Internship Description
Amanda Martin ’21 interned with MSquared, a new real estate development and investment platform that delivers solutions by partnering with government, developers, and investors to build mixed-use, mixed-income projects that include housing for a wide range of incomes, non-residential uses that add to the neighborhood’s social infrastructure, and high-quality, sustainable design and materials, led by the former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen. Amanda worked on projects across all aspects of a development deal — from research on potential markets, understanding federal and local government programs and affordable housing, and financial modeling.
This summer, I worked at MSquared, a recently launched real estate development and investment firm. MSquared is focused on developing and investing in mixed-use, mixed-income projects in growing cities facing potential affordable housing crises, such as Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Jacksonville, and Miami. Through partnerships with government, local developers, and investors, the goal is to build projects that provide affordable housing options with smart commercial space to help the community at large. It is also a mission of the firm to build high quality projects with a sustainability focus. As a summer associate, I worked with the team across all aspects of a development deal – from the beginning stages of a potential deal that included market research and due diligence on the potential site to looking through financial models to understand the underwriting. I spent a lot of the summer researching and learning about federal and local programs surrounding affordable housing, as well as looking into potential new litigation that would greatly impact the industry.
The courses I took during my first year at Columbia Business School were very helpful for success in my role. I was able to apply the financial modeling lessons I learned in Corporate Finance and Real Estate Finance to understand the models for our developments, and was able to have a good understanding of available data sets thanks to the PropTech & Real Estate Disruption course.
Due to COVID-19, my entire time at MSquared was done virtually. It was challenging and unfortunate to not be able to interact and work with my colleagues in person. All meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions were done on Zoom. We all had to do our best to work together and learn from each other in this format. It was also a challenge to explore and understand a particularly complex area of the industry I had not worked in before, affordable housing.
It was extremely eye-opening to get a glimpse into how large the affordable housing need in this country is, and to better understand how difficult it is for so many people to be able to live and work in these cities. I was able to learn a lot about how challenging the process is to get rental assistance from the government, as well as how complex and difficult it is to finance affordable housing developments, even though the need is so great.