Sunflower Development Group

Sunflower Development Group is a real estate development firm founded in 2007 and headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. The company specializes in historic rehabilitation and adaptive reuse, working with federal and state historic tax credits to bring older commercial buildings back into service as hotels, apartments and mixed-use property. Sunflower is a co-developer of the conversion of the 1928 Security Building in downtown Phoenix into a 255-room hotel, a $135 million project on a National Register-listed Curlett & Beelman landmark that Maricopa County will continue to own under a long-term lease. The firm is a small team of fewer than ten people and works across the Midwest and Southwest on development, historic tax credit structuring and project management.

Sunflower states its own operating premise plainly: where others see blight or neglect, it sees an opportunity to improve lives and create community. That is the developer’s version of the adaptive-reuse argument, and the project list backs it with dates.

The recent record runs from Brookside Commons in 2021, a new-construction residential project, through The Oxbow in 2023, combining commercial with multifamily residential, to the Margaritaville Kansas City hotel in 2025 and the University of Kansas Gateway District in 2026, a mixed-use scheme pairing new construction with hotel and student housing. Mission Mart Shoppes sits alongside those as a commercial renovation. The mix is deliberate: a firm known for historic rehabilitation that also delivers straightforward new construction is one that can underwrite either, which matters when the historic tax credit maths on a particular building does not close.

Three distinct lines of business are published rather than one. Development is the obvious one. Public-private partnership structuring is the second, described in the firm’s own terms as pursuing partnerships because big ideas often require even bigger budgets. The third is consulting: Sunflower lends its real estate development and tax credit expertise to other parties’ projects, which is unusual for a developer and only credible for a firm with a long enough track record on credit structuring that others will pay for the advice.

The construction promise is stated without hedging: whatever the client is planning, new construction or historic preservation, commercial or residential, the firm says it will get it built and built right, on time and on budget.

The firm describes itself as having planted strong roots in Kansas City and grown into one of the country’s leading historical real estate developers, working in communities well beyond the Midwest. The Phoenix hotel conversion is an example of that reach in practice rather than an exception to it.