Real estate leader stepping down after nearly 50 years in business

Buz Koelbel stepping down after nearly 50 years in real estate – Denver Business Journal (bizjournals.com)

By Kate Tracy – Reporter , Denver Business Journal

Apr 9, 2024

After nearly 50 years at the helm of his firm, a Denver real estate veteran is stepping down and handing off his day-to-day responsibilities to his son.

Buz Koelbel of Koelbel and Co. served as president and CEO for 47 years. Now, his son Carl Koelbel will be taking the role, and Buz will remain involved with the company as an executive leadership advisor. Buz’s other two sons, Walt and Dean, will also continue in leadership positions at the 72-year-old firm founded by their grandfather.

Looking back on his long career, Buz takes pride in many Koelbel and Co. developments, including the Pinehurst Country Club community, which Buz said was a trailblazing development from a land planning perspective at the time. The Preserve at Greenwood Village, The Breakers — now known as Tava Waters — and the Rendezvous community in Grand County are other highlights in his career.

“One of our monikers that my dad always said is that ‘Under all lies the land. We must respect it and use it wisely.’ And I think we’ve proven that we’re doing that,” Buz Koelbel said.

Koelbel and Co. employs more than 60 people and has an office in south Denver at 5291 E. Yale Ave. While Buz and Carl both value the outside perspective that other employees bring to the firm, they told the Denver Business Journal that they want to keep the leadership within the Koelbel family.

“It’s important, I think, from a credibility standpoint, when we go stand in front of a city council or we’re sitting in front of a city manager, to be able to say, ‘Look, we’re here, we’ve been here, we’re not hiding. The person you’re dealing with is the name on the building and the name on the firm.’ I think that helps us…in an environment right now where I think credibility for developers can be a big challenge for a number of reasons,” Carl said.

For his part, Carl has learned a lot from his dad. He’s watched Buz decide not to build fences around the homes at The Preserve at Greenwood Village. Even though real estate agents at the time thought it was a bad idea, Buz didn’t want the barriers that fences create between neighbors in that community.

Carl also watched his dad have residents vote on whether they wanted the development of The Breakers, which he said was “unbelievably risky.”

“He has a very incredible gut feel on development,” Carl said, adding that Buz couples that with “very rigorous research and work ethic.”

Looking to the future, Koelbel and Co. is building Innovus, a new office development catering to defense contractors, in Aurora.

In partnership with an experienced coworking operator, Koelbel and Co. launched a new initiative called Work Simple to buy distressed suburban office buildings and operate flexible or coworking spaces out of them.

And last May, Koelbel and Co. broke ground on a health care-centric office development called Catalyst in Omaha, Nebraska, modeling it after its first Catalyst project in the River North Art District.

Both Carl and Buz think Koelbel and Co. is in a good position to continue expanding some of these projects — Catalyst, Innovus or Work Simple — in other cities and states.

Buz recently returned from traveling in Africa with his wife Sherri, and is looking forward to more travel. But he’s not officially retiring from Koelbel and Co. either.

“It just energizes me and gives me an opportunity to continue to stay involved in something that’s obviously been a labor of love for me for the last 47 years,” Buz said.

As Buz’s and Sherri’s oldest of 11 grandchildren is only 9 years old, it will still be a while before the fourth generation of Koelbels starts getting the real estate bug.

“Having been around and been involved in a variety of organizations, the true blessing and reward for me is that successful third-generation families are the exception, not the rule,” Buz said. “We’re very excited that we are one of the exceptions, that we’re making this work and having a lot of fun doing it.”