[11.17.2025] How Scott Yauck and Cobalt Partners Tackle Complex Suburban Projects (BizTimes)

Asking Scott Yauck what he’s working on tends to take a while.

On a recent morning, the founder and CEO of Cobalt Partners unfurled a large sheet of paper across a conference table at the commercial real estate development firm’s headquarters in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward and worked his way down a list of more than a dozen projects that the firm has in the works throughout the region.

More than 30 minutes later, Yauck was finally finished.

“Every morning when I wake up – I get up pretty early – I go through this,” he said. “There’s a lot to keep track of these days.”

There’s the OneNorth development in Bayside, where a third building is planned to include another 200 residential units, along with a 60,000-square-foot health club and 50,000-square-foot grocery store. There’s a nine-block development in downtown Kenosha, which will soon enter its second phase featuring a seven-story building with 210 apartments and up to four street-level retail spaces.

The firm is working on several smaller projects, like the former Hy & Richard Smith JCC Water Park in Mequon that Cobalt recently purchased and is working through development concepts for, as well as a $50 million youth sports complex project that was recently unveiled in Brown Deer, and a 273-unit apartment complex in Greenfield where the firm is eyeing a 2026 groundbreaking.

And last month, Cobalt announced that it was about to undertake its largest project yet in the Pabst Farms area of Oconomowoc and Summit, with potentially 400,000 square feet of retail space and hundreds of housing units as well as other components like medical facilities and restaurants on a 210-acre site.

Since the company started its first signature project in 2014, Cobalt has grown from a one-person operation into one of Wisconsin’s most active real estate development firms, building a reputation for doing large, mixed-use projects and creating a constellation of developments stretching across the region that few local developers can match.

“I’m really excited these days,” Yauck said. “In Pabst Farms, we’ve got enough land to do some really cool stuff, and our pipeline has expanded considerably the past few years. I think what we do is unique.”

‘I wouldn’t go away’

After working for several years as a mechanical engineer, Yauck returned to his alma mater, Marquette University, for law school and began his career as an attorney with Quarles & Brady in the mid-1990s.

But in 1998, he saw an opportunity outside the legal world and bought a struggling Menomonee Falls manufacturer, Custom Metal Products, out of receivership.

Under his leadership, the company grew from roughly $2 million to $40 million in annual revenue. Yauck tried to acquire a larger firm, but the deal reversed course when the larger company ended up buying his instead.

That’s when Cobalt Partners was formed in 2005, initially with three partners, whom Yauck had bought out by 2010. Because of the Great Recession, though, the firm didn’t begin active development work until around 2014, when its debut project, Whitestone Station in Menomonee Falls, got underway.

That project redeveloped an industrial area at I-41 and Pilgrim Road. Yauck began assembling the 65-acre site, while he was still leading Custom Metal Products, when a property near the company’s headquarters became available.

Tackling a 65-acre property is not a small undertaking for a developer of any age, let alone as a first-time developer – and on a site that required a significant amount of environmental remediation work, wetland mitigation and abandoned railways.

“It helped that I was naïve,” Yauck said. “We had some challenging times along the way because the village thought (we were) a startup firm, and there’s no way I (was) gonna pull off a project like this. There was a lot of hesitation.”

National development firms took interest in the project, looking to partner with Cobalt or buy the property from the company.

“But I wouldn’t go away,” Yauck said. “They were proposing partnership arrangements, but they were just absurdly lopsided, to a point where I just couldn’t agree. I think that made the municipality nervous, because these national developers could mitigate some of the risk.”

Over the course of several years, Whitestone Station became home to a Wisconsin Athletic Club and Froedtert Health sports medicine facility, a few hundred thousand square feet of retail space, a few hundred apartments and two hotels.

“Real estate development was always something I wanted to do, but it was just never the right time,” Yauck said. “I always liked buildings. I don’t know if it started when I was 10 and my parents built a house, which I thought was cool and fun, but throughout my career real estate was always something I thought about.”

Building a reputation

By the early 2010s, Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke was used to hearing excuses from developers about why their projects wouldn’t work in the city. Despite its solid fundamentals with strong demographics and a central location, Greenfield had struggled to get on the radars of the region’s top developers at the time.

“I had shared information on a bunch of sites with a bunch of developers, but we had difficulty recruiting and getting developers to pay attention to the advantages that we had,” Neitzke said.

Neitzke and Yauck first met while serving on the Milwaukee Gateway Aerotropolis Corp. board, which aims to strengthen the area around Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. After a meeting one day, Neitzke pitched several Greenfield sites; Yauck zeroed in on one that would eventually become 84South, which spans 48 acres at South Layton Avenue and South 84th Street.

“Cobalt was the only one that really saw the opportunity here,” Neitzke said.

What followed was a sprint. In roughly a year, Cobalt assembled 48 separate parcels and secured project entitlements.

The development transformed a patchwork of underused properties into a mixed-use district anchored by retail – many of which are among the better-performing of those retailers’ locations in the region, according to Yauck – as well as restaurants, medical space and hundreds of apartments.

It also helped change the perceptions of both Greenfield and of Cobalt.

“Between how quickly that came together, how challenging it was and ultimately how successful it was, opportunities and doors opened everywhere,” said Dan Roskopf, Cobalt’s chief operating officer who was hired in 2014. “Municipalities started coming to us, developers came to us. It’s amazing how many opportunities come to us on a monthly, if not weekly basis.”

“I think that’s sort of their niche,” Neitzke said. “They do the deep dives into areas that are overlooked and maybe a little more complicated, which is unique in the marketplace. Some companies won’t do that.”For Greenfield, 84South became a catalyst. Cobalt went on to develop Loomis Crossing, a 38-acre mixed-use development a few miles east of 84South.

“If it hadn’t been for Cobalt’s willingness to try and to see the ultimate value, (the 84South site) wouldn’t be what it is, and we wouldn’t have seen the investment and progress at other sites that we have,” Neitzke said.

For Yauck, it was a turning point that shaped the firm’s strategy going forward.

“I didn’t set out with the mission to do these big mixed-use projects in the suburbs, but it became apparent that we were having success with this model, but it wasn’t strategic until after 84South,” Yauck said.

Small team, broad reach

Inside Cobalt’s Third Ward office, the firm’s projects span the region, but the company itself remains lean, with a team of nine.

Cobalt usually partners with other developers on components of the project, such as Milwaukee-based Fiduciary Real Estate Development, which has handled the multifamily components of multiple Cobalt projects, or Minneapolis-based Likewise Partners, which is handling the forthcoming industrial component of Cobalt’s Loomis Crossing project, also in Greenfield.

“You have fingers on everything,” Roskopf said of working for such a small firm. “We’re given the ability to make a ton of decisions. Scott and I have worked together now for well over a decade, and him and I are pretty much aligned on everything: making sure that we are putting together high-quality developments, delivering and exceeding expectations for partners and mostly for municipalities.”

Public-private partnerships, particularly tax-incremental financing (TIF), have become foundational to how the firm operates. Nearly every major Cobalt project has involved a TIF component. Yauck said he thinks public-private partnerships are one of the only ways development projects can get done in the modern day as the financing models that developers relied on for decades aren’t sufficient anymore.

“The reality is that most development is going to become public-private,” Yauck said. “Even today, there’s not a lot of buildings getting built without TIF because of interest rates and construction costs. When we started, the multifamily came in because it didn’t need TIF, and it would create all this increment. That was our secret sauce: we’d have a $50 million building that didn’t need any TIF. It would help fund all the other infrastructure just using that increment. Now, the multifamily needs TIF to get built, and it needs a lot of it. But beyond that, I think the industry is going to have to think outside conventional financing models.”

The firm rarely brings in outside investors, instead relying on its own capital and coordination with municipalities.

“We haven’t historically raised a lot of equity because we’ve been our own source of equity and worked with the municipality, sometimes we have a one-off partner,” Yauck said.

As Cobalt’s project pipeline expands, however, the firm is planning on launching a programmatic development fund at the beginning of next year, which will allow more third-party investment into the company’s projects.

Cobalt’s projects tend to be complex and long term, but that’s by design. The firm looks for opportunities where it can make a visible impact.

“I like it because we found sites that generally had low value,” Yauck said. “The satisfaction of transforming something like that is a big part of it, just creating community or a destination that didn’t exist before.”

That transformative force has become the company’s hallmark.

“One site, one building doesn’t move the needle,” Yauck said. “But if you look at Whitestone Station or 84South, it’s a whole different destination. It’s rewarding.”

The model isn’t without risk. Large, multiphase projects often unfold over several years or even a decade, during which the economy, market trends or politics can shift dramatically. But Yauck sees the long horizon as part of what makes Cobalt’s work meaningful.

“The law of averages works out that there are ups and there are downs,” he said. “But I wouldn’t change our model. I like what it is, and I think communities appreciate that.”

The next phase

Yauck has begun to view Cobalt as having a small research-and-development arm alongside its core development business. That’s led to a growing focus on how technology can improve parts of the development process, like analyzing potential development sites and configuring buildings on those sites.

Along with Brookfield-based MLG Capital, Cobalt co-founded Marquette University’s real estate AI lab that will explore how the technology can be applied across the development life cycle.

“Real estate as a whole can be kind of slow to adopt,” Yauck said. “We’re looking at ways to change that.”

Some of that experimentation is directed at broader industry problems like affordability. Yauck is currently working on an app that could let residents in multifamily communities essentially aggregate their everyday spending on groceries or household goods to achieve discounts similar to bulk purchasing groups, like AARP.

“Affordability is a challenge for everybody, but when I see it from the development side, we’re not going to suddenly have this magic bullet that’s going to make housing prices come down,” Yauck said. “We’re gonna have to find new ways to help people save money.”

Cobalt also recently began a strategic partnership with New York-based Heritage Outdoor Media to construct, manage and acquire advertising assets like digital billboards, which Cobalt has found success in incorporating into their mixed-use projects.

“The one thing that’s always impressed me about Scott is that he’s a visionary,” Roskopf said. “The relationship that he and I have is very complementary. He’ll come in and say, ‘Hey, we got this great development opportunity. It’s going to create all this value,…’ or ‘I want to try this new platform to help us with our design.’ And myself, being from a conservative background as a CPA, often challenge him on a lot of stuff, and make sure that the decisions we’re making are based in some real, verifiable facts and that we’re looking at the best-case and the worst-case scenario. So, in some cases, I tend to ground him.”