Buz Koelbel ran a top Denver real estate development firm for nearly half a century — but he’s stepping down as CEO to hand the business over to his first-born son.

Carl Koelbel will take over as CEO and president of Koelbel and Co., the real estate firm announced this week, continuing the tradition of being a family-owned business.

Koelbel and Co. was founded in 1976 by Buz’s father. Buz became president of the firm in 1985. He’s worked on retail, office and residential projects across Denver and mountain resort towns and recently got into building affordable and workforce housing for low- to moderate-income Colorado residents.

“Timing is everything in business and in life and I am confident this is the right time to pass the baton,” Buz said in a statement. “The future of Koelbel and Company is bright… Denver is one of the most exciting, innovative, and vibrant communities in the entire country.”

Keeping the business family-run, with three of his sons in leadership positions, was important to making sure the company continues to have ties to the community and to build with a long-term vision approach.

Carl graduated from the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business like his father and grandfather before him, where he got his masters of business administration in real estate. He also got a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from the University of Southern California.

Under Carl, the company is working on building a defense contractor office complex in Aurora and partnered with investor Mark Hemmeter on Work Simple, which targets struggling suburban office buildings to turn them into flexible offices. 

In this Q&A, Carl discussed with The Denver Gazette what he hopes to bring from his father’s legacy to the company and what trends are shaping the metro area’s development environment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Denver Gazette: Why is the company going through a change of leadership?

Koelbel: My dad’s looking to have a little more flexibility in his day to day. And as we were scaling up our activities and a number of different platforms, we felt it was appropriate that the one who’s running the day to day be a little more available.

Not that Buz is going anywhere. But he gets to travel a little more, golf a little more and provide supervision instead of keeping his hand on the wheel the whole time.

DG: What was the biggest lesson you’ve learned from your father about the real estate industry?

Koelbel: To be tenacious. I think it’s the biggest one. With these deals, you get told “no” a lot. Sometimes it’s by the city, sometimes it’s by a bank, sometimes it’s by equity. And you really need to continue to keep your focus on what you want to accomplish and fight through it. And if you do that, then you’re going to be successful.

DG: How did you get into the family business?

Koelbel: In eighth grade, my dad took me and my siblings on a trip to San Francisco and told us “Don’t get into real estate. It’s too hard.”

Clearly, we listened.

After college, I moved to Washington DC with the intent of working on the Hill and maybe getting into politics. And then I met a lot of the folks who did that and decided maybe it wasn’t for me and so I actually ended up doing an internship to turn into a job at the Urban Land Institute.

And while I worked there, I would get to see all these really cool projects. They had these awards and I could go through the awards files and look at them and realized that I really like this and I’ve got a really great platform that I could go do this at with the family business down back in Denver, so moved back to get my MBA at CU and then started at the company in 2010 because that was the only person who would hire me at the time because we were in the depths of the recession.

DG: What is one thing you hope to do differently now that you’re taking over?

Koelbel: The biggest thing is just to focus on our processes and our operations. My dad is incredible at getting projects done and historically in our company, we just focus on the projects and figure the rest of it would take care of itself. But for the last couple of years, I have been focused on identifying and cultivating our corporate culture, streamlining and codifying our processes and building a platform that allows us to scale these concepts.

DG: Stepping in as a new generation of the business, how do you think that will shape the company?

When I started working there, we did start looking at more urban sites, which is something we historically hadn’t done and there was a major trend at the time that I think still continues. Folks like these walkable, fun neighborhoods and those only existed downtown. So we did that.

The other focus is as we have identified the values, also making sure that we’re very focused on the millennials we’re hiring in terms of giving them the clear growth path for their career, and making sure that they understand the value of the work that they do with us and to the communities at large.

It’s not just that we’re providing homes and places to work, but we’re also building affordable housing and our success and all of those endeavors allows us to be philanthropic back to the community and that wasn’t something that we really talked about as a company before the way that we talk about it now.

DG: What are some of the biggest trends shaping Denver development that you are hoping to address?

We continue to see demand for places to recreate and we’ve got our project in Winter Park called Rendezvous that is doing exceptionally well. And 80% of our buyers are Front Range and we are starting to see people who are doing reverse commute.

One of the trends from COVID that I think is going to remain is people just really hated their commute and they liked not having to do it and so that means a couple of things mostly related to office. One is that suburban locations are going to continue to be more attractive, especially those that are walkable. Secondly, there’s going to be some flexibility that people want in how and when they come into work and what days they come into work to avoid peak travel.

The other trend that we’re seeing is just the continued influx. We’re still seeing the baby boomers follow their kids out to Denver. We’re still seeing some opportunities in the luxury market with the boomers looking to downsize and simplify their lifestyle. So those are kind of the big trends we’re going to try to capture.