UC Berkeley Wins Real Estate Challenge

AUSTIN, TX-A team from the University of California at Berkeley’s Hass School of Business has won the 2nd annual Real Estate Finance Challenge put on by the University of Texas at Austin’s McComb’s School of Business. The event concluded Friday in Austin.

Touted as the largest graduate real estate finance challenge in the country, 12 of the top business schools in the country participated, including that of Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, UCLA, Harvard and Columbia. The McComb’s School team came in second place and a team from Harvard took third place. A cash prize of $5000 went to Hass School of Business, while the teams from Harvard and the University of Texas each received $1000.

Goldman Sachs & Co. provided this year’s case, which cast each student team as a global real estate opportunity fund presented with a retail strip mall center suffering from multiple problems. The property was situated on contaminated soil, had a high vacancy rate, was difficult to subdivide and was surrounded by significant market competition.