Is It Worth Teaching a Class On CRE?

Kevin Gibbons, a commercial real estate asset manager with over 30 years of experience, currently with PNC Bank NA, has a secret identity. Well, maybe not so secret to the students who sit in a class taught by Gibbons. He’s been an adjunct professor in the department of economics and finance of Middle Tennessee State University’s Jones College of Business since 2014.

“This is personal growth and enjoyment,” he calls it, “being around college students, interacting, and keeping myself sharp.”

For many doing such work, teaching can also be about making connections for the future, building valuable professional credentials, and, yes, sometimes even making money, although indirectly.

There’s a lot of work involved and a lot of reward. Here’s how you can get into this world, understand what it takes, and make it a great experience.

SETTING EXPECTATIONS

Teaching is often seen as a calling by those in it. The work is difficult, demanding, exacting, and is much more than showing up to talk to a group of students once a week. Getting a grasp of what teaching involves is difficult and hits on areas you might not consider.

“At least one question I definitely would ask them is how much spare time do you have in your day?” says Linda Kanoski, a senior architectural project manager for CBRE who teaches graduate-level project and construction management at Roosevelt University in Chicago. “You don’t just walk in, talk, and walk out. There’s lots of time when you’re preparing and you’re grading papers and tests. Do you actually have time for this? Class time is 2.5 hours a week. I would say I put in roughly an additional 4 to 5 hours a week, preparing, coordinating with guest lecturers who can talk about areas when I’m not an expert, like sustainability, then grading papers and exams, making announcements, and entering grades into the university’s system. I’d say 8 to 10 hours a week.”

Not only are the time commitments significant, but so are the responsibilities. Kanoski says that the hardest part of teaching for her is becoming comfortable with the content she pulled together for each class. “Maybe it wasn’t the hardest, but it was the most time consuming,” she says, “making sure you are delivering the value to your students, making sure they’re getting out of the class what they need and setting aside your own needs and ego in service to your students to get them what they need, when they need it.” The content is what the students need to finish their degrees and to be ready for their careers.” Make a serious mistake, and it can follow other lives for a long time—one reason Kanoski constantly seeks feedback from the people in her classes.

And then there are the difficult conversations you’re bound to have. “Are you comfortable critiquing students and having in some cases difficult conversations about performance?” Kanoski says. “I don’t accept anything under a master’s-level performance. If somebody’s not performing at that level, those are hard conversations to have. You have to be prepared to deliver challenging information to people.”

Approaching the job can be intimidating. Seven years into his real estate career, James Nelson, principal and head of Avison Young’s tri-state investment sales group in New York City and author of The Insider’s Edge to Real Estate Investing, began to teach. “Even with 7 years in the business, I still felt very green,” Nelson says. The continuing education class he taught had a mix of professionals. Some were “going on to pursue a master’s, some of them had more experience than I did.”

Sometimes some of the harder aspects of it aren’t how to develop classes and teach, but how to manage the mechanics of working at a given school. “I went into school one day and spent an hour,” said Gibbons. “I probably could have used a little [more] training with that. They showed me how to hook up your laptop to the projection system, and how to present things on the screen. When you’re creating the course on D2L [the online learning platform the school uses], I ran into a couple of technical issues there, but I was able to work through it, ask someone some questions. Now everything is recorded.” Which meant that he had to learn how to stop and start the recording.

Overall, it’s a lot of work. “It’s a big commitment,” says Collete English Dixon, executive director of the Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate at Roosevelt University. “A program like ours really appreciates having that practitioner in the classroom, having someone teach the subject matter they deal with every day. But for some of them, trying to fit it into their demanding work schedules is a challenge.”

WHAT YOU GET

Again—it’s impossible to stress this enough—you don’t teach for the money. At least at the level of an adjunct professor, whether for undergraduate or graduate work, it can pay worse than flipping burgers.

“You can’t make a living doing this,” Gibbons says. “You take all the hours you put into it and the amount of pay and you probably get less than minimum wage. This is not a money-making proposition. It’s gas money.”

Then why does Gibbons do it? “This is giving back to an industry that was good to me,” he says. “This is personal growth and enjoyment, being around college students, interacting, and keeping myself sharp.”

“It’s really rewarding to teach an engaged group of students what I consider some fairly basic math and all of a sudden their world of possibilities opens up,” says Trevor Calton, president of Evergreen Capital Advisors.

“I had a student who owned a rental house, free and clear,” Calton says. “The house was worth about $450,000. After I taught them about net operating income and cap rates and how increases in income directly affect the value of a commercial property, he sold that one house and invested it in a 20-unit apartment complex. He doubled his equity in two years. He went from making 8% to 10% IRR to 50% IRR just by changing strategies. He didn’t know what the possibilities were until he took my class.”

In other words, although the student had the resources and a path to better results was there, it might as well have been overgrown. He didn’t know it existed, couldn’t have told where it started even if someone had told him the change was possible, and lacked the knowledge to navigate the trail. All that was made possible by the class and what Calton could bring to the students.

“Without the ability to do the financial analysis of both the real estate and the leverage, he wouldn’t have been able to choose a different strategy,” Calton says. “In order to measure all the different factors in real estate, you have to understand real estate finance. Having been a broker, an analyst, a lender, my ability to explain to him, ‘Yes this is possible, it’s not theoretical, here’s how you do it,’ was probably a difference maker.”

That’s a powerful feeling, and it’s terrific when you can experience it without necessarily other professional sacrifices.

“It’s something I enjoyed doing, Sunday school kind of stuff,” Gibbons said, but he admitted that he had wanted to earn more than a teacher’s salary so he thought a teaching career path was the wrong one. However, now he can do both.

“I enjoy being around younger people,” says Gibbons. “I like to give back—or call it pay forward. It keeps me on my toes at my job, too. This past term, everything was about interest rates, so I really dived into what the Federal Reserve does and how it affects interest rates.”

There are, though, some more personal benefits, even if the pay is low. Nelson points to the validation that’s available. “Especially early on in my career, being a professor at NYU, that was a great credibility piece,” he says.

Nelson, as some others do, also finds teaching to be a tremendous networking tool. Although he doesn’t teach steadily at any one institution, he currently will do guest lectures at such schools as Fordham, NYU, and Wharton. “It gives me an opportunity to be in front of a lot of different students,” he adds. Then there are the potential benefits for sales of his book. “If people are looking at my book and read the author’s description, if he’s spoken at NYU, Fordham, and Wharton, [they likely think] he probably has something to share.”

There’s also the inherent networking with potential colleagues and clients who will now see you as a knowledgeable and trusted person. “The networking is outstanding,” Calton says. “It gives me an opportunity to meet some of the most successful professionals in the city. I have a number of former students that have worked for me. I’m a go-to person for other people in the industry when they’re looking for someone to hire. I can’t count the number of people I’ve helped find jobs. It’s branded me as a resource in a number of ways.”

There are also the business opportunities that come about, as Calton has seen former students become clients and sources of revenue.

HOW YOU GET IT

There are many reasons for CRE professionals to teach. Getting started is largely networking. Gibbons fell into it after completing a master’s program in international real estate at Florida International University. “I had done very well in the master’s program. I had expressed to the folks at FIU that I’d be interested in teaching as I was between jobs at the time,” he says.

Nothing immediately came about from it, but then he moved to Tennessee for a new job. MTSU needed a new adjunct and so called FIU. The dean of the real estate school remembered Gibbons, knew he was in that area, and made the connection.

Calton had another academic connection, though a less formal one. “I have a client who was a professor in the program, and he asked me if I would be interested in coming in as a guest speaker,” he says. “I was involved in acquisitions of distressed assets. The next day, a half dozen of his students sent resumes saying if I was ever hiring, let them know.”

The professor kept asking him back, then one day mentioned that because his wife was expecting a child, he was stepping down, so asked if Calton would be interested.

“I said I’d enjoy that, especially in the master’s program because students are quite engaged,” Calton remembers. “Having lunch the next day with another professional who was an adjunct in the same program, he said, ‘You would be great, I’d be happy to put a word in for you.’ A couple of days later, the director asked me to come down. In 2011, I taught my first semester at the university.”

Kanoski is another who got an invitation through her network. “I know the executive director of the program through industry organizations,” she says. “Separately, she had reached out to my employer to ask for a candidate to potentially teach this class. The caveat was that anyone teaching it had to have a master’s degree. Late in life I had gone back to school to get my master’s.”

Kanoski has some advice for those who might want to teach. “Reach out to contacts who may also be in the academic world as adjuncts,” she says. “Going back to your alma mater is also good advice as well. Having a degree from the same university can be valuable. And build your content early. Once you do get a teaching assignment, get your focus together because it takes a lot of time and you’re not going to want to wait until the last minute. Never walk into a class unprepared. You’ll get eaten alive by the students. They want to know that you’re prepared to teach them.”

Or, as Dixon suggests, “Reach out to the leadership of the college or program to express your interest. Sometimes there will be one that’s readymade for you. Sometimes it will take a couple of semesters for something to pop up that works for you and the institution.”

Be patient and realize there are always schools that need teachers, possibly in the specific areas of commercial real estate where you have expertise. Or to get some experience, you might also consider adult education courses. You could even start your own YouTube series of instructional videos and build your own following.

After all, if you’re going to teach, you might as well learn some new marketing and networking skills too.