Meredith Marshall and Geoff Flournoy

For Meredith Marshall and Geoff Flournoy’s BRP — a New York City development firm with a $3.8 billion development portfolio — 2024 was about finishing the mixed-use, multi-family projects the firm had already begun and setting them up for closing in 2025. 

“In this environment, everything has to work precisely, so we were basically finishing up projects that we started in 2021 and 2022,” said Marshall. 

These included stabilizing and completing The Monarch a 605-unit, 542,00-square-foot development in Jamaica, Queens; Ruby Square, another 614 units across 715,000 square feet in downtown Jamaica; the Leaf in New Rochelle, a 477-unit project in suburban New York; and Arboretum, 62-acre property of townhomes and single-family houses on Long Island. 

Marshall credits his firm for avoiding floating-rate bridge loans during the mirage of low interest rates in 2020 and 2021, and said that BRP bought interest rate caps on several other deals. 

“We were in pretty good shape, thank God, and are in pretty good shape across our portfolio,” said Marshall. “Timing is everything. … We bought our projects in a timely fashion, and we didn’t overpay for land or vacant buildings.” 

Other big projects for BRP Properties included securing financing for the second phase of La Central, a 1.2 million-square-foot development in the South Bronx that will create 992 housing units, 35,000 square feet of retail, a 50,000-square-foot YMCA and a 30,000-square-foot community center; and securing the winning bid (together with BXP, The Moinian Group and Urbane Development) for Site K in Hudson Yards, a $1.135 billion project that will include more than 1,300 residential units (including more than 400 affordable ones), a hotel and the new Climate Museum. 

But, for Marshall, these complex machinations between city and state subsidies and private development financing is all part of the fun.  

“The end product is something you can see and touch,” he said. “The culmination of what we do is a beautiful building with a whole bunch of different components, and you get residents who are happy that they have housing for themselves and their family.”