Patricia Gage, chief financial officer for Continuum Partners, compared raising $250 million in financing for the first phase of Belmar, the "new Downtown" for Lakewood, to inviting 50 people over from Thanksgiving dinner at 2 p.m., only to have the kitchen explode at noon.
"But you serve everybody enough wine, so they all have a good time," she kidded at the packed ballroom in Invesco Field at Mile High.
Another speaker, Linda Clark, managing director of the investment banking firm Piper Jaffray, was lead underwriter for the $350 million in tax-exempt financing for the 1,100-room Hyatt under construction across from the Colorado Convention Center in Downtown Denver. Her experience was markedly different from Gage's.
Investors gobbled up all of the bond in only three hours.
Linda Chapman, with a background in engineering and finance, is director of global real estate for Level 3, a telecommunication company based in Broomfield, CO, which is fighting its way back from the telecom crash. Chapman, who is in charge of a 9.5-million-sf real estate portfolio, was in Miami on business and had to wake at 3 a.m. to catch a flight to return to Denver. She travels 270,000 miles a year on business, and gave examples of cultural differences that she faces as an African-American woman who spends much of her time abroad.
Thurber, who heads a $22-billion real estate portfolio for LaSalle, told her kids that if she has a Tony Soprano way of managing, it must work, because she said her children turned out so well.
On a more serious note, she says it is possible to balance life and work. Before joining LaSalle, she was a principal at Morgan Stanley & Co. She was allowed to work at home for nine years and was the first person at the investment banking firm to do so and still be made a principal.
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