CBBS News
Master of Real Estate Graduates First Class
In May, the first six students graduated from Clemson University’s new Master of Real Estate Development (MRED) Program. The full-time, 54-credit, two-year professional MRED program is jointly offered by the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture (administrative unit) in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities and the Department of Finance in the College of Business and Behavioral Science with required courses from six disciplines: MBA; Finance; Law; Architecture; Construction Science & Management; and City & Regional Planning plus new Real Estate Development classes.
Less than ten similar programs exist nationally in prestigious universities such as MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Southern Cal, Texas A&M, and Johns Hopkins. Clemson has the only program jointly offered by an architecture and business college. The second class has thirteen students and the MRED ’08 class consists of twenty students, the program’s maximum goal per year. Competition is keen for this highly regarded new program, with fifty applications this past year.
The mission of the program is to create the educational opportunity for encouraging future development entrepreneurs to produce exciting, quality projects respecting environmental and economic sustainability, social consciousness, design excellence, and financial feasibility within the risk-reward framework. The MRED program focuses on the “master builder” concept, the methodology that promotes an entire vision for a community through sustainable design, creative financing methods, place-making and healthy communities. The program primarily follows the principles of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), the premier land development research and educational organization with 30,000 members worldwide from the development industry, which acknowledges that development is a public-private partnership and that quality development requires integrating the perspectives of community, environment, and economics.