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REVIEW: The Future of Real Estate Education: From Pedagogy to Technology
Author Mr. Hugh Kelly, Ph.D., CRE Emeritus
Edited by Karen M. McGrath, Elaine M. Worzala, and Pernille H. Christensen. (Routledge, New York and London, 2026). 330 pp. ISBN 9781032625041. Paperback $70.99; hardcover $170.00; ebook $56.79.
As many in my circle know I (Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR, and owner of Proptech-X, independent proptech analyst, journalist and editor) get involved in numerous projects, and I would like to thank Olayiwola Oladiran Associate Professor in Real Estate at Sheffield University who asked me to contribute to the recently published book – The Future of Real Estate Education: From Pedagogy to Technology.
‘This book is a collection of nineteen essays, contributed by 29 individual authors and edited by three highly respected scholars. Its general level of quality is very strong, although the reader will find it stylistically uneven. And, as a compendium, the book lends itself to a ‘cafeteria’ approach: there is no need to read straight through from the first to last chapter, although (as suggested by its subtitle) there is an apparent logical direction in the procession of topics. I will have some reflections on this apparent progression toward the conclusion of this review.
The social psychologists Erik Erikson and Abraham Maslow identified generativity – the desire to mentor, teach, and create a lasting legacy – as a mark of human maturity. Education is more than just passing down skills and/or knowledge from one generation to another. It is about building communities, deepening values, and enriching culture. Real estate, with its ubiquitous presence across all dimensions of human life, has a profound stake in understanding education as an expression of generativity in the common wealth.
Who Should Read This Book?
The contributors are an international line-up with impeccable academic credentials. The essays are replete with references to classroom experience and citations of research literature. Certainly, the title indicates a focus on professional education, both in the sense of “education for professionals” and “education with high academic standards.” The notion that this book’s primary value lies within the specific confines of universities, however, unduly constrains its scope, in my opinion.
One signal of broader value can be found in its many discussions of how real estate interacts with other domains, almost as a matter of daily practice. An entire chapter (by German scholar Annette Kämpf-Dern) is devoted to ‘interdisciplinary education’, in fact. Another chapter, by Meagan McCollum of the University of Tulsa, speaks of ‘building real estate bridges across the university curriculum.’ Real estate practitioners can testify to their need to understand and be fluent in realms including law, finance, urban planning, architecture, marketing, negotiation, construction, management, and other areas of knowledge and skill.
Such a perspective is a healthy corrective to the phenomenon of “silos” in academic specialization, a tendency to stress “knowing more and more about less and less.” Thus do departmental faculties become academic fiefdoms with subject matters walled off from each other as, for instance, when a real estate finance major may graduate without much understanding of economic geography or the built environment.
This suggests a practical way in which experts in disciplines connected to real estate, but with applications beyond real property, can enhance the project of real estate education. Most colleges and universities seek to bolster their links to the business world by establishing advisory boards of senior executives. One way to enrich the intellectual content of real estate programs, stimulating cross-disciplinary discussion while introducing faculty and students alike to external developments affecting properties, would be to deliberately structure such boards heterogeneously.
Two principles would be critical to such an approach. First, the advisory board would be truly formed to give advice, not merely as ‘letterhead’ board whose obligations were primarily to channel financial donations. Second, faculty and students would benefit by access to the board members by a variety of activities (including classroom visits/guest lectures, field trips for students to workplaces, arranging mentorships and/or internships, and social events such as receptions where the academic and business communities would come together).
The educational benefits would flow both personally and structurally. Personally, students and faculty would gain from the experiences of interacting with seasoned professionals affecting real estate even if not specifically identified with the industry. Structurally, the continuing advice and critique of such professionals would serve to challenge the tendency to place real estate within a ‘siloed’ framework following the politics of academic fiefdoms.
Therefore, the readership of this book can and should include those already formally in academic settings, including administrators. But it can and should also extend to business leaders in related fields. As many, if not most, real estate programs already have “champions” in the business community, this book might be a vehicle for catalysing a conversation on how to improve interdisciplinary learning within the classroom and, more importantly, beyond the campus. The book’s chapter on engaging alumni and industry professionals (written by co-editors McGrath and Worzala) lays out some excellent ideas in this vein, ideas that deserve implementation.
The Breadth of Teaching
Scholastic argot calls the ceremony of degree-granting a “commencement.” Taken seriously, such an event marks a beginning, not an endpoint. In my experience (and that of virtually all successful real estate practitioners I’ve worked with), learning has accelerated over the course of a career. Geoffrey Chaucer, echoing the Greek physician Hippocrates, observed, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” For many, learning is not merely passed on but sharpened by the effort of teaching.
The very first chapter of The Future of Real Estate Education is titled “The Complexity of Simple Teaching.” Its subtitle is “The art of teaching students what they already knew but never realized.” Without stating the principle baldly, the author (U.K.-based Nick French) alludes to a widely remarked etymology of ‘education,’ from the Latin e-ducere [to draw out], which in turn harkens back to Socrates whose method was question-based dialogue intended to provoke critical thinking by unveiling hidden assumptions and biases. French’s approach, equally applicable in the classroom and to wider audiences, stresses simplicity, engagement, humour, and respectful dialogue between lecturer and listeners who become interlocutors. This framework implies that teachers are themselves co-learners in the educational process.
This perspective is not only faithful to Socrates’ own commitment to constant self-examination but a key to understanding how collaboration in the process of education yields not just knowledge but joy. I have frequently remarked to students that there is no point in doing research unless you are willing to be surprised. If you already have all the answers, why bother doing the work? Surprise is the ‘aha’ or ‘eureka’ moment of insight, a moment that is enriched when the discovery is accomplished mutually. For most of the contributors to this book, real estate education is motivated by such joy, over and above academic renown or financial reward.
To be sure, this book has plenty to offer to those whose teaching is classroom based. A quartet of UK professors (Oladiran, D’Arcy, Adebayo, and Dyer) contribute a chapter on game-based and experiential learning as practiced in their courses. Co-editor Christensen provides an example of a scavenger hunt exercise for students at the University of Technology Sydney. Constantino Korologos provides a chapter connecting capital market and real estate markets as taught at NYU.
Tobias Just (University of Regensberg, Germany) describes a case study approach to negotiating public/private housing interests in a shrinking urban economy. As valuation remains a core discipline for real estate professionals, John Kilpatrick (Washington State University) provides a practical discussion about teaching appraisal to university students. And, since international perspective is key for future real estate executives, Tom Guerts (George Washington University) unlocks the secrets of a successful study-abroad trip, from preparation to field activities to final evaluations.
Many seasoned real estate specialists find their teaching opportunities as adjunct professors. Indeed, most university programs build their faculties with significant rosters of part-time lecturers with industry experiences that enrich the conceptual content of the curriculum. So Tanya Bansal and Margaret McFarland, both at the University of Maryland, offer a signal contribution with their twenty top tips for adjunct professors, with do’s and don’ts for teachers whose primary frame of reference is in the workplace, not the campus.
Across the spectrum of recommendations are useful guidelines for relating to the university itself (e.g., on matters of the syllabus, grading standards, and institutional resources), to colleagues on the full-time faculty, and of course to students (e.g., assignments, expectations, and communications). The chapter incorporates a few templates for student assignments that can give adjunct teachers tools that can be adapted to a variety of coursework.
An Ambitious Vision of a ‘Big Tent’ Real Estate Education Future
In life, there’s a lot to be said for gradual continuous improvement, fine-tuning, tinkering around the edges. In the past fifty years real estate as an academic discipline has benefited from such an approach. A half century ago most real estate education was OJT, on-the-job training. Banks and insurance companies had internal programs to teach underwriting and risk management. Organizations like the Appraisal Institute and the CCIM Institute developed formal curricula and examinations leading to professional designations.
State licensure requirements set standards for brokers and salespersons and mandated continuing education as a condition for maintaining one’s license to practice. Many universities piggy-backed on such programs, which partly explains why real estate courses are sometimes still administered by Schools of Continuing Education.
Stephen Roulac, in his chapter on ‘positioning a college/school of property’, is manifestly dissatisfied with the status of real estate within the structure of the university. He notes that real estate programs are “of modest scale, generally lacking recognition, prominence, influence, and respect… [having] a diminished, marginalized stature” that sharply contrasts with the industry’s economic importance.
It is common for universities to slot their real estate offerings either within the business school (usually as a finance specialty), in the school of architecture and design, or (less frequently) in urban studies. This places real estate in the domain of academic administrators whose expertise lies elsewhere while, at the same time, providing those administrators with an enrolment base and potential donor base with great growth potential. It is not surprising that this structure encourages universities to slot real estate programs into subsidiary roles, as strategic assets but without significant autonomy. Roulac notes that “various academic disciplines of far less significance command considerably more faculty positions and resources than do the real estate programs.”
An alternative, Roulac proposes, is to develop a ‘college or school of property’ within the university pulling the diverse disciplines already being considered in real estate courses into a unit headed by real estate specialists and reporting directly to the provost and university president, rather than to deans with related but divergent expertise. Such a school would have its own faculty roster (including tenured academic and research professors, professors of practice and adjuncts, and post-doc scholars), as well as the requisite professional and administrative staff.
Clearly, this is an expensive proposition, as well as one that would likely be resisted by those presently benefiting from real estate’s existing position in the university hierarchy. Roulac’s view is that the vast wealth of the real estate industry provides not only an ample pool – already evident in the many campus facilities bearing the names of real estate donors – but that real estate’s entrepreneurial ethos can be tapped for a vigorous application of funding according to the Venture Capital model, rather than the traditional endowment model wherein donations yield only interest income to support ongoing programs.
The result is a highly detailed and passionately argued chapter in the book, a program with a high risk/reward profile. Whatever the pragmatic chances for adopting the college/school of property proposal, this should spur thinking beyond conventional bounds among the ranks of university officials and top real estate executives seeking to leave their marks for future generations. If improbable, we might recall Robert Browning’s observation: “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?”
Controversies of the 2020s and the Idea of the University
In addition to Annette Kämpf-Dern’s essay on interdisciplinary education, which is subtitled ‘real estate sustainability as an example’, Sandy Bond of Bucknell University, Stephen Buckman of Roosevelt University, and co-editor Pernille Christensen provide a chapter on integrating sustainability case studies into real estate programs. Both chapters link their real estate discussion to broader topics such as renewable energy, climate change, and both the direct and indirect effects of environmental matters on real estate investment performance and development choices. Such vital concerns are essential to present and future generations of real estate leaders and deserve full attention in a book on the future of real estate education.
Bond, et al., in their chapter explicitly make the argument:
The introduction of ESG [environmental, social, and governance] and the increasing requirements for reporting on these aspects to institutional investors and shareholders has increased the focus of property and asset managers, corporate real estate holders, and large corporate lessees on how well buildings meet not only environmental sustainability requirements, but also the social and governance goals of their organizations.
This is true enough. But what is left unsaid, perhaps due to the length of time it takes to gather 19 essays into a book and to shepherd the publication process, is the degree to which universities (and not just their real estate programs) are facing pressure to dilute or even cancel politically sensitive materials such ESG and its close cousin DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Recently, universities have experienced systematic funding cutbacks in an attempt to steer research and teaching away from topics considered politically fraught. Such pressure should not be thought of as particular to current circumstances. It is part of a strain identified as long ago as 1963 by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which identified populist anti-elitism and unreflective instrumentalism as underlying strains of resistance to the project of higher education.
That said, the chapters on sustainability retain the important virtues of clarity, coherence, and evidentiary power. Industry demand for graduates conversant with ESG awareness in development and investment is but one element. ESG recognizes a fiduciary responsibility to investors and users, as well as to the broader community. Not just a matter of theory, asset and property managers face practical decisions on how best to deploy resources as environmental stresses increase. Ultimately, real estate education has a responsibility to encompass the ‘three Ps’ of the triple bottom line: profit, yes, but people and the planet as well. The interaction of these three variables is not zero-sum but mutually reinforcing.
The buzz of controversy surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) is, if anything, even more intense than that accompanying ESG and sustainability. No fewer than three chapters in this book focus on AI. Intriguingly, all six of the contributors tackling the subject are either UK or Australia-based, indicative of the worldwide reach of this emergent technology.
While two of the chapters concentrate on classroom applications of generative AI, that is, for ‘technology enhanced pedagogy’, I found the chapter by Rebecca Johnson of the University of Sydney to be the deepest and most thought-provoking. That chapter is titled “The Model is Not the Market: Teaching Responsible AI in Real Estate.” Johnson has established an expertise in the ethics of applied technology and sounds the alarm about the use of ‘black boxes’ in analysis and in arriving at real estate decisions. She stresses that models, even the most sophisticated, are simplifications of the world. Artificial intelligence, based on large-language models, are abstractions of human discourse and, as such, have an embedded predilection toward the biases in their source material. Applications including automated valuation models, tenant screening systems, and site selection mapping are, in the end, influenced by the inputs used to ‘train’ the AI.
Following such insights, Johnson’s approach is positive, if cautionary. Johnson does not dismiss the technology but rather contextualizes it. “Human-centered AI ensures that tools support, not displace, human judgment,” she writes. “Real estate educators should encourage students to think beyond efficiency toward equity and user well-being.” The chapter is more than a philosophical perspective on AI, but contains numerous detailed examinations of model structure, case studies, sociotechnical system mapping, and mitigation strategies. In brief, Johnson brings the ‘intelligence’ to the fore over the ‘artificial’ dimension of AI. She encourages educators (and, by extension, practitioners) to ask who designs the models, whose interests they serve, and their impact on shaping the socio-economic world in which real estate does its work.
What’s in a Subtitle (“From Pedagogy to Technology”)?
To be clear, I don’t know the intention behind selecting this book’s subtitle. But it is what it is, and it concerns me. Deliberately or not, readers are being seductively prepositioned in a way that is troubling for the future and unfaithful to the past and present.
The prepositional structure (“from…to”) suggests directionality. Although the content of many of the essays appreciate and often illustrate the multi-dimensionality of real estate education, the table of contents begins with chapters rooted in communication and work experience, and concludes with chapters on artificial intelligence. In this, there is more than a faint echo of an educational trend now decades old of shifting both emphasis and resources from the humanities toward STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The more that proptech, fintech, and AI come to dominate the academy, at the expense of the broader socio-economic, civic, and (may I say) ethical dimensions of real estate education, the greater the likelihood that the direction of the industry accelerates without benefit of a compass.
Real estate as a discipline may learn from advances in other areas, including scientifically-based professions such as medicine. Even as medicine has been assisted by innovations in imaging, pharmaceuticals, and genetic engineering, doctors have embraced the guidance of therapy based on the principle “treat the person, not the pathology.” As is frequently the case, this invites us to return to the wisdom of the Greeks more than 25 centuries ago.
The terms pedagogy and technology both have their origins in ancient Athens. Many may be surprised that the paidos agogos was not a teacher but a guide (often a slave) whose job was to accompany the student safely so that learning was possible. And, for the Greeks, learning was key in developing leaders for the community (the polis) The object of the educational project was to develop a well-rounded citizen through the development of the arts (especially music), physical training, and command of language and arithmetic. Teaching involves assisting the student in becoming a whole and healthy person.
With that in mind, it becomes perhaps less surprising that pedogogia expanded in meaning to denote the nurture of the student. Ignorance is a condition needing attention, to foster the health of the mind. It is such a context that I return to the quote from Chaucer and Hippocrates I cited earlier in this review, “the life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
The English word “craft” translates Hippocrates’ Greek techne. This famous aphorism is immediately followed by an injunction from ‘the Father of Medicine’: “The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.”
Thus understood, techne as an educational tool should not be considered as a bloodless, mechanical, or indeed artificial approach, and certainly not a directional ideal in that sense. The future of real estate education, as so many of the essays in this book suggest, transcends the gap between humane learning and STEM and aims at developing whole and healthy persons dedicated to a craft that takes a lifetime to learn.’ – source
If anyone out there is putting together a white paper, article, book etc that might be in my scope I (Andrew Stanton) am always open to new projects please just message me – using this LINK
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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