FBE 591 - Real Estate Finance and Investment

The first midterm was way hard. The average was pretty low. There is group work. She is really nice but sometimes the material we cover is a lot. Who is this class for? If you are interested in a career in real estate finance or if you just want to learn more about real estate markets. Final Thoughts: We cover a ton of material. Sometimes I feel like the cases are old and there is a better way to teach them.

Gets pretty deep in terms of real estate analysis and the formulas/theory of the financial metrics. Not a very engaging class where the professor mostly reviews their slides. Seems best for students who really have an interest in real estate post-grad as the material can be a bit dense.

I took the class because I wanted some exposure to real estate while at Marshall and this class spends too much time reviewing time-value of money concepts like NPV. The professor spends almost an hour each class reviewing 2-3 articles from the WSJ or industry publications and often time he gets to a granular place that isn't necessary.

Professor Tuzel is very nice and the content is useful for anyone in the real estate, development, and mortgage industries. The course goes over property valuation and modeling property cash flows. If you have a basic understanding of Excel, you'll do great in this class.

Ayoob is amazing professor. If you're planning on a real estate career, take it.

The class would probably be useful if it was taught by a professor who actually stuck to a syllabus and taught the class with some structure. Most of the time Bob is just sitting on a desk and talking about current events. Midterm date and homework assignments are scheduled whenever the professor feels like grading them, which makes it hard to plan around curriculum milestones and track your own learning. Assignments contain material that the professor didn't bother to teach and when he does decide to actually cover relevant material his lectures are hard to follow and uninspiring. You're probably better off avoiding any class he teaches.

Obviously it's solely focused on real estate. Can be interesting to other finance-focused students because the finance concepts are similar but it goes into some industry trends and software used which again, unless you're trying to go into real estate, won't be too helpful for your career.

Exceptional class if you are interested in how mortgages and mortgage markets work. Richard Green is the authority on this topic: he is the Director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate and was appointed by the Obama Administration to work at the FHA for a year. Lots of reading that you don't really need to do, but will be very helpful if you do so.

"Most of this class seems to be stuck in the 80's or 90's, in terms of the skillsets and tools that are built while in class. The first midterm consisted of using financial calculators to calculate mortgage payments, and additional time value of money problems. If you were to do this in real life, you would be laughed out of a job. We should be learning the tools of today's real estate finance corporations, and we should be evaluating and understanding the project financing that's going on today. The concept of the class is fine, but the execution needs work. Another idea: Make a group project that requires each group of 4-5 to generate a pitch deck to get financing for a real estate project. We can bring in local bankers to evaluate the efficacy/perceived success rate of the pitch deck. This is a project for today that will prepare students for today's real estate market."

The class should be great but the prof is terrible. He is one of the finance professors that reads off of slides and doesn't do anything practical. If you want hands on skills for RE, this is not the prof to take it from.

"The entire class time is spent doing calculator problems solving mortgage loans. No analysis on how to value real estate, how to pick real estate, how to analyze your investments or anything else other than doing calculator problems. The professor also makes lots of mistakes and students have to correct his mistakes in class. No teaching plan, no outline, no learning. Please save your time and money and take other classes instead."