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As Wampold Companies continues into its fourth decade of property management and development in Baton Rouge and Louisiana, the company’s focus is on the completion of a largescale renovation on Rivermark Centre, the historic 21-story building just blocks away from both the CBD and the State Capitol.
AT A GLANCE
Top executive: Mike Wampold, Founder and CEO
Phone: 225.215.1800
Address: 4171 Essen Lane, #450, Baton Rouge, LA 70809
Website: wampold.com
Projected to be completed in the next 90 to 120 days, the complex houses Chase Bank, Wampold’s offices, an underground parking garage and a set of renovated apartments, expanding Wampold’s catalog of managed properties across the state that includes hotels, apartment complexes and business plazas.
“We really create and maintain extraordinary live, work and play environments,” says Mike Wampold, the company’s founder and CEO. “And extraordinary means different from the norm.”
Mike, who founded the company in 1982 with no formal real estate experience, started his portfolio developing 40- to 50-unit apartment complexes in Baton Rouge, a tradition that has evolved to include larger complexes of 200-plus units like the LSU-adjacent Bayonne at Southshore.
The company’s biggest development project in its early history came in 1986 when Wampold entered into a 20-year government lease to develop housing at Fort Polk, a US Army installation in Vernon Parish.
Wampold’s developments near Fort Polk—Sycamore Point and Timber Ridge—provide 600 housing units to families of active duty personnel serving on base. According to Wampold’s website, they “deliver off-base housing that goes above and beyond to make [the] park-like setting feel just like home,” separating it from the other military-adjacent housing communities.
“That really put us in the position to come into Louisiana and start buying properties around the state,” Mike says.
Today, the company operates more than a dozen properties across Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Fort Polk, with its crown jewels, Mike explains, being the two Baton Rouge hotels, The Renaissance and The Watermark.
Through award-winning staff and restaurants, the brand is most well-known for these hotels.
“I don’t mind saying that those are two of the nicest hotels in town,” he says. “Whatever talent there is in the Baton Rouge region, we can attract that talent to our hotels because they want to be associated with the top-end hotels in the city.”
As the company’s footprint expands across the state, Mike and the rest of the company are glad to call Baton Rouge home and want to continue the traditions that started here.
One of the biggest expansions that the company is making entering the 2020s is its development of Harveston, an 1,800-acre planned community just off Bluebonnet Boulevard. The community, Mike says, is intended to be a mixed use development with schools, residential housing and retail space, along with fitness centers and community hubs.
The community, “inspired by the neighborhoods and streetscapes of many classic southern towns,” will be developed in two phases: The Preserve, with 350 homesites, and The Lakes, with 1,100 homesites planned. It’s this community at Harveston that represents the future of Wampold: a celebration of the past and an eye to the future.
