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UCI Real Estate School Taking Shape, Seeking Money

Starting a real estate program at a university isn’t easy, with all the fund raising, course development and hiring of professors.

When your ambition is to have a program that rivals the country’s best,think those at the University of California, Berkeley, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin, Madison,the job is even tougher.

Kerry Vandell, director for the Center for Real Estate at the University of California, Irvine, has experience in building programs.

Vandell comes to UC Irvine from the University of Wisconsin, where he helped grow the school’s Graaskamp Real Estate program from a one-man show into one of the three highest-ranked programs.

He’ll be joining UCI on a full-time basis in July. Now he’s finishing up duties at Wisconsin, while shut-tling to Orange County to help set up the center.

Three adjunct professors have been named. The plan is to hire two full-time faculty members down the line.

Expect to see more progress at the Center for Real Estate, part of the Paul Merage School of Business, in upcoming months, Vandell said.

“We’ll be visible next year,” he said.

About five courses are set to be offered in the fall, on both the master’s and undergraduate side.

An advisory board is being set up. A breakfast series has drawn big crowds of industry folks.

And then there is the fund raising. The Center for Real Estate has raised about $2.6 million since last June. It has tapped 42 founding donors, including big names at Lennar Corp., The Irvine Company and Buchanan Street Partners.

UCI officials are pleased with the progress. But another upstart real estate center ramping up across town has overshadowed its fund raising.

Thanks to a $10 million donation from real estate investor Roger Hobbs last September, Chapman University’s Hobbs Institute for Real Estate, Law and Environmental Studies already has surpassed the $13 million mark.

UCI is working on a big gift of its own, in the $5 million to $10 million range, Vandell said. That would come with naming rights for the center.

There’s no rush, he said. The plan is to have the center fully endowed,at about $15 million, in 10 years.

Vandell welcomes the rivalry from Chapman.

“There’s room for everybody,” he said.


Top Broker Switches

CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. has grabbed one of the region’s top investment sales teams from rival Grubb & Ellis Co.

The team includes veteran broker Kevin Shannon.

Shannon, previously senior vice president of Grubb & Ellis’ investment group, is making the switch with his five-person team. One of Grubb’s top producers, Shannon and his team were involved in transactions valued at more than $1.6 billion in the past year.

The other members of the group: Scott Schumacher, Paul Perkins, Michael Moore, Rob Hannan and Lorie Armendariz.

Shannon was based in Grubb’s Torrance office and was involved in several big OC deals. He represented Santa Ana’s Triple Net Properties LLC when it sold buildings in San Diego and Hawaii, including the $123 million Emerald Plaza, a 355,000-square-foot high-rise in downtown San Diego.

More recently, he was working on the $136 million sale of the twin 10-story buildings in Newport Beach that serve as headquarters for chipmaker Conexant Systems Inc. and its spinoff, Mindspeed Technologies Inc.

The general consensus from economists and homebuilders is that local home prices will continue to go up in 2006, though nowhere near as much as the gains seen in 2004.

Tell that to homeowners.

The latest issue of Fortune cites a study of OC residents by Yale University economist Robert Shiller. His findings: Locals expect a 23% rise in their home prices,each year for the next 10 years.

If those projections came true, a house bought at the January median price of $582,000 would be worth more than $4 million in a decade.

There are a few facts supporting part of this wishful thinking. Since 1997, OC home prices have seen a 195% rise.

Of note, Shiller is the author of the oft-cited book “Irrational Exuberance,” published in 2000, which foretold the dot-com crash. His latest research has been focusing on the real estate market.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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