Residential Development Class “Builds” in Sayreville, New Jersey
Each spring first year students in the Program in Real Estate get the opportunity to apply their academics to a real-world development project being considered by a national residential developer. In their most intensive first-year course, Residential Development, students team up to tackle the development process with the oversight of industry veterans. The students experience the process as would the developer: touring the proposed site, performing a market study, creating an entitlement strategy, defining product concepts, preparing financial projections, crafting the site plan and product mix, preparing a comprehensive feasibility analysis, and presenting final project recommendations, purchase price and deal terms to the developer.
Spring 2009, the first year PRE students were assigned a 30-acre site in Sayreville, New Jersey controlled by a prominent national home builder. The site, a knotty plot of dirt impacted by hills, easements and protected wetlands, provides the students with a particularly fertile challenge. The course incorporates reality-based collaboration among the various real estate disciplines (represented in the Program in Real Estate), including architecture, engineering, finance, law, and sales. Working in teams, the students are given the freedom to determine the market opportunity and to decide on a program that is reflective of the highest and best use of the site. The five teams this year are proposing mixed-use programs incorporating various multi-family products, recreational areas, and retail space. The scope of the project provides the students with flexibility in terms of site plan, design and real estate product type.
In early February, the students traveled to Sayreville, New Jersey to tour the site, the neighborhood, and various potentially competing projects in order to ensure on-the-ground familiarity with the site and the market area. The developer controlling the site provided both classroom and on-site briefings, identifying the site’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and provided copies of an earlier Phase I environmental study of the site. Students spent time walking the site and adjoining properties and the toured various active and recently completed projects in the surrounding neighborhood and in the neighboring towns of Edison, South Amboy and Perth Amboy. Chris Haine (PRE ’10) commented on the benefits of the course, saying, “The project-based class really focuses on enhancing both our practical as well as our theoretical knowledge base and skill set. There is no better way to tie together all that we have learned thus far.” In preparing the project deliverables, the teams create a market analysis, site analysis, development concept and entitlement strategy, establish specific program goals, outline product design concepts, and prepare a detailed financial analysis. For each of five teams, the culmination of this project will be a formal written report and oral presentation to the builder’s executive team and Cornell University faculty. Course instructors Brad Olson and Pike Oliver together bring more than sixty-five year of experience in master planned community and residential development to the classroom.