The Real Estate Department recently revised and updated its undergraduate curriculum based on an analysis of 30 real estate position descriptions, focus group discussions with alumni, and input from student leaders. The outcome of those discussions revealed the need for a new undergraduate capstone class: Real Estate Investment Analysis.
The overarching goal of the undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to comprehensively underwrite and analyze commercial real estate for development, equity and debt investment, and asset management. The new capstone course fills a curricular gap in the previous curriculum by addressing how to operate commercial real estate and understand value-add investment opportunities. Bill Camp, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Real Estate, who taught the new capstone course says, “The goal is to inform students about how owners look at adding value to a property once it is owned.”
The course is designed to give students exposure to property operations and value-add opportunities of live, real-life property investment examples. Woven throughout the course are case studies and current events presentations where students analyze real investments and understand the effects of current capital and the economic world of the space market. Students are challenged to look at tension points in the deals and understand why something did not go as planned and think about alternative strategies that would work better.
The course features guest lecturers who provide a range of investment underwriting perspectives, from property management, asset management and portfolio management professionals to development and acquisitions specialists. Guest lecturers also provide multiple perspectives on property types and investment markets. Please note that we are always in need of new and updated cases and class presentations from alums and others! Contact Bill Camp at william.camp@wisc.edu if you have a case study to share.
The case assignments and final presentations are assigned as group projects to prepare students for the professional world. Overall, the class is designed to pull together the entire real estate curriculum into one course and teach students everything they need to underwrite commercial real estate and the soft skills required to succeed in the professional real estate world. More broadly, this capstone course challenges the students in their final semester in the Wisconsin Real Estate Program to think critically about real estate investment.
Additional required courses for students pursuing an undergraduate degree in Real Estate are one-credit skills courses in Excel and ARGUS modeling, in which course material has been streamlined to flow more sequentially. These changes prompted the creation of the Real Estate Investment Analysis as a new capstone course. The course builds upon the concepts taught in Real Estate Finance, Real Estate Valuations, and applies many of the topics covered in the entire real estate curriculum.
Tags: