Integrating Real Estate Professionals into the Classroom

This paper outlines an approach to balancing the teaching of theoretical, conceptual models and analytical approaches with up-to-date real world professional practices. This is an issue that plagues all business disciplines, but it seems particularly troubling in real estate, which is already suspected of being too applied and anecdotal in many universities and business schools The approach we have taken at De Paul is to house the program in Finance and to ensure that the curriculum is theoretically grounded, but to provide a number of options for incorporating contemporary practice into each course. These range from selective courses being taught by well versed professional adjunct faculty, a common practice in many colleges, to designing team taught courses with about a third of a course taught by an academic being led by a real estate professional. Details and results in several different courses, both undergraduate and graduate, will be discussed.