Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Jessica Joly, Development Manager at Stiles




Jessica’s presentation was one that brought a more real side to the actual responsibilities of a development manager.  Her responsibilities as a development manager at Stiles are: working with development managers on project planning and coordination, due diligence, obtaining government approvals, and financial feasibility analysis.  She was well prepared and provided the class with information about her latest and biggest project so far.  It is called West Lake Commons and is located on the southeast corner of US 1 and Sheridan in the City of Hollywood, Florida.  She explained how the property was a car dealership and had she underwent several challenges to develop a shopping center that was anchored by Publix.  The Publix grocery store across the street decided to relocate to this new shopping because it had flooding issues in their current location.

Jessica described in detail how for this project there was a great deal of due diligence, was very time consuming and how it turned to be very expensive.  They had to do a traffic study and relocate traffic lights, they also had to run environmental impact reports and found a condition on the land that had to be extracted.  The biggest challenge was a pipe that had to be replaced due to deterioration.  She showed us pictures of the project’s progress and shared acquisition cost of $13,700,000.00 and construction cost of $14,000,000.00 which she noted was very high because site work incurred extra cost.  Construction cost was supposed to be around $6,200,000.00. She shared her outline of the project beginning with due diligence, then site planning, platting, site plan approval, leasing, closing, construction bidding, permitting, construction administration, certificate of occupancy and transition to asset and property management.

I enjoyed Jessica’s presentation because she brought photos that illustrated the progress of the development; she was open to questions and provided valuable insight into the world of development management.

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