Malee Tobias
Senior Vice President + Chief Marketing Officer
Brookfield Properties
Malee has more than 20 years of experience in real estate and development. When Brookfield Properties acquired Newland Communities in 2021, she became their Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. For more than 15 years, she was the innovative leader of Newland’s marketing — working with operating divisions nationwide to delve into what consumers want in a community, neighborhood and home and how they want to live. Before that, she led Newland’s research — integrating economic and marketplace trends, consumer insights, and customer and product segmentation to drive development strategies, community planning, and the company’s core business.
Prior to joining Newland, Malee was Vice President at RCLCO, a national advisory firm serving the real estate industry, specializing in development strategy, planning, market and product segmentation, and economic and fiscal impact analyses for mixed-use, residential, and commercial developments across the US.
Malee is a full member of Urban Land Institute and is Chair of ULI’s Community Development Council (Green Flight). She graduated from UCLA and received a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Urban Planning from Harvard University. She’s a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Public Policy and International Affairs and serves on the Advisory Board for the Customer Experience Program at University of California, Irvine.
John Burns
Chief Executive Officer
John Burns Real Estate Consulting
John founded the company to help business executives make informed housing industry investment decisions. The company’s research subscribers receive the most accurate analysis possible to inform their macro investment decisions, and the company’s consulting clients receive specific property and portfolio investment advice designed to maximize profits. The team takes great pride in enabling the profitable development of the best places to live in the world.
John co-authored Big Shifts Ahead: Demographic Clarity for Businesses, a book written to help make demographic trends easier to understand, quantify, and anticipate. 750,000+ people follow John’s LinkedIn Influencer column, 30,000+ subscribe to his emails, and the media cited the firm 230+ times in 2019.
Before founding John Burns Real Estate Consulting in 2001, John worked at a national consulting firm for 4 years and for 10 years at KPMG Peat Marwick—2 as a CPA and 8 in their Real Estate Consulting practice.
John has a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA, and works in our Irvine, California office. He has attended home games for all 30 major league baseball teams, and regularly runs the hills in Southern California.
Peter Gajdoš
Partner
Fifth Wall
Peter Gajdoš is a Partner at Fifth Wall where he Co-Leads the Climate Technology Investment team. Prior to joining Fifth Wall, Peter was the Head of Venture Capital at IPM Group and Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Presidio Partners, where he focused on climate tech and biotech venture and growth investments. Peter started his career at J.P. Morgan’s Energy Group in New York before joining Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund in London.
Gene Myers
Founder + CEO
Thrive Home Builders
Gene is owner and CEO of Thrive Home Builders (formerly New Town Builders), Denver’s leader in building green, energy efficient production homes and recent winner of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Housing Innovation Award.
Gene has served on numerous state and local housing groups and currently serves as a member the board of directors of Denver Civic Ventures and the Challenge Foundation. He has served on the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel for Housing, the Boards of Housing Colorado and the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver and co-chaired Denver’s Housing Task Force. His company is Denver’s largest builder of for-sale affordable housing.
As a production builder in the Stapleton community, Thrive has logged a number of firsts in Colorado and the Denver Area including:
First to offer standard solar panels
First to construct all of its homes with Colorado beetle-kill lumber
First to offer a Zero Energy option on all its single-family homes
First production homes with Zero Energy as a standard feature
First Department of Energy Challenge Home, which broadens criteria to include indoor air quality and water conservation
Nationally, Thrive has been recognized as EPA’s Millennium ENERGY STAR® Builder, EPA’s Leadership Award for Indoor Air Quality, Green Building Magazine’s Green Home of the Year and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grand Winner for Innovation in Housing.
Lora Cecere
Founder
Supply Chain Insights
Lora Cecere has more than 35 years of diverse supply chain experience. She spent nine years as an industry analyst with Gartner Group, AMR Research and Altimeter Group and is now the founder of her own firm, Supply Chain Insights, where she works with supply chain leaders to take teams to higher levels of excellence.
Lora writes monthly columns for Consumer Goods Technology and CSCMP Quarterly and actively blogs on LinkedIn as an Influencer and on Supply Chain Leadership on Forbes. She is also the author of two books — Bricks Matter (2012) and Metrics that Matter (2014) — and the tech-focused blog “Supply Chain Shaman,” which focuses on the use of enterprise applications to drive supply chain excellence.
Prior to becoming a supply chain analyst, she spent fifteen years as a leader in the building of supply chain software at Manugistics and Descartes Systems Group and twenty years as a supply chain practitioner at Procter & Gamble, Kraft/General Foods, Clorox, and Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream (now a division of Nestle).
Joel Kirstein
Managing Director
Berkadia
Joel is a managing director with Berkadia. Berkadia is a leader in the commercial real estate industry, offering a robust suite of services to multifamily and commercial property clients. Powered by deep relationships and industry-changing technology, their people sell, finance, and service commercial real estate, providing support for the entire life cycle of their clients’ assets. Their unique ownership structure allows them to put their clients’ interests first and create a marketplace that delivers a superior experience.
Jack Buffington
Professor + Program Director, Supply Chain
University of Denver
Dr. Jack Buffington is the Program Director/Professor for University of Denver’s Supply Chain Program at the Daniels College of Business and the Denver Transportation Institute. The program is focused on developing 21st century problem solvers for supply chains, consulting firms, and public service to communities and the world. He is also the Director of Supply Chain and Sustainability at First Key Consulting, the world’s leading beer industry consulting firm, and an internationally recognized expert in supply chain management, enterprise-wide e-business and wireless initiatives, as well as packaging material science, sustainability and recycling.
Prior to joining First Key, Jack held leadership positions with the MillerCoors Brewing Company where he was responsible for supply chain operations including warehousing, logistics, yard management, e-commerce, packaging materials, logistics and freight. He worked as a consulting manager at KPMG. Jack is an accomplished researcher and author, has won numerous industry awards for his work, and holds board membership positions on related international supply chain associations and research councils.
Jack received his PhD in Industrial Marketing / Supply Chain from Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Luleå, Sweden, his MBA from the University of Baltimore and his BSc from Towson University in the United States. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Anthony Cazazian
Head of US Residential Real Estate
Man GPM
Anthony Cazazian is Managing Director, Head of US Residential Real Estate at Man Global Private Markets (‘Man GPM’). He is responsible for overseeing both the US residential debt and equity strategies.
Prior to joining Man GPM in November 2019, Caz was the CIO and President of Portfolio Services for Renters Warehouse. Before that, Caz served as Executive Vice President and Head of Originations for B2R Finance, a Blackstone company (now known as Finance of America Commercial). He also spent eight years at Goldman Sachs, including in the real estate investment banking and real estate financing groups.
Caz graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from NYU Stern School of Business and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School in Real Estate Finance.
Betsy Scott
Executive Director, Programs + Engagement
Housing Innovation Alliance
For more than 20 years, Betsy Scott has excelled at helping people think differently by taking complex ideas and concepts, analyzing them from the perspective of others, and translating the results into action.
If you want to meet people bringing innovation to the housing industry, or know what’s new, she’s your ticket. A natural collaborator with a great social sense, she connects the dots between smart people, forward-thinking companies and big ideas. With Betsy in your corner, everyone wins.
That’s why she helms the Housing Innovation Alliance, a passion she’s pursued since 2008 with founding partner IBACOS and now as the Executive Director, Program + Engagement of an independent entity focused on bringing business and technical innovation to housing. Her responsibilities for strategic planning, member and sponsor engagement, and programming speak to her fierce attention to detail, creative mind, and ability to make complex subjects tangible, relevant and actionable. She adds depth to ideas, finds and shares new opportunities, and conveys greater understanding to business issues.
Armed with a degree in Marketing from the University of Pittsburgh, Betsy cut her teeth in the agency world and as an independent B2B and B2C marketing consultant before joining IBACOS in 2006. In her off-time, she’s either feeding her farm-to-table foodie jones, working on her century-old house, or spending time with her husband and fur children, Watson and Finnegan, at one of Pittsburgh’s many parks and rivers.
Margaret Whelan
Founder + CEO
Whelan Advisory, LLC
Margaret Whelan has been CEO of Whelan Advisory, LLC since 2014. In this role she provides strategic and financial counsel to leaders of both public and private companies in the U.S. and Canada. She is a seasoned executive and industry expert with a deep knowledge of industry drivers, players, valuation and financing alternatives. She serves on the boards of three companies: TopBuild (NYSE: BLD), privately held Mattamy Homes, and John Burns Real Estate Consulting.
Whelan was a Managing Director and senior coverage partner in the Real Estate and Lodging group within the investment bank at JPMorgan from 2007 to 2013, advising clients on strategic and capital initiatives through the housing industry’s biggest boom and subsequent downturn. From 1997 to 2007, she worked at UBS as a Managing Director and highly regarded stock analyst covering more than 30 stocks including homebuilders, manufacturers and retailers. She was also the Global Head of Housing Research. More recently, from 2013 to 2014, she ran the finance group of a fast-growth, publicly traded real estate private equity firm and, as its CFO, oversaw budgeting, financial reporting, capital raising, investor and media relations, human resources and regulatory compliance. She started her career in the equity research department at Merrill Lynch.
C.R. Herro
Executive Vice President of Operations
bettr homes
C.R. Herro leads Business Innovation, which combines design, efficiency, sustainability, and new technologies to establish a new standard in home building that provides better comfort, healthier air, and costs less to own and operate.
C.R. has spent 20 years within Fortune 500 companies driving innovation and supporting change management. He is on the RESNET ANSI Standard Development Committee, Board of Directors for the Energy & Environmental Building Alliance, technical committee for the Leading Builders of America, and is an active member in the Housing Innovation Alliance. C.R. speaks nationally to advance the industry, regulations, and associated stakeholders in adopting credible improvements to the function, performance, and value of new homes.
C.R. earned a Bachelors of Science at Arizona State University in Physical and Life Science, Masters in Environmental Science from Governors State, Masters in Environmental Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Masters in Philosophy from Arizona State University.
Dennis Steigerwalt
President
Housing Innovation Alliance
Dennis is a catalyst. An expert at driving market transformation programs, he knows people, money and how to get things done.
As president of the Alliance, he leads our strategic vision and smart growth of our community.
Prior to the Alliance, Dennis helped change the face of the housing industry in Saudi Arabia through two key initiatives: the Ministry of Housing’s Building Technology Stimulus Initiative (BTSI) and SABIC’s Home of Innovation™ program.
In BTSI, Dennis helped to create a nationwide program to develop a modular housing industry—modeling 26 strategic initiatives that would jumpstart the creation of a robust construction ecosystem, evaluating 200+ global technology providers, and securing initial approval for $4B in government investment. Within one year, the commitment grew to $40B.
Dennis was also a key player in SABIC’s Home of Innovation program, a $30M+ multi-year market engagement program focused on encouraging collaboration among the housing value chain and ensuring that better construction practices are adopted throughout the region. Together with his team, Dennis established and managed a global ecosystem of more than 1,000 subject matter experts, including 46 leading manufacturer partners. The program resulted in the Middle East’s first LEED platinum home, a pilot community of 1,200 LEED Silver homes and a LEED gold interactive exhibition center, which has become the epicenter for collaboration in the region. As of 2016, the program yielded 40+ business opportunities with more than $200M in new value creation.
Before and after going global, Dennis acted as a consultant to and developer of residential and mixed-use real estate projects in southwestern PA, several of which are considered pioneering examples of placemaking in North America—including Venango Trails, Edgewater and Newbury.
In his spare time, he enjoys big adventures with his wife and sons on the water and in the mountains and supports the efforts of other entrepreneurs—advising and investing in their startup companies.
