If you’re a Ford employee in Southeast Michigan, you’ve probably worked or visited a building that Ford Land has been involved with in some way, whether you realize it or not.

Ford Motor Land Development Corporation, better known as Ford Land, was incorporated on Aug. 4, 1970. The decade saw a building boom for the Ford subsidiary of more than 2,300 acres surrounding Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn and straddling portions of neighboring Allen Park.

The Fairlane development – it was named as a nod to the ancestral home of Henry Ford’s family in Ireland – included the Hyatt Regency hotel, the Fairlane Town Center, office buildings, a commerce park, a residential community with apartments and condominiums, a health care center and a recreational and banquet facility.

Planning for the Fairlane development began in 1968 and Ford Land established as subsidiary to undertake the development. The project broke ground in 1971 and construction continued for several years. The land includes portions of Fair Lane Estate purchased by the company in 1951.

The project was highlighted by the Fairlane Town Center shopping center and Hyatt Regency Dearborn, which both opened in 1976. An elevated “people mover” spanned a half-mile between both buildings, connected the 1.5-million square-foot mall with the 14-story, 800-room luxury hotel, which Ford no longer owns, for several years before being discontinued and removed.

Also around that time, Ford Land subsidiaries were involved in developing the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. Later, Ford Land partnered with the UAW in 1997 to convert the nearby Veteran’s Memorial Building on the Detroit riverfront into the 140,000-square-foot UAW-Ford National Training Center.

Other notable projects have included Fairlane Green, a 1 million-square-foot green retail and recreation center in the early 2000s. The landfill redevelopment project sits on a 243-acre site, home of the former Allen Park Clay Mine Landfill.

More recently, Ford Land has been leading human-centered workplace experience efforts and Ford’s ongoing campus transformation in and around Dearborn, including the restoration of Michigan Central Station and other buildings in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, as well as a new central campus building on Ford’s Research & Engineering Center campus.

Ford Land also steered the redevelopment of two blocks of West Dearborn for Wagner Place, a 150,000-square-foot mixed-use development featuring retail, restaurant and office space.

In total, the company's real estate arm now also owns or operates 220 million square feet of global real estate including commercial and office space made up of 1469 building in 48 counties. One of Ford Land’s most recent international projects was a 2.5-million-square-foot campus and Ford Business Solutions global hub in Chennai, India.