Programs
Urban and Regional Planning


COURSE INFORMATION
Term: Winter 2021
Class Number: 591
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes

/ URP 591

Financing Real Estate Development

Real estate development projects are not financially feasible without one or more reliable, identifiable, and quantifiable revenue streams. Whether projects are developed for rent or for sale (or some mix of the two), a developer must be able to forecast reliable revenue streams in order to attract investors and lenders before securing the financing necessary to move forward with each step of a proposed project.

Yet, among the few observers who navigate the built environment while actually looking at the buildings around them—as opposed to staring at their phones—few ponder how end-products of real estate development endeavors got there in the first place; fewer still think about how the various financing structures made them possible, influencing them along the way.

This course uses The Development Process as the framework for learning and applying the essentials of how development projects are financed, and how that financing shapes the process as well as each individual building collectively comprising our built environment. This course is intended as a companion course for students who have already taken Professor Smirniotopoulos’s foundation course, Fundamentals of Real Estate Development, URP 596, in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning/Rackham Graduate School Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Certificate Program. However, the successful completion of URP 596 is not a prerequisite for taking URP 591.

Using The Development Process, the framework developed by Prof. Smirniotopoulos for teaching his courses in Fundamentals of Real Estate Development, Financing Real Estate Development, and Real Estate Law, and for developing his textbook, Real Estate Law: Fundamentals for The Development Process (Routledge, NOV 2016), this course seeks to help students answer the fundamental questions impacting the financing of real estate development projects.

Meets

Class instruction mode: Online

Tue 6:00-9:00pm

Faculty