Connecting Young Professionals with the Real Estate Industry
How strong is the pipeline of young professionals into the real estate industry? A year ago headlines such as “Shortage of Young Talent in the Real Estate Industry” were common as the industry, notably through its professional affiliations, worried over the industry’s graying workforce and its ability to replace the talent in the next generation. Despite current commercial real estate job market conditions, two facts still remain: (1) demographics and industry-entry pipelines still portend a looming talent shortage, and (2) real estate can be a challenging industry to break into as a premium is placed on experience, professional development, networking and affiliations.
The result is that university real estate programs and professional affiliations and associations, including ULI, NAIOP, ICSC, IREM, and others, find themselves as allies in the effort to increase the professional development and networking opportunities for the under-35 crowd. The Cornell Program in Real Estate annually supports all its students to attend the annual ULI fall meeting, held most recently in Miami, joining peer programs at Clemson, Columbia, and Arizona State and others in the belief that building connections to the industry is a critical part of student’s professional development. The Urban Land Institute (ULI), which lost over half its membership during the real estate downturn in the early 1990s, in turn has actively reached out to its younger membership. ULI launched its Young Leaders initiative in 2001 as an attempt to provide inclusivity to its under-35 membership, with the result that the number of members under 35 has increased by 45% over the past three years. ULI sponsorship of the Graduate Student Fellow program has allowed a Cornell student each year to reap full member benefits, including participation on a ULI Council, for two years of their fellowship. The ULI-Hines competition and other activities additionally help to foster ties between students and practitioners.
NAIOP (National Association of Industrial and Office Properties) has created a similar program – developing leaders – to specifically help real estate professionals under 35 in the early stages of their careers as well as hosts selected real estate competitions around the country. “We want to ramp up our efforts at universities that don’t have real estate programs and strengthen our efforts at those that do,” said marc Selvitelli, VP of membership and Chapter relationships at NAIOP in a recent interview. NAIOP also steeply discounts membership fees for young real estate professionals, as do all the affiliations.
IREM (Institute of Real Estate Management), meanwhile, recently launched a scholarship program for university real estate students, and is increasingly fostering collaborative initiatives with university real estate programs.
ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers), through its student membership program, has established a mentoring program, scholarships, networking events through local chapters, to name a few. ICSC will also be a key resource in Cornell’s new Retail Development course offering that is planned for fall 2009.
These identify just a few of the real estate affiliations and programs targeted at the under-35 crowd, yet the question remains whether appropriate and sufficient programming is in place to best link the future leaders of the real estate industry with today’s industry veterans. Professional meetings remain prohibitively expensive for many graduate students, while many current initiatives are promising yet still evolving. The Cornell Program in Real Estate is committed building bridges to the industry through the professional associations, and hopes to expand the association meetings that students can choose from in the future.
Dr. David L. Funk is Director of the Cornell Program in Real Estate. David can be reached via e-mail at dfunk@cornell.edu if you would like to follow-up with him about this article or the Program in general.