2016 - Real Estate

Runstad Center Mentors

Runstad Center mentor Joe Polito recently took his mentees on a project tour of Tilt49. Tilt49 is a mixed-use residential and office property, under construction in the Denny Triangle. The project includes 11 floors of office with 31,000 SF floor plates, a 7,000 SF deck on level 9 and a lobby featuring food retail and other “pop-up” retail spaces. Kristen Jensen from Touchstone, Kyle Paulsen and Ian Knowles from Mortenson Construction lead the tour. Our mentors are an invaluable resource for our students, providing career path advice and hands on exposure to real world projects. Click here for the bios of all the 2016-17 Runstad Center mentors.

group-photo — Kristen Jensen of Touchstone, MSRE Candidate Taryn Rehn, MSRE Candidate McKenzie Darr, Ian Knowles from Mortenson Construction, MSRE Candidate Fred Levine, MSRE Candidate Luqi Chen, Runstad Mentor Joe Polito from Touchstone, and Kyle Paulsen from Mortenson Construction

The mall experience, still surviving in Seattle

Runstad Advisory Board member Kemper Freeman was recently quoted in a Seattle Times article about the evolution of the Bellevue Collection, read the full story about the ongoing challenges and successes of retail in our city here

What can Seattle learn from Vancouver’s housing mess?

Peter Orser was recently quoted in a Crosscut article about how Seattle could be affected by Vancouver’s collapsing housing market, link to the story here

Keeping building materials green

One of our own, affiliate faculty member Nicole Denamur, wrote an article for the Daily Journal of Commerce this fall regarding environmental issues with building materials. Nicole is an attorney with Pacifica Law Group, a LEED Green Associate and WELL AP, and teaches Risk & Reward in Sustainable Development at the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies. Read the story here.

Faculty Search

The University of Washington’s Department of Urban Design and Planning and the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies are seeking applicants for two Assistant Professor positions and one Associate Professor position for the MS in Real Estate.

The appointments will be on a 9-month (100% FTE) basis with salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. Qualified candidates will hold a doctoral degree or foreign equivalent in a related field with expertise in at least one of the following areas; housing, real estate development, real estate finance and investment or corporate real estate and possess a record that demonstrates promise as a researcher and scholar.

Candidates for the Assistant Professor positions should be prepared to teach real estate courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Expertise in affordable housing and housing policy would be viewed favorably for the Associate Professor position. Follow the links below for full descriptions as well as application instructions.

Real Estate Associate Professor

Real Estate Assistant Professor

Not your dad’s aurora

We conclude our series from the ULI Fall Meeting with one more from Faculty member Pike Oliver…

During a session at the 2016 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Fall Meeting there was a session about the ULI Healthy Corridors project. It is an effort devoted to finding viable strategies for transforming unsafe, unattractive, and poorly connected commercial corridors into thriving places that further the goal of creating healthy and economically vibrant communities. Don Eernissee, economic development director for the City of Shoreline in our area, gave an overview of the Aurora Corridor Project, which transformed a retail strip into a business-friendly multimodal main street.

Shoreline was a bedroom community “with no heart and no town center,” he said, until the city embraced a three-mile north–south stretch of Highway 99 and invested in making it a main street. Over ten years, the city spent $140 million, or $4,400 per foot of frontage, on transit improvements such as safe crossings and sidewalks, business-access transit lanes, cohesive connections, protected bike lanes, stormwater management, and decorative lighting.

Walkers, bikers, and bus drivers love it, said Eernissee, as do retailers like Trader Joe’s. As a result of the improvements, the corridor saw a 56 percent reduction in accidents involving injuries. Ridership on the bus rapid transit (BRT) system shot up 50 percent along the corridor, which benefited from more frequent stops and a new “healthy, egalitarian, BRT lifestyle.” Improvements have led to “corridor living,” with development of 350 housing units replacing a single-story restaurant on a one-acre (0.4 ha) lot. A marketing campaign, “Not your Dad’s Aurora,” has helped change perceptions about the safety and attractiveness of the corridor within and beyond the community.

The ULI Fall Meeting, a great networking experience

MSRE Candidate Eric Jacobs recently attended the ULI Fall Meeting and shares his thoughts/fears on networking, a necessary skill in the world of real estate...

“Networking” has always been a bit of a scary word to me. It conjures up images of awkward conversations, exchanging business cards with strangers and trying to “sell” oneself. Those aren’t situations where I tend to be comfortable. The ULI Fall Meeting promised to be chock full of those sort of interactions so I had a certain amount of trepidation going into the week.

Thankfully, with the help of the MSRE staff and my friends and classmates, I never felt the need to put myself into awkward situations. Instead, I was able to “customize” my networking experience into situations where I felt comfortable and confident in my ability to put the best (and most genuine) version of myself forward.

Starting the week off with a tour worked well as it allowed us to meet people in a relaxed setting, whether watching longhorn steer being herded down a Ft. Worth city street or sampling a variety of Texas whisky at a cool outdoor bar. I made friends in a relaxed setting with natural conversations about who we are, what we did, where we were from and our differences and similarities. As other people from the group were doing the same we were constantly being introduced to new and interesting people.

As the week went on, different events were set up during the day where we met local real estate leaders and essentially got to grill them for helpful information. We could ask as many questions (or as few) as we felt comfortable. It was another great way to get to know contacts who could be a big help now, or down the road.

Finally, our last night in Dallas we headed out to a northwest networking event. Our little crew of Washingtonians piled into a random limo, jumped onstage and sung with a local bar band for a song or two and generally engaged in the sort of good-natured shenanigans that create lifetime bonds.

When I got home I thought about the great time I had before realizing, much to my chagrin, I had been networking the whole time. Oh well. Thank you so much to the staff and sponsors that made this trip possible for all of us!

The M-Line Trolley

While at the Fall 2016 Urban Land Institute Meeting in Dallas, I encountered an unexpected and delightful transit mode. The nostalgic M-Line trolley links the downtown Dallas Arts District with the trendy shops, galleries and bistros of Uptown, including West Village, where you can transfer to or from the more modern Dallas Area Rapid Transit rail service at the Cityplace/Uptown Station. An additional connection to DART Rail is available with the completion of an M-Line extension along Olive Street through Klyde Warren Park to near St. Paul Station. It reminded me of the waterfront streetcar that vanished from Seattle’s waterfront a decade ago.

Pike Oliver
Runstad Center Faculty

Investing and creating communities to love

Pike Oliver continues his impressions from this year’s ULI Fall Meeting with a summary of Sarah Filley’s session.

One of the more interesting presenters at the Urban Land Institute 2016 Fall Meeting in Dallas was from Oakland, California. Sarah Filley cofounded Popuphood, which she said, “invests in entrepreneurs with hearts of gold to create communities we love.”
Ms. Filley explained “Cities like Oakland are the most vulnerable to recession, where it hurts the most and lasts the longest,” she said. In 2011 Oakland’s downtown had 35 percent retail vacancy. But there was an active monthly arts festival drawing 25,000 people on a single day. The idea of Popuphood was to connect artists with vacant retail space.

Filley’s initiative aggregated very small businesses and concentrated them on a single block, using redevelopment funds to provide them with six months of free rent. The approach of curating local independent retail tenants to catalyze local economic development began to transform the downtown, block by block.Popuphood continues to offer three-month to five-year leases to micro entrepreneurs, helping activate and reposition downtown properties. As a result, the value of properties housing these small retailers and pop-ups has doubled over the last five years. “These buildings have gone from vacant to vibrant,” Filley said. Popuphood has proved that micro entrepreneurs can have major economic impacts.

To watch a video of Sarah’s presentation click here

Sell or hold?

Faculty member Pike Oliver joins the students this week in sharing his experiences at the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting…

Several Runstad students attending the 2016 Urban Land Institute Fall Meeting in Dallas, saw John McNellis, a principal with McNellis Partners, a northern California–based developer, share his perspective on one of the most difficult real estate decisions—sell or hold, as captured in his excellent how-to-do-it book, Making It in Real Estate (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2015). A video of that presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2PnevX5QG0

McNellis tells you how to get started as an entrepreneurial real estate developer, sharing practical tips and advice from his wealth of experience over 35 years in real estate development. He entertains with witty anecdotes, and wisdom on how to take advantage of opportunities and avoid pitfalls. Offering humorous insights, the book covers the ins and outs of how to get financing, working with architects, brokers, and other professionals, how to make a good deal, and win approval for a project.

For those looking to get into the real estate business, McNellis advised trying to take a 20-year approach to your career. “Do you want to work for the biggest company that’s constantly in the headlines, or do you want to focus on building economic independence? Are you doing the night classes and other hard work to get to where you want to be?”

Timing the market has never been part of his strategy. “We view ourselves like farmers; we plant, sow, and harvest each year,” said McNellis. McNellis outlined why he has always taken a “value add” approach, “buying junk and selling antiques,” rather than a merchant builder’s approach of selling fast at lower margins. But he also admitted, “We’ve lost money every which way you can.”