RE Development Course?

[Zander Kempf]

I have a friend who's done a handful of multifamily deals and wants to start doing real estate development. I don't want to recommend the college courses because I don't think they will have enough practical information in them. I know doing deals is the best way to get experience, but does anyone know of a good education resource?

[Bryant Brislin]

For other disciplines such as flipping, multifamily investing, wholesaling, creative finance, I agree that you would want to go straight to one of the many gurus and take their mastermind mentorship courses.  But for real estate development there are not gurus like that really (other than land flippers), but there are a few colleges that actually have pretty good real estate development programs, such as Cornell, University of Southern California, Arizona State University and others.  I've been in real estate development a long time, and most of the folks I know doing it either grew up in the business, or most of them know it from working for a larger builder, i.e. as a project manager, forward planner, acquisitions, and eventually went out on their own.  Another way to do it, is to hire a good consultant to make sure you are not missing something and checks all the boxes.  For example, I've seen where a hobbyist investor/developer works on project, they hire an engineer and/or architect, but they ended up missing something vital, i.e. drainage issues, environmental, fire dept review, planning the wrong type of product for that market (buyer & renter demographic), etc.