Real estate developer Randall “Randy” Kendrick recently drew the national spotlight, after reports emerged of his engagement to former Bravo reality TV star Yolanda Hadid.
For several years, Kendrick has been working on an extraordinarily ambitious project in Rockdale, TX, where he is building a 34,000-acre master-planned community dubbed Sandow Lakes, about 60 miles northeast of Austin.
Described as the “resurrecting of an industrial ghost town,” Sandow Lakes is being built on the site of an enormous, defunct Alcoa aluminum plant. The planned community will contain advanced manufacturing; commercial, retail, and leisure spaces; residential villages; and workforce housing.
The community has been compared to The Woodlands, a 28,000-acre community near Houston. However, Sandow Lakes will eventually eclipse it in terms of its size, which is more than twice that of Manhattan.
“We have such a frontier right now in Central Texas,” Austin-based Compass agent Michael Reisor tells Realtor.com®.
“This is a very, very big, robust, important master-planned community,” he says of Sandow Lakes. “It’s not just another subdivision.”
While residential housing is planned for the community, the first phase of development is The Switch, a 3,300-acre advanced manufacturing and logistics campus that aims to be “a fully sustainable Carbon Net Zero campus.” It will reportedly be ready for occupancy by the third quarter of 2026.
The Texas Triangle—anchored by 35 counties within Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston—is already home to a Samsung plant, a Tesla gigafactory, and a SpaceX rocket development facility.
“Leading with employment rather than building a lot of homes, I think, is the right move,” says Reisor of The Switch. In terms of residential housing in the area, there is already a “robust inventory,” with homes in the $400,000–$500,000 range being “overpriced and not really moving.”
“Letting the jobs and industry dictate the build-out of the residential is a thoughtful move,” he says.
“It’s a good site to do manufacturing. How much residential development will it lead to?” he muses. “Will it be the next The Woodlands? If you build this giant factory, will the residential development follow?
“If you’re looking in the next 20 years, I think it will happen. But for the next five or 10 years, will a beautiful community spring out of this site? I don’t know. I think there will be a lot of commuting to begin with. People will come for the jobs, but I don’t think they will come for the amazing elementary school or quality of life.”
He says he hasn’t heard complaints about the massive development from residents of neighboring Taylor, a small town of 16,000 residents, dotted with charming restored historical homes and a quaint town square. But he notes that they are accustomed to much nearby industry.
In fact, the town has two massive AI data centers in the pipeline.
But that doesn’t mean all residents are thrilled with the area’s industrial side. Community concerns over the planned data centers include “noise, light pollution, electromagnetic fields, water pollution/contamination, and air pollution/contamination” and that the facilities will be an “eyesore” and “hurt property values.”
Harrison Polsky, principal of development and sales at Catena Homes, a Dallas-based luxury residential builder, says the redevelopment of Sandow Lakes’ industrial brownfield site can only be a positive.
“It’s bringing new life to a property that’s been sitting idle for years and creates an opportunity for jobs, housing, and investment,” he tells Realtor.com. “That said, as with any project of this size, people will be watching closely to see how it’s executed and whether the infrastructure keeps up with the growth.”
But he notes that, with most large-scale developments, there will be community pushback to some extent.
“Some people will welcome the economic growth and new housing, while others will be concerned about traffic, infrastructure, and preserving the area’s character,” he says.
Hadid connection
Kendrick’s reported engagement to Hadid has rocketed the normally press-shy developer into national prominence in recent weeks.
This isn’t Hadid’s first rodeo when it comes to relationships with real estate moguls. Her former fiancé, Joseph Jingoli, is the chief business development officer of Joseph Jingoli & Son Inc., a construction and energy firm.
And Hadid’s first husband, Mohamed Hadid, is a Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, CA, luxury commercial and residential real estate developer. He and Yolanda Hadid share three children: Gigi, 31; Bella, 29; and Anwar, 26. All three are professional models, as was their mother.
It’s unclear how Hadid and Kendrick met; however, both run in real estate circles and live in The Lone Star state: Kendrick in Dallas, and Hadid in Fort Worth.
Kendrick is the founder and CEO of Xebec, a national logistics real estate platform that he’s headed up since 1996.
He also serves as the CEO of Sandow Lakes Ranch Venture LLC, which is leading the master-planned community at the former Alcoa site in Texas.
Who is Randy Kendrick?
Las Vegas-born Kendrick, who is notably private and declined to speak to Realtor.com, told D Magazine in 2025 that he’d wanted to be a real estate developer since age 12, when his father, who owned a construction company, suggested the career for him.
“My father told me when I was young that I should become a developer someday,” he told the outlet. “When asked why, he said, ‘You want to sign the front of the check, not the back.’ He also told me when I wanted to start my own company right out of college that ‘You have less to lose today than any time in your life, so take a chance.'”
Kendrick earned a B.S. in business administration from the University of Southern California and completed the university’s Real Property Development and Management Program in 1986, according to his official biography.
On the occasion of his $20 million gift to the USC Marshall School of Business in 2021, USC President Carol L. Folt called Kendrick a “first-gen college student.”
The developer also collects vintage guitars, loves to vacation in Montana, and is a huge Elvis Presley fan. (As a child, he appeared as an extra in an unnamed Elvis concert film, and can be seen sitting near Priscilla Presley.) He also said that Sandow Lakes will be his legacy.
“The pinnacle of my 38-year career will be the development of the first carbon-neutral, fully sustainable metro in the country on our Sandow Lakes Ranch holdings just northeast of Austin in the heart of the Texas Triangle,” he told the outlet.
In that same interview, Kendrick cited “cooking for my family” as a favorite hobby, and in a 2021 “fireside chat” with his alma mater, he mentioned driving his daughter to Southern Methodist University in Dallas and that he was born in 1964.
He’s also a big proponent of reshoring and bringing manufacturing back to the States.
“Somewhere along the way, a factory job became a bad job—it’s not,” he said in the interview. “Our leaders have to make a manufacturing job, a blue-collar job, not a dirty word.”
Reisor says he is familiar with the developer’s reputation and that Kendrick has “the bandwidth and development power to execute” a massive community like Sandow Lakes.
Told of the developer’s engagement to Hadid, Reisor says, “When there’s so much money going around and so much high-profile activity, these people that are known and famous [in the Hollywood and real estate worlds] all start to meet each other.”
“She’s got a thing maybe for real estate people,” he says with a laugh, referencing Hadid’s three relationships with men in the industry. “Maybe it’s a little bit of a pattern.”
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