Career Focus

This course provides students with the skills and knowledge essential for a career in managing, developing, or investing in real estate. Real estate is a multidisciplinary industry that requires strong analytical rigor as wells as broad strategic thinking.

Educational Objectives

Students will learn about the interplay of capital structures, building characteristics, stakeholders, and legal parameters. The class goals are to illustrate the process of sourcing, underwriting, and ultimately acquiring real estate investments.

Content and Organization

The course is organized into three modules.

Deal Making Fundamentals – The first module focuses the mechanics of real estate deal making and provides a foundation to understand the fundamentals of deal structuring, property types, negotiation and sourcing techniques.

Stakeholder Motivations – Students will learn to understand the various stakeholders’ economic incentives, legal constraints, moral and ethical motivations and fundamental human behavior. Negotiation games and role play will be an important part of this section.

Success and Failure The last module will reflect an investment committee style organization highlighting key decision-making characteristics that may lead to success or failure.

Pedagogical Mix

Real estate lends itself to case method teaching as virtually every subject requires quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgment calls, quick thinking and development of practical action plans. "Cold calling" and active participation are frequent and important components of class. We expect that students will be prepared as most classes will have the case protagonists or other industry leaders present.

Most homework assignments are required to be completed in groups. Additionally, polls will be used frequently and are considered an important aspect of class participation. The course will have a final exam.

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