BBR Director of Real Estate and Special Projects
Baton Rouge, LA 70801
Full-time
Salary: $90,000.00 /year
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POSITION SUMMARY
Build Baton Rouge (BBR), the redevelopment authority for Baton Rouge, seeks an energetic, experienced professional for a dynamic role leading the agency’s burgeoning real estate development activities and related special projects. This position will join our senior management team and supervise and direct all real estate development matters and special projects per the direction of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Over the past several years BBR has charted an exciting new course for equitable development in Baton Rouge. With a slate of new projects, funding, and partners, BBR is currently expanding its operations and staff. As the Director of Real Estate and Special Projects, you will work directly with the CEO to advance projects that will deliver equitable, innovative, and impactful development to not only meet pressing community needs, but also dramatically change the city’s quality of place and catalyze urban revitalization projects. You will manage a wide-ranging set of partners, constituents, and stakeholders and work at the intersection of real estate development, public finance, urban planning, and community engagement.
This position will command a minimum $90,000 base salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. Full-time employees also qualify for fringe benefits, including medical, dental, long term disability, vision, and life insurance. Full-time employees may also qualify for retirement benefits, including employer retirement contribution matching.
PRINCIPAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead and manage real estate development and special projects and/or programs as directed by the CEO, including major grant-funded activities, urban planning, and other initiatives deemed priority
- Provide day-to-day management, supervision, leadership, direction, and coordination for all project and program team members, consultants and third parties, to ensure that deliverables are produced on schedule and within budget
- Plan, organize, coordinate, and control projects and programs in accordance with established policies, procedures, systems, requirements, and Executive Staff direction
- Direct preparation of project plans and proposals, and manage project scope, budget and project timelines in accordance with contractual and other obligations
- Prepare project plans and manage project scopes, budgets, and schedules in accordance with contractual requirements and/or partner expectations, including the administration of a project’s or program’s legal, thematic, process, quality, technical, cash management, financial tracking, and social impact goals
- Perform financial tracking for projects and communicates with Executive Staff to ensure alignment with BBR’s budget, staffing and resource needs
- Protect BBR from unnecessary risk and ensure adherence to legally binding requirements through active risk management
- Represent BBR, be a steward of BBR’s mission and projects, and maintain client, stakeholder, and community relationships
- Monitor the flow of information regarding project and program management among interested parties including BBR Executive Staff, BBR Board of Commissioners, funders and other project partners
- Provide Executive Staff with periodic updates and progress reports on program and project deliverables using project management software and other support tools
QUALIFICATIONS/SKILLS & KNOWLEDGE REQUIREMENTS
Education
– Bachelor’s degree from an accredited four-year college or university required with a preferred concentration in project management, engineering, architecture, urban planning, finance, or a real- estate-related discipline. Graduate or professional degree preferred. Exceptional educational attainment may offset a lack of relevant work experience.
Experience
– Minimum of seven years of experience in real estate development, project management, urban planning, construction, finance, economic development, or community economic development.
Additional experience may offset educational requirements. Computer programs skills required for Microsoft Office and GIS-related tools.
OUR GOALS
We expect all of our team members to support our mission, vision, and values by exhibiting competence, empathy, respect, leadership, humility, collaboration, innovation, personalization, commitment to our community, accountability, and ownership. You must be able to work in a fast- paced environment with the ability to juggle and prioritize multiple, competing tasks and demands and to seek supervisory assistance as appropriate.
We are a diverse workforce that is representative, at all job levels, of the communities we serve.
We work to promote equality and equity, recognizing that our strength lies not only in our individual abilities, but also in our connection to various identities, communities, and histories. We celebrate that intersectionality and are committed to the ongoing process of creating a more inclusive and participatory workplace.
Build Baton Rouge is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, veteran or disability status.
ABOUT BUILD BATON ROUGE
Our mission is to bring people and resources together to promote equitable investment, innovative development, and thriving communities across all of Baton Rouge. Over the past decade, BBR has deployed and leveraged over $80 million to create $300 million in projects, including 863 affordable housing units and over 3,400 jobs. We have awarded over $5.6 million in below-market-rate financing, leading to the construction or rehabilitation of 564 affordable housing units and over $250,000 in facade grants to improve 69 storefronts in low-income areas.
Since 2010 we have been developing Ardendale, a 200-acre urban infill master-planned development that has already received over $50 million in investment and is the centerpiece of a $30 million HUD Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant awarded in 2019. In 2018 we opened Electric Depot, a mixed-use brownfields redevelopment of the city’s first power plant.
Electric Depot is an anchor for redevelopment in the Downtown East/Mid-City neighborhood and the planned development for the proposed Baton Rouge-New Orleans intercity high-speed rail. We are also leading a comprehensive, transit-oriented revitalization plan for Plank Road, Baton Rouge’s most blighted commercial corridor. As a result of these efforts, in 2019 Baton Rouge was awarded a $15 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant to implement bus rapid transit along 10 miles of urban Baton Rouge, including Plank Road. In 2020 Build Baton Rouge was one of seven communities out of over seventy nationwide that received a $5 million grant from the prestigious JP Morgan Chase Advancing Cities Challenge to implement various projects under the Plank Road masterplan.