2024 CEO of the Year: Christine Camp of Avalon Group

When Christine Camp was a young girl, Fort Street was a busy shopping district anchored by Kress and Liberty House, with five-and-dime stores and mom-and-pop shops in between. She and her siblings had emigrated from South Korea in 1976 and, after settling into a three-story walk-up in Kaimukī with their parents, Christine would often catch the bus to Chinatown with her mom and siblings to explore her new world.

Each of the kids would get a dollar, she says, and they’d spend it all on clothes or toys at The Salvation Army. At Woolworth’s, Christine bought her first English books, a Sherlock Holmes volume and “Little Women.” Mysteries from the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series fast-tracked her comprehension of a new language. She was only 10, but she had glimpsed the promise of opportunity.

Fifth grade, however, shattered Christine’s grand illusion of America. Kids threw rocks and made fun of her for being a foreigner. “I was this little girl with a broken spirit, wanting to hide whenever classes started,” she recalls.

Her sixth-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary, Mrs. Hasegawa, changed all that. She read aloud a poem that Christine had written about maile lei, singling it out as exemplary.

“Everybody looked at me differently from that day forward, or maybe I just felt that way. It made me stand up,” she says, marveling at the impact one person can have. “I don’t know what I would have been if she hadn’t given me a voice and a presence. That confidence went so far that in seventh grade I ran for class president. That was the beginning. When somebody gives you hope, you have a willingness to try. When you have hope, you’re living for the possibilities.”

That modest spark of confidence has grown over the years. Today, Avalon Group, the company Camp founded, owns or manages 1,100 residential units and 2.3 million square feet of gross leasable floor space across Hawai‘i in partnership with other companies and financiers. On O‘ahu, she, her team and her partners have built for-sale and rental homes, shopping centers, schools and industrial parks.

She has supported 17 nonprofits and served on multiple boards, most notably 20 years at Central Pacific Bank and its parent, Central Pacific Financial Corp. In July, she was selected to be a global governing trustee for the Urban Land Institute, the international think tank for land use and real estate experts. She and her projects have earned countless accolades; in 2016 she was named Developer of the Year by the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, and in 2019 and 2020 she received similar awards from the General Contractors Association of Hawaii and the Building Industry Association of Hawaii, respectively. Plus, she is a leading force in efforts to revitalize Downtown Honolulu. For those reasons and many more, Hawaii Business Magazine has selected Christine Camp as its 2024 CEO of the Year.

The 2024 CEO of the Year celebration honoring Christine Camp will take place on Wednesday, December 4, 2024. For more details click here.

“It Can Change a Generation”

After graduating from Kalani High School, her first full-time job was with RK Development, where Rex Kawasaki introduced her to a career that would let her give hope to others.

“He helped people who would have lost their properties. He would subdivide for them so they could sell off pieces or so they could pay their taxes or deed those properties to their children. I realized you could really touch people’s lives with land and housing,” Camp says. “It can change a generation and what their trajectory is.”

Five years later, Kathy Inouye hired Camp as an assistant project coordinator for the Castle & Cooke team that built Mililani Mauka. “She was not just an incredibly fast learner – if she didn’t know something, she sought out the answer to it,” recalls Inouye, herself a pioneering female force in real estate development and a longtime Kobayashi Group partner and chief operating officer.

Inouye saw how Camp developed strong relationships with colleagues in business and government, and how she gained their respect. Recently, Inouye came out of retirement to be a consultant for Camp. “There are investors that come to her and say, ‘I want to invest in your next project,’ because they trust her.”

During the decade after high school, Camp took evening classes at whichever campus accommodated her work schedule — UH Mānoa, Kapi‘olani and Honolulu community colleges, and Hawai‘i Pacific University – ultimately graduating with a business degree from HPU. “The education I received was quite fruitful,” she says, “because everything I learned was targeted to apply to what I was actually doing in my work.”

After five years at Castle & Cooke, where she was promoted to senior project director in development, Camp became VP of development and acquisitions at A&B Properties, further establishing herself as a dynamic powerhouse in an industry dominated by men. In 1999, at 32, she launched her own company, the Avalon Development & Consulting Group. Then, after two years of consulting for others, she changed the name to Avalon Development Co. and committed 80% of its efforts to its own projects. In 2002, it became Avalon Group, a full-service real estate development, consulting and sales company.

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Revived a Hawaii Kai Project

Avalon excels at niche developments that complete communities. Camp offers a surprising fact: The company has done housing projects on O‘ahu, but since it began investing in Central and West O‘ahu about 20 years ago, it completed 19 projects there, none of them involving housing.

“Homes alone don’t make a robust community,” Camp says, explaining that homebuilders like Gentry already filled that role. Instead, Avalon built shopping centers, schools and industrial parks, among them the Shops at West Loch, Kapolei Business Park, Plaza at Milltown in Waipahu, which houses the Hawai‘i Technology Academy headquarters and Ballet Hawaii’s westside location, two Cole Academy sites and the Social Security Administration building in Kapolei.

In East Honolulu, Avalon took over a housing project in Hawaii Kai that developers had tried – and failed – to build three times. Avalon was contracted by Hanwha Engineering and Construction in December 2013 to develop, redesign and obtain financing for the project. Avalon later purchased the property from Hanwha outright.

Avalon Group took over a failing housing project in Hawaii Kai, and after construction was completed, converted 213 units into the Hale Ka Lae condominiums while preserving 56 units as affordable rentals. Many existing tenants applied two years of already-paid rent as credit toward a condo purchase. | Photo courtesy: Avalon Group

When a loan on the property came due and high interest rates forced Avalon to consider alternative refinancing, Camp converted 213 units into the Hale Ka Lae condominiums while preserving 56 units at Avalon’s adjacent Hale Manu building as affordable rentals for the next 30 years. The moves gave existing tenants the option to apply two years of already-paid rent as credit toward a condo purchase, enabling a lot of these families – including many that may not have been able to obtain mortgages otherwise – to become homeowners.

“The buyers were exactly the kind of people we want to build homes for: policemen, firemen, teachers and nurses,” Camp says, adding that living in Hawaii Kai also gives these workforce families access to outstanding public schools.

What Does Your Mother Think?

Her mother, who supported five children as a waitress after Camp’s father died of cancer the year after Camp moved to Hawai‘i, wasn’t sure what to think of her developer-daughter’s job. “She said, ‘So you are a contractor for construction?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t do construction. We hire people for that.’ ‘Oh, so you design, you draw pictures?’ I said, ‘No, we have architects for that.’ ‘Oh, so you sell?’ I said, ‘No, we have sales agents today.’ ‘So what do you do?’ ” Camp says.

“I said, ‘I make decisions, Mom. Every project is a little business. I come up with the idea for the business. I come up with a budget and the schedule. I ask people for money, and I hire people to do the business,’ ” she continues. “She said, ‘That’s not real estate.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s an investment, but you do it through real estate.’ ”

The 2010 documentary “The Lottery,” which features the joy and heartbreak of families of New York City students vying for coveted spots in a charter school, made a big impression on Camp. Later, she discovered that when DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach opened in 2019, the charter school had space for only 100 sixth graders. The next year, the school moved from Laulani Village to Kapolei Marketplace.

Camp thought about the hundreds of parents who wanted to enroll their kids but there was no space. “They wanted something better for their kids,” she says. “I said, ‘What can I do to help?’ They said, ‘We’re going from one shopping center to another shopping center. We need a school.’ ”

With little expectation of profit, Camp dedicated land that Avalon owns outright for the construction of the DreamHouse Center in Kapolei. Slated for completion this fall, it will be anchored by DreamHouse High School, which will accommodate 400 students.

Here are pictures of groundbreakings for two Avalon projects. Top, Camp dedicated land that Avalon owns for the construction of the Dreamhouse Center in Kapolei, which will be anchored by Dreamhouse high school and its 400 students. Bottom, the crossing at Kapolei Business Park West Phase I offers about 28 warehouse condominiums ranging in size from 929 to 15,645 square feet, which can be combined into larger spaces. | Photo courtesy: Avalon Group

In September, Avalon and Hawai‘i Pacific University opened HPU’s Downtown Science Laboratories, a four-story, 22,000-square-foot complex on Fort Street Mall. Home to the College of Natural and Computational Sciences, the facility includes teaching labs, specialized research labs, a dark room, a security office and a faculty lounge.

“HPU had been looking to build a lab for a decade. It represents an important part of HPU’s core mission and core responsibilities,” says Stephen Metter, CEO of MW Group and a trustee of HPU. “Camp took the responsibilities of the previous developer and agreed to a delivery date of Aug. 19, and she actually delivered the space in advance of that.

“It was a very complex build with all the very specific requirements necessary for a full-scale research and teaching lab. She inherited incomplete plans with an incomplete environmental analysis. Because of the inflation of both raw materials and labor, it’s likely that Camp had additional expenses that were unpredictable in building out the space. But she honored the existing contract fully with HPU. So from HPU’s perspective, she is a superhero.”

Camp’s development acumen has helped many other nonprofits, from the Hawai‘i Opera Theatre to Hale Kipa, a safe haven for at-risk youth. But if there’s an issue that tugs at her heart as much as education, it’s housing. She still remembers cosigning the mortgage for her mom’s house in ‘Āinakoa in East Honolulu, when fee simple ownership became available. She was 18, working full-time, and moved by the sense of security that came from knowing her mother would never be kicked out.

“She fully realizes the critical nature of housing in Hawai‘i. It’s critical at all levels. It’s not just affordable housing. It’s housing for all local residents,” says Inouye, the former Kobayashi Group COO. “She will go after projects that oftentimes people don’t want to touch because they have unique challenges.”

That was exactly the case when the Institute of Human Services sought to build the ‘Imi Ola Piha Triage and Treatment Center, O‘ahu’s first medically monitored drug detox and psychiatric stabilization center for houseless people who are ready to seek help and stability.

“When you think of drug detox, it’s something everybody knows our community needs, but many don’t want it in their backyard,” says Leina Ijacic, who was chief administrative officer at IHS when Camp helped them tackle the project. IHS struck out twice at securing a location, and then struggled to close on the third location. Their grant funding – secured years earlier – fell short because of construction cost inflation, so they lost the contractor.

Camp swooped in with the expertise to finalize the acquisition of the property and aid in its renovation. On her own dime, she assigned a project manager for a year to see the construction to completion.

“Christine would lend her expertise in our small meetings talking about construction finishes because durability and details matter. She would shake up our long term strategic meetings, helping us to dream big and map a clear vision. She would remove roadblocks that seemed insurmountable, then overnight, give you a detailed financial pro forma on how to get there,” Ijacic says. “She kept the team motivated, reminding us we were doing something good for Hawai‘i, and showed us that with innovation, grit and camaraderie, even this tough project was achievable. I am certain that ‘Imi Ola Piha would not exist without Christine.”

“She is also extremely caring and thoughtful on a personal level,” Ijacic adds. “While we were doing all this, I had my ‘last hurrah’ baby, my third child. We were doing so much, yet she checked in to say, ‘Congratulations! Can I send you food to your house to celebrate?’ There’s thoughtfulness in everything she does.”

Inouye has also witnessed Camp’s generosity. They were in a meeting together when Camp received a phone call about the wildfires ravaging Lahaina. “She owns a property on Front Street. This was a commercial building, so she had all the tenant numbers. While I sat there, she started calling people to find out if they were OK,” Inouye says.

After a sleepless night and confirming everyone had escaped safely, Camp told Inouye the building was her own personal investment, something she had planned to retire on. “She told me, ‘I’ve hit rock bottom before. I’ll make it out. I’m more worried about them.’ For the next several weeks she personally reached out to those individuals and said, ‘Don’t worry about paying rent. What do you need?’ And she provided that assistance. That’s not just resilience, that is compassion.”

“I Want to Be a Mom”

Camp explains a change in her mindset when she turned 40. “I think a leader has to understand how to say no. Because we – especially women leaders – we tend to want to say yes. We’re trained to be the accommodators in many ways. Our parents said, ‘Be a good girl. Do what you’re asked. Be liked by others. Don’t make a fight.’ Whereas men can be more bold.

“In my younger days, I said yes to everything, and I did my best. It made me see and learn so much, but also delayed my ability to have children. When I turned 40, I said, ‘Wait a minute, I want to be a mom.’ And I ended up giving birth at age 41.”

It was 2008, and Camp knew she wanted to carve out more time for her son, but she also says she felt obligated to her staff. “As the CEO of the company, Camp carries that weight with her that everyone in this office is ultimately depending on her and Avalon to be successful in our business because all of our families rely on that,” and it’s a traumatic experience for her when she has to let someone go, shares Robby Kelley, executive VP at Avalon.

2008 is when the Great Recession began to unfold. “I was in for a lot of hurt. Everything that I thought I accomplished, I lost it all,” Camp recalls. “I had to lay off half my staff, and I knew that it impacted their lives, but I had to keep the core going.”

“I had my son, my little bright-eyed son. There he is. That was age 2,” she says, pointing to a framed portrait of him by a pool. “I couldn’t even afford to take him anywhere. Somebody invited me to a swimming pool, and they bought him an Elmo, and I felt so grateful. I keep that here to remind me how hard it was back then.”

Gabe Lee, a former executive VP of American Savings Bank, has known Camp for 35 years. He offers his perspective as a lender at that precipitous time: “After 2008, development and residential mortgages and valuations all went down. That’s when I got to see Camp’s ability to scramble and find different sources of capital.”

He describes all of the variables that can topple the multilayered capital stack that goes into financing a property. Obstacles can appear at any stage of the project: cost estimation, design, construction, property management, compliance. Then there’s the flip side of the formula: the customer.

“All those are always changing. Equity investors and bankers – their parameters change based on the economy. If the bank says, ‘No, we want more equity and we want to charge you a higher interest rate and go at a lower loan-to value ratio,’ you have to scramble to the equity investors to try to sell that to them. Then you have to look at your sales team to see if you can raise prices to come out with a return. Same thing when interest rates go up and the stock market goes down and people change their buying habits – that’s another scramble. Nothing is just one phone call.”

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“She’s Quick on Her Feet”

Lee describes some of the attributes that enable Camp to juggle and pivot effectively. “In these types of negotiations, when we come back and say, ‘What about this?’ and ‘What about that?’ she has done her homework. There’s constant feedback. What she’s really good at is following up and closing the loop on things that will help people make decisions. The other thing is she’s quick on her feet. If things aren’t going her way, she can be flexible and possibly even change directions.”

Camp’s investments are informed by a comprehensive understanding of what every stakeholder stands to gain or lose. They’re also bound by her sense of hope and willingness to try. She sings the lyrics of “I Still Believe In Me” from the TV show “Fame”: “When you don’t care, you don’t cry. It won’t hurt if you don’t try.”

“Basically, you have to try. If you don’t hurt, you won’t learn. Learning is such a big part of growth. All of my failures? Those were expensive lessons,” she says. She has even made a PowerPoint presentation showcasing her failures so others can learn from her mistakes.

“What you don’t do in your failures is hurt others along the way. What I mean by that is in a business, if you fail, that means you owe people money. During that time after 2008, I owed people money. I was so happy when I was able to pay everyone back within 10 years, at 9% interest.”

Camp lived in a walk-up apartment until she repaid every loan, even to investors who had knowingly assumed the risk.

“I felt I didn’t deserve enjoying anything nice until I paid back everyone who believed in me – I had their trust,” she explains. She pauses before sharing what she calls the secret to her success. “I was able to raise $135 million last year for investments. I’ve raised over half a billion dollars in my 25 years in business. You cannot do that unless they believe they’re going to get paid back.”

Reimagining Downtown

When Camp talks about the revitalization of Downtown Honolulu, she rattles off numbers with keen anticipation: $1.3 billion invested in Downtown and another $500,000 in Chinatown since 2018. Hawaii State Federal Credit Union spent $60 million renovating its site, which allowed it to bring back 250 employees who had been working remotely. Central Pacific Bank spent $40 million, and next year an additional 150 employees will return to the bank’s Downtown headquarters. Paris Baguette has 4,000 locations worldwide, including 150 in the U.S. The Downtown Honolulu shop ranks among the top 5% in U.S. sales. When the rail line is completed in 2031, it will take 10 minutes to get from the airport to Downtown. The old Downtown Walmart space – site of Liberty House back when Camp was a kid – was acquired by Avalon in February. It has 87,000 square feet – more than 2 acres of floor space on which they can innovate – plus 454 parking stalls. Such numbers are stored away in Camp’s memory, accessible whenever she needs them to make a calculated decision.

“Quietly, people have been buying and investing and making transitions. We’re looking at $1.8 billion moving through. In the next year and beyond, another $783 million,” she says, explaining the rationale that persuaded her to make the revitalization effort her focus for the next 7 years. “What was hollowing out is coming back. We already have a beautiful city. The grids are already there. We just need to refresh it, reimagine it.”

Camp’s company is converting the Davies Pacific Center at Queen and Bishop Streets into a mixed-use building with 352 condos. Now called Modea, it is part of an ambitious effort to revitalize downtown Honolulu. | Photo courtesy: Avalon Group

Mapping out the Downtown and adjacent Chinatown district, Camp recognized that more market-rate housing was needed to balance the concentration of affordable housing in the area. Hence the decision to convert the former Davies-Pacific office building into Modea, a mixed-use complex with 352 residential units. The old Walmart will be transformed into Forté, a social destination with pickleball courts, restaurants and shops where HPU students, Downtown hotel guests, office workers and residents can congregate. Forté, as in Fort Street, strong and loud, Camp explains. “We’re coming in forté at DoHo – Downtown Honolulu.”

Because of her diverse investments Downtown, Camp has become an important player, says Colbert Matsumoto, a fellow longtime CPB board member and chair of Tradewind Group. He praises her energy and enthusiasm and says she’s staked out a strategic position “that will be key to forming Downtown into a different kind of community going forward.”

In pockets where the homeless, drugs, crime and pollution had taken over, new infrastructure is in place, along with a united effort to clean up the streets. Additionally, several developers have chipped in to hire private security.

“You can’t do something like this alone. Christine understands that, and she’s embracing being a partner to everybody,” says Patricia Moad, VP of operations at Continental Assets Management, which opened the new 112-room AC Hotel by Marriott a block from Fort Street Mall.

Moad says she appreciates the standard that Camp has set. “Christine is a successful female who is leading her own company, raising her own capital, consistently closing on these landmark deals and through all of that, she’s changing communities. It’s great to see a female dominate in this space as she has.

“I’ve reached out to her for advice, and she’s always happy to give it,” Moad continues. “She’s considerate of others, patient and a good listener. That’s a woman trait, and maybe I’m shocked by it, because you don’t get a lot of that in this industry. It’s refreshing.”

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“She Will Truly Listen”

Being a developer often carries a stigma in Hawai‘i, where knee-jerk opposition to almost any development can be the norm. “For some folks, it’s difficult to maintain your calm when you’re being accused or criticized unfairly,” says Inouye. “But what Christine will say is, ‘I hear that you’re very upset. Change is very difficult.’ And she will truly listen and try to accommodate their concerns where possible.”

Says Camp: “I try to understand the other side and try to be understood, which means a lot of time communicating. The best defense when someone attacks your integrity is transparency.”

“Downtown is my last big project,” adds Camp, who, as part of that transparency and to hold herself accountable, answers her own calls and makes her own appointments. “I live by goals. I have a peg and I tell everybody about it so that everyone knows where I’m going, and then they help me along the way.”

This lifelong approach makes perfect sense for Camp, who studied accounting before realizing she prefers to keep her gaze forward. “Accounting is backward-looking, finance is future,” she says. “I dream, I project and I use that as a guiding force for putting together our business concepts.”

But she’s quick to point out that any vision is just 1% of the work; the other 99% is in the execution and decision-making. “I enjoy all of it because the peg is always visible to me. The peg is the end. The end is that we’re going to make this community better, because when we finish this project, there will be available services, or there will be completed homes, or there will be a converted office building.”

“I don’t develop on the mainland, because I couldn’t possibly make good decisions for that community the same way I can make good decisions for this community where I’ve been working, living, breathing and having friends, family and associates for the last 50 years,” she says.

“Nowhere else but in Hawai‘i could I have had the opportunities I’ve had. When you ask for help, you’d be surprised how many people just help you. That’s the Hawai‘i way. We all play the long game because we never know how we’re going to be connected to each other.”

Camp’s next visible peg has a date attached to it: Jan. 4, 2033. After finalizing her succession plan, which includes leaving half her company in the hands of four key employees, she shared it with her leadership team on Jan. 4, 2018. In that plan, she sets a 15-year goal with increments of five years. “We all have to make a living, but whatever you do, why not do something you are passionate about, where you can make a difference, do no harm and provide a win-win situation?”

She could have named her company after herself, but she chose Avalon, the mythical island where Excalibur, King Arthur’s magical sword, was forged and where the fictional king himself was taken after his final battle.

“I wanted a name that was evergreen, so even if I left, it could survive and they will continue to do the work I feel is meaningful,” Camp says. “That’s Avalon.”

The 2024 CEO of the Year celebration honoring Christine Camp will take place on Wednesday, December 4, 2024. For more details click here.