I spent this summer working as an intern at Blueprint Local, a real-estate investment fund based in the Roanoke/Blacksburg region that specifically focuses on Opportunity Zones, which I learned a lot about during my internship. Opportunity Zones are areas across the country that give tax benefits to developments inside of them that benefit the community in some way. Blueprint local and my boss, Ross Baird, were directly involved in the creation of the Opportunity Zone laws, so I learned from experts on the subject. During the entirety of my internship, I worked directly for Ross Baird, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Local. Blueprint Local has no office, so my work was entirely online and I communicated through emails and phone calls. During the beginning of the process, I was given many opportunities to learn about the world of real estate investment through resources such as books, articles, and reports from different investment funds. I wrote summaries and copied important data from the reading I did, and some of this work was used in Blueprint local investor reports.
A few weeks into my internship, I was invited to come to the Blueprint retreat to work helping set up and clean spaces used for meetings and activities during the event. This was by far my favorite part of the internship, because it gave me a chance to meet everyone involved with Blueprint Local as well as many important people in the real estate industry from all across the country. During the retreat, while I spent lots of time working, I also got to sit in on meetings of about 30-40 people discussing the future of the real-estate market and opportunities for growth and synergies between their fields of expertise.
As the internship progressed, I began doing more technical and in-depth work. I learned more about the finances of real-estate development and how to do things such as cost-segregation analysis and charting depreciation tax write-offs. I also spent a lot of time looking at the website of a company called The Conservation Fund, which provides funding to purchase land for wildlife conservation. Here, I analyzed the project map and found which land overlapped with Opportunity Zones, and I organized my findings in an excel sheet. This could allow for further tax benefits on potential protected areas, allowing for forests and coastlines all over the country, many of which are in the Appalachian region, to be protected at lower costs. This internship was an amazing experience. I learned so much about the real estate world, but also about how important the connections you make with people are. My boss and the other people I worked with were amazing and gave me so many opportunities to learn, and taught me how rewarding hard work can be if I'm doing something I feel is meaningful.