Gary in 2014
Incorporated in 1969 by Gary DeShano, DeShano Development Corporation (DDC) has been an active player in Northern Michigan’s housing market for over 50 years. Gary started by building stick-built homes, doing most of the manual labor himself. After some initial success, he transitioned to modular construction, where he built and owned two modular home factories on Fraser Road in Bay City. At the factories’ height of production in the early 1980s, each plant produced one home a day.
As economic conditions soured and the housing market slowed, Gary was forced to shutter both plants due to the large overhead associated with operating and maintaining a large workforce and buildings. Though he was pushed almost to the brink of insolvency, Gary and his wife, Florence, managed to avoid bankruptcy, eventually paying all of their creditors off several years after the closure of the plants.
In the mid-1980s, Gary saw a new opportunity in the small community of Gladwin, where he would move his family so as to be close to the construction of a new apartment project there. Village East Apartments would become the first project he developed through Rural Housing’s Section 515 program, a financing source that he would later come to utilize many times over. Most of the original developments created through this program are still owned by his family today.
Throughout the 1990s, Gary and his development team started to develop projects through the newly minted Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. To date, the company has developed or rehabbed over 1,500 units using LIHTC as a financing source.
In the late 1990s, Gary’s sons Scott and Chad assumed more prominent roles in the new home construction division of the company. Throughout the late 90’s and early 2000s, DeShano Construction produced between 80 and 100 stick-built homes each year. In 2007, Chad purchased the new home business from his father, and as market needs changed, he began to focus more on larger custom-built homes, rather than on production-style housing.
A new door of opportunity was opened in 2005 when the company built its first assisted living community. The DeShanos started developing and building Assisted Living Communities on a regular basis, and during the fifteen-year period between 2009 and 2024, over 40 of these projects would be built throughout central Michigan.
After selling the construction business to Chad in 2007, Gary decided to start a property management company to oversee his growing portfolio of multi-family projects. This allowed him to enact tighter controls on expense management, collections, and even turnover times. That one change resulted in many properties that had been generating negative cash flow for years finally turning a profit.
Gary was always focused on efficiency in design and production. This became a guiding principle for us; we always strive to make federal and private dollars go as far as possible.
First home built. Circa 1966.
Today and the Future
Chad DeShano now owns controlling interests in the construction, lumber, management, and development companies. Having control over this group of companies allows Chad to bring together a unique network of skillsets to successfully develop and construct new developments.
Looking ahead, DDC is focused on creating more multi-family projects and using new types of funding sources to build successful capital stacks.