Roger Glover grew up on a cattle farm in southwest Virginia, the kind of place where the work started before school and never really let up. His father was the town doctor, so there was always a second income in the background, but Roger still spent his childhood in the lots with a shovel and on a horse from about age four.
He played football at Hampden-Sydney, then went back for a law degree and an MBA. By the time he finished, he was pretty sure law wasn’t going to be his path, and he shifted his focus to real estate instead. That’s what landed him at Trammell Crow, one of the biggest development shops in the country at the time, where he spent a couple of years learning land deals from people who’d been doing it for decades.
“My father was a doctor, a small town doctor, and we had a large cattle farm, and I had the pleasure and enjoyment of growing up working on the farm with the cattle and the horses. It was a great experience. It also was an opportunity to really start what I really love, the outside, from four years old.”
The Walmart chapter came next, after a friend from the brokerage world became the acquisition broker for Walmart’s expansion across Virginia. The two of them put together a group of investors Roger still calls his coal miners, and over eight or ten years they built out roughly 15 shopping centers around new Walmart sites. Roger still owns six of them today.
“He had become the acquisition broker for Virginia for Walmart when they first started expanding 30 years ago. So we, over a couple beers and maybe a couple shots of something, came up with the idea that we find the site for Walmart, we can do outparcels and strip centers beside them. But we need money.”
The 55 plus housing focus came after that, once the Walmart work dried up. Roger sat down and asked himself a simple question, which buyer actually has the money and the staying power, and his research kept pointing at the same answer, boomers. He’s spent the two decades since chasing that answer, first as a franchisee and then on his own through Cornerstone Homes, which he founded in Richmond in 2001.
The difference at Cornerstone comes down to sequence. Most builders start with a house. Roger starts with a clubhouse.
“There’s always that grumpy grandfather. There’s always that grandma that never seems to be happy. That’s just part of any community. My opinion is you don’t focus on them, you focus on the majority.”
“One of my principles is the first building permit is the clubhouse. And you immediately start bringing people together. You create activities to start. You create a social committee.”
One of his first 55 plus communities, about 150 homes built some 25 years ago, ended up running 25 different clubs by the time it was two thirds built out, all without a paid activities director. It wasn’t in the budget, so the residents just started running their own.
That approach built out around 1,800 homes as an Epcon franchisee before Roger spent nearly ten years easing his way out on his own terms, careful about what he could carry forward and what belonged to the franchise on the way out. It’s added up to about 20 communities across his career so far. We spend a good chunk of the conversation on what he calls his black belt buyers, the 55 plus crowd he says will not move on a marketing pitch alone, only on proof, and how that changed the way he sequences every project from the ground up.
“The senior buyers, I always considered, learned quite quickly they were the black belt buyers… And I always said they’re the show me crowd, don’t tell me crowd.”
That same approach also put him through the hardest stretch of his career. When the recession hit in 2008 and 2009, Roger had two North Carolina communities right at the point where the clubhouse and the models were finished and the infrastructure was already in the ground, and the buyers simply stopped showing up.
“So when the great recession hit, I had two communities in North Carolina that we had just gotten that point. I had all this investment and capital in the infrastructure, in the clubhouse, in the first buildings, and the light switch just dropped.”
We get into what that stretch actually cost him, how his capital stack looks different today than it did when he started, and why the discipline he learned working cattle as a kid is the same discipline that carried him through it. Roger also walks me through the favorite project of his career, an agrihood in Virginia built around a working farm with walking trails and a butterfly garden along the river, and explains why age qualified zoning gives him room that a standard subdivision developer never gets from local councils.
“Clearly Chickahominy Falls… That’s the one that’s centered around a 10 acre working farm. And with my history on a farm, that’s the one.”
Toward the end we talk books, including one written by the people behind this show, and Roger shares a line from a movie that’s stuck with him for years.
“When the young emperor at the end, and Tom Cruise… he brought the sword and presented it to the young emperor, and the emperor said, ‘Tell me how he died.’ And Cruise shook his head. ‘No, I’ll tell you how he lived.'”
Stick around for the rapid fire round too. His answer for the biggest lie builders tell themselves, and the one word he’d want every builder to remember, are both worth the listen on their own.
About Roger Glover
Roger Glover is the founder and owner of Cornerstone Homes, a Richmond, Virginia based active adult developer and builder. Since founding the company in 2001, he has built it into a vertically integrated platform covering land development, homebuilding, and HOA management, delivering 75 to 150 homes a year across multiple 55+ communities in Virginia and North Carolina. Cornerstone’s flagship community, Chickahominy Falls in greater Richmond, has delivered more than 600 active adult homesites and earned back to back HBAR MAME Community of the Year honors in 2022 and 2023, along with a NAHB Best in American Living Platinum Award.
Before founding Cornerstone, Roger spent roughly 10 years in commercial real estate, starting at Trammell Crow, and later founded Villa Development Co., building seven active adult condominium communities in Hampton Roads. He holds a law degree and an MBA from the University of Richmond and has never had a zoning case voted down in three decades of entitlement work across Virginia jurisdictions. He grew up on a cattle farm in southwest Virginia and played football at Hampden-Sydney College.
Cornerstone Homes: https://www.cornerstonehomes.net/
Roger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-glover-40784627/
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