Jessica Joly - STILES 

We had the pleasure of having Jessica Joly come to our class and give us a presentation on the West Lake Commons development, a shopping center developed by Stiles, one of the oldest Commercial Real Estate Companies in South Florida. Jessica, a NSU Real Estate Program Graduate and an advisory to the board was appointed as project management for this project, which aimed to develop a total of about 100,000 sf. of retail space with a cost of over 35 million dollars. West Lake Commons has Publix, with 54,000.00 sf as an anchor store,

Her presentation was very clear, enlightening and educational. She went through the developing process of this project since the beginning, as she was involved in every part of it that included site analysis, planning, coordination, permits process, financial feasibility and execution.

She very well explained in detail what each of this steps entitled and what major issues they had to overcome. Site analysis, she emphasized is extremely important. Planning for contingency, she said, even though it is accounted for as a percentage of the total cost, has an intangible cost in time and efforts. Jessica explained how some issues that came up: a road widening request by the city and a mistake in the design façade, took an enormous amount of time and effort to be resolved in addition to the 3% of the contingency actual cost.

Jessica also explained how Stiles is following the road of sustainability in their projects and how West Lake Common development has some added features leading that way such as: construction waste management, energy and water, efficiency and recycle content.

Jessica’s presentation was excellent. She brought together all the development components of this project, which she successfully managed, explaining them in detail and giving us a sense of what issues we can encounter in future projects and how to deal with them.