re:publica 2014

Peter Rummell has been active in the real estate development industry for over 40 years.   Rummell began his real estate career in 1971 with the Sea Pines Company, developers of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and Amelia Island, Florida.  Beginning in 1977, he was general manager of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida for the Arvida Corporation.  He joined the Rockefeller Center Management Corporation in New York as vice chairman in 1983, leaving in 1985 to become president of Disney Development Company.  The Development Company was responsible for The Walt Disney Company’s non-theme park land, directing hotel and related development at the company’s theme park locations in Orlando, Anaheim, Paris and Tokyo.  During Rummell’s 12-year tenure, Disney produced over 20,000 hotel rooms.  The new town of Celebration, Florida was also a product of this focused development effort.  Disney Development Company and Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s design and creative division responsible for theme park development, were later merged and Rummell became chairman of the combined group, Walt Disney Imagineering. 

In 1997, he left Walt Disney Imagineering and became chairman and chief executive officer of The St. Joe Company (NYSE:JOE) where he led the transition of St. Joe from a regional manufacturing conglomerate focused on paper making to a dynamic real estate company and place maker.  He retired from St. Joe in 2008. 

Rummell is on the board of AvalonBay Communities, the largest publicly traded apartment REIT in the United States, The Haskell Company, a privately held design-build organization headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, with business interests spanning the western hemisphere and Kitson & Partners, a Florida-based, private residential and commercial real estate investment and development company.  He is also active in real estate advisory work for several clients.

Rummell is currently active and is past chairman of the Florida Council of 100, a nonpartisan organization of the state’s leading CEO’s.  He is also past chairman and on the board of The Alliance for World Class Education, an advocate for public education in Northeast Florida.  Rummell is the immediate past chairman of the Urban Land Institute and past chairman of the Urban Land Institute Foundation, the worldwide real estate organization promoting the intelligent use of land.  He is the immediate past chairman of the Jacksonville Civic Council, a CEO-based civic group dedicated to long-term growth and community betterment and serves on the board of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, an organization created by Governor Jeb Bush to establish Florida’s education system as a model for the nation.  Rummell was co-chairman of the Jacksonville Super Bowl Host Committee, which hosted Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 and is a founder of One Spark, a crowd-funding creator’s event that launched in Jacksonville in 2013.

Rummell, 68, graduated from The Hill School, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  In 1971, he received a master of business administration degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.