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Try keeping up with him. Some say it's difficult.

One member of Mike Daly's staff said if you feel a breeze pass your nose, it might be him.

"It's the biggest criticism and the biggest praise I get," Daly said.

Daly is chief operating officer of Forest City Covington, the developer working to reshape much of a 12,900-acre chunk of south Albuquerque with a mix of industry, educational campuses and more than 30,000 homes.

It's a project he feels is building momentum. As he lures a solar panel company, a film production company is waiting in the wings, followed by the next company.

"Why are we doing this so fast?" he asks rhetorically of his push to keep the momentum rolling. "I don't want to miss an opportunity."

Daly, 43, is a fast-moving Long Islander who hasn't missed many opportunities.

He's the public face of one of the most anticipated and watched land development projects in Albuquerque. A slim, energetic figure with a receding hairline, Daly exudes a style and confidence that has generated respect among his mentors and the public officials he's negotiating with.

"One thing I always appreciate," said City Councilor Isaac Benton, whose district includes Mesa del Sol, "is a guy that comes in . . . and really gets things done."

Getting things done isn't a foreign concept to Daly.

While in high school, he started his own business doing plumbing, electrical work and carpentry - "a general fix-it man," he said.

He grew up in a community, he said, where people generally migrated to work on Wall Street.

Daly did, too. Only his work wasn't on the stock exchange, it was as a broker for Cushman & Wakefield, a giant global real estate brokerage firm.

"I knocked on doors in downtown Manhattan asking, `When does your lease expire, and can I show you some office spaces?' "

Daly once knocked on every door in the World Trade Center. It was two months of hearing, "Go away. You're the fifth person that's been here," he said.

But the first building he worked on as a broker - a 500,000-square-foot office building in downtown Manhattan - led to even bigger things.

The client was Forest City, which today is an $8.5 billion publicly traded real estate giant.

In 1987, Daly, then in his early 20s, caught the eye of Bruce Ratner, now CEO of Forest City Ratner, the New York arm of Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland. Ratner is also owner of the New Jersey Nets NBA franchise.

"I hired him because he was the youngest guy on our account," Ratner said. "He was young. He was eager. You could tell he had integrity.

"He was honest, in terms of always telling the truth as well as in the way he dealt with companies."

Daly later went to work for Forest City on MetroTech, an urban renewal project in Brooklyn, with the tall task of luring Wall Street companies out of Manhattan.

As head of the project's commercial division, Daly enticed global investment firms like Goldman Sachs, power utility KeySpan Energy and the New York Stock Exchange as tenants to the project.

"People thought it was not possible to get companies to move to Brooklyn," Ratner said. "Michael led the effort."

Daly left Forest City in 1998, only to work in partnership with the company on Sterling Glen, a series of 11 senior-living centers around New York and Philadelphia and in Connecticut.

Daly says Forest City can take its time on projects, leaning on its status as an $8.5 billion company as a means of saying, "We can afford to wait."

The same rang true at Sterling Glen, where he said one building took eight years to get zoning approvals. A second building endured 93 public hearings, two litigations and a moratorium.

"I drew that building three times," Daly said.

As Sterling Glen moved from a real estate project to an operating business, Daly, too, moved on.

Mesa del Sol had been little more than a big idea for 20 years, as the city's growth centered mostly on the West Side.

In 2003, a land-swap deal involving the University of New Mexico and the state Land Office resulted in the sale of much of the property to Forest City Covington, the New Mexico arm of the Cleveland company.

Forest City ended up with control of 9,000 acres, with UNM as a partner with a 15 percent stake in the project, along with land for a branch campus.

Daly, a father of three, had married a Santa Fe native, whom he met at a wedding in Miami. His family spent summers in Santa Fe, so he was aware of what New Mexico had to offer.

He set his sights on the Mesa del Sol project.

"I went to the chairman (Albert Ratner), and I asked him for the job," Daly said.

He felt his vast experience in economic development projects could serve the project well, and he believed he knew something about residential projects from his work on Sterling Glen.

Daly got the job in the fall of 2004 and moved to New Mexico in June 2005.

In doing so, he began a calculated series of sales pitches and strategies that has, thus far, won over local public officials and business leaders.

It includes relying on his economic development background to preach a mantra of "jobs first, houses later" - a theme that resonates with local political leaders faced with sprawling development and resulting traffic problems.

It includes taking things like New Mexico's complicated array of business incentives and hiring local accountants to simplify them, allowing Daly to show prospective companies a bottom-line figure as to why it makes economic sense to locate at Mesa del Sol.

It includes taking a clever pitch phrase and saying it like he means it: "You can live like a millionaire in New Mexico, but you don't have to be one like you do in New York," Daly said.

And it includes doing what he knows best - luring companies - while learning the rest, like building massive residential developments, from people who know it better. In Daly's case, he's leaning on the Forest City team that turned the old Denver airport into a master-planned community called Stapleton.

"I can be mentored by the Stapleton team," Daly said. "I've got what they thought was the best, and I can try to make it better."

He's succeeded thus far in luring Advent Solar, a company that makes photovoltaic solar cells with technology developed at Sandia National Laboratories, as the first tenant at Mesa del Sol. That launched what he refers to as a "naturally forming cluster," of potential businesses, thanks to New Mexico's abundant sunlight.

Last month, Albuquerque Studios - a full-service movie production facility - became tenant No. 2. Daly said other media companies are expected to soon follow.

"I am a broker. I basically love chasing after tenants," Daly said. "My first passion was to find a tenant to sell a building."

That confidence is part of what's won him respect in public circles.

"One thing I've realized with Mike is that he is confident; he does firmly believe in what he has there, which is a great asset," said Bernalillo County Manager Thaddeus Lucero. "One of the things Mike has been is respectful and cognizant of his surroundings."

But not everyone believes Forest City's work is entirely benevolent.

Gabriel Nims, executive director of smart-growth advocacy group 1,000 Friends of New Mexico, is critical of Mesa del Sol's ability to get tax breaks from city and state government.

The City Council in December approved creating a tax increment development district, allowing Forest City to spend 67 percent of future city gross receipts tax revenue generated in the district on streets, sidewalks and other public infrastructure, rather than turning that revenue over to the city.

The state Legislature this month passed a similar plan, allowing for Forest City to use 75 percent of the state's future gross receipts tax revenue generated within the tax district to repay $500 million in bonds for infrastructure costs.

"What they have been given approval for is essentially to get a public subsidy for market-rate housing, not affordable housing and nonbase economic development," said Nims.

Regardless of the criticism - and the critics have been few - Daly is continuing forward with that momentum.

He's building a critical mass, he said. The more in place at Mesa del Sol, the more he has to show the next prospective tenant.

"Why do we need to move so fast," the fast-moving Daly asks again. "Strike while the iron is hot."