Melissa Román Burch of Lendlease Development | Claremont Hall in New York City | Creating Successful Partnerships
Courtesy of Lendlease Development
Creating Successful Partnerships
Today, I’m joined by Head of the New York City office for Lendlease Development, Melissa Román Burch. Melissa is a leading property executive and developer in New York with twenty years of public-company real estate experience.
In our conversation, we discuss how growing up in Ohio, attending college in Cambridge, and living her adult life in New York City has shaped her outlook on real estate. We touch on the role of academic institutions as economic generators for the cities in which they're situated and the connection between community and higher education.
Melissa shares the three main lessons that she learned from her time on the Pacific Park/ Atlantic Yards project, a massive mixed-use commercial and residential development in Brooklyn. We discuss getting buy-in from the community, learning how to build in a dense urban environment, and understanding the nature of public-private partnerships.
Melissa’s currently working on the Claremont Hall renovation and provides some details on the background, challenges, and opportunities that she’s seeing with the project. We get into the New York City phenomenon of air rights and Melissa shares how the team is monetizing 300,000 aerial square feet to weave together the gothic collegiate style into modern living.
Melissa also shares the importance of incorporating community feedback and local organizations on development projects, namely through the lens of the 1 Java Street project. Lendlease is transforming a vacant, single-story industrial warehouse into 850 units of housing, 30% of which will be affordable. They are also redeveloping the waterfront into an esplanade that will be open to the public. As property and rental prices skyrocket, housing access is top-of-mind for Lendlease.
We round out the conversation by discussing the core purpose of Lendlease and what drew Melissa to join the team. Because Lendlease has construction, development, and investment under one roof, they’re set apart from almost every New York City developer. She describes some of the significant carbon reductions that they’re making towards their goal to be absolute carbon zero by 2040. A lofty goal, but Melissa believes it’s achievable given their resources and dedication to the mission.
“So partnership is so important in the development business, and there’s many different types of partners. Some of them are capital P partners and some of them are lowercase P. And I say that because some of them are more about a mentality about how we approach creating new buildings together. And others are maybe capital P partners that have a financial interest or an equity interest in a project. So this project, Claremont Hall has an incredible group of people that have come together to support its creation. ”
Courtesy of Lendlease Development
About Melissa Román Burch
Melissa is the Head of the New York City office for Lendlease Development where she spearheaded the Sydney-based firms’ entry and expansion into the New York market and originated a pipeline of large-scale, ground-up developments for the firm.
Before joining Lendlease in 2015, she worked at Forest City Ratner for 12 years, where she oversaw the Pacific Park/Atlantic Yard project featuring the Barclays Center. She started her career at Merrill Lynch. She serves on the board of the Henry Street Settlement, Citizen’s Budget Commission, Urban Design Forum, and Coro New York Leadership Center. She is an alumna of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.
Episode Timestamps
3:32 – Could you compare these different places you’ve lived and how they have shaped your outlook as a real estate professional?
8:18 – Tell us about what you learned working with MaryAnne Gilmartin, particularly on the Pacific Park and Atlantic Yards projects.
14:29 – For listeners that may not be from New York City, could you explain what FAR, or floor area ratio, is?
19:40 – The Claremont Hall project is located in Upper Manhattan next to Columbia University and on the campus of the Union Theological Seminary. Tell us about this context and the challenges and opportunities of the site itself.
24:12 – This partnership between Lendlease and Union Theological Seminary, help our listeners understand what a partnership like that means from a legal, financial, and operational perspective.
33:15 – Walk through the project for listeners. Describe what they would be seeing along the way in terms of the finishes and the design.
38:25 – Tell us about 277 Fifth Avenue and One Java Street. What did you learn about establishing relationships and working with stakeholders to create partnerships?
51:01 – Help me understand what you see as the mission of Lendlease and of the Claremont Hall Project.
Connect with Melissa Román Burch:
Courtesy of Lendlease Development
About your host:
Atif Qadir is the Founder & CEO of Commonplace, a technology company making it easy for commercial real estate professionals to find and use the $100B of real estate incentives given out every year in the US.
His work has been covered by Technology Review, The Real Deal, Commercial Observer, and Propmodo. He’s also a frequent speaker on the future of buildings and cities on popular industry podcasts and at conferences, including this past year at the Commercial Observer National DEI Conference, Yale AREA Conference, Columbia Real Estate Symposium, Open Data Week NYC and Austin Design Week.
About Commonplace
Commonplace is a founding sponsor of American Building. It is a 100% minority-owned, real estate technology company founded in 2020 to make financing social impact development projects across the US easier. It is funded by venture capital investors Hometeam Ventures, Park West Asset Management, New York Ventures and Shadow Ventures.
About Michael Graves
The world-famous design firm Michael Graves is also a founding sponsor of American Building. Its namesake, the iconoclastic designer Michael Graves, FAIA was a fierce advocate for people-centric design. His work defines a generation of American architecture and includes the Portland Building, the Humana Building and the Denver Public Library. The 1st season of American Building was filmed live at The Warehouse, his historic home in Princeton, New Jersey:
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