About the Role
Keyser is seeking an experienced Senior Project Manager to independently lead commercial real estate projects on behalf of our clients, including commercial interiors, tenant improvements, renovations, expansions, and build-to-suit projects.
This is a senior, client-facing project leadership position responsible for managing projects from early planning and due diligence through design, construction, installation, occupancy, and closeout.
The Senior Project Manager serves as a primary point of contact for the client and brings together all aspects of successful project delivery, including architecture and engineering, construction, furniture, audio visual, IT and low-voltage systems, security, signage and branding, move coordination, landlords, developers, specialty vendors, and internal client stakeholders.
Successful project management at Keyser goes well beyond managing a general contractor. You will be expected to understand the entire project, anticipate risks, communicate clearly, coordinate multiple interconnected workstreams, and independently drive projects toward successful outcomes.
This role is ideal for an experienced project manager who is comfortable taking full ownership of projects and becoming a trusted advisor to clients.
What You'll DoLead Commercial Real Estate Projects
Take primary responsibility for projects from initial planning through occupancy and closeout, including:
- Project programming, planning, and due diligence
- Design management
- Budget development and cost management
- Master project scheduling
- Procurement strategy and bidding
- Preconstruction and construction management
- Furniture procurement and installation
- Audio visual, IT, low-voltage, and security coordination
- Signage, branding, and specialty-vendor coordination
- Move and occupancy planning
- Punch list, turnover, and closeout
You will establish project structure, identify what needs to happen and when, assign accountability, monitor progress, and keep the project team aligned with the client's goals.
Client Leadership
Serve as a primary representative of Keyser and a trusted extension of the client's team.
You will:
- Build strong relationships with client executives, project stakeholders, and end users.
- Lead client and project-team meetings.
- Clearly communicate project status, decisions, risks, financial information, schedule implications, and recommendations.
- Understand the client's business and operational objectives and ensure project decisions support those objectives.
- Help clients navigate complex decisions involving scope, cost, schedule, quality, and risk.
- Anticipate questions and concerns before they become problems.
- Deliver difficult information professionally and provide clear recommendations.
- Manage expectations while maintaining strong working relationships.
- Represent the client's interests with landlords, developers, architects, engineers, contractors, consultants, and vendors.
Exceptional communication skills and professional presence are fundamental requirements of this position.
Integrated Project Delivery
Commercial real estate projects involve many interconnected scopes. The Senior Project Manager is responsible for ensuring they operate as one integrated project, rather than as separate vendors or individual workstreams.
You will coordinate architecture, engineering, construction, landlords and developers, furniture, AV, IT infrastructure, low-voltage systems, security, signage, specialty equipment, move management, and internal client teams.
You are not expected to be the technical expert designing every specialty system. You are expected to understand these scopes well enough to identify dependencies, ask the right questions, recognize coordination gaps, and ensure the appropriate parties are communicating and delivering at the right time.
This includes identifying issues such as:
- AV, power, data, blocking, and infrastructure requirements not being coordinated.
- Furniture layouts conflicting with electrical and data locations.
- Security requirements not aligning with doors, hardware, electrical, or low voltage.
- Long-lead equipment not being identified or released on time.
- Owner-direct vendors missing required access or installation windows.
- Construction sequencing conflicting with furniture, technology, security, signage, or move activities.
- Unclear responsibility between consultants, contractors, vendors, landlords, and clients.
Design and Construction Management
The Senior Project Manager will:
- Lead architects, engineers, contractors, consultants, and vendors through design and construction.
- Review design documents for scope, coordination, constructability, budget, schedule, and client requirements.
- Facilitate design decisions and maintain decision accountability.
- Manage RFPs, contractor procurement, bid leveling, recommendations, and contract coordination.
- Lead preconstruction activities.
- Manage RFIs, submittals, change orders, allowances, pay applications, punch lists, and closeout.
- Review contractor proposals and change requests for scope, pricing, documentation, and project impact.
- Conduct site visits and construction meetings.
- Monitor construction progress and proactively address issues affecting cost, schedule, quality, or client expectations.
- Coordinate landlord requirements and landlord-provided work.
- Drive projects through commissioning, turnover, and final closeout.
Build-to-Suit Project Delivery
For build-to-suit assignments, you will represent the client's interests throughout the development and delivery process.
Responsibilities may include:
- Supporting site and building due diligence.
- Establishing project requirements, operational criteria, schedule, budget, and occupancy objectives.
- Coordinating developers, landlords, architects, engineers, contractors, civil consultants, utilities, and other stakeholders.
- Reviewing base-building plans and specifications against client requirements.
- Tracking landlord, developer, and client obligations, milestones, approvals, and decision dates.
- Coordinating base-building and tenant-improvement scopes to identify gaps and overlaps.
- Monitoring development and construction schedules against required occupancy dates.
- Coordinating client-specific requirements involving power, data, security, AV, furniture, equipment, signage, loading, parking, and other operational needs.
- Participating in design reviews, construction meetings, site walks, punch lists, commissioning, turnover, and acceptance.
- Identifying risks affecting delivery, occupancy, cost, or operations and providing clear recommendations.
The Senior Project Manager does not need to serve as the developer or general contractor. The role is to understand the development process well enough to represent the client's interests, challenge assumptions, identify risks, and help ensure the completed facility meets the client's business and operational requirements.
Budget and Schedule Management
The Senior Project Manager is responsible for understanding and managing the entire project budget, not just construction costs.
You will:
- Establish and maintain comprehensive project budgets.
- Track construction, design, furniture, technology, AV, security, signage, consultants, relocation, and owner-direct costs.
- Maintain commitments, actual costs, forecasts, allowances, contingencies, pending changes, and anticipated final costs.
- Review proposals, invoices, pay applications, and change requests.
- Identify cost risks early and develop options and recommendations.
- Clearly communicate the project's financial position to the client.
You will also develop and maintain an integrated master schedule covering design, permitting, approvals, procurement, construction, furniture, technology, security, signage, move activities, and occupancy.
You must understand critical-path activities, track long-lead items and decision dates, challenge consultant and contractor schedules when appropriate, identify schedule risks, and drive project participants toward commitments and deadlines.
Project Controls and Communication
You will:
- Establish clear project governance and communication protocols.
- Lead recurring project and client meetings.
- Prepare concise agendas, meeting minutes, project reports, executive summaries, and decision documentation.
- Maintain action-item, risk, and decision logs.
- Track unresolved issues and drive them toward resolution.
- Translate technical construction information into clear business language.
- Provide clients with the right level of information without overwhelming them with unnecessary detail.
- Ensure decisions and action items are documented and followed through to completion.
Required Experience
- 7+ years of experience in commercial real estate project management, owner's representation, commercial construction management, corporate interiors, build-to-suit development, or a closely related project-delivery role.
- Demonstrated experience independently leading commercial real estate projects from planning through occupancy.
- Experience serving as the primary project-management contact for clients.
- Strong knowledge of commercial design, construction, and project-delivery processes.
- Experience managing architects, engineers, general contractors, developers, landlords, consultants, and specialty vendors.
- Experience managing comprehensive project budgets and integrated schedules.
- Working knowledge of RFIs, submittals, change orders, pay applications, procurement, bidding, punch lists, commissioning, and closeout.
- Experience coordinating owner-direct scopes such as furniture, AV, IT and low voltage, security, signage, specialty equipment, and relocation.
- Ability to read and understand architectural, engineering, and construction documents.
- Ability to identify scope gaps and coordination issues across base-building, tenant-improvement, construction, and owner-direct work.
- Ability to independently manage multiple projects and client relationships simultaneously.
Communication and Professional Skills
The successful candidate must demonstrate:
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
- Confidence leading client and project-team meetings.
- Strong presentation and executive communication skills.
- Ability to simplify complex issues and clearly communicate recommendations.
- Strong negotiation and conflict-resolution skills.
- Professional judgment and discretion.
- Ability to maintain composure and credibility when projects encounter challenges.
- Strong attention to detail without losing sight of larger project objectives.
- Exceptional follow-through and responsiveness.
- Ability to hold consultants, contractors, developers, and vendors accountable while maintaining productive relationships.
The Person We're Looking For
We are looking for someone who operates like an owner, not simply a task manager.
You naturally ask:
- What are we missing?
- What decision needs to happen next?
- What could affect the client's budget or occupancy date?
- Who needs to be involved?
- Has this been coordinated with the other project scopes?
- What does the client need to know?
- What problem could develop months from now if we do not address it today?
You are comfortable walking a construction site with a superintendent, reviewing a budget with a client, coordinating technology requirements, challenging a contractor's change order, working through furniture lead times, discussing landlord or developer responsibilities, and presenting an executive-level project update.
You do not simply report problems. You identify them, understand the implications, develop solutions, make recommendations, and drive the appropriate parties toward resolution.
Seniority at Keyser
This is a Senior Individual Contributor position.
The Senior Project Manager is expected to independently lead projects and key client relationships without requiring day-to-day supervision.
Success in this role is based on your ability to:
- Manage complex projects independently.
- Earn and maintain client trust.
- Make sound project-management decisions.
- Anticipate risks and opportunities.
- Lead multidisciplinary project teams.
- Communicate effectively at all levels.
- Deliver consistent, high-quality project outcomes.
This position may collaborate with and provide guidance to other members of the Project Management team, but formal personnel management is not a primary responsibility.
Preferred Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Construction Management, Architecture, Engineering, Real Estate, Business, or a related discipline.
- Experience with an owner's-representation or project-management consultancy.
- Significant tenant improvement, commercial interiors, renovation, expansion, or build-to-suit experience.
- Experience representing corporate occupiers on developer- or landlord-led projects.
- Familiarity with commercial leases, work letters, landlord and developer responsibilities, tenant improvement allowances, delivery conditions, and lease-driven milestones.
- Experience coordinating furniture procurement and workplace installations.
- Familiarity with AV, IT and low voltage, security, signage, branding, and move-management scopes.
- Experience with MS Project, Smartsheet, Procore, or comparable project-management platforms.
- PMP, CCM, LEED, or other relevant professional credentials.
What Success Looks Like
A successful Senior Project Manager becomes someone clients depend on.
Your client knows that you understand the project, raise issues early, and provide thoughtful recommendations when decisions need to be made.
Projects are organized, financially controlled, and actively managed. Design teams understand required decisions. Contractors understand expectations. Furniture, technology, security, signage, and specialty vendors are integrated into the project rather than treated as afterthoughts.
Risks are identified early. Decisions are documented. Action items are completed. When challenges arise, the client has confidence that you are leading the team toward a solution.
About Keyser
Keyser provides integrated commercial real estate services with a client-first approach.
Our Project Management team represents clients throughout the real estate and project-delivery process, helping organizations successfully plan, design, build, equip, and occupy their spaces.
Because our team works alongside clients, real estate professionals, architects, engineers, contractors, developers, landlords, furniture dealers, technology providers, security vendors, and other specialists, our Project Managers have visibility into both the strategic real estate decisions and the detailed execution required to bring a project to life.
Compensation: $115,000 to $140,000 annual base salary, depending on experience, qualifications, and demonstrated project leadership. Eligible for performance-based incentive compensation.
Benefits: Health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, health savings account, life insurance, disability insurance, paid time off, and opportunities for professional growth.
Work Location: In person, Scottsdale, Arizona
Before Applying
This position requires meaningful experience independently leading commercial real estate projects involving design, construction, and integrated project delivery.
Candidates do not need to be technical experts in every project specialty, but they must understand commercial design and construction and have experience coordinating multiple consultants, contractors, developers, landlords, and owner-direct vendors.
Experience may include tenant improvements, corporate interiors, renovations, expansions, build-to-suit projects, or similar commercial real estate assignments.
Candidates whose experience is primarily residential construction, brokerage, property management, administrative project coordination, or general business project management without substantial commercial design and construction experience are unlikely to be a fit.
Portfolio of Project Experience
As part of the interview process, candidates will be expected to provide a portfolio or representative list of projects they have personally managed or led.
Candidates should be prepared to discuss:
- Project type and approximate size.
- Their specific role and level of responsibility.
- Overall project scope and budget.
- Consultants, contractors, developers, landlords, and specialty vendors coordinated.
- Project duration and delivery method.
- Challenges encountered, decisions personally owned, and contribution to the successful delivery of the project.
- Representative project photos, where available and permitted.
Confidential client information is not required and should not be shared where prohibited by previous employers or client agreements.
Pay: $110,000.00 - $140,000.00 per year
Work Location: In person
