How a Tiny Bank From the Ozarks Got Big and Outpaced Wall Street’s Real Estate Machine

George Gleason isn’t one of those chief executives who make the job look easy. Rather, he’ll tell you (and tell you) it’s hard. Not up-at-dawn hard. Up-at-midnight hard. That’s when he got out of bed to write the remarks for his bank’s first-quarter earnings statement, finally hitting “send” one March morning at 5:30 from a hotel room in Washington, after a full week of client meetings on the road. Gleason, who runs Bank of the Ozarks, an institution in Little Rock with $22 billion in assets, even makes being interviewed look hard. In response to an emailed list of questions, he composed five pages of answers in red, then referred to the printout frequently when we met at the bank’s headquarters in April. “I should have numbered these pages,” he said.

At 64, Gleason is bald, with white eyebrows that give him an incongruous baby face. He speaks in maxims that indeed sound predrafted: “If a loan doesn’t meet our credit-quality standards, we don’t make it.” Most of his career he was a respected but little-known community banker. During the post-recession gentrification wave that’s seemingly blanketed U.S. cities in barre studios and artisanal toast, he’s become something else: the country’s largest construction lender. That this superlative—based on data compiled by Real Capital Analytics Inc. for multifamily housing, hotels, and other commercial properties in the first nine months of last year—should go to a relatively small Arkansas bank and not, say, Wells Fargo & Co., with 87 times the assets, is a measure of the skittishness many lenders still feel when it comes to real estate. Memories of empty Miami condo towers, vacant Silicon Valley office parks, and half-finished Las Vegas casinos don’t easily fade.