This summer, I joined the Ddevelopment team at Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation to help the company progress forward towards realizing their master plan. Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation is a nonprofit real estate developer and operator charged by the City of New York to transform the Navy Yard into a modern advanced manufacturing center, while creating jobs for local residents. With this goal in mind, the company has renovated and modernized a number of the existing buildings in the Navy Yard. The next phase of development is realizing a master plan, which envisions several new office developments, comprising millions of square feet of space.

At BNY, I worked on a few different initiatives to help bring the next phase of their master plan to fruition. In particular, I first prepared a memo to help codify and summarize the key tenant profiles for BNY to target in order to secure an anchor tenant. The company lacked direction in discussions internally and with key stakeholders, and the target audience one-pager that I developed was circulated among the management team to ensure alignment on the strategy and communication regarding this key step. Secondly, I researched and prepared a presentation deck to showcase different options for soliciting design ideas for the immediate next phase of developmen:– a 650,000 square foot advanced manufacturing office space. Lastly, I compiled a complete database of potential tenants, incubators, case studies of similar sites, and other relevant statistics, associations, and companies to be aware of as BNY researches and builds relationships to secure an anchor tenant.

To evaluate the appropriate profile for the current tenants and the right strategy for marketing the development to prospective tenants, I had to understand the strategic positioning of our site, which tapped into the insights I gained from Strategy Formulation and Economics of Strategic Behavior. In these classes, I learned how competitive dynamics affect the positioning and profitability of a firm, and I used this to help understand where the property could create the most value (while also optimizing for non-monetary considerations, like job growth). I also applied concepts I had learned in my Marketing course – namely, product positioning to understand how our proposed product (office space) would be perceived in the market, the tenant profile and preferences of our target tenants, and how we could best market to and communicate our value proposition to these tenants.

The biggest challenge I faced was in working with my manager and team to understand the greatest value I could bring to the project. Initially, I understood that BNY had commissioned a master plan to visualize the next phase of development and transformation of this site. However, BNY had experienced roadblocks since the master plan was commissioned several years prior. There was no clarification as to where the road block was, and the goals for my role were vaguely defined, so I spent my initial time interviewing several stakeholders through the company, while gathering external perspectives from personal contacts throughout the real estate industry to understand typical best practices and challenges faced. With these insights, and in concert with my boss and colleague, I gathered that the key issues were lack of clarity around the tenants BNY intended to target with these new developments, as well as lack of clarity around how BNY intended to position itself within the capital and real estate markets. I then developed a memo to codify and document the company’s thoughts and strategies, which was distributed among the leadership team and development teams to inform and align both teams on tenant strategy and targeting.

Through this experience I drew two primary takeaways: (1) I gained a broader appreciation for the challenges of executing a massive, transformative real estate development, particularly in the realm of public-private-partnership, and (2) I grew in my ability to independently drive the process of defining a problem and taking the steps to solve it. As a nonprofit, BNY has a broader mission than just profit maximization – namely, rebuilding an American manufacturing industry and providing quality jobs to local residents. However, BNY simply acts as an administrator of the Navy Yard site and does not have any sort of guarantee from the City of New York, so the company must navigate dynamics and competing priorities of the city budget and ensure that its service offerings are valuable and ensure it is creating as economically viable of a real estate development as possible, while staying aligned to its mission of job growth. This creates additional complexity that slows down the process of development. Secondly, this internship was very loosely defined, so it required intensive thinking and planning to determine how I could most effectively add value. To do this, I performed stakeholder interviews to identify where the most important pain points were in the development process, and then worked with my boss to define valuable deliverables that would help alleviate these pain points.