In the Fall of 2014, Ms. Sembera joined the firm’s research group, A&M’s Insight Center (“IC”), where serves as Operations and Finance Leader. In this role, she serves as the IC liaison for Finance, HR and other shared services groups. She creates, monitors and reports on IC operational metrics and maintains the Insight Center’s financial records, including monthly analysis and budget preparation. In addition, she produces Salesforce.com dashboards and other reports for the firm’s divisional leaders, which provide insight into the research requests the IC team has completed. As part of the Insight Center’s leadership team, Ms. Sembera helps guide the group’s strategic vision and works with other IC leaders on several practice development initiatives.
Ms. Sembera transitioned to the Insight Center from A&M’s Real Estate Advisory Services group where she focused on real estate transaction and advisory projects, including real estate underwriting and due diligence, market research, site selection and valuation. Ms. Sembera spent two years on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy case where she was responsible for maintaining and reporting on the Real Estate Group’s annual budget, assisting in the role of liaison between the Lehman team and the Creditor’s Committee, reporting on quarterly valuation updates and the day-to-day management of the group’s Land Asset Team. Prior to Lehman, she focused on providing creditor advisory services, assessing policies and procedures, identifying current and future risks and formulating plans to reduce the banks’ exposure to real estate losses.
Prior to joining A&M in 2006, Ms. Sembera was a Manager with the Real Estate Advisory Services Group at PricewaterhouseCoopers (“PwC”) where she gained considerable experience providing underwriting due diligence services for clients such as Deutsche Bank, GE Capital, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, and Wells Fargo. During her time at A&M and PwC, Ms. Sembera has spent more than ten years performing conventional multifamily and student housing analyses, demand studies and site selection for a variety of clients including universities, bond issuers and underwriters, bond insurers, investors and developers. She has performed market studies for more than 100 markets and 75 universities across the country.
Ms. Sembera earned a Bachelor of Business Administration with a focus in Finance and a Master of Real Estate, both from Texas A&M University. She is active in the Aggie Real Estate Network, serving as the organization’s treasurer.
