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

We live in a world of unprecedented uncertainty. So as real estate practitioners, having a “crystal ball” to anticipate the future is crucial to success. To cope with risks, we need to build solid investment strategies based on locally distinct factors. In this course, we will explore the real estate cycle in-depth – what its drivers are, the difference between physical, psychological and financial cycles, and the factors that drive other investors to enter or exit a particular market.

September 2023’s session will continue to focus on inflation - the most-discussed risk in recent years. We will dedicate a full session to understanding why inflation happens and which tools we can use to hedge our real estate investments from inflation.

We will explore how to take advantage of both expansions and recessions, how to prepare our projects for the next cycle, and how to anticipate and outmaneuver competitors. We will also learn how to assess, measure, and mitigate the risks when we enter a new market, either in our own country or abroad.

We will discuss externalities - factors unrelated to real estate that could affect our projects either in a negative or a positive way, including market transparency and corruption, governmental intervention, inflation, currency exchange risks, political and economic risks, interest rate fluctuations, and demographic changes. As real estate practitioners we need to understand this entire picture to design and implement the right project for a particular market.

In the second part of the program, we will address best practices for negotiating international deals, including different negotiation tactics and strategies, common mistakes, understanding your counterparty’s position and Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA), and the unique challenges that cross-border negotiations pose. We will learn about the three layers of negotiation: rational, emotional, and identity. The participants will engage in several interactive negotiation exercises where they will be able to practice newly learned negotiation tools.