Director of Conversions for the Division of Portfolio Management & Conversions

Job Description

About the Agency:

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) oversees housing standards across all 3.7 million homes in New York City.

As the nation’s largest municipal housing agency, HPD is responsible for building and preserving affordable housing, protecting tenants from harassment and displacement, and holding landlords accountable across the five boroughs. Under Commissioner Dina Levy and the Mamdani Administration, HPD is pursuing an ambitious housing agenda focused on the needs of New York’s tenants. With a broad set of tools including standards enforcement, tenant resources, and the creation of new affordable housing, HPD is committed to making New York City a more affordable place for renters and homeowners alike.

Your Team:

The Office of Development (OOD) leads the agency’s effort to create and preserve affordable housing in collaboration with other HPD offices as well as other city, state and federal agencies. The OOD is comprised of eight divisions that administer a range of programs. These divisions include Portfolio Management & Conversions, New Construction Finance, Special Needs Housing, Building and Land Development Services (BLDS), Homeownership Opportunities and Preservation, Preservation Finance, Compliance and Enforcement, and Housing Incentives.

The Division of Portfolio Management & Conversions (PMC) manages development projects after closing with an initial loan to manage rent restructuring and conversion to permanent financing, to deploy rental assistance to tenants prior to project stabilization, to ensure projects’ adherence to program and accounting requirements, and to facilitate timely completion. As a relatively new division in the OOD, PMC administers multiple programs areas including Conversions, Rental Assistance, Requisitions, and Construction Monitoring & Completions.

The Conversions team oversees the conversion of construction loans to permanent financing, a critical checkpoint for HPD to ensure that development teams have adhered to program requirements, and to set up these projects for long-term success for decades to come. The unit also oversees rent restructuring, a process through which HPD resets rents in a project in accordance with various laws, regulations, and program policies, and which is a critical tool to ensure housing affordability and long-term project stability. All of this involves managing due diligence requirements, managing multiple external stakeholders to overcome barriers to achieving these milestones, establishing new rent-stabilized rents, and close coordination with a broad array of HPD staff.

Your Impact:

As Director for the Conversions team, you will help create the vision and provide the leadership and day-to-day management needed to improve the overall productivity and work quality of a unit that is undergoing a significant increase in work volume while transforming the way it does business. This work involves multiple internal and external partners, including developers, tenants, and lenders, and may also involve coordination of rental subsidies, rent increases or resolution of issues related to housing code, legal, underwriting and/or other issues. The ability to prioritize, track, shepherd, and trouble-shoot a complex workload and effectively galvanize team members and stakeholders within tight deadlines is critical.

Your Role

The Division of Portfolio Management & Conversions seeks an experienced professional with strong leadership, analytical, and management abilities to be the Director of Conversions responsible for the timely stabilization and conversion of the full pipeline of HPD projects, as well as the successful management of a team consisting of a Deputy Director and seven Project Managers.

Your Responsibilities:

Responsibilities include standardizing and documenting procedures, creating and implementing reporting and other management tools, training staff, trouble-shooting complex, multi-stakeholder projects, improving communications templates, exploring technological solutions, and strengthening relationships with internal and external partners. In addition to proactively managing the unit’s workload, anticipating and resolving operational, policy, procedural and staff issues, and consistently producing measurable results, the Director will also manage and analyze the future workload data to plan, prioritize and allocate resources accordingly. The Director of Conversions will also collaborate with the Deputy Director of Rental Assistance and the Director of Operations on various initiatives, and will also work on other special projects and duties as assigned by leadership.

The Director reports to the Executive Director of Portfolio Management and Conversions, and plays a key role in developing and supervising division operations and activities, including personnel, data tracking and management, policy, budget, and planning actions for all components of the division.

The Director will directly supervise the Deputy Director and Project Managers on the Conversions team.

Preferred Skills:

- Experience and demonstrated efficacy in staff management

- Demonstrated success implementing change, managing growth, proactive problem-solving, and improving productivity and work quality

- Excellent verbal, written communication, and presentation skills; excellent interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively in collaboration with others

- Strong analytic abilities

- Ability to work well in a fast-paced environment with multiple stakeholders and priorities

- Familiarity with NYC government, knowledge of housing development/lending, project management, Section 8/rental subsidies, and/or knowledge of HPD development programs

- Excellent MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS Outlook skills

- Real estate development, law, finance, or related experience a plus

- Familiarity with financial modeling and business process analysis is a plus

ADMINISTRATIVE BUSINESS PROMOT - 1000C

Qualifications

1. A master’s degree from an accredited college or university with a major in business administration, public administration, urban planning, economics, urban affairs, marketing research, finance, or political science and three years of satisfactory full-time professional experience handling business promotion related to capital projects, urban planning, economic development, or financial development at least two years of which must have been in a managerial or executive capacity; or

2. A baccalaureate degree from an accredited college or university and five years of satisfactory full-time professional experience as described in "1" above, including two years of managerial or executive experience described in "1" above; or

3. A satisfactory combination of education and/or experience equivalent to "1" or "2" above. Thirty (30) graduate semester credits from an accredited college or university will be considered equivalent to one year of the required experience. However, all candidates must have two years of managerial or executive experience as described in "1" above and a four-year high school diploma or its educational equivalent.

Experience in a managerial capacity must include, but is not limited to, responsibilities such as: strategic planning for an office/division; creating and implementing policies; setting standards and best practices defining and documenting project scope; root cause analysis with recommendations; collaborating with other managers and executives to define future state of a program; and/or forecasting.

Experience in an executive capacity must include, but is not limited to, responsibilities such as managing multiple bureaus, areas and/or divisions; formulating the organizational strategy/governance; formulating the organization's architectural strategy; developing, setting and enforcing the organization's policies; developing partnerships; and/or developing the organization's budget, cost savings, and revenue generation.

Additional Information

The City of New York is an inclusive equal opportunity employer committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce and providing a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment based upon any legally protected status or protected characteristic, including but not limited to an individual's sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity, or pregnancy.