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Brendan ONeill enrolled at CSU Sacramento 20 years ago with the idea of becoming an engineer but switched his major to accounting and finance.
Good move.
O'Neill today is division executive vice president and chief financial officer of Beazer Homes of Northern California, one of the Sacramento area's largest homebuilders, and also president of the Building Industry Association of Superior California. After learning the business with Larchmont Homes, he joined Beazer in 1995, the seventh employee of the Atlanta-based firm just starting to build in Sacramento.
Things are going well for ONeill and Beazer, and should get even better, he believes.
"The forecasters are predicting that the Sacramento area's population will grow roughly 40,000-to-60,000 persons a year for the next 20 years, so somewhere about 800,000 to a million more people will be here in 2023," he says. "The challenge will be to provide affordable housing for the newcomers." The limited supply of available, affordable lots, ONeill says, will require an increased emphasis on "high-density" dwellings - condominiums, townhouses, apartments especially along major transportation corridors.
BACKGROUND
* Age: 42
* Education: B.S., business administration and finance, California State University Sacramento; graduate training in business, CSU Sacramento
* Resident of: Fair Oaks
* Native of: Fresno
* Family: Wife, Laura; daughters Kristen, 13, and Allison, 11; son Matthew, 7
THE COMPANY
Started in England: "Beazer started as a company in the U.K., and opened an office in the States in 1984, but in 1994 the U.S. operation had grown large enough that it cut its ties with the U.K. company and went public, with an IPO on Wall Street. Beazer is still one of the bigger builders in the U.K., but the U.S. firm is a stand-alone company, although Brian Beazer, whose father founded the firm, is a non-executive chairman of our board. He fives in England, but spends quite a bit of time in the U.S."
Larchmont Homes: "I started out at Larchmont as a division accountant, then moved on to division controller, then vice president of finance. Beazer was a startup company in 1994, when the homebuilding market here was hurting, and I thought it was interesting that a company would come to town and start up in that market. At the same...