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Golden Corridor | ROX! Magazine
Continued from page 13: ROX! INTERVIEW ther going to be an engineer or you're going to teach. I had no interest in academia and if you're an engineer that means you're on a team. And all I wanted to be was Albert Einstein. I just wanted to sit around and have an idea and win a Nobel Prize and call it a day. At some point I realized neither of those was going work, so I started losing interest. I didn't want to be an engineer, I didn't want to teach. And then the real problem was I had never learned to study; to do any homework or anything. GCROX: Because to that point everything taught to you came naturally? ROCK EARLE: Yes and then one day I was sitting half awake at some upper division algebra class and I can still remember to this day this crazy Hungarian teacher with white frizzy hair. It was kind of like Einstein was up there doing stuff on the board. I couldn't understand him and the stuff on the board meant nothing intuitively to me. GCROX: That must have been a rude awakening. ROCK EARLE: Yes. I listened to that class for a couple of weeks and I realized, well, I guess I'm done with college. [laughs] GCROX: So that's when a decision was made? ROCK EARLE: Yes, I realized that my real estate business could proceed as a sole practice and I could do my own thing by myself and not have to interact with other humans as co-workers. GCROX: Did you just pack up and leave? ROCK EARLE: I did. I left school. I left Hewlett Packard and I drove to Phoenix because I'd always liked the desert. In high school while my buddies were surfing, I was always in the desert camping or doing whatever. Also, my sister had moved to Phoenix because her fiancé at the time lived there and I had met a guy in the real estate company I was working with who wanted to go to Phoenix and buy properties and invest so that's exactly what we did. GCROX: Did you have an Arizona State
real estate license when you came over? ROCK EARLE: No. GCROX: So you just came over and went to work? You obviously had to take the state exam. ROCK EARLE: Yes. GCROX: Who did you work for? ROCK EARLE: I hung my license with Auerbach Real Estate located on 32nd Street just South of Campbell. GCROX: Did you go right back into residential? ROCK EARLE: No, my partner was experienced in the land business, and we went right out and bought a bunch of land that we thought looked good. GCROX: Where was that? ROCK EARLE: We bought a piece at Cave Creek Road, north of Cactus, and an apartment zoned piece in East Mesa. This being in 1978. GCROX: That property was way out in the middle of nowhere! ROCK EARLE: Yes, exactly and we were funded by an investor and sold the properties almost immediately at a nice profit! We thought we were just the smartest guys on the planet. GCROX: After you put the required 2 years in, you obviously went and obtained your broker's license. ROCK EARLE: Yes in 1981, which means I've now been a broker for 34 years. I formed Newport Properties, and even then I had other companies, other partners. We had the Gibraltar Group, clever right? “Rock of Gibraltar”…? We were developing fourplex lots and condos; condo-convertible four-plexes and lots. We had a Canadian partner in the development, and we hooked up with a couple guys who were doing arid crop commercialization research and development. We were buying, actually the agricultural arm, was buying farms in Casa Grande that we would then plant in jojoba. And to do that, we needed some real estate expertise. We had hired a custom farmer, Tom Gaddis, and his wife Nan had her li-
cense, so we opened a branch office here in Casa Grande that I was the broker of, she was the manager, and I would come down here every couple weeks and look over the files, and I ended up liking it so much that I moved here. GCROX: What year was that? ROCK EARLE: I moved down in 1996, actually to the Maricopa area, near the air park that we developed and then I moved out to Tierra Grande area in 1997, and then to Casa Grande proper in 2007. GCROX: The air park which is now known as... ROCK EARLE: Ak-Chin Regional. I've always done well with what we'll call “old infrastructure”. Water lines, power, and asphalt that someone else paid for, like someone else's dog and someone else's boat and someone else's cabin-someone else's infrastructure that they'd forgotten about, you can buy for a discount and get the land for free. There's a whole section that Cecil Crouch had farmed … GCROX: Saddleback Farms? ROCK EARLE: Yes, Saddleback Farms. And in-between the residential subdivisions, he'd left a big area that was split into 40 acre parcels, and they were zoned heavy industrial, and there were 2 major waterlines for the company; the water company at the time was Mohawk Water Company, and it had the right zoning and everything else needed so I started investing, and selling land there to some guys, investors, and little by little the investors turned more into users, because everything was there that you needed to escape Phoenix as an industrial user. One of those guys was a pilot, he was a metal building guy, and he wanted a yard to store his steel, and to build a little shop, and he also had the idea to develop the air park, and that's how what is now Ak-Chin Regional Airport started in 1991. GCROX: How did you decide which direction the runway was to run and all that business and paperwork with the federal Continued on page 30