Bruteig’s bully pulpit.
Cary Bruteig, the go-to apartment authority for everyone in the multifamily business, book-ended the half-day multifamily conference last week that drew about 500 brokers, lenders, developers and others on the ground floor of the Front Range apartment market.
Bruteig not only provided a detailed analysis of where the Denver-area and Front Range multifamily is today, where it has been and where it appears to be going at the wide-ranging 2017 Fall Multifamily Development & Investment Conference & Expo sponsored by the Colorado Real Estate Journal.
It was the largest conference this year in Colorado focused on the multifamily market.
Cary Bruteig moderated the development panel at a recent multifamily conference sponsored by CREJ. Photo credit: Rocky Mountain Photography.
Bruteig, owner of Apartment Appraisers & Consultants, which publishes the data-rich Apartment Insights, helped kick off the conference by providing an overview of the multifamily market.
“I am going to give you cold, hard facts today,” Bruteig said, noting that more units are being built than being absorbed, which is the definition of overbuilding.
He said is “mission is the truth,” but joked if the statistics he presented were depressing “Jeff (Hawks) will cheer you up immediately after my presentation.”
Hawks, a vice chairman at ARA, a Newmark company, returned the favor by joking that he only uses “broker math” that isn’t tethered to the rigors of algebra like Bruteig is. He also quipped that he slept through part of Bruteig’s conference.
The reality is that many people in the audience and on the panels held on to the litany of facts and statistics presented by Bruteig, who prefers to let the numbers do the talking than color his commentary with doom and gloom or only blue-skies ahead pronouncements.
As a testament to his impact, almost every subsequent panel alluded to something Bruteig said. That was the case whether the panel was on lending, investing on behalf of private clients, or institutional investing.
Bruteig also moderated the last panel of the day. The panel members have developed tens of billions of dollars of multifamily communities in the Denver area.
Cary Bruteig speaking at the recent multifamily conference sponsored by CREJ. Photo credit: Rocky Mountain Photography.
Early in his talk, Bruteig looked at a Wall Street Journal article published on Oct. 12 that focused on how overbuilding of luxury apartment units has led to increased concessions by developers and property managers in downtown Denver and surrounding neighbors.
He noted the irony with tens of thousands of new apartments recently built or underway, the Wall Street Journal used a photo of a condo project to illustrate the article.
“I read through the article and noticed how light it was on statistics,” Bruteig said. “It quoted a couple of leasing agents and had quotes from experts I have never heard of before.”
Note to the Wall Street Journal: next time, quote Cary Bruteig. I guarantee it will give your article more authority.
