The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings real estate leaders to campus

Peter Ma earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering from UF and spent most of his career at England-Thims & Miller, a Jacksonville-based civil engineering firm, where he serves as executive vice president. He specializes in land development for all manner of commercial real estate projects, including big master planned communities that may take decades to build out like Nocatee in Ponte Verde, Fla. He spoke March 27 about “major deal-breaking issues” that can curtail such projects. These include the location of floodplains, which are dictated by often-changing maps from the Federal Emergency Management Administration; mitigating harm to wetlands; and relocating gopher tortoises, a threatened species in Florida. He delved into strategies to solve such issues and outlined tricky local, state and federal regulations builders must navigate. Consulting with clients on such issues “is what I do every day,” he said. He has help: The company has built a team of software and geographic information system experts and hires floodplain specialists and scientific consultants to solve such challenges.

Aaron Wessner, managing director of New York-based Cantor Fitzgerald Asset Management, spoke April 4 about his career in finance and real estate, which included packaging commercial mortgage-backed securities at Merrill Lynch before and during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. A native of Miami, Wessner got his start in high school working for a family friend who owned a small portfolio of apartments; later he owned and managed his own apartment building before he earned a bachelor’s in business from the University of Miami and an MBA from UF. Today, Wessner spearheads real estate deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars but “the fundaments are exactly the same” as those early apartments. He outlined the financial underpinnings of real-world real estate projects in Salt Lake City, Dallas and Las Vegas. He also offered career advice to students, including: Challenge assumptions and don’t be afraid to go against “group think” to avoid a flawed real estate transaction. He cited the Wall Street adage: It’s better to be wrong than long — meaning better to lose a $5 million deposit than be stuck with $200 million in bad real estate.

Lisa Dilts is founder of Compspring, a real estate advisory firm in Winter Park, Fla. She earned two degrees from UF: a bachelor’s in design and a master’s in real estate. Her real estate career began in 2001 at Ernst & Young, where she helped select sites for industrial and government customers. She later conducted market studies and analyzed residential and commercial projects for RCLCO, a real estate analytics and advisory firm. She launched Compspring in 2012 to provide research and analysis services to landowners, developers and government agencies. In her April 11 presentation, she outlined her work to optimize site development for clients including the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center in Orlando and the Tampa Bay Rays. Her research dives deep into data and trends — from labor market demand and transportation networks to demographics and neighborhood character — all to help landowners maximize a property’s profitability. “I’m biased, of course, that you should get a market study, but I’ve definitely seen people that have not done a market study and it doesn’t usually turn out well,” she said.

Find recordings of Ring speaker presentations.

Photo credits: Ben Simons