Cornell Places 3rd at Sixth Annual National Real Estate Challenge
On Friday, November 1, sixteen graduate student teams from leading schools competed for top honors and cash awards at the National Real Estate Challenge held in Austin, Texas. (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec07/real.estate.team.html) The case-based competition was held at the University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business and featured leading business and real estate schools from around the country. The Cornell team earned a spot in the final round of the competition, besting teams from Harvard, Wharton, Duke, Virginia, Berkeley, and Columbia, among others. In the final round, Cornell earned third place while Northwestern and Stanford finished in first and second place, respectively.
Each school was allowed only one team of four to six graduate students and is required to provide a 20-minute case presentation to a panel of real estate professionals. The winning team received $6,000, while the second, third, and fourth place teams received $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. This year’s case was distributed by Goldman Sachs & Co. and was judged by professionals from Goldman and from lead sponsors such as Bank of America, Credit Suisse, GE Real Estate, ING Clarion, The Lionstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Transwestern Investment Company, and Weingarten Realty Investors.
Program in Real Estate Senior Lecturer Brad Olson, lead faculty adviser to the team, described the competition as “a great way for students to come together in an intense and challenging environment, and to test the development and finance skills they are learning in school.”
The Cornell team is comprised of students from both the Johnson Graduate School of Management and the Program in Real Estate. Participants included Zsofia Kondor (PRE ’08), Daniel Lentz (JGSM/PRE’09), Brian Semel (PRE ’08), Ramandeep Walia (JGSM ’08), Benjamin Weissbourd (JGSM ’08), and Rachel Wilson (PRE ’08). Matthew Monson (JGSM/PRE ’09) and Timothy Yeager (PRE ’09) served as alternates and are guaranteed a spot in the competition next year.
“The competition was a fantastic opportunity to combine Cornell’s learning environment with real-world challenges,” said Lentz. “Actual deals are complex and have many different risks and compromises which must be considered. The intense preparation, collaborative team effort, and sheer volume of faculty and advisor coaching made the experience invaluable for anyone considering a career in either investments or development.”
This year’s case study required student teams to examine a hospitality investment opportunity on behalf of a global real estate opportunity fund, and to focus on a number of potential obstacles surrounding the acquisition such as partnership structure and property management. The case also addressed issues concerning renovation and repositioning opportunities. Representatives of Goldman Sachs & Co.’s fund presented a retrospective on the actual investment and its performance following the completion of the case competition.
The case competition was a chance for students to deal with real estate issues, to work together in a group setting, and to test their skills in a concentrated time period. “What I value about preparing for the competition is that it forces you to bring together skills learned in different classes and apply them to a single, complex scenario that encompasses all phases of real estate investment,” said Kondor.
Next semester, students from both the Program in Real Estate and the Johnson Graduate School of Management will vie for spots on next year’s case competition team.