with a national homebuilder," Underwood said in an interview. "It was called an assistant superintendent, but it was really just a gopher" — meaning he did whatever task was necessary no matter how menial.

The home-building company, Ryan Homes, still exists. He worked there for eight years until he connected with the private development company Summit Properties, which was seeking someone to build more custom housing.

He stayed at Summit Properties until 2005, with a brief break in 1992 when the real estate industry was falling apart during a recession and there wasn't much available work. Camden Property Trust purchased Summit Properties in 2005, and by then Underwood was running development for all of North Carolina and Washington, D.C.

"I was commuting to D.C. four days a week," he said.

From there, he decided to start a company with Greg Bonifield. The firm, launched as Woodfield Investment, does business as Woodfield Development.

Woodfield, its name a combination of last part of the partners' surnames, is a multifamily development firm that now has projects across the Eastern Seaboard. Its recent developments include Morrison Yard, a 379-unit apartment complex in Charleston, South Carolina.

Looking back, Underwood said he was so naive about how hard it would be to start his own business that it almost worked to his advantage. Despite Woodfield having no previous projects to highlight, the partners attracted capital for the development, and they launched their first one in the form of a 400-unit apartment complex in Cary, North Carolina, near the state capital of Raleigh.

"We literally had no resume of being on our own," Underwood said. "We wanted to be a pure development company and not have any general contracting or property management functions."

Underwood's group didn't want any employees and kept it that way for a decade.

"That served us well in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. We were able to survive because we had no offices and no employees," he said. "We didn't get paid for two years but stayed afloat and bought some land at a very low basis, so when the world did come back in 2010 we were poised and ready to take off."

Eventually the company got too big and had to ramp up its workforce, mainly in the accounting department. Today the firm has about 20 employees.

Underwood now wants to leave the "front lines" and focus on strategy in his role at Woodfield. That process started a decade ago.

Two of the four principal partners in the company told him that "the right candidate is under your nose," Underwood said. They had pointed to his son Scott Underwood.

" 'The idea is you will work with me the first few years as we continue to develop in the Raleigh-Chapel Hill market,' " Mike Underwood said he told Scott. "It has been a pretty seamless transition."

Now 71, the elder Underwood said he is close to the point where he is ready to transition to a role such as chairman emeritus, in which he would remain a key executive but not be involved in daily operations.

Closing in on 50 years in the industry, he never imagined himself in real estate for five decades after starting out running small tasks for a large real estate company.

"I had to beg for the job," he said with a laugh. "I remember sitting in the division manager's office and saying: 'I have no construction experience, but I have proved I can learn.' And he gave me a shot."