Industry
Discover how our Partnerships are Impacting the Real Estate Industry
Our industry partners are critical players in the co-creation of new knowledge and the generation of enduring positive social, economic, and environmental impacts on industry research, teaching, and practice.
Facilitating a diverse next generation of leaders
Change begins at the individual level, the Real Estate Exchange (REEX) Jumpstart Program offers an opportunity for individual high school students to participate in a commercial real estate summer learning program focused on building cultural diversity in the field by providing introductions to real estate careers and MIT as a school option.
Each summer, the program admits thirty African American and Latinx teenagers from across the US and Puerto Rico before they apply to colleges and universities. Initiated in 2019, the program now in its fourth year, is a collaboration between Harvard University and the Center for Real Estate. CRE partners of this program include CBRE and EY.
Centering sustainability
In the last decade alone, adverse climate impacts have cost United States citizens alone over a trillion US dollars. The global economic and human cost is far higher. The structures built by the real estate industry comprise over a third of the world’s tangible wealth, and are responsible for as much as one-third of the world’s total global greenhouse gas emissions – primarily through the use of fossil fuels during their construction and operation. For the industry to maintain responsible leadership in the global community, it must encourage a culture of sustainability and innovation that meets the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world.
Working with partners, our labs generate new ways of understanding and addressing air pollution, green building materials, and more. CRE’s Climate and Real Estate hub is the Center’s home for climate research within the real estate industry – facilitating a cycle of research, innovation, and implementation with our partners.
Incorporating technological advances
The MIT Tech Tracker project, running from 2019–2021, was sponsored by JLL and was envisioned to provide a composite database that would showcase all of the new and innovative technologies that have the greatest potential to make an impact across the built environment. The tracker scouts, analyzes and predicts the future of technology within the built environment. This industry-first platform provides unparalleled insight into technologies that have the potential to make the biggest impact on the development, management and configuring of property and space.
Nascent and emergent technologies– such as augmented reality, 5G, flying cars, plastics made from algae, Martian concrete– have immense potential to alter the means by which the real estate industry develops, manages, and designs property and space. CRE’s position within the MIT innovation ecosystem situates it as a leader for the integration of new technologies.
The MIT Tech Tracker project provides a composite database showcasing new technologies with the potential to make an impact across the built environment. The tracker scouts, analyzes, and predicts the future of technology within the built environment. This industry-first platform provides unparalleled insight into technologies as well as their potential impacts for development, management and configuring of property and space.
CRE’s Real Estate Technology hub provides opportunities for partners to learn about new technologies and field test them for the industry.
Leading global change
More than half of the global population lives in urban areas, with the United Nations estimating this share will increase to two thirds by 2050. Sustainable development will require the successful international management of the urban built environment and a shared vision for urban planning that captures a more just, healthy, and joyful future.
CRE’s Asia Real Estate Initiative seeks to connect real estate practitioners globally – providing opportunities for global north-south and south-south learning to enhance real estate practitioners ability to develop efficiently and sustainably.
Building connections
Each year, CRE and our partners host the annual MIT World Real Estate Forum a far-reaching conversation about the latest industry trends, ground-breaking research, emerging markets and technology in the built environment. The Forum brings together more than three hundred industry professionals from more than two dozen countries.
Now in its 8th year, the Forum has been named one of the top real estate conferences to attend by Sharplaunch (2018).
Industry partners are critical for providing opportunities for peers throughout the industry to connect, share ideas, and accelerate opportunities within their own firms.
Educating peers
Recent global developments, coupled with economic conditions, have demonstrated that one cannot understand financial markets and the economy without understanding real estate markets and underwriting real estate risk. CRE offers a Professional Certificate in Real Estate Finance and Development providing real estate professionals and executives the opportunity to obtain state-of-the-art insights and skills about the key factors and investment strategies driving real estate markets.
The certificate attracts a global cohort of fifty students who blend their professional experience with the expertise of CRE faculty to further their knowledge and skills in real estate development. Each cohort forms a tight-knit group with lasting connections and competencies that have an immediate as well as lasting impact on their organization’s international development future.
