Advanced Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management

5205 COURSE DESCRIPTION:

5205, Advanced Real Estate Finance Development and Management is an important course for students going into real estate acquisitions, development, asset management, investments, or private equity. This year’s course is divided into two major sections.

Section 1 focuses on individual properties or projects and covers five major topics: (1) advanced analysis and management of development projects, (2) advanced analysis and management of acquisitions (including complex waterfalls and investor after-tax capital accounts), (3) the asset’s capital stack, distress, and “special situations”, (4) management and recovery of an asset in a distressed environment, (5) the real estate underwriting process, investment committee package and stochastic return analyses.

Section 2 focuses on critical concepts and skills required to build performing real estate portfolios and successful real estate companies. Section 2 covers up to seven additional topics: (6) real estate market cycles and investment/management considerations, (7) portfolio construction and techniques for optimizing long-term risk adjusted rates of return, (8) REITs and the IPO process,  (9) raising private equity capital for real estate projects, portfolios, and companies, (10) developing a financial business plan for a startup, (11) PropTech, CleanTech, and FinTech in real estate, and (12) leadership of real estate companies.

The course is fast paced, rigorous and quantitative. We will be using a combination of  case studies, lectures and problem sets to examine a multitude of important advanced real estate topics. Many of the cases require students to apply a full range of real estate skills and learnings to evaluate the appropriate strategic opportunities. They also require one to work outside of their comfort zone in tackling complex problems. We may occasionally host guest lecturers who are experts in their respective fields.

This course is required and intended for GSD MRE students. Non-MRE students who successfully complete GSD 5204 with high grades, may apply to take 5205 with the instructor’s pre-approval in my.harvard. This course builds on 5204 and assumes students can adeptly analyze and model real estate financial pro formas, including levered investor returns, project waterfalls, and investor taxes for all major real estate asset categories.