VCU Business Students Thrive at Real Estate Competition

By Tom Gresham

Four VCU School of Business students finished second in a highly competitive real estate challenge at Villanova University this month that brought together teams from 10 colleges.

The students – Michael Duncan, Josh Ridpath, Will Martin and Kristen Corwin – earned a $3,000 prize for their showing in Villanova’s first real estate challenge. Each is a senior majoring in real estate and graduating next month. A team from the University of North Carolina won the $5,000 first prize in the competition, which also included student teams from American University, Baruch College, Florida State University, Lehigh University, New York University, Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania and Villanova. The competition’s eight judges each came from the commercial real estate field.

Robert Taylor, director of the Virginia Real Estate Center at VCU, said the students received the details of the case that they were to analyze four days ahead of the competition and spent the subsequent days developing a rigorous analysis. The case put the team in the place of a developer with an option to buy a 323,101-square-foot-parcel in Tyson’s Corner for $116 million. A central issue was whether to exercise the option in light of market conditions.

The team traveled to Philadelphia to present their case. The teams were given names unrelated to their schools so that the judging would be blind. Each team member was required to present at least one aspect of the project to the judges.

Taylor said the VCU team’s analysis was deft and clearly impressed the judges.

“They did a great job,” Taylor said. “They were a well-rounded team. All of them worked really hard and they did very well together.”