Rainier Development Company and the University of Oklahoma Foundation broke ground on the Rock Creek Entertainment District on May 12, officially setting in motion construction of a $1.2 billion, 269-acre project in Norman, Okla., that’ll include a $330 million arena, home to Sooners basketball and gymnastics.
Rainier Development Company will lead the project’s planning, design, coordination and development, its quasi-official entry into the sports-adjacent mixed-use development game. Rainier Development Company was launched in 2023 by Dallas developer Rainier Companies with a sole focus on sports-adjacent real estate. And it quickly grew its sports expertise by hiring a handful of people, including President David Neher, from Lincoln Property Company (which was initially involved with the Rock Creek effort but no longer is).
Rainier brings its own angle to sports real estate, informed by its parent company’s retail focus. In recent sports mixed-use projects, retailers — like high-end shopping, food and drink-driven concepts and music venues — were performing better than national averages. Higher sales were leading to landlords collecting higher rents.
The positioning of retail within the development and easily accessible surface-level parking are symbiotic priorities for any Rainier project, according to CEO Danny Lovell. It’s allergic to five-level parking decks that scream to visitors “you’ll be stuck in here.”
“The retail’s got to lead,” said Lovell. “And if you get the retail right, then those other components,” meaning office, residential or hotel, “are ancillary, and while they’re beneficial, you can move them around a little more than the retail.”
Here are two other takeaways from my recent conversation with Lovell:
Rainier is focused on college sports-adjacent possibilities
Lovell said that Rainier has about $3 billion’s worth of projects in development, including one breaking ground in September and another in the first quarter of 2027. There are two big reasons Rainier zeroed in on the college sports-adjacent development opportunity: first, universities are significant landowners, so public-private partnerships with developers can be established more quickly.
“If you’re thinking about a major market and buying up land around a stadium, that land is expensive, especially in a major metroplex,” Lovell said. “A lot of [universities] have more land than they know what to do with right now.”
Second, higher-ed institutions carry the necessary political and cultural clout in their markets to get development tax incentives approved, like the pair of 25-year tax districts that will help fund the Rock Creek project.
“You can’t build these without a public-private partnership, pretty much anywhere,” Lovell said.
College brands can make smaller markets viable sports-adjacent mixed-use destinations
Nationally, new retail construction over the last 20 years has been limited, Lovell said, something Rainier Companies knows as a serial landlord.
That’s led to higher costs and rents, which can hinder development in the large towns and small cities that are often home to nationally known universities. But those locales — Norman, for example — share one market condition-defying advantage: a magnetic university brand.
“In Norman, Oklahoma there is no way we could build a $1.1 billion entertainment district and project in a town of 125,000 people without the University of Oklahoma and the attraction of tourists and shoppers that go to Norman because of the university,” Lovell said. “If the university wasn’t there, there is no way this would work.”
