Dreiss Heeds Call of the Wild

Tricia Lynn Silva, San Antonio Business Journal
Week of July 8, 2002

As Thomas E. Dreiss talks about his latest real estate developments, he is at his family's summer home in Colorado -- looking out over mountains that tower 11,000 feet.

Although he makes his home in San Antonio, the 45-year-old Dreiss has been going to the Rocky Mountain State every summer of his life -- to the second home that his dad built back in the 1950s. Situated between Rocky Mountain National Park and Roosevelt National Forest, that is the place where Dreiss first learned about the importance of preserving the natural beauty of a piece of land.

About a year ago, Dreiss took that commitment his dad instilled in him a step further when he purchased about 400,000 acres of land in Canada. The land, which is adjacent to Banff National Park, looks out over the same Rocky Mountains that Dreiss sees from his summer home. His spot in Canada, however, is a little more remote.

And that's how Dreiss wants to keep it. Eventually, he will likely have a home there, but for the most part, Dreiss plans to leave the land as it is -- making it an ideal place for outdoorsmen.

Dreiss sums up the land succinctly: "It rocks and rolls."

Most importantly, it is Dreiss' hope that the land will ultimately serve as a site for ecotourism. In other words, he hopes this land -- to be owned by his family for generations to come -- will serve as a place where people can simply study and learn about conservation of the environment.

"The land lends itself to something like a summer camp for adults and kids," he says, "a place to bring people out and let them appreciate the native environment -- experience the true wilderness."

Closer to the Alamo City, Dreiss is widely known for his residential projects, starting with the prominent North Central Side community Sendero Ranch back in 1995. Over the past seven years, Dreiss has been the developer behind 15 communities. Those communities comprise a total of 8,000 acres of land throughout San Antonio and some cities beyond.
 

That Dreiss makes his living as a developer does not put him at odds with his conservation goals, he says. Instead, he simply works to incorporate those ideas in his projects.

"That's the key," he says. "What you try to do is adopt an environmentally sustainable approach to development -- it's development through preservation."

A good example of that process is Wyndgate Ranch, a new community located off of Culebra Road, on the edge of the Hill Country. The project was initially comprised of 1,700 acres when Dreiss bought the land a few years ago. Then in December 2000, Dreiss sold 1,023 acres out of that development to the city of San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department -- for $1 million below its appraised value.

The Parks and Recreation Department purchased the land under the Open Space Program, which was created back in May 2000 by the voters, explains special project manager Susan Crane. It was the sole proposition under the Better Futures Initiatives that passed that year, she adds. The program -- which is funded by a 1/8-cent sales tax -- enables the city to buy land that has been deemed critical to the health of the Edwards Aquifer and the city's linear parks system along Salado and Leon creeks. By purchasing the land, the city keeps the tracts from being turned into high-impact projects, like housing developments.

The land that Dreiss sold to the city out of his Wyndgate Ranch project was some of the most critical to preserving the Edwards recharge zone, Crane says. Now begins the task of the Parks Department to come up with a game plan for deciding how to best use not only this land but the several thousand acres it now owns under the program.

While Dreiss cut the city a deal on the price of the land, the sale was also a good business decision. By the very nature of being adjacent to a City Parks project, the lots in Wyndgate Ranch are now more valuable. What that shows, he says, is that a developer does not have to "squeeze the last acre you've got" to make a project viable.

Taking out the approximately 1,000 acres of Wyndgate Ranch that Dreiss sold to the city, that left him with close to 700 acres for the project, which will consist of 450 lots in all. Dreiss recently finished the first unit of Wyndgate, a total of 35 lots. The price range for the lots, he says: between $40,000 to $55,000.

Like all of his residential projects, Wyndgate will also incorporate very stringent deed restrictions, including selling the lots to individuals instead of builders in order to ensure that each home is truly custom-made. Buffer zones of native habitat will be set up between the lots -- so as to keep much of the natural environment intact.

Many of Dreiss' developments also follow a given architectural theme -- thus requiring that each new home go through an architectural review board before construction can begin. Dreiss sits in on every meeting, he says -- striking the balance between what existing homeowners may want and what is allowed.

"For a developer to be successful, there are a lot of different paths he can go down," he says. "Squeezing the last acre out of project does not necessarily maximize your profit. You can master plan a development where you have big parcels of open space, you can let the landscape dominate the development and preserve the environmental integrity of the land -- and be successful doing that. You can do the right thing."
 

Indeed, Dreiss has had a lot of practice working with environmentally sensitive projects. Early on in his career, the civil engineer had the chance to work on a little project known as La Cantera. The year was 1984; Dreiss was working with Pape-Dawson Engineering, serving as a consultant for the owners of the project, locally based USAA Real Estate Co.

La Cantera was the brainchild of former USAA CEO General Robert McDermott, recalls USAA Real Estate President Ed Kelley. McDermott saw the 1604/I-10 intersection as the gateway to San Antonio from the West. At the time, however, that gateway simply opened up to a bunch of quarry land.

"McDermott wanted to turn (the land USAA Real Estate owned) into much more of an amenity for San Antonio," Kelley says, "and something that could make for an outstanding investment for USAA."

A year and a half into the project, Dreiss made the move from Pape-Dawson to a land planner for USAA Real Estate.

"I wanted to be more of a developer," he says, "and less of an engineer."

It was Dreiss' job to help conceptualize the layout of La Cantera -- from figuring out what Kelley calls the horizontal aspects like street and utility systems of the project to even helping to secure some of the land for the project. La Cantera also required that USAA be in contact with U.S. Fish and Wildlife from the beginning, he adds.

Then came the hard part: putting the project together.

"The first time I walked in that quarry, having been charged with the responsibility of turning it into something of an amenity, I thought, `Kelley, you've made a mistake,' recalls Kelley about the La Cantera Project. "It looked like a moonscape, you had acres of quarry with railroad tracks and big rock-crushing machines and huge boulders -- some as big as a Volkswagen."

Dreiss spent a total of 10 years with USAA -- during which time he helped to master plan what is now Six Flags Fiesta Texas and the Westin La Cantera Resort. Seeing such behemoth projects go from a simple conception to a finished product gave Dreiss the experience he needed to do his own residential project.

"La Cantera didn't just fall out of the sky," he says. "I got to see a quarry go from something with boulders the size of trucks to a theme park. If you can conceptualize it, it can be done."

Which brings Dreiss back to his recent projects today. Next spring, he plans to break ground on a new community in Northwest San Antonio. The project will be located on 750 acres across I-10 from the Dominion.

Dreiss likens the project to Sendero Ranch. Just as that development cemented the U.S. Highway 281 North corridor as an epicenter for high-end housing, so too will this new project, yet to be named, further mark the I-10 West area as a prime site, he says.

The statement begs the question: isn't that what the Dominion is for?

"The Dominion is very nice, very exclusive," he says. "But it's about a country club, a golf course and big houses on small lots. What I'm doing, instead of golf courses, I'm doing greenbelts, spring fed creeks, hike and bike trails, three- to five-acre lots with big conservation buffers."

And like Sendero Ranch and his other developments, Dreiss will also work to ensure that each house in this Northwest Side community is truly original, and fits the Hill Country architectural theme that he ultimately comes up with for the project.

That means that Dreiss will be sitting on quite a few architectural review boards for a long time to come.

"I'm absolutely doing exactly what I want," he says. "I'm very fortunate to be doing exactly what I like best."

Home • Links • Photos • Developer • Master Plan • Map • News • Contact