6 Boston Developers to Watch in 2024
Developers to Watch
Sep 12
NAME: Tom Colleran
COMPANY: Elevated Companies
My path to development was very much through construction. I didn’t know early on that that's an area I wanted to go toward, but it was an area I was good at. Nowadays, hiring people, we, around the office, call them tape measure kids, and I was definitely that. I was adept at construction. It's just everyone wants to go to college, they all want to be rich, they want to do something different than construction, and I always thought the same. I knew that I wanted to be somewhat entrepreneurial. I knew I wanted to be working for myself. I knew I wanted to pave my own way. For a while there, I don't think I was interested in it at all. I thought I might go to business school, thought I might work at a corporation.
From there, your thoughts start to congeal. You get to a place where you do know where you're going like, "I want to be entrepreneurial. I would like to make a good amount of money. I'm good at construction." So real estate development started to come up more and more for me. I moved toward it with a co-op working for a couple of brokers on the waterfront in Boston. That was my first taste. I knew that I could take the skillset I had and use that avenue of real estate to go where I believed I wanted to go. So it was stages for me. It wasn't necessarily evident from an early time, but I guess if I had thought about it or now that I look back, it was pretty obvious that it could go there.
My father was in construction. We would always work with him in the summer. We were always part of a renovation project of his where we're going to work with him. I was very exposed to it from an early age, and I really enjoyed it. I was always into tools, always into job sites.. I think with joy comes direction. If you're good at it, if you love it, you keep moving toward it. That was very much the case for me.
In my early 20s when I wasn't so impressed with my own piece to the puzzle, I was taking the steps that I could to move toward real estate development. What that looked like is being a carpenter, while bartending at night. I was a frame-to-finish carpenter for a good handful of years, but didn’t talk about it much. You don't talk about it with your parents because you went away to school and they hope that you're going to be what they believe is more awesome. They are such strong examples of love and hard work and I felt their expectations were greater. It’s the same with your friends and peers, ‘What are you up to man?’ So I'm working away as a carpenter and all the while hoping and planning to one day own and manage these projects that I’m working on, but it's very small steps and you take what is available to you on that road at that time.
There's a ton of pieces to the development puzzle. So I was very fortunate to work at Sun Property Group for a long period of time, and these guys, they're looking for deals, they're buying deals, they're finding financing, they're going to zoning. So eventually, they saw in me someone who could help them with the construction end and then eventually help them with the development. I think if you look around, you can find a lot of places to add value for busy people, especially this industry is very, it's wild out there. You got neighbors yelling at you, ISDs yelling at you. Whoever can stand in the storm and still come to work every day and get things built becomes a valuable piece of the puzzle.
They were quite established as a brokerage a couple of years before I came in and were also getting deeper into development work I originally came on as a freelance project manager and eventually began partnering in the development projects. JD Wild and Dan Duval are the brokerage partners, the 3 of us have been the development team for the last several years, and JD and I operate Elevated Construction. We build our own projects as well as for a handful of other owners.
It's a very entrepreneurial environment, and we do take pride in that. We talk often about different areas we can add value to that are adjacent to our core businesses. We talk often about bringing people in who we wish to align with and offering them also the chance of being partially entrepreneurial. I really enjoy being around those kinds of people. It helps you with your mindset, it helps you produce, it helps you imagine where you can go, where you can take it. So yes, it is that way and it works for me very well.
At any time we have four to six projects open, and a handful of them in pre-construction. My daily responsibilities really involve making sure the open projects are moving as they're supposed to and toward close, making sure our guys in the field have what they need to do that, making sure the projects in pre-construction are moving through. Then also developing new relationships, developing new business is probably the third pillar.
Level Up is a great example of that third pillar. There are a lot of people in there that are far younger than me, and I wish I had the foresight to be that intentional about it early because now, being intentional about relationship building is probably one of the greatest tools I think that's out there. So through groups like that and just through my own realization later at this stage in life, I try to be very intentional about that. It's stuff like this, stuff like connecting with your brother, stuff like physically joining a group, but I think it's very important.
My hope is to build really great buildings at scale. Like I was saying earlier, you fail and you learn, you fail and you learn, and you hope to not make the same mistakes over and over or if you're having some success, how do you repeat the process at scale? So a lot of my last year or so has been trying to focus on what we do well, getting it documented, and being able to share it with others to repeat it at greater scale. We've also had some ups and downs with hiring and firing. So the building teams piece, also, you fail, you learn, you fail, you learn, and I'm trying to grow there. The hope is one day, again, bigger projects, more challenging projects, less mistakes, and a very robust team.
It’s basically a knowledge base. It's based in Apple Notes, and it's essentially trying to put forth the expectation more than once so that everyone's on the same page and then provide our guys with checklists to ensure those expectations were met before the close of a job or before the balance of a subcontract is paid out. So it's very repetitive language, but it is borrowing knowledge from all sorts of places or project-specific language. I'm trying to have the language be available when we put it out to bid. When we sign a contract, it's reiterated in a different format. Then our project management software, a very similar checklist is loaded. So our teams in the field are verifying that what we attempted to scope and purchase is what is being produced.
Development is hard. I mentioned building in the city and how it's hard to learn, but it doesn’t have to be. If you go down to ISD and you try and follow their permit checklist or certificate of occupancy checklist, you're going to fail every time. If you try and ask people what you need, you're going to fail every time. I don't think that's the way it should be. I've always enjoyed being a student of building in Boston. I've always kept my own checklists and learned from mistakes, added it to the checklist and, again, the relationships. So I feel that if you want to be more profitable building in Boston, you really have to focus in on knowledge and relationships.
So Build Boston is an attempt to commoditize relationships and knowledge through community. Very simply, it could look like peer reviewing these checklists. Someone might learn something before you're down there and then that gets added to the checklist. So hopefully the documents you're working off of are optimal at all times, whether it's a checklist or someone might have a more robust budget than you and you can learn from that.
Then the relationships could be as easy as happy hour with people experiencing the same stresses you are, or a conversation in Slack where you might be in a jam and you race for help and three people have your answer that thankfully might save you two, three weeks. It might be something different. It might save you an outright cost, but access to those relationships and knowledge I feel can be very valuable.
We do a quarterly happy hour and we try to do educational sessions in areas that either I'm looking to learn more in or think others can find value, such as right now, the new energy code's rolling out. So we've had a HERS rater and a Phius rater. We’ve had an attorney who's very well-versed in construction documents. Just continuous learning.
Then we have a Google Drive full of typical forms that you can access quickly for work in the city. Again, I mentioned checklists for permitting and certificate of occupancy hopefully to get people through quicker, to save them time and money, as well as construction proformas, utility documentation, how things are done in the field for each utility, that kind of thing.
If you're out there and you're trying to make a decision that could swing on $100,000 and you can't find the information, you're out there on an island, you're pretty lonely. So in order to fix that, to have a group of peers you can turn to very quickly and not only get an answer, but maybe get a consensus because if you ask five people individually, you might get five answers. So in a room where you have a group of people who have done this before, you're much more likely to get an answer you can move on.
I don't feel a lot of people are advocating for the builder in the city. You have a lot of different groups involved in the development, and it's often difficult to get them built. So I would like to form one voice of a group of strong developers, people who are really trying to learn how to build better and build in the city they chose. So a large voice in maybe the discussion of housing in the city, et cetera, could be one avenue. Maybe some pricing reduction through volume buying, whether it be concrete, rebar, whatever it may be. Could also look like mobilizing it to give back to the community. I have a lot of ideas like that where these people build all day in the community and have infrastructure. It could be a nice alignment to have people who do have capital and subcontractors and carpenters and trucking to use that mobilized as volunteers.
I've thought about that or people have asked me that. I'd like to think that I'm forever learning and growing. So if you're learning something from me, happy to have taught it to you, and I'm trying to move higher. And that's not like a “see you later” thing, but I am happy to have you learn it. Because it's constantly evolving. But I don't think it's going to slow me down by sharing. And I think the goodwill comes back to you also. The larger Build Boston becomes a network or a magnet for deals, money and people, the more I think it'll come back to me 10X. So, I’m happy to do it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For a long time I've thought that construction is very much in need of evolution or disruption. People in the industry are historically very slow adopters. Many forms of technology or softwares have been out there, different iterations, new ones come to market. I'm like the kind of person that likes to try them all, and then I find 100 things that I don't like about each one, but there are different things that I don't like about the other one. And you're emailing the customer service people saying, "Hey, it would be cool if you did it this way."
So we're constantly searching for these solutions. And we definitely know the problems. We know where we can gain massive leverage, but previously we didn't really think the solutions were possible. I had the opportunity to consult for Kaya AI, starting last year. Kaya ended up winning for their BOOST class this year. BOOST is like an accelerator that Suffolk runs. So through Kaya and BOOST, I started to spend some time at Suffolk.
I had an awesome time at their event and listening to John Fish speak. What they have going on there is awesome. And it's obvious to see how committed they are to the idea of construction tech changing the industry. It's almost a given. It is a given. So now what will it look like or who will it be or how will it happen? Those are harder questions to answer. So my goal is to just stay in proximity to it. So I got to know a few people at BOOST and I got to know what everybody was up to and I was really excited about it and wanted to be a greater part of it.
It started as just inviting them to happy hours, because I want the people in Build Boston to have access to any facet of construction that may be helpful to their businesses. So it could be in any way adjacent to our businesses. In this case, tech. A lot of people in the construction space maybe haven't thought about it or maybe don't know what's available. So how do you introduce it? How do you bring them proximity as well? I think that's a really important piece of this. If I'm going to collect resources for people to have stronger businesses and build more efficiently in Boston, I can't ignore the tech piece.
So a lot of Suffolk's resources are very large. Subcontractors, vendors, consultants, they're all larger than my space. And it sounds like the candidates from the BOOST program are often asking BOOST for insight from builders and operators more in my size space, more down in the medium construction world. So the plan is that Build Boston will partner with them. They have operating partners for their program and these people, we have conversations just like this. You weigh in on the incoming class, who the highest or who the most highly regarded candidates are. And it's a way to maintain proximity to what's going on in the industry and what's evolving in the industry. It's a way to get yourself a larger voice in this conversation. And then almost in a mentorship role, you provide insight to these new companies in places. They're looking for insight from actual operators, actual builders in the hopes that you're helping them evolve their businesses so they can help the construction industry.
And then the last piece is these job sites are like physical lab spaces for these startups. So again, having a diverse portfolio of types of job sites to test drive these solutions becomes important. So I'm pretty excited about it.
Yeah! We vetted a bunch of project management softwares and got pretty into Fieldwire and did the Procore dance. But aside from project management softwares, Kaya has been my first foray towards hands-on. I met their founder, Ojnonimi, at a networking event actually, one of these Build Boston-type happy hours. And he was like a nomad CTO. He's been on a number of different startups. But the key was him and his sister are developers in Ohio, so he very much understands the business. And he was working on a few solutions for real estate developers. He and I had this crazy vibrant discussion over an hour and a half about the problems in our space and what we could do about it. And previously I was well versed in the problems, but I don't have the capacity to create these solutions aside from talking them through, I don't have the technical capacity to create them.
So then I realized he had the technical capacity to create them. And we just wound up talking about it day in and day out for over the course of weeks and months. And I eventually wound up signing on with them as a consultant, and Elevated was one of their initial customers to not only try this software out but inform its early creation, which steps it was going to take. And so it eventually was going to be an entire back end for our financial operation. In its simplest form right now, it parses all of our PDF information, so invoices and bids and COIs and budgets, to ingest all that information and make it usable data so that we can manipulate it so you can compare invoices against budgets or against bids or compare two lumber supply estimates that might not be apples to apples so you can understand which is the more efficient quote.
I have this whole roadmap planned out about how I'd like to use it, but it's like a step at a time. And it's another area we're just very excited about. We used to try and build leverage through data through deep manual entry. And it wasn't just leverage. It was reconciliation of cash flow too, making sure the correct jobs were tagged with the correct expenses, that kind of thing. So I'll know historically what we spent on framing or siding or windows instead of just knowing the whole number we spent at the lumberyard. And in that, we'll be much more informed on creating future budgets for future projects. We'll have much greater understanding of where the spend is going.
My favorite projects are, and this term might be overused, but “placemaking,” like Edison in South Boston or Ironworks on Old Colony, these areas where you can produce whole concepts like roll out a whole neighborhood of new tenants and new housing and new design in an area that maybe didn't have that much going on – I'm very excited about that. JD has some parcels down in Milton where we have the beginnings of some of that proposed. I would very much like to move in a direction where we're creating more than just one building at a time. Do we keep a commercial space and open a coffee shop or bar instead of selling that commercial space? What do we do to improve the area around it? Are we fixing a playground across the street? Are we planting trees out front? There are a lot of simple questions we can ask to start that, no problem.
So I’m very obsessed with National Development and Ink Block and Ironworks, these concepts where they're not just one building, it's an area, and they're not just many buildings, but they're almost thematic. They know what tenancy they want in there, they know how they might try and affect it. They're awesomely executing on the construction and then almost immediately rolling the tenancy in there. So you can see it take life and it completely changes what that area of the neighborhood looks like.
And I follow some others, like it's WS Development down in the Seaport. On rainy weekends, I'll take my kids to their programming. Almost every one of their spaces down there, they leave room in the lobby or a courtyard and they have ice cream and places to sit and magicians and concerts, and programming is what I've been calling it for lack of a better word. But to almost build more than just a structure. And I find that it's a way to separate from those around you. It's a way to kind of congeal your message, like what are you building or where are you going? And it's a way to affect the city in a far greater manner than throwing up a box. JD and I have talked pretty deeply about this. We've focused the lens on it, we've turned it. We want to be looking for projects like this or opportunities like this, larger lots, larger, say, assemblages or multiple lots together, squares in neighborhoods somewhere you can have a large and clear canvas to attempt something like this.
It’s true. And so also, we're pretty open to operating businesses in these projects as well. We'd happily take on a hospitality project, whether a bar or restaurant or coffee shop, et cetera. And have a lot of interest in being the owner operator there. So we continue to affect this place we're trying to create. JD has had some success with it in Milton, and we have some projects proposed down there that we're really excited about, like brewery spaces, coffee shop/bakery spaces. And I feel like it attracts people and then illustrates or dictates what else it could be, like what other businesses do I need here? Do I need coworking desks down here? Do I need some type of grocery down here? Do I need whatever it may be to support and want people to spend time in this place?
One of the beautiful things about Ironworks I think, is that I think most people would've said that South Boston is not that canvas, that it was already saturated in a way or overdeveloped or any of those words. And it certainly was, but they found an area where they did produce an assemblage and did pull this off, which I think is awesome. And one of the indicators that you were just asking about is, I've lived here since '06, and if you watch... My wife and will joke like, we don't need another pizza place or another nail salon or another... There are a number of things that appear over and over. There's a great commercial space that they're about to open a vape shop in, and I think a lot of people had hoped it'd be a bar or restaurant to add to the neighborhood. But certainly if you're going to be intentional about this, there's cues you can and have to take from the neighborhood.
And that's what I think I mean about how intentional the theming or programming is. It's so comprehensive, their tenancy, they kept the existing rock gym, they added a spin studio. There's a lot of demand for spin studios. They have multiple food and beverage options, but it kind of runs the gamut. There's the pickleball bar, so activity and bar, there's casual places, there's coffee places, there's nightlife places, and then there's a lot of, you don't want to overuse the word cool, but cool urban places like an urban farm and things of that nature. They have pop-up shops in the summer in shipping containers.
So those are the creative in-demand spaces that maybe the neighborhood wasn't necessarily getting, even though it was highly developed. Especially in a tough market, there's a lot of tendency to take anyone who will fill a mixed use space. And you can't knock anyone for that. But if you do want to be intentional. And then you can take it a step further, being willing to be an operator is one more way to underwrite the deal, because the equation for development is very tight right now. So the more creative you can be or introducing another variable like operating a space in what you're creating, the easier it might be to underwrite that deal.
The one that stood out the longest was a Secret Service agent.
