Colorado Real Estate Journal -
Terry Considine is an icon in the apartment world. Considine, 64, is the chairman and chief executive officer of Denver-based Apartment Investment & Management Co., better known as AIMCO. With a market cap of $3.2 billion and a portfolio of 93,630 units, it is the second largest publicly traded apartment real estate investment trust in the country. To put its size in perspective, its holdings equate to about a third of all of the apartment units in the Denver metro area. AIMCO provides rental housing to about 250,000 residents in 38 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It has about 2,000 units in the Denver and Boulder area. “I’ve been involved in real estate for most of my life,” Considine said in a rare interview. “My family had been investing in real estate when I was growing up. My father, a CPA, liked the tax benefits of owning real estate at that time.” So real estate was in his blood? “I guess so,” Considine said. However, he was quick to add that he never planned to make real estate a career, although it is one that now has spanned more than four decades. After getting his undergraduate degree from Harvard and while attending Harvard Law School, he started a REIT for Boston-based Cabot Cabot & Forbes in 1971. “It was a boom time,” Considine said. “We focused on equity investing. We owned all property types and had holdings in 30 states.” He found that he really liked real estate. “Real estate has always been my favorite investment vehicle,” Considine said. “I found that I was interested in the operation, financing and just the physical nature of real estate assets.” But then came the economic crash of 1974 and 1975. “It was not too dissimilar to the recent one,” Considine said. “There was too much loose money, the government was spending too much, and on top of that came wage and price controls. It was the whole Nixon economic plan.” About the same time, “I was courting Betsy,” who soon became his bride. “We were engaged and looking for a place to live. She grew up in Georgia and I grew up in a cattle ranch in California and so Colorado was a compromise. Now, it has been our wonderful home for more than 30 years.” Even then, Considine was no stranger to Colorado. “I had been coming to Colorado to ski for 15 years,” Considine said. “I went to Aspen, Vail and Crested Butte.” Betsy’s father, Howard “Bo” Callaway, owned Crested Butte’s ski resort from 1970 until 2004. Callaway also was involved in politics, as was his son-in-law, Considine. Callaway was a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, was secretary of the Army under President Gerald Ford and in 1980 unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Colorado. Considine served as a Republican state senator in Colorado from 1987 to 1992. In 1992, he was defeated by Democrat Ben Nighthorse Campbell for the U.S. Senate. Campbell later became a Republican. Considine took a much lower public profile after that election. He also was recovering from a broken back that he suffered in a horseback-riding accident in 1991 on his ranch in Carbondale. “After we lost in ’92, I told Betsy I was going to start driving our children to school, focus on my business and learn to walk without crutches,” Considine said. He was building quite the business. When he moved to Colorado in 1975, he formed Considine & Co., which in addition to real estate investing engaged in venture capital and leveraged buyouts. It was later renamed as the Cairn Co. In 1987, the real estate arm of Cairn purchased McDermott, Stein & Ira, which became one of the largest fee-management companies in the U.S. A year later, Cairn bought Florida-based Property Asset Management, or PAM, and in 1990 it bought a Texas company. The entire company became known as PAM. In 1994, PAM became AIMCO, which Considine took public. It trades under the symbol AIV. The same year, AIMCO bought PDI Realty Enterprises from Peter Kompaniez. Through several other purchases, by 1998 AIMCO was the largest owner of apartment units in the country. In 2000, it owned 326,259 apartment units, a number that has been drastically reduced by a number of strategic sales. In 1997, Considine also inked a deal with Larry Mizel, chairman of Denver-based homebuilding giant MDC Holdings, to buy two REITS it ran outside of its core business. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about those,” Considine said. Considine said he would like to add to his apartment holdings in the Denver and Boulder markets. “Sure,” Considine said. “We are looking in Denver and the Boulder area. If we could find the right site we might even do some development.” He also likes the outlook for apartments in general. “If you look at demographics, the baby boom generation largely wanted to buy homes,” Considine said. “Between 1980 and 1994 there was another boom, which some people call the echo boom. The echo boom generation is very big and a large number of people want to rent, as opposed to buy. Also, a lot of them are waiting longer to form households. When you look at those trends and demographics, it makes a pretty good environment for the rental market for the next 10 years.”