Looking to deploy their model of mass timber building nationally, the leaders of Milwaukee-based development firm
New Land Enterprises have launched a new mass timber development company, boosting New Land and Milwaukee's presence in the — still young — mass timber building industry.
Timber + Partners, based in Milwaukee, will perform it's own mass timber real estate development projects, as well as serve as a partner or advisor on mass timber building projects led by others.
"The bottom line is that building mass timber, for the time being, is just more complicated because there's so many more unanswered questions," said
Tim Gokhman, managing director of New Land and chief executive officer of Timber + Partners. "I want us to be the dominant player in mass timber real estate development in the United States."
New Land developed the 284-foot tall mass timber apartment tower
Ascent in downtown Milwaukee, which opened in 2022 and is the tallest mass timber and concrete hybrid building in the world.
Mass timber is a more environmentally-friendly way of building construction and can be more cost efficient and visually appealing.
The industry is often compared to the electric vehicle industry, Gokhman said, and New Land compared to Tesla.
"Ascent is really our Roadster, our proof of concept this can work," Gokhman said. "There's very few companies in the United States that have been able to get to that level. What Ascent has taught us is the power of iteration, and that's something I think the commercial real estate industry really struggles with."
The goal is to build more Ascents across the country by using Ascent in Milwaukee as a prototype, he said.
"Because the prototype is based on a successful project, it offers a high level of precision in the development process," Timber + Partners' website says. "By iterating on a proven design, the amount of time and money spent on sizing and pricing a project in a new market is a small fraction of the typical predevelopment costs. Timber + Partners has already successfully tested the concept in a new market."
While they scale Ascent, Timber + Partners will be exploring more models, such as hospitality or office buildings, or different variations of multifamily that's shorter or taller or less high-end than Ascent.
Timber + Partners will also work as a partner or advisor to other developers to help them avoid the "development doom loop," which forms when a developer outsources critical design decisions, usually due to a lack of subject matter expertise, leading to higher design costs, a longer schedule and sometimes project failure.
Through its experience with Ascent, Timber + Partners says it can perform or assist with feasibility and site selection, preconstruction and design, sourcing and logistics, construction efficiency, codes and permitting, and financing, according to its website.
"When it comes to, let's say, sourcing or logistics, we're not actually producing the mass timber, but we understand the supply chain because we've studied it for the last five years," Gokhman said. "There are manufacturers in Europe, in Canada, it's produced different, costs are different, currency exchange issues, certainly logistics questions. That's a level of knowledge that we can bring to a project team and it's just one of the components you have to know in order to make mass timber building happen."
Working with clients or partners in other markets, which could also include nonprofits or other institutions looking to build using mass timber, is also how Timber + Partners plans to get its foot in other markets.
Gokhman said that the mass timber industry in the United States is still so young that there are only a few companies focused solely on mass timber development at scale.
Using the Tesla analogy, Gokhman said "The legacy car manufacturers looked at their existing fleets and said, 'How do we make them electric?' and Tesla started ground up. That's the difference between Timber + Partners as a development company, it's using a different set of rules for how to think about real estate."
As for New Land, Gokhman doesn't anticipate much changing as New Land will continue to pursue its own projects.
"New Land and Timber + Partners are both development companies, they're both development companies that do projects," he said. "We see the ability to repeat and scale our designs across the country specifically with Timber + Partners."
Gokhman described the two as kind of like sister companies, which is beneficial because New Land already has robust property and asset management, among other supportive departments like accounting. Timber + Partners will be using that staff until it's big enough to hire it's own full-time staff.
As for now, Timber + Partners is led by Gokhman; his father
Boris Gokhman, who co-founded New Land in 1983, as chief technology officer; and
Sheldon Oppermann, who is now chief financial officer and general counsel for both New Land and Timber + Partners.
