One day Zeigler had a chance happy-hour conversation with the firm’s only female partner, an encounter that led to an invitation to join the Ernst & Young real estate group.

“She said I was going to be working on REITs,” Zeigler said. “I didn’t know what a REIT was.” Zeigler dashed over to Barnes & Noble and purchased every tome she could find on the topic. Today Zeigler is COO of Cedar Realty Trust, a REIT that owns, manages, and redevelops grocery-anchored shopping centers across the Boston to District of Columbia region. The portfolio comprises nearly 60 properties amounting to some 8.5 million square feet of gross leasable space in the aggregate. “The reoccurring theme in my career is that I didn’t say no, and I stepped up to the opportunities.”

Real estate offered Zeigler one thing in particular that had been missing in her former auditing job. “One of the things I hated about Coca-Cola is that I would spend hours doing an inventory of their secret ingredient that goes into their cola — and I couldn’t see it,” she said. “Real estate is tangible; you are creating something that didn’t exist before and contributing to parts of a community and environment. It was something that really resonated.”

Zeigler left Ernst & Young in 1996 to become an analyst with Yarmouth Group, a financial services firm that Australia-based Lend Lease Corp. owns. Shortly afterward, Lend Lease acquired Atlanta-based Equitable Real Estate Investment Management, which proved to be fortuitous as Zeigler sought to continue her retail real estate education. Certainly, she showed herself willing to accept a challenge. “I remember the first time I was asked, ‘Do you know how to model a shopping center?’ I had never done it before, but I figured out how to do it,” she said.

When Lend Lease needed help managing King of Prussia (Pa.) Mall, Zeigler stepped up for that, too. “I got my feet wet in asset management, by starting at an 800-store shopping center,” she said. In her half dozen years at the company, she came to manage a portfolio of some $800 million worth of regional and super-regional U.S. malls.

In 2002 Zeigler took a job at KeyBank Real Estate Capital as a senior portfolio manager on the lending side, involved with the financing of some $10 billion in real estate capital annually. “I was the person who determined whether the development projects they were lending on were actually good real estate deals,” she said. Zeigler discovered that she enjoyed the equity side more than lending, so in 2004 she joined Federal Realty Investment Trust as a development asset manager, beginning mainly on new projects. She realized that this asset management position could be expanded to cover Federal Realty’s core portfolio. “They had people running operations, but not necessarily in an asset management function,” Zeigler said. Less than a decade into her tenure, Zeigler was made vice president of asset management for the entire firm, and a few years later she was promoted again, this time to COO for the mid-Atlantic region. In this post she helped spearhead such mixed-use projects as Pentagon Row, in Arlington, Va., and Rockville (Md.) Town Square.

Zeigler assumed her current position at Cedar Realty Trust in 2016. She specializes in redeveloping mixed-used projects in such historically undercapitalized urban areas as South Philadelphia’s South Quarter Crossing, and Ward 7 of Washington, D.C. The job appeals to her love of place-making. “The urban neighborhoods I’m working in now are truly urban neighborhoods,” she said. “I’m excited to bring real estate and jobs to the community.”

Zeigler brings much to the firm itself, as well: She mentors young women and people of color to help with their career paths. Indeed, under her watch, Cedar Realty created a mentorship program for students at Florida A&M University — Zeigler’s alma mater. Zeigler, who sits on the board of the ICSC Foundation, was inspired by her role with the foundation’s Mentorship Program. And at New York Deal Making last month, she joined other female real estate leaders in sharing strategies for industry success.

Zeigler understands from personal experience the importance of receiving encouragement from upper management. “All along the way, I had people who were supporting my trajectory,” she said. “I will never forget this day [when] we were coming out of a boardroom and a former boss said to me, ‘You are as smart as or smarter than anyone else in that room; don’t forget it.’ It really resonated with me, because at that point in time I was younger than anyone in that room, I was the only female, I was the only African-American, and I was intimidated. I didn’t think anyone else knew, but I was. Having him say that to me changed my perception of how I saw myself going forward.”

Cedar Realty affirms that perception. “Robin is a true expert in the shopping center and mixed-use redevelopment space,” said Bruce J. Schanzer, the firm’s president and CEO. “Even more important, she personifies the qualities of collaboration, collegiality, excellence and overall professionalism that make her an invaluable member of the Cedar leadership team.”