Data Scientist - Real Estate Investment

Maverick Real Estate Partners is a data-focused private equity fund manager with deep expertise in New York City commercial real estate (CRE). We work on behalf of our investors to identify dislocations in the NYC CRE market and uncover unique investment opportunities.

We are seeking to add the first Data Scientist to our five person Data Strategy team, after a multi-year effort to build out robust data infrastructure and staffing to support the role. This includes development of an extensive data warehouse and cloud infrastructure, mature ELT orchestration, rigorous data cleaning, comprehensive documentation of every aspect of our data ecosystem, and other considerations we view as important to supporting and maximizing the value of this new role.

In the course of this work we’ve developed proprietary data sets that no other CRE investors possess.

The initial focus of this role will emphasize the development of predictive models to inform CRE investment and risk management strategies (e.g. value prediction, propensity to sell, distress/default probability, etc.)

What You’ll Do:

• Help our data team make the leap from descriptive to predictive analytics.
• Work with stakeholders and subject matter experts to frame modeling challenges and desired outcomes.
• Identify how our current data sources can be best utilized within the models you’ll develop. These current data sources include an extensively curated and cleaned data warehouse (Big Query with dbt for ELT orchestration) containing many municipal and commercial data sets, a graph database (Neo4j) capturing the network of relationships between NYC CRE market participants, and a large document store.
• Lead feature engineering efforts with dedicated support from the rest of the team (domain expertise, data engineering, data cleaning, ad-hoc analyses, data visualization) to prepare data resources for modeling use. We expect feature engineering to address challenges like dimensionality reduction, encoding of categorical data, addressing sparseness concerns, etc.
• Identify specific ML/AI techniques relevant to our needs. Modeling approaches are likely to include hedonic regression (to understand how property features influence value), clustering (to group relevant types of properties and property owners into useful segments), time series analysis (to understand how trends evolve over long time horizons), simulation (to evaluate how investment outcomes may vary under different macroeconomic circumstances), etc.
• Identify how modeling results can be presented to the broader team and investors (via investment memos, presentations, white papers, etc.) and integrated into our core BI toolset (Looker). For an example of current content published by Maverick, see our recent white paper at  regarding trends in the NYC market.
• Develop a prioritized roadmap for modeling initiatives, balancing short-term “wins” with progress toward long-term strategic initiatives.
• Identify opportunities to improve our data infrastructure.
• Evaluate new data sets and vendors to determine potential value to modeling initiatives.
• Adhere to Maverick’s high standards for code quality and documentation.

Qualifications:

• Specific and proven expertise with modeling techniques that add value for real estate investment strategies.
• Expert Python and SQL skills.
• Experience product ionizing models in cloud environments.
• Experience with geospatial data is helpful.
• This position does not require a PhD, but we are looking for candidates who have a deep understanding of the underlying statistical methods at play - not simply the ability to deploy common Python libraries and interpret results.
• While this role will have robust data engineering support, we do expect candidates to have strong data engineering skills - working with APIs, manipulating data in a variety of forms, handling complex transformations, etc.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to communicate with non-technical audiences about how complex modeling concepts are applicable to our business challenges.

Compensation will include a base salary of $175,000–$225,000 plus discretionary annual bonus. All Maverick employees work five…