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Real Estate Students Put Fictional Plans To the Test

Designing for the future in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic proved especially daunting for aspiring San Diego commercial real estate professionals competing to see who could come up with the best plan for fictional developments.

Even so, a team from the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego was among the top finishers in an international competition.

The Burnham-Moores group from the center’s Master of Science in real estate program placed third among 36 schools from around the world that competed in the annual ARGUS University Challenge. The competition is sponsored by the Altus Group, a real estate software company.

Team Members

Team members included Alexander Allione, Humberto Arechiga, Peter Menne, Roman Scholten and Stella Zimmerman with Charles Tu as the faculty advisor.

Competing schools included Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California.

Scholarships

The Burnham-Moores Center also honored two of its graduate real estate students with scholarships for “academic excellence and intellectual curiosity.” The $2,500 scholarships went to Shane Isdaner, an associate at IDS Real Estate Group, and Lesley Hudson, who was recently promoted to associate director of CBRE San Diego Property Management Division in San Diego.

The scholarships are named for Dan Woodruff, a University of San Diego graduate who died of cancer in 2000.

Students don’t apply for the scholarships. They are awarded by the faculty and staff based on their knowledge of the students, said Stath Karras, executive director of the Burnham-Moores Center.

“We nominate these individuals because we believe they will be very visible future leaders in the community,” Karras said.

Working from Afar

Because of the pandemic, the design competitions were completed online, which proved especially challenging for the Burnham-Moores team, with team members scattered as far away as Germany.

Coincidently, the team’s winning design project was set in a German university town. The guidelines for the competition said that teams had to pick a European site for their fictional project, and the team picked Germany because of the country’s strong economy, Allione said.

Coordinating remotely across multiple time zones was the biggest challenge, said Allione, whose day job is working on an asset management team in the San Diego offices of Kimco Realty, based in New York.

“We were up at all hours,” Allione said, adding that the toughest part of working remotely was being unable to communicate and share ideas among team members face-to-face.

Their project was to convert a six story parking garage into micro apartments and student housing.

Fictional Apartments

With fictional apartments at about 280 square feet, Allione said “We intentionally kept the units smaller but decreased the rent that would be required of each unit in order to appeal to a broad base, specifically students and also young professionals.”

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