REAL ESTATE RESEARCH ANALYST na City of Columbia, SC

About the Department

This position serves as an advisor and subject matter expert on commercial real estate, economic data analysis, and technological innovation for the Economic Development Department. The work involves coordinating with internal and external stakeholders on the strategic positioning, promotion, and disposition of real estate assets to support new investment and job creation opportunities in the city. This role provides support by analyzing economic data, identifying trends, and providing insights and reports to better inform the City’s economic development strategies while managing the oversight and adoption of technology platforms and solutions to help maximize staff efficiency such as the customer relationship management (CRM) system, the department’s website, online property listing platforms, and new technologies that may better improve departmental efficiency. 

The work is considered sedentary in nature and involves walking or standing some of the time and involves exerting up to 10 pounds of force on a recurring basis or routine keyboard operations. The work requires the following physical abilities to perform the essential job functions: fingering, handling, hearing, mental acuity, repetitive motion, speaking, talking, visual acuity, and walking.

Work environment involves exposure to no known environmental hazards; and is safe and secure that may periodically have unpredicted requirements or demands.

Position Duties

• Oversees available real estate options across the City of Columbia to ensure we maintain current, reliable information on properties in order to help facilitate the sale, purchase or lease of real estate to new businesses and investment, and to track the economic impact of those projects;
• Helps develop and implement a comprehensive real estate and redevelopment strategy for public and private owned properties, managing a constantly evolving inventory of retail, office, distribution, industrial, and flexible space and sites with an emphasis on prospective strategic sites for redevelopment that can be professionally packaged and routinely presented to potential developers and investors;
• Manages the City’s internal real estate disposition process and promote available surplus properties for the purpose of new development, taxable investment, and job creation opportunities to drive high quality growth and revitalization within the City limits;
• Helps market and promote “featured properties” that the City would like to highlight for future development, utilizing a wide variety of media including website, video, social media, print, and partners/media organizations;
• Develops a deep understanding and knowledge of principles, practices, and negotiation of real estate transactions and the City rules and regulations that may impact development projects;
• Coordinates with staff to identify, analyze, and recommend building and site locations that meet prospect criteria, including challenges and other traits that might negatively impact a site’s desirability, then develops solutions on how to best position and minimize barriers to the strategic alignment of building and site inventory;
• Builds relationships with real estate brokers, private developers, property owners, and government agencies, including those not actively listing their property for sale or lease, in order to better understand critical information on their properties as well as facilitate potential development and investment partnerships should an ideal opportunity arise;
• Engages and convenes private developer and commercial realtor roundtables to strengthen relationships with development professionals to better coordinate and share information regarding potential redevelopment activities;
• Directs and oversees all CED research activities, conducting research, analysis, and provide reports on economic, demographic and real estate data to identify trends and opportunities for economic growth to better assist in the development of economic strategies, goals, and priorities, and to help maintain various CED informational databases including major employers, available properties, city, regional, and state rankings, workforce, population, and income data, and internal CED metrics;
• Assists in tracking and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs);
• Conducts financial models and economic impact analysis to evaluate potential projects;
• Prepares reports and presentations on research findings and project progress for internal and external audiences, both from standard dashboards to custom research and analysis;
• Maintains and utilizes existing economic development tools and technologies including but not limited to Salesforce, Airtable, Crexi, CoStar and Loopnet records, RESimplifi to track information on leads, projects, companies, contacts, cases and properties to develop and generate reports;
• Designs and implements custom business workflows and processes, configuring dashboards, reports, and opportunity pipelines, ensuring data quality, accuracy, and integrity, and providing end-user support;
• Maps and documents current business processes across teams/workstreams, develop new system processes, monitor the effectiveness of implemented changes, and suggest/implement subsequent refinements;
• Establishes a foundation, aggregates, and analyzes data to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvements in business operations and customer experiences including the evaluation of AI driven tools and automation opportunities within business processes;
• Works with the Director and staff to plan, layout, produce and distribute property flyers, regularly occurring and annual reports, presentations for Council, leads, prospects, etc… and various publications including information decks, targeted marketing brochures, and other work;
• Helps manage and maintain the organization’s website with the Director and staff;
• Helps draft and sends regular Market Report e-newsletters and expand audience for this list, assist with marking and communications efforts with sharing stories and social media posts pertaining to economic development and commercial real estate; and
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS TO PERFORM WORK: 

• Bachelor’s degree in public administration, economics, business, marketing, finance, or a closely related field;
• Two (2) years of relevant prior experience;
• Valid South Carolina Class “D” Driver’s License.