This is a sponsored event by the Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education.

Program Description

As commercial real estate investment professionals, we’re called to make wise decisions, yet we’re awash in often meaningless and contradictory information that passes for “data”. But how to sort the wheat from the chaff? How to form an integrated perspective that galvanizes investor interest and enables action and most importantly, results?

These programs, taught by a real estate data expert, help you to use technology, proprietary data, and a proven framework to elevate your decision making and investment outcomes. This will be done with a focus on the state of these high value asset classes in 2021, with additional insights on medical office, lab space, ground-floor retail and industrial cold-storage.

These are not programs in theory, but rather in commercial real estate investment strategy and execution based on real data and application. These programs are designed specifically to clear out the noise and zero in on the fundamental drivers of real estate value—and then create a range of strategies, responsive to both market conditions and your selected capital expectations, to execute on the creation of value.

Program Details

We’ll cover global and US-specific macroeconomics, financial market conditions, the drivers of wealth creation in any given society and the role of “place” in it, demographics, societal trends, the dynamics and measurement of regional, local, and neighborhood economies, and then the identification of specific assets most likely to align with the resulting investment strategy. We’ll cover a range of investment strategies, from CORE, Value Add, Distress (and near-Distress), as well as the Development decision, and how and when to pivot between strategies, and we’ll draw from proprietary data sets as well as compilation of existing publicly available data.

The focus of the program will be on high value asset classes in 2021, namely office, industrial and ecommerce warehouses, with additional insights on medical office, lab space, ground-floor retail and industrial cold-storage.

Who Should Attend

Real estate development entrepreneurs at all levels of experience; design, engineering, construction, legal, permitting, financing, marketing, or property management professionals who are members of a real estate development team; real estate investors and other participants in the real estate investing ecosystem.

This is an open enrollment program with content suitable for a diverse group of professionals. For experienced executives seeking advanced learning and networking opportunities, please consider the Advanced Management Development Program or our Real Estate Management program.

Learning Objectives

Secular trends driving demand in housing- age, marital trends, education, job formation, domestic and international immigration- and where to source the data to demonstrate it.
Market and Asset Identification strategies leveraging commercially available datasets
o What makes a Regional/Local economy “tick” and where is activity concentrated?
o What is the source of wealth creation in a society & which type of “places” increase in value
o Local Demand/Supply balances- leveraging future supply pipeline data vs. est. demand
o Leveraging data on market fundamentals- rent, occupancy, supply, sales, expenses, cap rates, capital expenditures
o Societal trends in the disposition of purchasing power
o Which assets & locations are best positioned to take advantage of these drivers?
Speeding up Underwriting Cycle times- the hidden cost of inflexibility
o Explicitly evaluating the trade-off between purchased data costs and time
o Financial Underwriting of Investment Candidates in 30 minutes or less
Understanding the Macroeconomic & cost of capital context, including inflation/deflation