The brains behind the Apex real estate empire claims it all started with a paper route.

When Bruce Bosben was 13, he began delivering The Capital Times to homes on Madison’s west side. Bosben was eventually handling six different routes with the help of his family and in 1983 was named “CT Carrier of the Year.”

By the time he started college at UW-Madison, Bosben had saved enough money to pay his own tuition and launch the Empire Records store in the Westgate Mall.

But Bosben was just getting started. In 1986, at age 21, he jumped into the apartment rental game, purchasing with a friend two older buildings: a four-bedroom home on Mills Street and a two-unit on Fifth Street.

“Seriously, I used $40,000 I’d saved from delivering Cap Times for the down payment,” says Bosben during a recent interview at the Apex Property Management offices, a converted railroad roundhouse on Commercial Avenue.

Over the next 20 years, Bosben, his younger brother, Brian, and handyman Brian Linaberry continued to acquire rental properties. (Originally known as B&L Properties, the company was incorporated as Apex in 1998.) The properties the men acquired were mainly older homes or converted apartments, in the downtown or near campus.

There were brick buildings on Kendall Avenue; a Victorian three-flat on Jenifer Street; an older home on Van Duesen Street; an eight-unit on Castille Avenue. Some needed complete gutting and overhaul; others just a paint job and a cleaning.

From these humble beginnings, Apex grew to one of the largest rental real estate companies in town, with holdings worth $100 million. Today it owns nearly 400 units and manages another 800 apartments and condos for other investors. The company counts 70 employees, including a full-time staff of maintenance and repair people.

The firm also owns 15 commercial properties, including the Market Square and Clock Tower shopping centers near West Towne Mall.

“From 1990 to 2000 was just a great time to be buying real estate in Madison,” recalls Bosben, “We bought the stuff nobody else wanted and kept fixing it up.”

Not content to simply collect rents, however, Bosben is now pushing Apex into the real estate development game amid one of the toughest financial environments in a generation.

The firm has two major projects in the works: a $100 million, 300-room hotel one block from Monona Terrace at West Wilson and South Henry streets; and a $50 million, 120-unit high-rise apartment/condo project on the 200 block of East Mifflin Street encompassing the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “Lamp House.” Apex is also pursuing a 24-unit apartment development on Merry Street in the Marquette neighborhood.

“I guess it’s self-actualization but I’m always looking to do something that is both interesting and challenging,” says Bosben, 44, whose resume includes a stint as a delivery driver for Pizza Pit, a city golf title and a business degree from UW-Madison.

During college, Bosben had a chance to study under the late professor James Graaskamp, whom he credits for getting him excited about urban land economics. It’s the interest in cities, Bosben says, that drives him to push the envelope on taller buildings and more compact development in Madison.

“I’ve seen what has happened in other cities, where you’ve got a downtown with an empty ring around it and everybody living in the suburbs,” says Bosben. “I don’t want to see that happen here.”

To date, however, Apex hasn’t managed to move any of its development ideas past the proposal stage. It recently postponed any future meetings on the Wilson Street hotel until 2010. It’s also waiting for designs from Wright aficionado and Taliesin architect Tony Putnam before moving ahead on the East Mifflin residential project.

Downtown Ald. Mike Verveer says one of the problems is that Apex has approached neighborhood groups without any concrete designs.

“Apex is absolutely unorthodox in how they do development,” says Verveer. “Usually someone will come in with drawings that are nearly finalized. Apex has come in early and often but it seems like they don’t have a firm handle on what they want to do.”

Apex has lined up an impressive team to make the pitch. It’s hired as president Steve Yoder, former business development director at Advanced Building Corp. Apex has also retained former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, real estate attorney Bill White and economic development consultant Bert Stitt.

“What Bruce has done is assemble a group of people who’ve shown they are responsive to the community,” says Soglin.

He says Apex isn’t under pressure to rush anything and that is why the firm has been working with neighborhood groups to see what kind of project might gain support before presenting finalized plans.

“You also need to realize these projects are on a 3- to 5-year time frame,” says Soglin. “They’re not all going to launch at the same time.”

In the case of the hotel, a city-paid consultant recently called for delaying the Apex project in favor of the proposed expansion of the Edgewater Hotel on Lake Mendota. That $93 million project from the Hammes Co. hinges on $16 million in city tax incremental financing, among other issues.

A 13-page report from Hunden Strategic Partners of Chicago this summer said the Edgewater proposal “deserves public political and financial support.” That report stunned the Apex team, with Bosben complaining that the Hunden consultants didn’t even talk to him directly.

Bosben says the Apex proposal for a hotel on West Wilson came only in response to an earlier Hunden study recommending a 400-room hotel within walking distance of Monona Terrace. He maintains there is no reason the Apex and Edgewater proposals can’t both move forward on their own merits.

“Everybody has been made to believe it’s us or them (Edgewater) but that’s not the case,” says Bosben, who says he is working with development teams from the Westin and Marriott hotel chains and maintains he can line up private financing without any city TIF.

Moreover, Bosben says that based on his own consultant’s report, there is plenty of need for more hotel rooms downtown. There are roughly 1,200 hotel rooms downtown now, not including the 151-room Hyatt Place under construction on the 300 block of West Washington Avenue.

But Steve Zanoni, general manager of the Madison Concourse Hotel, doesn’t want to see any new rooms added here until the market improves. He quotes the latest report from Smith Travel Research showing Madison with a 54 percent hotel occupancy, below the national average and well under the 70 percent occupancy generally needed to turn a profit.

“They’re really pushing it to be talking about adding additional rooms right now,” says Zanoni, noting he just returned from a hospitality industry conference in New York City where analysts were warning the hotel business is “10 years away from any meaningful recovery.”

Bosben’s other big development proposal on the 200 block of East Mifflin Street also faces stiff opposition. That project would involve tearing down older homes and buildings surrounding Wright’s three-story, 1903 Lamp House at 22 N. Butler St., set back in the middle of the block.

But Apex is also exploring a deal that would save those houses by putting apartment or condo units above the public parking ramp on the other side of East Mifflin.

Either way, both Apex projects are drawing questions from downtown neighbors concerned about tall buildings blocking their views and historic preservationists worried about the loss of older homes or the Lamp House.

A three-flat at 151 W. Wilson owned by Apex that stands in the way of a new hotel, for instance, was recently nominated for city landmark status. Bosben contends the move to landmark the “Sayles House” came only after the hotel proposal started to gain momentum.

“That building has been there 150 years without anybody saying it’s a landmark and now it supposedly is,” he says.

Dan Stephans, chairman of the City Landmarks Commission, doesn’t dispute that version of events and says the panel will have to weigh the nomination carefully. He notes the city’s landmark ordinance was not designed to block specific projects — although he admits it has been used that way in the past.

“It is a political fact of life that people will use everything they can to achieve their desires,” he says. “There are many buildings in the city that should be landmarks but someone must nominate them.”

Peter Ostlind of Capitol Neighborhoods Inc. agrees there has been friction between Apex and the preservation community. But he says a bigger concern is whether neighborhood groups or citizen panels might be wasting their time on projects that have no chance of proceeding.

“Bruce is very personable and open to discussion,” says Ostlind. “I know he’s got some big dreams but there are going to be lots of hurdles getting through the city design process.”

Bosben counters that any perceived lack of direction is because he doesn’t want to get into lengthy battles with neighborhood groups, like the fight between the Edgewater developers and the Mansion Hill Historic District. Bosben maintains he wants to improve the city and protect its historic character — not ruin it with ugly buildings.

“Anytime you propose something in Madison it creates a big fracas,” he says. “But I’m Norwegian. I’m not big on arguing. We just try to keep our heads down.”

The Bosbens have deep roots in the area.

Bruce’s father, Robert, who died last month at age 77, grew up in the town of Burke and attended East High School and the UW-Madison, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.

A staunch Republican, the elder Bosben spent 33 years working at Ray-O-Vac in Madison, retiring in 1999. He held several patents and was the designer of a battery system used aboard the Space Shuttle.

“He was a quiet man who never complained and got along well with everyone,” says Bruce Bosben.

Bruce and his brother, Brian, were inspired to start Apex by their late uncle, Conrad Severson, who owned rental real estate in the Madison area and also founded WKOW television here in the 1940s.

“I really liked him and it seemed like a cool way to make a living,” says Bosben.

Actually, Bosben says he never intended to pursue a career in real estate; his first choice was professional golfer. As a teenager in 1984, he won the Odana Hills club championship. In 1991, he won the city public links championship.

“I was good but not great,” says Bosben, who estimates he has broken 70 more than 200 times and has played rounds with Steve Stricker, the touring pro from Edgerton.

Bosben captained the West High golf team as a senior and says his biggest claim to fame is beating PGA touring pro Jerry Kelly three times during their high school days. Kelly played for Madison East before going on to bigger things.

Bosben still gets out on the course — he played last week at Whistling Straits near Kohler for the first time — but says family and business has cut into golfing time. He and his wife, Gwen, live in Sun Prairie with their two young sons.

Much of Bosben’s work involves simply managing the company’s finances. Apex holds about $68 million in various mortgages that must be refinanced as interest rates adjust. “A big part of my job is management of the debt portfolio,” he says.

While Apex has made news of late with its development proposals, most Madisonians know it as an apartment management company. On that account, Apex seems to score well, earning an A- minus rating from the Better Business Bureau of Wisconsin. BBB has received three formal complaints about Apex over the past 36 months, according to its database.

“I wouldn’t say they are any better or any worse than the other big management companies,” says a source at the Madison Tenant Resource Center.

Bosben takes issue with any criticism, saying Apex has a file “only about 1/16th of an inch thick” with the tenant rights group. A review of the state’s circuit court database shows just a handful of tenant/landlord disputes under the name Apex or Bosben.

The Apex Property Management division is headed by Brian Bosben and includes five property managers. The maintenance crew is headed by Linaberry.

One of the biggest setbacks for Apex came in 2007 when fire tore through the back of the company’s headquarters at 1741 Commercial Ave. Apex in 2004 had purchased the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad roundhouse from Madison advertising executive Bill Towell, a rail buff who restored the brick-and-wood facility on five acres across from Hartmeyer Ice Arena.

The building houses both Apex Property Management and Warren Heating & Air Conditioning, which Bruce Bosben purchased five years ago.

Not only did the fire cost Apex financially — Bosben says insurance didn’t come close to covering the estimated $1.5 million in damage — but it destroyed a warehouse full of lighting fixtures, stairway railings and other artifacts collected from 20 years of rehabbing old buildings. The fire was likely caused by a faulty fluorescent light fixture in Apex’s maintenance facility.

The warehouse has since been rebuilt with imported timbers and is now protected by a modern sprinkler system. “We didn’t want to take any more chances,” says Bosben.

But putting money back into the roundhouse, Bosben says, reflects his commitment to older buildings and the town where he once delivered hundreds of newspapers a day. It’s a commitment he says is also reflected in his new development efforts. “I am one of the biggest property taxpayers in Madison,” he says. “I certainly don’t want to see the city fall apart.”

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