Profile: Dan Molloy

Tampa Bay’s building industry faces challenges both today and in the future due to the slumping economy and increasingly costly government regulation, says Dan Molloy, who was installed recently as the 2009 President of the Tampa Bay Builders Association (TBBA).

The trade organization, headquartered in Tampa, has merged with the Pasco Building Association. Molloy will be the first president of the combined group, which now encompasses Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. TBBA serves builders, developers, suppliers and subcontractors.

Molloy is an attorney with Molloy and James—his wife, Judy James, is his law partner—and also president of Oak Creek Land Company.

He says one of his first goals as TBBA’s top volunteer leader is to improve communications between the community and the organization. “There’s been a deep wedge between them and there shouldn’t be,” Molloy says. “This industry is an integral part of our community.”

Another goal: To steer builders through the current housing slump and help them prepare for what lies ahead.

“The biggest challenge this year—and I really hope it will be this year—is dealing with the governmental and public side of things as we begin to get into a recovery,” Molloy says. “We’re in a downturn and everyone is doing what they have to do to survive. I think we’ve all adjusted to the new realities and so, in that sense, we’re already recovering.”

But, Molloy adds, governmental regulation is going to be much tougher in the future. “We’re engaged in a very transitional time in Florida,” he says. “There’s a movement against any future suburbanization.”

So builders can expect to see more regulation on issues such as water and energy use as well as development patterns and density. “Green building is something that’s going to be mandated more and more by government regulators,” Molloy says. “The problem with all of it is, it’s expensive.”

Through TBBA, Molloy has engineered some governmental affairs successes. Last year, he and James led an effort to alter a proposed update to the Tampa" target="_blank">Hillsborough County Comprehensive Plan that TBBA contends would have “shut down the building industry and severely hampered any economic growth.”

Although Molloy is an attorney who says “I like exactly what I’m doing,” he has a long-standing interest in the building industry. “My father was an electrical contractor and I’ve always been involved in building one way or another,” he says. “I worked construction in college. I worked in a law firm that worked with builders.”

In fact, Molloy was local general counsel for Morrison Homes of Tampa for 13 years and for Lennar Homes of Tampa for eight years. His legal background also includes stints as Assistant State Attorney and Assistant County Attorney in Tampa" target="_blank">Hillsborough County.

Oak Creek Land Company was formed in 2004 when Molloy and his partners acquired and revitalized a 1,200-unit development near Brandon.

Molloy, who is originally from Philadelphia, has lived in Tampa since 1959. “I live in Hyde Park in a house that’s now over 100 years old,” he says. “I love our neighborhood. I can walk wherever I need to go. I love being in the city.”

Over the years, Molloy says Tampa has grown and changed in a number of ways. “I think there’s a lot more diversity of interests and diversity of things and diversity of people,” he says. “Tampa is now the kind of place that you can pretty much find any product, any kind of food and any kind of cultural event. When I was growing up here, it wasn’t that way.”

The concern, Molloy says, is that the rise of Florida’s housing costs—including taxes and insurance—is forcing working families to leave the state. “We’re losing families and picking up more retirees,” he says. “Retirees don’t have an investment in the area (like families do).”

Molloy’s advice to homebuyers: Don’t think about your home so much as an investment, but rather as a home. And don’t be so concerned about the timing of buying a home, but rather how that home can fit your family’s needs.