How Farbman exec Andy Gutman sees the post-COVID landscape — and how he got into writing children’s books

When Andy Gutman was attending Michigan State University, he had no goal of entering the commercial real-estate field. But the accounting major couldn’t find a good CPA job after graduating, so he became a staff accountant for Schostak Bros. & Co., which was ultimately his only other career stop before spending the following three or so decades at Farbman Group.

Now president of the Farmington Hills-based company, Gutman heads one of the major multi-generational real estate firms in the region, overseeing its suite of specialized companies in the field. In addition, he is also the author of 10 children’s books and a songwriter. Gutman spoke with Crain’s about the state of commercial real estate and his creative passions that keep him busy outside the office.

COVID-19 upended the commercial real estate market. We are now five years from the start of the pandemic. What are you seeing in terms of trends across the industry today? What can be done to return to sort of a pre-COVID normalcy, if there is such a thing?

I’ve never believed that there’s normalcy in any industry, but in commercial real estate especially. I don’t think we’re ever returning to a day when everybody goes into the office five days a week. I think that era is gone … Today, people are returning to offices but I think it’ll always be three to four days a week going forward.

But the one thing I’ve always loved about commercial real estate is that the only constant is change. We’re very bullish right now on opportunities that come from the change and markets, and we’ve always succeeded based on our ability to adapt and take those opportunities to heart and grow with them.

Right now we see a time when if you have a vision, the future is very bright for the ability to make money in commercial real estate just by adapting to the changes that are occurring in some of the industry. Some of the sectors like industrial (are) very strong. I can go sector by sector, but (it’s pretty clear) which ones are doing well, which ones need a little TLC. For us, we served as receiver on a few dozen different opportunities over the last few years, growing every week with new opportunities, especially in office but other sectors. We love the opportunity to help people find their value again in those assets.

I don’t think Farbman has been immune from the changes in office. It’s not like you just do management and receivership, you also own office space. How has the company adapted?

I think we’ve fared very well. For us, even the same issues that give us opportunities to take on new work also create chaos in our own portfolio at times. But I think part of what we’ve always done is we’ve been good landlords. We’ve been good partners to our lenders. We’ve been good partners to our partners. So as we go through the chaotic times, they’ve all kind of stuck by our side and we really haven’t seen a whole lot of chaos in our portfolio, other than, like everyone else you’re dealing with the challenges of a changed office environment. We’ve been fortunate that we have lenders and partners and clients that all stick with us, and that has really kept our portfolio stable during this time.

Farbman Group recently moved from its longtime headquarters in Southfield to Farmington Hills. Talk a little bit about what prompted the move.We love Southfield. We still have buildings in Southfield and Bingham Farms. We had taken on Essex Center, about a 65,000-square-foot building that (company founder) Burt Farbman moved us into over 30 years ago. It was a distressed asset that he helped turn around, invested in it and made it work. As we continued to grow over the years and our companies went beyond real estate — David Farbman is our CEO on our non-real estate assets — we missed having everybody in one place and the building just wasn’t big enough, not only for today but the future. We found this great building in Farmington Hills, just about three miles down the road, give or take, that allowed all of our companies to be under one roof, which has been wonderful for growing collective opportunities.

I’m really interested in the non-commercial real estate side of your personality, which are the children’s books and songwriting. I think you just had a new book come out. Talk a little bit about that and what got you into this in the first place.

Yeah, the most recent one I had was in November. It all started with my daughter. For me, when she was growing up I would make up songs to kind of help her sleep at night when she was a baby. Horrible that I would sing to her, because my singing voice is not good. But she grew up with me making stories and singing to her and trying to make life interesting and kind of spur her creative side.

I always wanted to leave a legacy for her, something that she can look back on with her kids and grandkids one day. But the challenge was I can’t sing, or I shouldn’t, and I don’t play musical instruments, but I wrote. As I continued to explore the internet and have someone help me with my vision, I realized all the pieces were out there but I needed to learn how to use them.

I would hire singers to sing the words I was writing, and I would turn those words into a book and have a graphic designer do the artistic work on it. So it worked out really well and I started doing it for her, and after a while I learned how to do it with an initial publisher that went out of business during COVID. I then started doing it on my own through Amazon and Kindle Press.

It changed into a whole thing where it was not only just for my daughter, but I found that schools started to pick upon these books and they’d ask me to come in and read to their kids. For a while I was selling books and there would-be one kid who couldn’t afford it or the parents couldn’t afford it. And I’m like, “Everyone gets free books.”

To me it’s become that now where two of the 10 books I’ve written were with Beechview Elementary in Farmington Schools and one was with Brilliant Detroit, the nonprofit. To me, the more I’ve learned about the needs of kids and the need to nurture their capabilities — several of these kids are now authors. There’s probably been a total of 40child authors that we have helped nurture and the whole thing has been about giving back to the next generation for me.

How does that translate, if at all, to your day-to-day with Farbman? Using those two sides of your brain, the creative and the analytical. Does one inform the other in any way?

It all connects. I was a little reluctant for so many years — and I’m so sorry I waited as long as I did to bring the two together — because I think if nothing else, what I found was everyone has a dream. They have a side gig, they have a hustle, they have something they’ve always wanted, and I’ve been able to share what I feel is my success through incorporating creativity into my world. But it also goes into everything I do nowadays with our clients in our real estate portfolio. It helps me to think creatively. I have always believed there’s a solution for every problem you run into in the business world, but by using that creative side of my personality, it’s allowed me to do that. It’s also connected me so much to our clients. If they have kids or grandkids or they wanted to be an author or a song writer, suddenly we’re connected on such a deeper level. And it’s turned some of those relationships I have into some of the closest friendships and strong relationships without limits.