Meet our Housing Architecture Specialist

Mike Anderson, newly promoted to Associate Architect, has long been involved with housing. In fact, he helped build homes for a building contractor before entering the architecture industry.

“When I went to architecture school, we designed a single-family residence for a Navajo family in the Four Corners area,” Mike relates. “They lived in a one-room Hogan prior to that. That helped me re-think the varied ways people view housing, depending on their cultures and beliefs.”

When he joined CMA in 2001, housing architecture projects came at a blistering pace. Mike laughs, “It seemed like we did a townhome development per week.” While new ways of designing and building are always evolving, the demand for more traditional townhomes and apartments has shifted to higher density mixed-use developments with residential above and parking and retail below. “With changing demographics, apartments and senior oriented communities with high-amenity spaces in close proximity to transit hubs are more popular, too,” says Mike.

Mike and the rest of the housing team separate themselves from the competition with a simple solution: showing the client exactly what they’ll get. “3D walkthroughs, VR walkthroughs and links to stereoscopic views have helped ‘sell’ a property to their potential clients,” Mike begins. “With the Rockpoint development, we gave clients a tour of the leasing room, into the clubhouse, and a look over the pool deck to the greenbelt. We were able to take a ‘leasing walk’ virtually with the client before the project was ever built, simulating what a potential tenant would experience as part of their leasing sequence.”

Mike’s passion for construction, coupled with the creative use of 3D video, help clients see their return on investment.