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UNIVERSITIES INCREASINGLY OFFER REAL ESTATE COURSES

Today’s real estate graduates may lack years of experience managing malls or steering complex projects through the entitlement process, but it might come as a surprise how much some of them actually know.

And that’s because the shopping center industry’s growing involvement with university real estate programs in recent years — along with an upsurge in student interest fueled by the booming market, the rise of New Urbanism and other trends — has sparked strong growth in retail-specific curricula. “Because the industry has been so lucrative, many more students want and demand these kinds of classes,” said Sarah Ritchie, manager of the ICSC Educational Foundation. “Universities are responsive to that.”

At Chicago’s DePaul University, for example, the success of a two-year-old teaching collaboration with General Growth Properties has led to serious talk about creating a graduate seminar focused entirely on retail real estate, says Susanne Cannon, director of DePaul’s Real Estate Center. “The point is, if you look at the spectrum of things that go on in retail, it is everything,” she said.

Today’s students can gain concrete experience by taking advantage of a growing number of internship programs at top-flight shopping center companies, but their actual course work can come quite close to the real thing as well, Cannon says. DePaul students study for up to 13 weeks with General Growth executives such as Mark Bethel, first vice president of development, and tackle problems pulled straight from the market.

“The reason we put it together was to give them a taste of real-world, real-time real estate development,” Bethel said. “It seems to solidify their interest in retail. We go through the entire development process throughout the quarter and give them a real project to research. We actually fly in the planning and zoning lawyers, the architects.”

One group of MBA students immersed itself in some redevelopment challenges facing a General Growth mall in Naples, Fla., and presented its solutions to a mock capital committee. “GGP felt like they actually learned something from the way my students approached this,” Cannon said. “They realized they were far more focused on internal issues at the mall and probably not properly appreciative of the external issues, the way strangers felt about its sort-of fortress look.” Students also went step-by-step through a request-for-proposals process from General Growth’s files. “GGP gave us the information so that our students could act as if they were competing for it,” Cannon said. “They gave them construction pricing, environmental constraints. The students looked up zoning requirements and did a lot of market and demographic analysis. The mock capital committee was very impressed.”

A fresh perspective isn’t the only thing General Growth gains from the program, says Bethel. “It gives us the opportunity to pick the best and brightest out of the class, watch them over the entire quarter and then hire them,” he said.

Having started in the business as a broker in 1965, Ben Reiling, owner and president of Los Angeles-based Zelman Development Co., is the kind of industry veteran who might scoff at the idea of learning the shopping center business in college. After all, Reiling pounded the pavement as a broker for eight years before getting into development.

“I started right out of college,” he said. “I didn’t know my ass from a hot rock about real estate.”

In 2001, however, Reiling became impressed with several real estate development students from the University of Southern California who quizzed him about Zelman’s Burbank Empire Center, a 900,000-square-foot power center then in development. “They had a good understanding,” he said. “At least from the education I’m seeing come out of [USC], I’m bullish on what they’re doing.”