Timothy Naughton and the art of making room

Timothy Naughton spent more than three decades helping an apartment company grow. Then he spent a year helping somebody else learn to run it. In a business fond of putting names on buildings, this is an unusually useful detail: a leader willing to make room.

Benjamin Schall joined AvalonBay Communities as president in January 2021. During the transition that followed, he visited 125 of its almost 300 communities and worked alongside Naughton before taking over as chief executive in January 2022. Schall later called Naughton a mentor and described the care he took with the handover. The itinerary gave the incoming boss time to meet the people behind the portfolio.

Naughton had arrived in 1989. He had been an investment chief, an operating chief, president and CEO. By the time he handed over the executive job, he knew how many different kinds of work were concealed inside the simple business of renting someone a home. His career is a study in learning those jobs, keeping them connected, and eventually trusting other people to do them.

A local boy, a long apprenticeship

Naughton grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. He and Diane, who grew up in nearby Arlington, met at the University of Virginia and later raised their family in Northern Virginia. His professional life would expand across the country while retaining a remarkably familiar center of gravity.

He earned his economics degree at Virginia in 1983, graduating with High Distinction and election to Phi Beta Kappa, then completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1987. Two years later he joined Trammell Crow Residential as a development partner. That business became part of the corporate ancestry of AvalonBay.

The distinction matters. Naughton joined before the current company existed. Avalon Properties and Bay Apartment Communities merged in 1998 to form AvalonBay; the business he helped lead was assembled across successive corporate chapters. His tenure supplied continuity through changes that a company name alone can hide.

In 2000 he became chief investment officer. In 2001 he became chief operating officer. His promotion to president in February 2005 put development, construction and investments directly under his oversight. Investment decisions and operating consequences were becoming parts of the same education. By September that year, he also had a seat on the board.

Three front doors

AvalonBay announced Naughton’s succession to Bryce Blair in June 2011. He would become CEO the following January. Just before that change, the company introduced two new apartment brands, AVA and eaves, alongside its existing Avalon offering. The announcement carried an idea that sounds obvious until a large organization has to act on it: renters want different things.

Avalon served the upscale end of the market. AVA pursued urban customers who valued access to neighborhoods and shared spaces, often in smaller apartments. Eaves offered a more moderately priced, practical suburban option. The brands gave the company different answers to the question a prospective resident brings through the front door.

“We have come to know our customers better than ever,” Naughton said at the launch. This required choices about location, service, apartment design and price. A feature can be attractive in a brochure and irrelevant to the person paying for it every month. A swimming pool has excellent publicity instincts; its usefulness depends on the resident.

At the start of his CEO tenure, Naughton joked about waiting behind Blair: “would he work longer than me?” His humor was dry; the apprenticeship had been long. The brand strategy gave him something more demanding than a ceremonial first act. He had to help turn customer distinctions into decisions people could make across a large portfolio.

The idea kept evolving. AvalonBay added Kanso in 2020, offering apartments with fewer communal amenities. The business had found another group of customers for whom the list of things they did not want to pay for was worth taking seriously.

A rival across the table

Early in Naughton’s CEO tenure, AvalonBay and Equity Residential teamed up to acquire Archstone from the Lehman Brothers estate. The transaction closed in 2013. Two competitors became partners in dividing an apartment portfolio that would have been a substantial undertaking for either one.

AvalonBay took 40 percent and Equity Residential the remainder of a transaction valued at approximately $16 billion, including assumed debt. For a company strongly associated with developing apartments, this was a conspicuous acquisition. It also fit the geography AvalonBay already understood, including Southern California, where creating new supply could be difficult.

Naughton called it a “once-in-a-generation type of opportunity.” He did not treat the purchase as a substitute for building. In March 2014 he was also discussing a development pipeline of about $6.6 billion, split between work under construction and potential future projects. Acquisition, redevelopment and construction gave the company several ways to put capital to work.

The distinction between an announced pipeline and completed homes deserves attention. A potential site still needs approvals, financing and execution. A finished apartment needs a resident. Naughton’s progression through the operating jobs made those stages part of his own professional history. The numbers were attached to work he had spent years overseeing.

The unglamorous pleasure of being ready

In his 2014 corporate responsibility letter, Naughton recorded $1.1 billion of completed development across 17 communities, with more than 4,100 apartments. Another $1.3 billion of work had begun. Those figures described a business making long commitments, with money going out well before residents arrived.

By 2016, AvalonBay was describing a practice of securing roughly 80 percent of a project’s long-term capital when construction started. This match funding reduced exposure to financing conditions changing halfway through a development. The policy was an acknowledgment that a building schedule and a capital market do not owe each other any favors.

There was a related emphasis on goals that could be checked. His 2014 letter set out longer-term corporate responsibility targets and plans to update lighting standards using LED technology. These were modest-sounding details beside billion-dollar development totals. They also made a large ambition answerable to specific actions. Somebody would have to change the lights.

Learning to leave the keys

In December 2020, AvalonBay announced its next succession plan. Schall would arrive as president and a director, with the expectation that he would become CEO after the transition. Naughton pointed to ten years in the chief executive job by the end of 2021, preceded by eleven years as president or COO.

He remained executive chairman through 2022 and retired as an officer on January 1, 2023, continuing as non-executive chairman. The stages gave the company an overlap between incoming leadership and accumulated knowledge. They also drew a progressively clearer line between running the business and overseeing it.

Schall’s account gives the arrangement a human scale. He had time to travel, meet teams and develop relationships before becoming CEO. Naughton’s contribution included helping a successor feel at home inside an organization he had known for decades. That kind of knowledge travels through conversations as well as board papers.

The boardroom work extended beyond AvalonBay. He joined Park Hotels & Resorts’ board in 2017 and BXP’s in 2024. He also became a senior adviser to Navitas Capital and Energy Impact Partners. Those roles connected his operating experience with property technology and climate technology investing. His 2017 term as Nareit chair had already taken him into the wider industry’s public conversation.

What happens after the apartment?

In 2022, Tim and Diane’s $250,000 gift to the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing’s Next Generation Fund received an equal match from AvalonBay. The combined $500,000 supported the launch of enrichment programming for children and young people living in APAH communities.

The connection went back to Arna Valley View, an affordable-housing community AvalonBay sold to APAH in 2014. The later gift focused on opportunities beyond securing an apartment. Naughton wanted young people to have room “to explore a passion, feed their curiosity.” It was a specific aspiration for resources that could open up activities otherwise out of reach.

“to explore a passion, feed their curiosity”

Tim Naughton, on the Next Generation Fund, 2022

In June 2020, he had also urged AvalonBay to examine its responsibilities around inclusion, representation and access to housing. His message to employees proposed more diverse recruiting, wider opportunity in management and stronger advocacy for affordable housing and inclusionary zoning. These were stated commitments, with the practical questions of implementation still attached.

Another company, a familiar responsibility

On August 17, 2026, AvalonBay and Equity Residential completed their merger, creating Vivmark Residential. Naughton became a trustee of the combined company. Schall became its CEO; Stephen Sterrett became chairman. The two apartment businesses that had worked together on Archstone were now part of the same enterprise.

Vivmark launched with more than 184,000 rental apartments and over 11,100 under construction. Those are company totals, built through the work of many people across both organizations. Naughton’s place in the new board carried forward a history stretching back to a development partnership in 1989.

That history is full of changes of scale: a regional job, a public company, a larger portfolio, a successor, a new corporate name. The more revealing changes are in what he chose to pay attention to. Different renters needed different apartments. New leaders needed time to learn. Children needed opportunities beyond the front door. After decades of building, Naughton’s story keeps returning to the people who get the keys.