My name is Luke Brunea, and I hope this message finds you well! I’m writing today to express – on my own behalf and on behalf of my team – our wholehearted endorsement of Victoria Burch’s real estate development coursework, both in terms of its content and in Victoria’s approach to the learning process. I’ll begin by briefly summarizing the professional backgrounds of myself and my partners, before discussing some of our subjective takeaways from Victoria’s teaching and – more concretely – how we believe her coursework can benefit other students in the future.
I share a military background with each of the undersigned individuals; all four of us have served as Army officers and have led organizations, teams and projects at multiple levels and in diverse operational contexts (to include leadership in combat). Three of us are West Point graduates. Each of the four of us have successfully executed real estate deals over the past five years, both in residential and commercial (multifamily) projects. In order to broaden our collective skillset, I even earned my M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In relative terms, our team was reasonably experienced and well-equipped prior gaining Victoria’s mentorship.
Reason for Endorsement
I wanted to make mention of our backgrounds for two reasons: firstly, to establish some degree of baseline credibility and, secondly, to highlight the degree of benefit that students can expect to find in Victoria’s expertise. That’s to say, even for a group of individuals more seasoned than the average student, Victoria’s experience dwarfed our own. As we began formally engaging with her coursework, we very quickly recognized just how much she had to teach us.
I could fill many pages discussing what I didn’t know before entering her course; for brevity’s sake, I’ll condense my thoughts to three, main takeaways:
First, her coursework gave contextual grounding to what had been largely abstract to me. Having already completed my M.B.A. prior to becoming Victoria’s pupil, I came to the table armed with at least a conceptual understanding of the various financial mechanisms which real estate professionals must employ. Yet this understanding had felt nebulous and abstract – it was “so much Greek” without concrete significance. I credit Victoria and her course with creating opportunities for me to place conceptual understanding in dialogue with practical application, through both hands-on exercises and robust classroom discussion. By virtue of her course, I found that I not only better understood how to apply these concepts, I also better understood the concepts themselves.
Second, I gained much deeper insight into the differences between BTS (build-to-suit) and speculative development. Although I had taken both of the specialized real estate courses offered at Chicago Booth, these courses made no mention of the important distinctions between BTS and Spec. Victoria, again, provided vital clarity here through her course, which illustrated the tradeoffs associated with one path over the other, the “relational” aspects of each, as well as concrete examples of when one approach might make more business sense to the keen developer.
Third and most significantly, Victoria’s experiential advantage made itself felt throughout all aspects of her course, and became even more beneficial as the course progressed. The benefits of her hard-earned expertise to students are difficult to overstate; in both open-forum discussion and case-based learning, her ability to speak from direct experience and to synthesize the abstract into the relatable greatly enriched our learning experience. Moreover, as we gained mastery of many of the basics, our classroom discussions began to take on aspects of an “investment committee” meeting, wherein we laid out ideas to Victoria and she carefully, methodically assessed the assumptions and thought processes that led us to our conclusion, while offering feedback derived from her experience. Simply put, I believe it is precisely Victoria’s experience and expertise that made her coursework so engaging and rewarding for us as her students.
To consolidate what is becoming a longwinded communication, I wanted to provide here a list of thoughts (in bullet format) for how my team and I can envision Victoria’s course benefitting other students, in that it provides:
- The conceptual framework used to evaluate deals and opportunities: At first glance, is there sufficient perceived benefit to merit further inquiry?
- Upon deeper investigation, does the opportunity still make sense? What might be the hard constraints, and which factors are of greatest sensitivity to the project’s outcome?
- More subjectively, how should the developer view the upside potential when placed in context with market risk factors that are outside of his/her direct control?
- The specific, concrete steps that a developer must take in order to: Gain well-grounded construction estimates on time, scope and budget
- Minimize exposure and the potential for “surprises”
- Ensure legal and contractual coverage and optionality required for a successful diligence process
- Plan, negotiate and manage commercial tenant lease considerations, to include rates, terms, escalations, special provisions, and much, much more!
- Deeper perspective on managing teams and projects, even for those already familiar With special emphasis on how contractual preparedness (stipulations made before breaking ground) can greatly enhance the developer’s ability to steer the project toward successful conclusion (throughout execution of the project)
- Perhaps most importantly, an intuition of when it may be time for the developer to accept sunk costs and “walk away” from the deal
Speculative ventures – such as real estate development – carry inherent risk and unpredictability, and no form of pedagogy can capture every scenario that a venturer may face. The most effective forms of learning recognize this fact, and therefore focus on providing three key benefits to the student:
- Conceptual and practical understanding of the major, moving pieces across the landscape
- Step-by-step frameworks of those (experientially derived) actions that best mitigate liability and exposure
- The intuition and confidence required to navigate an ambiguous landscape
As a self-made developer, Victoria understands these tenets well, having earned her knowledge and expertise through hard work, persistence, and iterative improvement to her own development process.
