Two new real estate elective courses were offered this Spring 2010 semester: Real Estate Development and Real Estate M&A and Restructuring Deal Workshop.  Students completed final assignments that required them to apply the analytical skill sets and practical frameworks covered in each course.Real Estate Development, taught by Adjunct Professor John Livingston, examines the development process and reviews practical applications of design, construction and finance in developing real estate.  For the final assignment for this course, students were asked to examine a distressed development deal.  The original developer and equity partners acquired the property – a Manhattan office tower – in a hotly contested auction at the height of the market in 2007.  Creative in their design and land use strategy, they prospected an anchor tenant and used a creative design to increase the FAR and lower the land price per buildable square foot.  The project was going well until the credit crisis, when the anchor tenant pulled out, they could not identify a replacement tenant, and were stuck with significant carrying costs and architectural and engineering costs – forcing them to hand over the keys to the first mortgage holder.  The bank, as the current owner of the office tower, is seeking a new developer to step in and complete the project.  Students worked in teams to prepare an investment summary that described the steps of their proposed development process and as well as a final recommendation to the bank.Real Estate M&A and Restructuring Deal Workshop, taught by Adjunct Professor Robin Panovka and Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate Lynne B. Sagalyn, is a multidisciplinary course offered jointly with Columbia Law School.  For the final assignment, students were asked to display their understanding of the underlying business, legal, financial and strategic frameworks by evaluating two real-world high-stakes real estate M&A and restructuring transactions – General Growth Properties (“GGP”) and Extended Stay Hotels (“ESH”).  Drawing on the reading materials for the course and any additional materials subsequently filed on these two bankruptcy cases, students drafted papers that compared and contrasted the financial and business merits of the various proposals and rumored proposals to restructure GGP and ESH.