Susan Smartt leads MacFarlane Partners’ property development activities in metropolitan areas on the West Coast. Her responsibilities include negotiating and closing land acquisitions and investments; obtaining requisite entitlements and government approvals; and selecting and overseeing project design, engineering, construction and marketing/sales teams.

Career Overview

Susan has 32 years of real estate investment and development experience, during which she has entitled and developed more than 1,500 multifamily housing units and over one million square feet of office and industrial space.

Past Experience

Prior to joining MacFarlane Partners, Susan was senior vice president of Forest City Residential West, a division of Forest City Enterprises, a publicly held real estate operating and development company that owns more than $10 billion in real estate assets nationwide. She oversaw the firm’s development activities in the San Francisco Bay Area, which included two large public/private partnerships:  The Uptown, a 1,000-unit, mixed-income residential community in downtown Oakland; and the Presidio Landmark, a rehabilitation project that has transformed the six-story, former Public Health Services Hospital on the Presidio of San Francisco into a residential community with 161 rental apartments.

Earlier, Susan has been division president for Watt Industries (now Watt Companies), a real estate operating and development company based in Los Angeles. While there, she established and ran the firm’s Northern California office and helped develop more than one million square feet of office and industrial space, including Great Western Bank’s 130,000-square-foot corporate headquarters in Northridge, Calif.; a multi-tenant office park in Culver City, Calif., that consisted of 160,000 square feet in eight two-story buildings; and Lake Merritt Tower, a 10-story office building in Oakland totaling 200,000 square feet.

Honors

• Honoree, Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business, San Francisco Business Times, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008

 Professional Affiliations

• Board of Directors, Urban Land Institute, San Francisco District Council

• Bay Area Council

• Board of Directors, Bay Area Council/USC Ross Program in Real Estate

• Lambda Alpha International

• San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association

Education

• Bachelor of Arts, Urban Planning, University of Washington