Using Recent News and Mapping to Teach Real Estate Finance

Abstract

The Real Estate industry employs millions of people in developing, servicing and managing land and buildings that comprise two-thirds of global real assets or net worth (Woetzel et al., 2021). Investing and financing this real estate is therefore an important topic for business students. A course in real estate finance would include subjects such as whether one should buy property or rent, real estate valuation to determine a good price, sale and lease-back to finance emergency-time needs, whether real estate should be a part of your portfolio investment and if so how much, how to finance your real estate investments, whether you should invest in commercial real estate or housing, how to finance the development of real estate, the different forms of real estate ownership and their tax implications, and of course risk management. Different textbooks would have different ways to organize these and other topics (Brueggeman and Fisher, 2011, Sirota and Barrell, 2015). Finance textbooks may or may not have a chapter dedicated to real estate finance but usually provide examples that include this sector (e.g., Brealey et al., 2017).