A team of four students from the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies won first place in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CASE Competition on March 28.
The students, Jamie Minkler (GRD ’14), Mark Schrieber (GRD ’14), Damon Orobona (GRD ’14), and Nicole Snarski (GRD ’14), are graduate students from the SCS’s masters of professional studies in real estate program. The CASE Competition, organized by the Alumni Association of the MIT Center for Real Estate, brings together real estate students from around the world to create a plan for a real development site.
“We in the real estate program were thrilled with our four-student victory in the MIT competition. I think it speaks to the quality, creativity and caliber of our students, and certainly enhances the stature of our program, its international reach and its competitive advantage,” Georgetown real estate program executive Bill Hudnut wrote in an email to The Hoya.
The annual competition began in February of this year in Boston, Mass. when 48 teams competed and presented their ideas for a real world development site on the campus of MIT. From there, Georgetown was among three teams, including Harvard University and Columbia University, to advance to the final round in London where they presented their ideas at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
According to the MIT CASE Competition website, the competition “provides graduate real estate students an opportunity to compete, showcase their knowledge and learn from each other in connection with choosing a development program, preparing financial analyses and structuring a purchase and/or joint-venture transaction for an actual complex, real world, (re)development site.”
The Georgetown team proposed a development plan for an office building in London, according to Minkler.
“Our team proposed a mixed-use development for an existing office building site in the South Bank neighborhood of London,” Minkler wrote in an email. “It is home to ITV, a large TV station. We proposed building ITV new office and studio space, along with building an apartment building and a hotel with condos on the top floors overlooking the River Thames. In the middle of these structures would be an entertainment space modelled after Rockefeller Center.”
The competition required the team to develop a proposal in five days without outside help, which, Minkler said, was both a hectic and exhausting experience.
“A lot of finance and acquisitions classes are case-based, so we all had experience with this type of assignment, but what’s was different about this was we only had five days to complete it, along with delivering a fully-functional Excel financial model,” Minkler wrote. “As we are all working full-time jobs as well, this lead to some late nights.”
Once the team won the preliminary rounds in Boston, they prepared their presentation for more rigorous judging in London. The group had a month to prepare an oral presentation to go along with a slideshow outlining the project.
“Beyond having a successful proposal, we knew we would have to ensure we framed and messaged it effectively in the short amount of time and slides we were allocated, 15 slides and 15 minutes, in order to win,” Schrieber wrote in an email. “From a very large amount of work and content, fine tuning the presentation to hit on the key aspects of the project and delivering an effective presentation was a great learning experience.”
The team presented their final product in front of a live audience and judges at London City Hall on March 28. Schrieber said that the win was an incredible experience.
“It was a great feeling to have all the hard work and preparation that went into our submission and presentation pay off,” Schrieber wrote. “The level of competition was extremely high, with the top universities in the world represented in the competition. We were very proud to be able to represent Georgetown on the stage accepting first place.”
