You may be one of the special few who have realized a few things about commercial real estate. You are smart enough to figure out commercial real estate is not residential real estate. Those who work in commercial real estate deal with high capital, are risk-seekers, think creatively, and build. They love doing deals. They love making money. As real estate became more institutionalized in the big transaction-junkie shops like CBRE, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Cassidy Turley, studying commercial real estate as it relates to the financial- and business worlds has become a more popular undertaking for business-minded students.
Graduate programs now offer a pedagogical focus on industry rather than philosophy, and industry peers consider studying commercial real estate finance as on par with “getting an MBA in real estate.” Real estate employers will consider the real estate finance graduate degree more substantive, if not for the hyper-focus on real estate as an alternative investment, then for the fact that many executives are adept networkers and recruit from a concentrated pool of like-minded professionals.
Real estate as a career has transformed from what was considered a cowboy, male-centric, “dirt business,” full of nepotism and family legacies. It is a more sophisticated economic sector comprising environmental, urban planning, finance and banking, accounting, landscaping, and architectural experts paired with the many “product types,” like senior housing, multifamily, office, industrial, data centers, hotels, retail, and countless others. Because real estate is so tied to every business (food for thought: even virtual businesses use servers, and servers are housed in warehouse-like data centers – a booming business), it is also tied to virtually every Wall Street outlet.
Like the shift of the real estate business, academia has had to overhaul itself from extinction. The “tweed coat mafia” of tenured faculty withered and is supplanted with equally- or more- educated adjuncts in touch with jobs. Academia is business too. Even if a university is classified as non-profit, it must still stay afloat and in the black. Like a business, universities grow, innovate, and adapt. A couple years ago, the old guard academics considered the for-profit schools unscrupulous “diploma mills,” but the fact is that those companies thrived because there was an untapped market to serve. You may think this market was not capable of going to a better school, but this proved to be only partially the case from my experience.
There are motivated, bright, and emotionally capable students marginalized by outdated schedules of full-time masters programs or fulltime MBA schedules. Think military, older students, full-time professionals, and career shifters. Evening programs were not convenient to anyone, and online was once intimidating infrastructure to implement, maintain, and offer. Once newer competition with specialized degrees, cheaper tuition and an emphasis on job placement surfaced, our more distinguished schools leveraged this nouveau education paradigm to appeal to not only the above marginalized populations, but to those who got paid too well to leave the workforce for daytime programs.
READ: 6 Tips For Looking For A Graduate Real Estate Program
Written by: Student Intern Network contributor Jill Phaneuf
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