Real Estate News

This intergenerational panel, the closing session of the day, brought together prominent industry figures to discuss trends, expectations, and concerns related to real estate development.

The panel discussion, "Where are we in the Real Estate Cycle," moderated by Michael Giliberto of Columbia Business School, and including A.J. Agarwal of Blackstone, Adam Schwartz of Angelo, Gordon, and Joshua Scoville of Hines, focused on where to find investment opportunities in the current market environment.

Steven Spinola, of the Real Estate Board of New York, led the panel “New York: At the Very Center of Business” by framing the discussion around key market drivers: population, job growth and transportation.

The Real Estate Capital Markets panel discussed current capital market and investor trends in light of recent economic developments. The panelists provided valuable insights from their diverse perspectives, from public to private capital markets and across product types.

On December 10, 2014, Christopher Mayer, Co-Director of the Richard Paul Richman Center of Business, Law, and Public Policy & Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate, Columbia Business School moderated a panel titled "The Implication of Secular Change" at the Barclays Select Series 2014 – Real Estate: The Year Ahead. 

MBA students Chris Doman '15, Dennis Giuliano '15, Sarah Pous '15, and Kris Ronning '15 won first place, the Alexander Bodini Foundation Prize, at the Real Estate Project Class Final Presentations Competition and Awards Dinner at Columbia Business School on December 10, 2014. Their team was one of four to present at the competition, which is the culmination of the second-year course taught by Adjunct Associate Professor Andrew C. Jacobs '96. Each team was tasked with developing and presenting its own investment strategy for actual properties owned by the real estate firms sponsoring the event. Prior to the contest, four other teams had been eliminated.

Columbia Business School’s case competition team topped 18 other business schools to finish first place in the prestigious National Real Estate Challenge, hosted by UT Austin on November 19 - 20, 2014. The team, consisting of Azeem Ahamed ’15, Nikhil Chaudhri ’16, Christopher Doman ’15, Aaron Kazam ’15, Lauren McDermott ’15, and Daniel Wagman ’15, impressed the judges by presenting a plan to redevelop Boston’s Landmark Center into a premier retail destination for local residents.

From November 3-4, 2014, 20 students of the Columbia Business School Real Estate Association traveled to San Francisco to explore the market landscape and learn how San Francisco-based companies are taking advantage of local, national, and international opportunities. The group had informational meetings and site visits with real estate developers and investment and private equity companies.

On Friday, October 31, 2014, members of the Real Estate Association and Paul Milstein Center staff met with Brookfield Property Group CEO, Ric Clark, and other members of the Brookfield team for a discussion regarding the Manhattan real estate market and Brookfield’s newest acquisitions and developments.

The Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate hosted a full-day, interactive workshop on negotiating real estate joint-venture agreements at Columbia Business School on Friday, October 24. Hosted in conjunction with the MIT Center for Real Estate and Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), the event attracted over 60 participants from Columbia, MIT, and Harvard with professional backgrounds ranging from business, consulting, private equity, real estate development, urban planning, law, and public policy. Mentoring the students were some of New York’s top business and law professionals, who helped students understand the key provisions of joint-venture contracts, including overall project risk, risk allocation, governance, and fee and incentive structures. The teams then negotiated those provisions before a panel of prominent industry experts, receiving additional feedback at the conclusion of the negotiation.