Duo time.

• Author: Burns, Matthew
• Position: BUILDING NC - Real estate Developers reports

Backed by the state's richest businessman, developers Bubba Rawl and Tim Smith have shaped the Triangle. The pair's latest project promises to leave a legacy.

Eight thousand acres is about 12 1/2 square miles, about twice the size of Boone and larger than all of the incorporated towns in Chatham County combined, according to IndexMundi, a website of state municipal statistics. The county seat, Pittsboro, is a mere 4 square miles in size, but it sits just west of the 8,000 acres on which developers Tim Smith and Julian "Bubba" Rawl have invested more than $200 million.

Smith and Rawl are launching Chatham Park, which is likely the Triangle's next boomtown and the largest planned community in North Carolina's history. When fully built, Chatham Park is expected to have 22,000 homes and 22 million square feet of office and retail space, making it among the largest such developments nationally. An analysis by North Carolina State University estimates it will create 61,000 jobs and an $80 billion impact for Chatham County over 40 years. The developers bet that a chunk of the Triangle's population growth--likely to top 500,000 over the next 15 years--will choose the site 30 miles south of downtown Durham.

"We're still adding to it," Rawl says. Property owners on the fringes of their planned Chatham Park continue to approach them about selling their land.

"It's a hell of a way to go out," Smith says with a laugh, acknowledging that neither he nor Rawl will likely see Chatham Park through to its completion in 30 to 40 years. Both men are in their mid-60s.

The project is the culmination of more than three decades in real-estate development for the partners, which started in 1983 when Smith called Rawl about buying a piece of land along the RaleighCary border for a car dealership. "I've been married to him as long as I have my wife," Rawl says, recalling that he was on his honeymoon when he first received a message from Smith.

An engineer by training, Smith shapes projects from the lay of the land, while Rawl handles the marketing as the developments rise from the ground. Rawl, a Greenville native, started and sold a sportswear company to Nike before entering real estate. "They are two completely different people who are both super bright and who complement each other," says Karl Blackley, a 20-year colleague. Smith "sees things into the future," Blackley says, while Rawl is the details guy, prone to stopping his car on the way to lunch to pick up litter in one of their partnership's neighborhoods.

After several years of smaller projects, Smith and Rawl landed their first major residential development in 1991. Preston, a Cary golf course community, had been taken over by the federal Resolution Trust Corp. after its owner, a Dallas-based savings and loan, became insolvent. With banks nervous about extending credit in a slumping real-estate market, Smith approached Cary billionaire Jim Goodnight, the co-founder of software giant SAS Institute, about bankrolling the purchase. The two had known each other for more than a decade, with Smith selling Goodnight several parcels of land that became part of SAS' sprawling corporate campus.

An investor group led by Goodnight paid $11.2 million for the 1,400-acre development, including Prestonwood Country Club, and Smith and Rawl were catapulted into the big leagues of Triangle real estate just as the market heated up.

With Goodnight acting as what Smith describes as "a very friendly banker," the team went on to craft upscale neighborhoods throughout Cary, from Wessex in the north to Camden Forest in the south to Cameron Pond in the west. While they handled some commercial projects, creating high-end residential developments and then...