In Depth
What makes a profession?
» A core body of knowledge
Real Estate as a Metaphor
In the spring of 1967, Professor Phil David offered a course in Urban Land Development, aimed primarily at doctoral students. In response to student demand, the course was opened to MBA students in the following year, and 150 MBA students (and a lone doctoral candidate!) signed up. The following year, 210 MBAs signed up.
What was going on here? David was teaching about deals: the totality of site acquisition, planning, zoning, financing, construction, rentals, sales, and (as the catalog phrased it) “the relationship of the project to the social, political, and demographic forces influencing the market.” By the spring of 1973, the real estate market had heated up, and 303 students signed up to take the course from a young professor named Howard Stevenson, who co-taught the course with a local real estate investor and developer named William Poorvu.
With Poorvu’s help, Stevenson developed a set of frameworks to explain the dynamics of the real estate industry. The successful real estate venture, Stevenson concluded, involved bringing together people property, deal, and context. The entrepreneurial challenge was to perceive and respond to opportunity despite resource constraints, and to minimize risks.
These same principles later served as the underpinnings of a revitalized entrepreneurship curriculum, developed in the 1980s and 1990s by Stevenson and a cadre of junior colleagues.
