After the Fisher Building portfolio acquisition for $12.2 million, The Platform began acquiring a batch of properties in a variety of neighborhoods around Detroit, including the New Center area, but also around TechTown and Eastern Market, Milwaukee Junction, northwest Detroit and Islandview, among others, generally with plans to create mixed-use developments centered on residential space. 

However, there have been bumps along the way, ranging from a condo market that didn’t support new high-end for-sale product to what the company later said were miscalculations in market conditions in some of the areas where it had invested.

“When you make mistakes, you’ve just got to accept that you’ve made a mistake and be creative about fixing it,” Cummings said in an interview two years ago, referring to what he called “early missteps with The Platform.” 

There were stalled and ultimately scrapped developments, the loss of a major commercial tenant in WeWork Inc., which in November was revealed to owe The Platform $5.1 million in unpaid rent. Also in November, Cummings put up several key development sites up for sale and unloaded an office property and other parcels for $18.4 million. One of its partners in the Fisher Building, the New York City-based former majority owner HFZ Capital, also imploded and The Platform bought out its interest. 

However, the company notched a series of wins over the years, ranging from starting a large-scale renovation of the Fisher Building — sometimes called Detroit’s largest art object — to completing new ground-up apartments in the New Center area with The Boulevard, which has 231 units at West Grand Boulevard and Third and is on the market for sale, to the area around Midtown with Woodward West, a 204-unit development with Queen Lillian LLC at Woodward Avenue and Stimson. 

It also rehabbed a northwest Detroit property known as the Obama Building on Grand River Avenue, turned a former cold-storage warehouse into the Chroma office and co-working space building and rehabbed a building at Woodward and Milwaukee. Overall, the company says, it has brought about 600 residential units to the market, with 250 of those being affordable. 

The company also brought the Michigan State University endowment and Michigan State University Federal Credit Union in as ownership partners in the Fisher Building portfolio, sans the Albert Kahn Building, which it sold off and which has since been turned into hundreds of apartments by Matthew Sosin and Adam Lutz. The MSU endowment now owns 79% of the Fisher Building, a pair of parking decks and land as part of a $21 million deal last summer, whereas a joint venture between The Platform and MSUFCU owns the remaining 21%. 

MSU is now also an investor in the $38 million Piquette Flats project, which is expected to be complete in the fall with 161 workforce housing units. 

The Platform also developed the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center, which is the NBA team’s new corporate headquarters and practice facility that opened in 2019. 

When asked about succession planning two years ago for The Platform during an interview, Cummings told Crain’s that he was “working on it.” 

“I’m not a kid anymore,” he said. “It’s a really challenging and satisfying business, fulfilling and purposeful kind of business, particularly in Detroit. But we are working on succession and what comes next for The Platform. We have, in a way, a much smaller team than we used to have, but it’s doing more work and, I think, doing it more effectively.”