homebuilders, Ingram went hunting for a water company. He went to Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Dallas. “Nobody would put in a water company or wastewater,” he said. “So, we put in the water and the wastewater.” Eventually, Global Water agreed to take over most of Maricopa’s water system, inheriting those early lines. Ingram asked Cox to provide cable service. That was another no-go from a company that did not believe Maricopa would be a success. Then Ingram found Orbitel and talked its principals into being a partner in the venture. “Orbitel was certainly one my favorite projects of all time,” said Rick Anderson, a partner in Orbitel at the time. “Mike’s group had a great vision for Maricopa. I have never witnessed anything like growth in the early days of Maricopa.” Anderson said when he was asked to pull something together after Cox passed on the opportunity he was impressed with the developers. Two decades later, Cox finally would come to Maricopa. “I found the Rancho El Dorado group very straightforward in their approach to forming a partnership that formed the foundation for the success of Orbitel,” Anderson said. President John Schurz said the founders of Orbitel “believed in the city of Maricopa and its residents. There is a ‘Can Do’ spirit that permeates throughout the community. And, like Mike Ingram, Orbitel saw the potential in Maricopa.” Then Ingram received back-to-back doses of bad news. “The darkest day of my whole life was the day Arizona Public Service told me they wouldn’t bring me electricity,” he said. “Qwest said they wouldn’t bring fiber optics.” Electrical District No. 3 was serving farmers in the area with hydroelectric power. Ingram saw they did not have the capital or the know- how to bring thousands of homes online. So, he flew to California to convince Edison Power to partner with ED3 on a new utility company. “About that time, Qwest called after they saw the utility formed, and they said, ‘We’re on our way with fiber optics,’” Ingram said. Looking back, it might have been easy for Ingram to quit trying to open so many closed doors. “People didn’t believe in it. I would go to these meetings at these restaurants, and people would say I was the craziest man in the world,” he said. “We built this four-lane divided highway and thought we could build a town down there. I was absolutely the laughingstock of the real estate community.”
Kyle Norby
you’re going to take the people to those other places.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. It’s an emerging market.’” In 2000, Nathan and his partner, David Mullard, took the first phase of 1,000 lots and sold to three homebuilders. It took them just 10 weeks. Nathan said a top selling point was the newly widened road. “The affordability in the Southeast Valley was going away, just like it is again, and so Maricopa exploded,” Nathan said. Many homebuilders wanted to go cheap, building homes with carports and swamp coolers, roof-mounted air conditioners and composition roofs instead of tile. “Mike was like, ‘No, I’m creating a whole new city,’” Nathan said. “We went with the builders that Mike believed would build the quality product that he demanded. He never wavered from that once.” Ingram said if he had settled for the county standards, he wouldn’t have put in curbs and sidewalks and could have chip-sealed the roads. He said Maricopa would look like Arizona City today. Instead, he wanted standards like those in municipalities like Chandler and Gilbert. At Nathan’s insistence, the homebuilders agreed. Ingram was spending $14 million on The Duke golf course and another $3 million on landscaping for phase 1 of Rancho El Dorado and wanted quality homes to go with it. With no impact fees at the time, homebuyers could get an 1,800-square-foot home for what they would pay for a 1,300-square-foot home in Chandler. The homebuilders were just the first hurdle. Utilities had no interest in coming to Maricopa. When he had 1,103 lots in escrow with five
roadway, was killed in a crash on that very road in 1990. The main park in Rancho El Dorado is named in her honor. The widening of the section of Maricopa Road, newly named State Route 347, to two lanes in each direction was completed in 1996. Despite naysayers calling it a road to nowhere, Ingram knew it was vital to his plans. He started piecing together his properties, buying farmland from Smith and others. THE NEED TO BELIEVE Ingram knew he still needed a powerful real estate broker to bring in homebuilders. Each one he called in Phoenix shot him down, telling him Maricopa would just be a bunch of mobile homes. “In those days, all the interest was on Casa Grande,” he said. “I went to every broker in town and showed them my idea. And every broker except one said, ‘Mike, you’re absolutely crazy. You’ll never sell one lot. You’ll never sell one home until Casa Grande is completely built out. Do you not understand that Casa Grande has doctors, they have shopping centers, they have car dealers, they have dentists? You have a Circle K and Headquarters, and NAPA was there.’” The one broker who listened was someone Ingram did not want to approach in the first place. James “Nate” Nathan of Nathan & Associates brokered some of the biggest deals in the state, including Johnson Ranch, Power Ranch and Copper Mountain Ranch in Casa Grande. Ingram saw him as a major competitor. Nathan listened because he saw what Ingram saw: tiny Maricopa’s proximity to the East Valley and Sky Harbor. “You could tell growth patterns,” Nathan said. “He said, ‘I can’t list this with you because
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