MBK In the News

Tim Kane to Step Down as MBK CEO After 14 Years

(by Builder Magazine)

Those who've known Tim Kane for some time recognize a look on his face.

It's the kind of joke you might repeat because it's so inanely simple, most often as riotous to an 8-year-old as it would be to older people, and most often fine for mixed company. And you keep on wondering what he does to it that makes you laugh, every time.

Kane, who has led MBK Homes, a diversified U.S. unit of Tokyo-based Mitsui & Co., Ltd., as its president and CEO for 14 years, and has worked there for 21, will put in his last day at the headquarters offices in Irvine, Calif., tomorrow, March 31. It won't be an April Fool's eve prank, and very likely, his beloved executive team and company associates will be laughing through their tears.

Tim Kane, like many of his home building's entrepreneurial peers, worked at MBK as though it was a second family writ large. With the longview support and guidance of MBK's 400-year-old Japanese parent company executives, Kane navigated MBK through the darkest days of the Great Recession profitably, reducing the balance sheet, focusing on opportunistic infill tracts in SoCal's land- and housing-constrained markets. And, in the vanguard of the market turn, Kane introduced the company to its one of its now more successful core strategies in multifamily rental development, ahead of the multifamily juggernaut. Since, MBK has diversified its real estate development portfolio into MBK Senior Living and MBK Retail, given the California infill marketplace's propensity for mixed-use and integrated properties.

Noted for articulate, sharply defined vision as an operator, Tim Kane served as one of our Hive "discovery panel" perspectives in the inaugural Hive event in Los Angeles last September. He's always said that as a going concern in U.S. residential real estate, he's enjoyed ongoing operational and financial support from his parent company, a luxury few other private home builders could draw upon during the dislocation of the Great Recession.

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