Layne Varney has just recently celebrated his 21st anniversary as general manager at SunBird. “It’s hard to believe how fast time has passed by and how much has changed.” Since beginning work at SunBird, his family has grown from three to five children, four boys and a daughter, the youngest, who is turning 16 years old. His four boys are in college now, with the oldest graduating last year. Over 21 years, his hairline is receding with speckles of gray, he’s gained a few pounds and nearly qualifies in age to live in SunBird. Before joining SunBird, he worked at Sun Lakes Phase 2 (Cottonwood Palo Verde) for two years as assistant manager and previously worked with a community management company that managed several large HOAs in the valley.
While attending high school in Tempe, he began cleaning swimming pools and performed a variety of maintenance for several HOA communities. After graduating Ottawa University with a bachelor’s degree, double majoring in business administration and human resource management, he began taking courses to further his education with the Community Associations Institute. He completed the course work and passed an extensive exam to become a licensed Professional Community Association Manager (PCAM).
Layne was born in California, but his father was transferred by IBM to Arizona in 1974. Megan, his wife, was born in Yellow Knife, Canada, and moved to Tempe, where they met in junior high school and church. Layne and Megan will soon be celebrating their 27th wedding anniversary and became grandparents last year.
Layne enjoys watching his children play sports and perform music, has a great passion for mountain biking in the several mountain trail systems here in the local area, enjoys the outdoors and playing bocce ball and corn toss. It’s not uncommon for him to have bruises, cuts and scrapes from his biking mishaps. He enjoys working at SunBird because of the many great people and the progressive style SunBird has in moving forward with updating and improving. He credits his terrific staff of employees, past and present boards of directors, committee members, clubs and many other residents who work together to keep SunBird a great place.