Colorado Real Estate Journal -
Eric Tupler first strapped on a pair of skis at the age of 6, and learned the art of sliding down hills on the icy terrain in New Jersey. Fast-forward about 20 years and it was a ski trip to the far more friendly and forgiving slopes in Vail that changed his life, personally and professionally. “In 1993, I took a ski trip to Vail that was sponsored by the Miami Dolphins,” said Tupler, who turns 45 this month and recently accepted a new commercial real estate investment banking job as the senior managing director for the new Denver office of Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, or HFF. Tupler, the former vice chairman at CBRE Capital Markets, has originated, structured, underwritten, placed and closed more than $6 billion of debt and equity real estate investments during his career. Before he launched his career in Denver, a cousin worked at a Florida law firm that represented the NFL team and invited Tupler to join him on the Vail vacation. “It was kind of weird that I wasn’t originally planning on going because I was going to grad school at the time in Florida” and was going to stay home and hit the books, not the slopes. But a lawyer dropped out at the last minute, and Tupler took his place. “There, I met my future wife, Jane,” who was a legal secretary at the firm. “It was love at first sight on my side, but I’m not sure it was the same for her,” he chuckled. In any case, they started dating, it became serious, and they became engaged. The next step was to figure out where to live. “We definitely looked at moving to the Northeast, where I was from, and my wife came from Chicago, so we thought of moving there. But Denver kept popping up. Everything we really liked kept pointing us to Denver – the lifestyle, the weather. We came out to visit and we just fell in love with the people here and Colorado.” Tupler joined CBRE/Melody, formerly L.J. Melody & Co., in 1996, as an analyst. Previously, he had worked as a senior credit analyst with Barnett Bank in Miami and also had been a loan officer for PNC Bank in South Florida. He also spent five years as manager of sales and operations for family business Austin Tupler Trucking in Davie, Fla. “I started as an analyst in 1996 (at Melody) and went into production in 1999 and became the National Rookie of the Year. My first transaction was for a loan in Parker for David Faestel. It was a loan for the Twenty Mile Station, for a retail property there, through a pension fund lender we had at the time. It was my first deal and David was my first client. He is still my client.” His single-largest deal was a $700 million loan for a 119-building portfolio with a total of 5.3 million square feet of space in Northern California. At the time the deal also was the largest financing transaction in the history of CBRE/Melody. The office and research-and-development portfolio included buildings throughout Silicon Valley, in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and Mountain View. Tupler and his team represented the seller, Peery-Arrillaga. The buyer was a RREEF America Fund, which paid $1.1 billion for the portfolio. Three years later, the nation was gripped in the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. “We saw it coming in 2007,” Tupler recalled. “In late 2006 and early 2007, we saw the residential mortgage-backed securities having issues and problems with CDOs (collateralized debt obligations.)” At that point, he realized that “it was inevitable” that the problems would reach the commercial real estate market, where too much money had been chasing too few properties. “There was an overleveraging on the commercial side, and we knew there was going to be a deleveraging.” For his part, that required a shift from doing the large transactions such as the $700 million deal, to advising clients on their best course of action to ride through the tumultuous times and hopefully come out on the other side. “As an adviser to our clients, that allowed us to kind of really focus on their core needs at a time that was very stressful for them, their properties and the entire economy. Hopefully, in my career, I never have to see another downturn of the magnitude we experienced in 2009.” Although he saw the red flags, did he think the markets would deteriorate as quickly and to the extent they did? “Actually, it hadn’t been as bad as I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be Armageddon – a complete collapse. No matter how you look at it, even if you think it was nothing but a Band-Aid, the federal government’s intervention helped ease the severity of the collapse. The question is how quickly we can get beyond that. “There were really two paths to take. One was the path of a complete collapse. Let the markets take their course. That would have caused a tremendous amount of pain and loss of equity. We would not have had a soft landing. The positive outcome, possibly, is that we might have hit bottom quicker and would have recovered quicker.” The government’s intervention, while criticized by some and praised by others, especially when a long-term, worldwide market collapse seemed imminent, appears to have resulted in a crash that was not as severe as it could have been, but one that is still trying to find its financial footing, Tupler said. “I imagine history will tell us whether we took the right path.” On the other hand, he said today’s market conditions “absolutely create opportunities. As advisers, our focus at HFF will be to continue to serve our existing clients, while bringing in new clients, and really help them focus on value-added opportunities. Nationally, HFF is certainly a big player on the debt-placement side. When I was with L.J. Melody, we were kind of a boutique version of HFF.” One thing that hasn’t changed is his passion for skiing. “Every year, my father, Milton, who is now 73, comes out to visit me. We always ski and golf in the same week.”