THE HOUSE WHISPERERS
Peter Wells has just returned from the Mediterranean coast of Spain. It was not a vacation. Instead, Wells spent days stomping around Andalusia’s Costa del Sol in workboots and a hard hat, checking up on his latest real estate project. Along with his longtime partner, finance guy Marcel Arsenault, Wells is building luxury beachfront condos to sell to rich Europeans and Middle Easterners looking for second (or third) homes. He shows up periodically to scout new deals and to make sure the construction is meeting American standards. After all, some of his local competitors “sell units without kitchens, no cabinets and appliances at all,” he claims. “There’s no lighting. Just bare wires hanging from the ceiling.”
Then it’s back to Colorado, where Wells trades waterfront concerns for the mud rooms and heated floors of ski-resort townhouses in Breckenridge. A lifelong skier (and lapsed dentist), Wells knows this territory particularly well. Wherever he’s dispatched, Wells is used to being Arsenault’s eyes, the one who actually checks on the things they’re building together. “I’m the partner on the ground,” he says.
That’s in part because Arsenault isn’t all that interested in real estate, which is a bit weird for a guy who makes a living—a fortune, actually—in the business. Sure, he’ll travel to meet with investors and bankers, but as for the buildings themselves, “I usually don’t look at them anymore,” says the founder and CEO of Real Capital Solutions, a Louisville, Colorado–based independent real estate company that invested $250 million in housing last year.
In the past 20 years, Arsenault has built an entrepreneurial empire financing, developing, and building houses, apartments, and office towers. The ponytailed mogul, an aging hippie by appearance and a scientist by training, runs his company from a charmless low-rise outside Boulder. He does so by relying on Wells, his primary development partner, who doesn’t have a job title at RCS—but who knows what kind of kitchen you need to build in a Dallas
