The Amherst Group of companies comprise of leading real estate investment and advisory firms with a mission to transform the way real estate is owned, financed and managed. Amherst leverages its proprietary data, analytics, technology, and decades of experience to seek solutions for a fragmented, slow-to-evolve real estate ecosystem and to materially improve the experience for residents, buyers, sellers, communities, and investors. Today Amherst has over 1000 employees and $14.1 billion in assets under management.

Over the past decade, Amherst has scaled its platform to become one of the largest operators of single-family assets and has acquired, renovated, and leased more than 46,000 homes across 32 markets in the U.S. The firm delivers customized, stabilized cash-flowing portfolios of assets to its investors, wrapped in all the ongoing services required to manage, own, and finance the asset including property management, portfolio management, and a full capital markets team. In addition to its single-family rental platform, Amherst’s debt business pursues two distinct credit strategies in mortgage-backed securities and commercial real estate lending. Over its 25-year history, Amherst has developed a deep bench of research and technology talent, and leverages data and analytics at every stage in the asset lifecycle to improve operations and preserve long-term value for our investors and the more than 188,000 residents the firm has served.

The Amherst Group (“Amherst”) has an incredible opportunity for a Strategic Operations Associate, interested in making an impact in a company that is an industry leader in real estate investment management. Amherst is revolutionizing the way U.S. real estate is priced, managed and financed in order to unlock opportunities for all market participants. Driven by data, analytics, and technology, Amherst has a 20-year history of anticipating where the next risks and opportunities are likely to emerge and designing actionable strategies for investors to capitalize on opportunities across residential real estate, commercial real estate and public securities. Amherst, along with its affiliates and subsidiaries, has more than 900 employees and $9 billion under management.

This role represents a unique opportunity to be exposed to and operate at the highest levels of a leading digital real estate company that’s already at scale, profitable, and growing quickly. You’ll build relationships with senior leaders across all functions of the vertically integrated Amherst platform and bring the skills you’ve built to bear on some of our most interesting, and impactful work. It's a great opportunity to set yourself up to transition into a range of roles in 1-2 years if desired, or to continue assuming more responsibility within the role as the organization grows.

As part of your role, you will use your cross-functional knowledge and skills to diagnose complex business issues, coordinate resources, develop solutions, and support their execution in partnership with the relevant teams. This position requires someone who is highly driven, quick to learn, self-motivated, has excellent quantitative, analytical, and modeling skills, works well independently and in a team setting, and has a passion for learning real estate markets and operations.

The Strategic Operations Associate is a critical thinker who will help conceptualize and structure problems, perform quantitative analysis and extract key insights that underpin solutions. In this role, you will be based in the Austin, TX headquarters and work directly with the Chief of Staff to the President of Amherst Residential as well as other leaders and teams across the organization in tackling some of the most significant challenges facing Amherst.

Candidates will need to demonstrate essential capabilities:

• Executional excellence: You have the organizational skills, meticulous attention to detail, high sense of responsibility, and general skillset to take on a wide range of high-priority tasks in support of the CEO, CFO, and Executive Leadership Team (ELT) projects. You are dependable and always deliver quality work

• Executive-level communication and presentation skills: Your written (including presentation decks) and verbal communication are compelling and precise. You can quickly take complex concepts and communicate them briefly, simply, and persuasively. You’ve demonstrated the ability to communicate at executive levels of large companies or organizations

• Structured problem-solving: Strategic thinking, in particular the ability to break complex problems down into component parts. The ability to lead on and enjoy both strategic and tactical work is key

• Analytical capability: You’re confident creating, scrutinizing, and improving everything from revenue models to KPI dashboards. You’ve repeatedly done the work to make sure complex business reporting data is accurate, but you’re also able to cut out the noise by identifying the most salient data points to inform decision-making

Additional capabilities that will help the best candidates stand out:

• Emotional intelligence and the ability to establish strong and trusting relationships with colleagues

• Designing or leading organizational change management around new goals, priorities, team changes or projects

• High initiative, self-starting capabilities; the demonstrated ability to identify and seize opportunities for impact in messy, uncertain contexts without direction or oversight

• Facilitation skills; you design thoughtful meeting processes/agendas and are skilled at chairing or facilitating meetings or sessions that make progress on high-stakes discussions with senior stakeholders

As the Strategic Operations Associate, you will:

• Report directly to the Chief of Staff to the President of Amherst Residential to tackle key strategic and process improvement initiatives through a data-driven, analytical and systematic approach in support of all originate activities related to the Single Family Rental (SFR) platform

• Collaborate with the President of Amherst Residential and the Heads of Pricing & Product, Asset Management, Sales & Trading, Construction, and Leasing, as well as executive leaders across the organization in Technology, Business Intelligence, FP&A, Human Capital, and Marketing

• Work with management to identify business needs, challenges and opportunities

• Plan and execute cross-functional projects that will drive future business operations. Take ownership of the success of the projects

• Provide value added strategic insight, quantitative analysis, presentation, and project management support from the beginning through the end of the project lifecycle

• Assist in developing and driving KPI processes inside of the projects, ensuring that as the projects are stabilized, they have the organizational alignment, regular dashboard reporting, and transparent performance management to maintain controls on an ongoing basis

• Assist in developing strategies and recommendations for new processes or technologies to achieve business goals

• Coordinate closely with internal teams in order to drive a holistic and integrated view of business performance: i.e. Economics, Strategy, Finance, Operations, Communications

• Consolidate, synthesize, and communicate regular reporting on the projects that give insights and support to our CEO, CFO, and ELT

Skills & Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in quantitative field, including Business, Finance, Information Management, Math, etc. MBA preferred

• 3 - 6 years of work experience in Strategy Consulting, Finance, Real Estate or related fields; candidates who have completed analyst training at a strategy consulting firm, investment bank or private equity firm are highly desired

• Effective interpersonal and written/verbal communication, presentation skills

• Proven project management skills with the ability to manage multiple projects and tasks effectively in a fast-paced environment

• Strong organizational and time management skills; follow through with sense of urgency

• Ability to work independently and in a team environment

• Strong Microsoft Excel skills; SQL/R/Python skills desirable

• Familiarity with real estate private equity investment concepts nice to have

​Amherst is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information or veteran status, and encourage all applicants to apply.