Meet the Multifamily Power Players Defining the Future of Real Estate

Connect CRE’s fourth annual Leadership Series brings you an unfiltered perspective from the heavyweights driving investment, development, finance and operations. For the first time ever, these industry-shaping insights are available as an exclusive downloadable report and a digital profile series on connectcre.com. 

To put this series together, we invited the lenders, developers, operators and capital-markets voices who are defining where rental housing goes next.  With each bringing decades of experience to their senior-level positions, they’re uniquely qualified to assess the current state of multifamily as well as the near-term and long-term outlook. 

We provided these 18 multifamily leaders with a range of questions, leaving it to their discretion to select the topics they wanted to discuss. Their responses are presented here in their own words. The choices of which questions to answer, as well as the responses themselves, underscore the priorities they see in the current market. 

In alphabetical order, our 2026 Industry Leaders are as follows: Brenda Barrett, Apartment Management Consultants; Kelli Carhart, CBRE; Lili Dunn, Bell Partners, Inc.; Jim Flynn, Lument; Andrew Kadish, CAPREIT; Sharon Karaffa, Newmark; Garrett Karam, Embrey; Donald P. King III, Walker & Dunlop; Evan Kinne, GSP/AXCS Capital; Ray Lawler, Hines; Gregory MacDonald, Ballast; Nicholas Matus, BCE; Hessam Nadji, Marcus & Millichap; Ethan Penner, Hill Street Realty; Elie Rieder, Castle Lanterra; Ken Rogozinski, Greystone Housing Impact Investors L.P.; David Schwartz, Waterton; and Larry Taylor, Christina Development. 

Each of the companies represented here is an industry leader along with the C-suite executives in the 2026 series. For example, two of the companies manage more than 185,000 apartment units nationwide between them, while another is one of the nation’s largest privately held multifamily investment and management firms. Still another has developed more than 50,000 units since its founding, and another brings a longstanding position as one of the world’s premier multifamily developers and investment managers to the conversation. 

On the capital markets and investment sales sides, we’re presenting insights from leaders at one of North America’s largest multifamily investment sales brokerages ,one of the nation’s top Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA multifamily lenders and one of the industry’s leading multifamily capital markets platforms. Another closed more than $51 billion of multifamily transactions in 2025. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll feature each industry leader on our website and in the National daily newsletter. You have the option of reading each profile individually in this format or downloading the free report, available here.