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12/02/24
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A five-member graduate student team from USC took home the silver shovel as the winner of the 27th Annual NAIOP SoCal UCLA vs. USC Real Estate Challenge, held November 21 at USC.
The competition featured five-member graduate student teams from the Ziman Center of Real Estate at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business and the Lusk Center at USC’s Marshall School of Business and Price School of Public Policy in a battle to determine the highest and best use for a unique parcel of land in Southern California.
The event opened with a sit-down interview featuring Rick Caruso, Founder and Executive Chairman of Caruso, and Jordan Kaplan, Douglas Emmett Chief Executive Officer, moderated by Greg Brown, Real Estate Challenge Chair and Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Orange County office of JLL Capital Markets, Americas.
USC winning student team: Austin Risley, Jonathan Moftakhar, Alexandria Gordon, Austin Adams, and Sagiv Hartmayer |
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Serving as Honorary USC Coach, Caruso shared his thoughts on industry success, noting, “Break the rules. If you want to be exciting and successful in real estate, you need to be innovative. That means you must do things differently. If you are in the retail business, figure out how to create a better experience and how you can take what is a commodity and non-commoditize it. When you add value above and beyond what's on the financial statements, that’s exciting. And you are only going to do that if you break the rules.”
Kaplan, Honorary Coach for UCLA, added his expertise, stating, “If you want to lead, start by being the best example. If you want people to work hard, you must work harder than they do because if you are not willing to do it, they will not be either. The second aspect of leadership is that the people who are working for you are only as good as you make them. If someone is not doing something right – look at yourself first. Work to make them better - that is how you keep a team together. And working as a team is much more powerful than working as an individual.”
This year’s Real Estate Challenge competition site was a 9.27-acre parcel within the partial redevelopment of the broader 142-acre Raytheon Campus in the city of El Segundo. The site consists of three parcels in an irregular shape located at the intersection of El Segundo Blvd and Nash St. One of the parcels is bisected by the El Segundo Green Line metro station which provides transportation options for residents, employees, and visitors. In 2011, RTX executives recognized the campus was underdeveloped and engaged Continental Development and Mar Ventures to lead a re-entitlement effort to allow for renewed flexibility around its campus and invite new uses to the area.
USC’s winning proposal titled “The Concourse”, featured a medical campus supporting retail and a modern data center and substation. The students’ proposed concept marries the needs of the community and ownership by improving the site with a financially viable mixed-use development. The USC student team was comprised of Austin Risley, Jonathan Moftakhar, Alexandria Gordon, Austin Adams, and Sagiv Hartmayer.
The UCLA student team included Lauren Gargano, Dan Wood, Ryan Weir, Andrew Hemberger, and Holly Ulicki.The 2024 Real Estate Challenge judges included: Jason Bonomo, Asset Manager, MetLife Investment Management; Andrew Fogg, Partner, Cox Castle; Chris Tipre, Principal, Trammell Crow Company; Courtney Trujillo, resident, SR Watt Company; Blake Rogers, Senior Managing Director, JLL Capital Markets; Sergio Valenti, Regional Principal, Ware Malcomb; and Zach Zanolli, Managing Director, Longpoint Partners.
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