Feature photo above: Jack, from left, Randy, Brock and Rick Ferguson
Rick Ferguson is a man who knows which way the wind is blowing, and not just because he spends so much time outside. The developer behind Valley Falls Estates in Little Rock and Waterview Estates and Lakeview West in Roland, he understood early on that Little Rock has been growing west practically since the French landed there more than 300 years ago.
He himself was living in St. Charles — then part of the city’s western reaches — when construction began in the newly annexed Chenal Valley in 1986. Catching a whiff of opportunity, he talked to his father, Randy, about doing business together in the up-and-coming area.
“My dad’s always, always been my hero,” Rick said. “At 89, almost 90, he’s still my hero. I just wanted to be with him. I always say, ‘I guess if he’d been a truck driver, I would have been a truck driver.’”
Randy started building homes during the 1960s. A farm boy from a one-horse town, he was used to working from sunrise to sunset. When the day’s work was done, however, he still had some time left, so he spent it with his neighbor, a carpenter.
“On the farm, when it gets dark, you quit. So what am I going to do with the other three or four hours of my day?” he said. “I’d go over there every day and say, ‘Where are you going to be tomorrow?’ and I’d meet him over there. Never charged him a penny. He’d always say, ‘When are you going to let me start paying you?’ I told him one day, ‘You don’t realize it, but you’re educating me.’”
He told his wife he might be able to make a living building houses and began apprenticing with the carpenter in earnest.
“He was a good, old-time builder with a lot of quality in mind,” Randy said. “You’ve got to understand, back then, we didn’t have air guns, none of that. Everything was hand nailed. Nowadays, it’s bap, bap, bap, bap. Young carpenters today would think they’d gone back into the Stone Age if they’d worked with us, but you didn’t have these tools back then.”
The hours were long, he said, but he enjoyed the relationships he built along with the homes.
“My wife used to say at some point in the summertime, ‘8:30 — well, he’ll be home any minute now,’” he said. “These people work 8 to 5. Then they come out to the job, and then you sit there on a pile of brick and talk for an hour and a half, and it just creates a rapport because you learn to love the people. You learn to like them because you’re around them every day.”
Randy built mostly north of the Arkansas River, where he lived, but after his son noticed the westward momentum in Little Rock, he and Rick began building in Chenal Valley. In 1998, Rick started a new development near South Katillus and Cantrell roads: Valley Falls Estates.
“I just listened to my customers,” he said. “I was building a lot in Chenal Valley, and they really wanted bigger lots, and so that’s why I developed [Valley Falls] into football-field-sized lots. Back then, people were building really, really big homes. It was kind of a trend, and so I got really blessed with good fortune there, that a lot of people wanted to be in a gated community that’s still in west Little Rock on bigger-than-normal lots. It just feels really private.”
Private, spacious, luxe — Valley Falls had it, but it was nothing in comparison to what was to come. Around 2007, Rick started Waterview Estates on a sprawling tract of land overlooking Lake Maumelle.
“I knew that people were drawn to water, whether it’s a river, a lake, a pond, a creek, an ocean,” he said. “People just love overlooking the water, and the second-most popular is the mountains.”
With mountain or water views in each direction, the beauty of nature is all around in Waterview. Also important is the privacy afforded by the lots, each of which backs up against a greenbelt for a sense of relative seclusion. A trail system runs throughout the green space, including some undeveloped land for dirt bikes and ATVs, and the subdivision borders the Ouachita National Recreation Trail, a nearly 200-mile route from Pinnacle Mountain State Park to Oklahoma.
Beautifully designed with luxury features, the homes are just as grand as the surroundings, although Rick said they are not all as over the top as some might imagine.
“A big misconception of Waterview Estates is that the houses are all huge, but they’re not,” he said. “We have, really, about three different sizes of homes. We’ve got the huge estates, and then we’ve got what are still larger homes. We even have something around 2,000 [square feet] that is a downsize for those people who love living here, but they don’t need a big 6,000- to 8,000-square-foot home anymore.”
After Waterview Estates was established on the east side of Lake Maumelle, Rick turned his attention to the west side, starting Lakeview West about five years ago. The development is similar to Waterview Estates, offering ample green space, spacious lots and a feeling of seclusion but perhaps even more remarkable views.
“Every house in the subdivision has a lake view,” Rick said. “That is a real anomaly. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
At nearly 90, Randy has long been out of the building business — he said he took to retirement “like a duck to water” — but Rick is far from alone in his work. He is joined by his two sons, Brock and Jack, who co-own Ferguson Building. The two started the business in 2020 after working for a different company.
“It came pretty naturally,” Jack said. “I always like to tell a story on Pawpaw. When Dad would drop me off to hang out with Pawpaw for the day, I’d follow him around on jobsites, and there was a funny story where he picked me up, and I was dressed just like him. I even had a pencil in my ear just like Pawpaw, which was his signature move.”
He said he enjoys taking a piece of ground and turning it into something beautiful. It is a passion shared by his brother, father and grandfather.
“I wanted them to do whatever they wanted to do, but I’m real thankful they thought of the legacy because I always enjoyed it,” Randy said. “When I got to the job every morning, I’d take the visual of it, and when I left in the afternoon, I always thought, ‘Hey man, look what we got done today.’”
He added that he expects a fourth generation of builders will be found among Brock’s children, at least one of whom is showing early signs of wanting to be in the construction industry.
“It’s just been a wonderful career,” he said. “I love the building business, and I have a lot of wonderful customers. I’ve built two or three homes for some people and then built some of their children’s homes, and the kids are already getting into this.
“I’ve always looked at it this way: I’m going to be there six months to a year depending on the size of the house, but [the customers] are going to be there the rest of their lives, so let’s try to get it the way they want it, not what the builder wants.”
That work ethic has trickled down the generations like the water flowing from the pool features at Waterview Estates. Rick said the keys to his work are to underpromise and overdeliver, treat people the way he wants to be treated, and be tenacious about attention to detail. Strong communication never goes amiss when it comes to walking a client through the homebuilding process, Jack added.
“My grandfather and my dad have cultivated a great name over their careers, so we certainly want to continue that legacy,” Brock said. “Anybody we ever meet who knows we’re related to our pawpaw asks about how he’s doing, and that’s kind of the same thing with my dad, so we definitely want to continue the family legacy.”
Rick Ferguson has built his career on listening to his customers’ needs and anticipating the westward expansion of Little Rock residents.
In addition to joining in the projects in Roland, the two brothers are working on a development in Saline County that is primarily for starter homes.
“I’m super proud of them. It’s the second-fastest-growing county in Arkansas, so I think they made a good decision,” Rick said. “I’m super, super proud of my sons, the character of my sons and their work ethic.”
Political and economic turmoil may cause people to “tap the brakes” on building, he added, but with a current shortage of luxury homes, the market still has plenty of opportunity. Rick said he believes Waterview Estates and Lakeview West will continue to be in demand as his sons build their company.
“If nothing else, simply because of the views,” he said.
Now in his 60s, Rick said he is nearing the end of his career. There are no plans for new developments in his future, he said; he is focused on the two neighborhoods currently underway.
“I’m a family guy, and so I want to spend as much time as God gives me with my close friends and family,” he said. “I would like to travel some with my wife.”
Rick spoke from a lot that would be a dream for anybody to own. The views are panoramic — Pinnacle Mountain to the southeast, Lake Maumelle to the south, and the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains rolling on as far as the eye can see to the southwest.
Both Waterview Estates and Lakeview West feature breathtaking views of Lake Maumelle and the surrounding mountains.
Reflecting on his career, the legacy he built with his father and his sons’ continuation of that journey, he summed it up simply, using the same words that will probably be used by whoever comes to own that piece of God’s country:
“I’m blessed,” he said. “That’s about it.”
Photos by Jane Colclasure
SEE THE FEATURE BELOW AND IN OUR SEPTEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF AY MAGAZINE
