200 Liberty is a 1.7 million sf office tower, one of the five towers that together forms the Brookfield Place. It has abundant yet sterile lobby space with little retail experience and poor way-finding, disconnected from the rest of the complex. With significant portion of the building's office tenants expiring in 2020, the tower is challenged with an important re-positioning task that would cause long-term value impact.

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What should be the financial inputs and metrics to evaluate the possibility? How do we translate the problems into concrete design and leasing agendas? What are the execution risks? I was a core team member at the Brookfield asset management team throughout the process in crafting a strong argument and narrative, receiving management approval and managing the project afterwards.

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Defensive or offensive? The first task is to create a proper framework to evaluate the project. The team collaborated with the leasing team to study downtown New York comparable buildings, tenant demands and projected pricing trends, analyzed where the building's asking rent and valuation would be in various scenarios in order to come up with urgency the project, justifiable budget, key inputs as well as the metrics for the financial modeling. 

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In the meantime, I also worked closely with Design and Construction team and the leasing team, to come up with design guidelines for the architects, examined the human-experience through various design options, studied and compared financial outcomes associated with each design options. This iterative process between design and financial studies yielded the most optimal scheme. This is then translated into a narrative and argument for the management, outlining purpose, outcome, key metrics and deliverable as well as the value impact. This project was approved by the management and currently under construction.

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