I’ve been getting a lot of (email) questions lately about what to study in order to become a real estate developer. So I thought I would reblog this post that talks about exactly that. I wrote it over a year ago and I almost forgot it existed.
At the same time, I’m reminded of something: I think these questions really speak to the fact that there’s a significant opportunity (particularly in Canada) in terms of real estate development education.
Oftentimes when I get these questions, I end up recommending the Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) at Columbia, MIT, and USC. Why don’t we have something similar (and better) in Canada? We are falling behind.
I have raised this with some Universities here in Toronto, but the response I got was that they felt the real estate courses being offered as part of their existing MBA programs were more than sufficient. I think we can do a lot better.
One professor suggested that I line up a big donor and work with them to spearhead the creation of the (Insert Donor Name Here) School of Real Estate. I think that’s a great idea, but not something I have the capacity for right now.
Hopefully somebody else out there is of the same mind.
Post Update: 3 days ago the Schulich School of Business (York University) announced a one-year full time Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure (MREI) program – the first of its kind in Canada.
This is great news.
Now I would love to see the University of Toronto and Ryerson University (as well as others) step up and leverage their respective architecture schools. Schulich is already out of the gate on this one.
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently teamed up with a few other research groups to investigate the relationship between human interactions and city size. If you happen to be a member of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, you can download the full report here. But in true ATC fashion, I’m going to give you the Coles Notes version here.
What the study did was look at billions of anonymized mobile phone data in both Portugal and the UK in order to determine how our real life social networks change with city size. And what they found is a pretty consistent relationship:
[T]his study reveals a fundamental pattern: our social connections scale with city size. The larger the town you live in, the more people you call and the more calls you make. The scaling of this relation is “super-linear,” which means that on average, if you double the size of a town, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way.
What’s interesting about this finding is that it starts to explain how cities–and the clustering of people–can act as fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The bigger the city the more people you probably know.
I’ve been a big fan of MIT’s Senseable City Lab since I was a grad student at Penn. Their work sits at the intersection of cities and technology, and so I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating.
Recently, the lab examined data from all of New York’s 13,586 registered cabs and looked for ways that technology and mobile tech could potentially optimize the way the system works today. In particular, they were interested in examining instances where people were heading to the same place at the same time, and were within no more than a 3 minute walk of each at the start of the trip.
What they found was that, of the 150 million taxi rides taken in New York City during 2011, almost 80% of them could have been shared.
That is, 80% of the time, there was an overlap in both time and route. That’s an hugely interesting stat because it starts to show just how much waste and inefficiency there currently is in the system. Think about all the trips and carbon emissions that could be potentially eliminated through optimization.