Real Estate Student Association Podcast RESA Exec.

Matt Vermunt is Director of Acquisitions and Development at HomeSpace. His role is to help grow the portfolio of affordable housing by overseeing the acquisition, due diligence, approvals, design, and construction of HomeSpace developments. We apologize for the poor audio quality of this episode, we had some technical difficulties during recording.

In this podcast, we sit down with the entire 2022-2023 RESA executive team to wrap up the school year and to discuss the role of the members and successes/challenges across the year. We hear from the president, VP's of events, marketing, investment, membership, mentorship, finance and podcast. This podcast discusses the responsibilities of each role, successes and highlights throughout the year as well as the challenges each executive faced. Also, executives provide advice to future students looking to join RESA in an executive position, diving deeper into what students should expect when joining the club!

In today's episode, we sit down and chat with Jace Jonsson, a senior manager at Oxford Properties Group. His area of expertise is downtown office leasing and right now he manages the Bow Valley Square, which includes an estimated 1.5 million square feet of leasable area! Jace highlights the challenges of high vacancies in downtown office leasing in previous years and how their team has reduced their vacancy rates. He explains his journey entering the industry, as well as his experiences in previous roles such as his time at Triovest. Jace, a Haskayne alumni, gives advice to students wishing to pursue a career in downtown office leasing and provides insight into the steps required in completing a commercial real estate transaction!

In this episode we dive deeper into real estate development with Joel Tiedemann and his experiences throughout his career. We explore topics related to his time at Brookfield Residential in Edmonton where he helped manage, plan or deliver over 1000 residential units. Followed by his time at Sarina Homes in Calgary as a development manager and finally his switch over to Anthem Properties in 2017 to become a senior development manager. Currently, Joel works at the Minto Group and is a real estate professor as the Haskayne School of Business, where he helps students gain real world and applicable knowledge of the industry. Altogether, we learn more about what it takes to plan, develop and execute projects in a timely and cost efficient budget.

In today's podcast, we dive deeper into commercial real estate financing. In particular, we gain insight into the journey of Nadeem Keshavjee in founding GreenBirch Capital. Nadeem explains the obstacles he has had to overcome up until this point of his career as well as his experiences along the way! He provides his perspective on the economic landscape in regards to real estate in Calgary and offers advice to students interested in real estate!

In this podcast, we overview the residential real estate market in Calgary and across Canada. We dive deeper into the journey of our guest, Rahim Damji, and his experiences growing his company, PropZap, as well as the challenges he has had to overcome.