Looking Ahead: 20 Years In, Focused on What Comes Next
By Rob Hunden, President and CEO, Hunden Partners
Hunden Partners is celebrating a milestone: 20 years of shaping destination real estate. This milestone is an opportunity to reflect with gratitude and look forward with purpose. We are proud and humbled by what our clients have built, are building, and the impact the projects we’ve had the opportunity to advise on has had on their place.
Two decades in, our work remains rooted in the same principle that shaped our earliest engagements and my reason for starting the firm: strong places are built on clear-eyed truth combined with informed vision and strong leadership, not wishful thinking. That commitment to rigorous analysis, honest counsel, and long-term impact has guided our evolution and will continue to guide what comes next.
As guides who spent years learning, writing and executing a playbook for development success, we are grateful for the journey and more ready than ever to guide our clients from vision through execution.
From Projects to Partnerships
Over the past five years, Hunden Partners has grown more than fivefold. That growth reflects a deliberate shift in how we serve our clients and the trust they place in us to walk alongside them for the long term, beginning right when they are envisioning what is ‘next’ for their place.
We have evolved from primarily delivering time-limited studies to serving as long-term trusted advisors, development partners, and asset optimizers. Today, we work alongside dozens of client teams over many years to help shape, fund, build, and steward transformative destinations, through both moments of opportunity and times of complexity.
What That Looks Like in Practice
Our work spans the full destination development journey, from vision and planning to feasibility, governance, financing, development, operations, and asset management.
In practice, that means:
- Start with vision. Guide communities, institutions, and destinations to define who they want to become through placemaking and tourism action plans.
- Turn vision into priorities. Advance projects, events, and organizational strategies through deep due diligence, feasibility and impact analysis.
- Move ideas to reality. Lead creative funding strategies, developer and operator selection, and site, design, budgeting, deal development and project execution.
- Stay for the long haul. Serve as optimization advisors and asset managers once projects are built and events are launched.
Highlights from 2025
Our work in 2025 spanned destination development, placemaking, sports and real estate advisory, convention center strategy, and long-term asset optimization.
A few highlights include:
- Work with nearly 90 clients across 35 states, Washington DC, and British Columbia
- Destination development and placemaking action plans from coast to coast, including a statewide tourism plan for Virginia and destination planning work in communities such as Washington DC, Bentonville, AR, Jackson, MS, Oak Creek, WI, Mammoth Lakes, CA, Sugar Land and Mesquite, TX, the Indianapolis riverfront, and Henderson County, NC
- Major collegiate, sports-anchored developments including those at LSU, Kansas, Oklahoma, and others still under non-disclosure agreements
- Convention center expansion, development, governance, and asset management work in markets such as Baltimore, the Meadowlands, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Cleveland, Baton Rouge, Corpus Christi, Durham, and South Padre Island
- Convention headquarters hotel strategy and development advisory in Tulsa, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, East Montgomery County, TX, Houston, and Phoenix
- Major league sports and real estate development advisory related to the Chicago Bears, Chicago Fire, Indy MLS, the Nashville Predators and several others under NDA, including NBA, NHL, NFL and MLB teams
- Continued work on multiple Kentucky Tourism Development Act impact studies, one of the most effective development incentive programs in the country. Hunden has assessed nearly 30 projects representing more than $600 million in development for this program since 2010, and Rob Hunden has worked on the program since 2001, prior to forming Hunden Partners
- Developer and operator selection, financing strategy, and execution work for authorities, universities, cities, counties, states, and destination organizations across North America
Looking Forward to 2026 (and the Next 20 Years)
As we enter our 20th year, our expertise is deeper, our platform is broader, and our ambition for client impact is stronger than ever.
In 2026, we will continue expanding how we support clients, both through advisory services and through new tools designed to help destinations make better, faster, and more informed decisions.
What will not change is our role as truth-tellers and trusted partners, helping clients navigate complexity, align ambition with reality, work through obstacles, and create authentic built environments that move destinations forward.
Gratitude, and What Comes Next
None of this happens without people. The quality of our work, the extensive insights we provide, and the impact Hunden Partners has achieved through our services depends on great people demonstrating great effort.
Thank you to our clients for trusting us with your most complex and consequential decisions. Thank you to our teammates and partners for the creativity, discipline, and commitment you bring every day.
As we mark 20 years at Hunden Partners, we remain focused on what matters most: helping places become the best versions of themselves, using the playbook and framework for success crafted and executed by Hunden.
We invite you to learn more about Hunden Partners, our placemaking expertise, and how we serve as transformative catalysts, one destination at a time.
