Westchester County has become fertile ground for Cleveland-based developer The NRP Group, which in 2020 began construction nationwide on 21 projects with 4,865 housing units involving more than $1.3 billion in third-party capital.
“We”™ve been focused on Westchester. It has so much going for it,” Jonathan Gertman, NRP”™s vice president of development, told the Business Journal during a visit to a construction site at 1133 Westchester Ave. where a 303-unit apartment development will contain a mix of market-rate and affordable housing.
Westchester “has big employers and a well-educated workforce and employment growth. It has communities with tremendous assets and people with very on-average high incomes. It has access to water, to regional transit, regional road networks. It’s really well located and so close to so much economic activity and a wonderful place to be,” Gertman said.
The Westchester Avenue project site had been a dedicated office park and now is among the leaders in a trend to bring residential uses to office parks along what was branded as the Platinum Mile.
NRP”™s projects in the county are:
- apartments at 1133 Westchester Ave. and on Webb Avenue in Harrison in partnership with Robert Weisz”™s RPW Group;
- The Renaissance at Lincoln Park in New Rochelle, in partnership with Guion Renaissance Housing Development Finance Corp., and Kensworth Consulting;
- a 135-unit residence for active adults at the Colonial Terrace site in Cortlandt in partnership with the St. Katherine Group; and
- a two-tower apartment project at 115 S. MacQuesten Parkway in Mount Vernon in partnership with Grandview Consulting Group and Kensworth Consulting.
Last year, the developer sold off four of it market-rate properties with a total of 1,326 units, generating more than $300 million in proceeds.
At the end of 2020, NRP had 51 active projects underway encompassing 12,000 residential units and involving $1.6 billion in construction costs. The company, which was founded in 1994, reported in January that it has developed more than 43,000 apartments, manages 23,000 residential units and has built developments in 16 states.
Gertman said that when NRP is considering whether to undertake a project, part of the review process is analyzing options for involving local development partners.
“Our thinking is that we bring real expertise, a lot of experience building apartments, a financial capacity and a lot of really good brain power and smart folks who know the business very well and know how to build and manage them at very high quality. This is a relationship business and finding trustworthy partners with high integrity that matches our core value means that we can be places where we may not have previously had a footprint and can succeed there,” Gertman said.
Establishing a relationship with a local developer or property operator, he said, allows NRP to expeditiously learn the local mores and ways of doing things.
“For us, that’s been a huge element to our success locally, that we have a really symbiotic relationship and a positive relationship for both ourselves and our partner, to help them do something maybe they don’t have specific expertise in but in an area that they really know well and we”™re newer.”
Gertman commented that pundits love to declare that things are dead, whether they be suburban offices or even inner cities.
“Things don’t die, thankfully, in our business, but they evolve and cities are very much alive and are going to evolve. Suburban areas are very much alive and are evolving,” Gertman said.
“I think we’ve just seen that there”™s not such a separation anymore, such a strict line of separation, that we want to live close to where we work and to eat out and enjoy amenities close to where we live and work and things aren’t in such strict buckets as they once were and thankfully towns in Westchester are seeing that as well.”
Gertman said that the increasing acceptance of the live-work-play concept has been very important for NRP”™s operations in Westchester as has the need for affordable housing and the fact that many municipalities require it in new developments.
“Our roots are in the affordable housing business. I think that’s part of why we have such a community-minded and partnership-minded approach to development,” Gertman said.
“It’s our DNA of how we started. Over the last dozen years we’ve gone from being builders of high-end affordable housing to high-end market-rate housing and what we see now especially in these dynamic close-in suburban areas is there’s a lot of crossover as well. We have all those tools in our tool belt to do affordable, to do market, to do mixed-use and to try to solve the challenges of any community where we operate.”
Gertman said that while getting a development off the ground requires a lot of calculating, drawing, planning and developing procedures, there also is something else.
“The magic is bringing all the talented minds in our company and outside of our company, whether its our partner, our city partner, our consultants such as our architects, our engineers, into the mix to find that recipe that’s going to work for that site and there are a lot of projects that we look at that we pass on,” Gertman said.
“We’re very disciplined about what we go into and very disciplined about how we evaluate opportunities but I think very creative in finding solutions. Our business is very much a puzzle and putting the disparate pieces together to create the puzzle at the end that we see that”™s part of the fun of it. We have a lot of great people that can help us put the puzzle pieces together but it doesn’t always work and there are things we’d like to do that we just don’t get the chance to pursue.”
Gertman said that the pandemic had an impact on operations, but not as great as it theoretically could have had it not been for adoption of extensive safety protocols and the fact that NRP had been using computer technology in its basic daily operations long before the virus appeared.
“We were already enabled for our workforce to work from home; we already had communication systems on all of our construction sites,” Gertman said. “Our construction team was incredibly nimble and managed to keep all of our construction sites going except for one which was shut down due to local regulations. We were able to keep building and keep building safely.”
Gertman said that he’s noticed a trend toward proactive planning in Westchester in the last few years that allows developers to come into a municipality and know the rules of the road they’ll have to follow in advance of starting the approval process.
“Communities feel they have control over their land use process; it’s their vision and developers benefit by knowing the rules of the road and then doing what we do best within them. Westchester is a very sophisticated place and folks have a very strong sense of their local identity,” Gertman said.
