Jay Hardy exits Brinkman, begins consulting work with Brue Baukol, PCL Construction

Jay Hardy, who spent more than four years as an executive at the Fort Collins-based Brinkman development company — including more than three years as president — has left the company.

Hardy told BizWest that his tenure as president ended in March. He now is under contract with two Denver-based companies: Brue Baukol Capital Partners, where he is working as a development consultant, and PCL Construction Co., where he is providing business-development services.

Hardy said he sold his equity stake in Brinkman to Kevin Brinkman, the company’s founder and CEO. He said his departure came as it was becoming more difficult — even pre-COVID-19 — to make projects “pencil out” in Northern Colorado due to high construction costs, land prices and development fees. Brinkman engages in development, investment, property management and brokerage.

“Over the last four or five months, certainly development has gotten more difficult,” Hardy said. “Pre-COVID-19, just trying to get anything to pencil was more difficult.

“We were fortunate to be at the tail end of a significant number of projects,” he added, noting The Foundry in downtown Loveland, The Exchange and Harmony Commons in Fort Collins, and Union Pointe in Longmont.

Brinkman CEO Kevin Brinkman, in a statement emailed to BizWest, said, “We are grateful for Jay’s time at Brinkman and the visionary role he played in bringing our recent development projects to life.  We are committed to the business model our company has worked so hard to cultivate and have prioritized our core strategies to navigate the current market conditions.  We are shifting from new development projects until the end of the year and will be focused on aggressively pursuing, what we believe to be, unprecedented acquisition opportunities during that time.” 

Hardy, a Windsor resident, has a long history of shepherding major projects through the development phase. His experience includes three years as executive director of the Fort Collins Downtown Development Authority, and he served as director of The Ranch, Larimer County’s fairgrounds complex near Interstate 25 and Crossroads Boulevard in Loveland, from 2001 to 2006. He also worked as vice president and general manager of Loveland-based McWhinney from 2007 to 2015.

Hardy already has experience working with Brue Baukol through that company’s investment in major components of The Foundry, a Brinkman redevelopment project in downtown Loveland. Brinkman partnered with Brue Baukol on the Patina Flats residential and commercial project and the movie theater. That project sold in February for $44 million.

Brue Baukol is working to redevelop the former Storage Technology Corp./Sun Microsystems property in Louisville. Sun sold the 430-acre property for $55.6 million to ConocoPhillips in 2008. The energy company announced plans to build a clean-energy research campus that could have employed 7,000 workers. But the spinoff of Phillips 66 as a separate company ended those plans.

Brue Baukol now plans a mixed-use project known as Redtail Ridge. The project is located along U.S. Highway 36 and Northwest Parkway and will include a new campus for medical-device maker Medtronic, which will employ 2,500 workers there. Also planned are a senior-living development, retail, hotel and other office uses.

He noted that Redtail Ridge will include $175 million in development costs alone, including $100 million in the first phase.

Hardy said that although construction costs in the Denver area are comparable to Northern Colorado, it’s easier to get projects in the metro area to “pencil out” because of higher rents that are possible there compared with Northern Colorado.

“The income side of it is stronger in the Denver market,” he said. “That’s what’s going to keep the spigot on in Denver.”

He said Northern Colorado faces challenges in retail and hospitality and “a little in apartments,” as well as from job losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That should actually help new development projects work out financially, as construction costs might come down, he said, noting that construction accounts for 70% of a project’s costs.

“I think we’ll see a little bit of a correction in construction costs,” he said. “If it drops by 5-10%, that might be enough to make it come back.”

For PCL, Hardy expects to help the Edmonton, Alberta-based construction company grow its Colorado business, including in Denver, where the U.S. headquarters is based, and Northern Colorado.

“They have a strategic plan to really grow their presence in the Denver market,” Hardy said.

He said he will help PCL “connect the dots, find projects and just grow market share in Colorado specifically.”

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