DaVinci Development was brought on board by Millsaps College – a private, liberal arts college located in Jackson, Mississippi – to create a development strategy for 14 underutilized acres on their campus. The DaVinci Development team led a master plan program to engage students and connect to the community, and delivered an implementation plan to help the College realize value from their property.

To get started, the team conducted extensive site analysis, precedent research, and a high-level market analysis. Stakeholder interviews and focus groups with more than 100 members of the College and community led to key programmatic themes, and collaboration with a local architect firm created the project’s Guiding Principles and master plan programming. Next, alternate scenarios were prepared and carefully analyzed to ensure market-based reality checks including financial and market benchmarking. Finally, the team presented the scenarios to the Board of Trustees who selected and approved their preferred alternative. Millsaps subsequently engaged DaVinci Development again to further define the development program, create a master developer selection strategy, validate the high-level cost assumptions made in the initial scope of work, and establish an overall master development schedule. The team created a robust strategy for a master developer solicitation, created an RFQ and RFP, and curated a distribution list of potential regional and national developers to aid the process. The team also provided Millsaps with strategies to promote certainty and reduce risk in the developer search, as well as a phasing strategy and suggested temporary uses to activate the site. With these plans in place, Millsaps is poised to attract a qualified developer in the future.