Students from three top business schools from around the world will soon come together at the Wisconsin School of Business to prepare to become leaders of the global real estate industry.

Wisconsin is partnering with France’s HEC Paris, China’s HKUST Business School and Costa Rica’s INCAE  Business School to offer a new degree, the Global Real Estate Master (GREM).

Students and alumni from the three partner schools will have a semester of intensive real estate training at Wisconsin that will include real estate coursework, a study tour of a major U.S. real estate market and professional development aimed at sharpening their networking skills and forging industry connections. Graduates will become part of an international real estate network made up of the best and brightest students from around the world.

It’s no surprise that Wisconsin should be at the center of such an innovative international real estate effort. Wisconsin’s real estate program is one of the oldest and most highly regarded programs in the United States, consistently ranked among the top three programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report. Wisconsin real estate faculty are particularly known for expertise in real estate economics and finance. The program is noted for strong connections to industry and for its active alumni network.

Professor François Ortalo-Magné, who chairs the real estate program at Wisconsin, is leading the initiative. “We are excited to have assembled such a stellar partnership of top business schools around the world to help us recruit and train future leaders of the global real estate industry,” he says. “It will be an incredible experience for all involved—students from around the world sharing the same classroom in Madison and learning real estate the Wisconsin way.”

Applications for the four-month program are now being accepted. The first GREM class will graduate in May 2011.

 To learn more, visit the Global Real Estate Master program.

Author and veteran entrepreneurship reporter Donna Fenn was on campus November 9-12 as the fall Business Writer in Residence, a joint effort by University Communications, the Wisconsin School of Business, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, bringing nationally known business writers to campus to interact with students.

Members of the UW-Madison community and the public were invited to attend a special Q&A with Fenn on Tuesday, Nov. 10, to discuss her new book:“Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8Ways You Can Profit from Their Success.’ The Q&A was held fr in the Plenary Room of 1310 Grainger Hall, with a book sale and signing to follow. A live webcast of the Upstarts! Q&A will be available.

Moderating the Q&A session was Dan Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship.

Fenn’s talk was sponsored by University Communications, Wisconsin School of Business, INSITE (Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship), and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Business Writer in Residence program is funded in part by a grant from the UW Foundation.

Fenn has more than 20 years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends. Her latest book, “Upstarts!,” analyzes young entrepreneurial success strategies and what to expect from these highly collaborative and team-oriented individuals in the future. She provides readers with eight critical lessons every entrepreneur and marketer must learn.

In addition to “Upstarts!,” Fenn wrote “Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack,” which profiles eight successful small companies in ordinary industries, including a sock manufacturer and motorcycle dealership. Fenn is a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, a community leader at Work.com, a featured expert on SBTV.com, and a blogger on Inc.com. Her work has appeared in Inc., The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other national publications.

In 2001, Fenn was a co-recipient of the Women’s Economic Round Table Entrepreneurship Prize, sponsored by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. From 1988 to 1992, she lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was a correspondent for The Associated Press and covered a variety of issues, including business, culture, the economy and the Gulf War.

The essence of the WI-FUR plan is to attach a housing “voucher” to each unemployment check that could be directly applied to a mortgage payment.

The U.S. Treasury, according to top Fed officials, is beginning to concentrate very closely on the effect of unemployment on the housing crisis and foreclosures. There is increasing concern that the foreclosure problem cannot be addressed without providing financial assistance to unemployed homeowners.

Proposals to prevent foreclosures by attaching government housing vouchers to unemployment checks is gaining traction among officials. Recent discussions for relief plans have been along the lines of a foreclosure relief plan proposed by three Wisconsin School of Business real estate professors earlier this year. Read recent USA Today coverage here.

“The Wisconsin Foreclose and Unemployment Relief Plan” (WI-FUR), was developed in the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate by Professors Morris A. Davis, Stephen Malpezzi and François Ortalo-Magné. WI-FUR calls for the rapid expansion of two established programs—unemployment insurance and housing vouchers—to prevent a wave of foreclosures among recently unemployed workers.

“In a nutshell, the WI-FUR plan gives unemployed people a housing voucher to enable them to make their mortgage payment,” says Davis. “It doesn’t require any mortgage modification and it’s temporary in nature. You receive a voucher when you are unemployed and then when you are employed, you stop receiving a voucher.”

Davis says the other foreclosure proposals currently being debated, including the “Making Home Affordable” plan put forward earlier by the Obama Administration, have focused on mortgage modifications—to take a person who has a bad or ill-suited subprime mortgage and convert it to a more appropriate 30- year, fixed rate mortgage.

“Those plans really do to nothing to help the unemployed who have completely sensible mortgages but simply can’t afford to make payments on them,” says Davis. “Our plan is the only plan that we know of, outside of one by the Boston Fed, that helps people make mortgage payments while they are unemployed.”

The essence of the WI-FUR plan is to attach a housing “voucher” to each unemployment check that could be directly applied to a mortgage payment. The amount of the voucher would be based on the Fair Market Rent, which is already computed for each county by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The cost of the WI-FUR plan has been calculated by the faculty members, but would depend on parameters set by policymakers in terms of size of the voucher, number of people eligible, and the length of time an individual could receive the vouchers.

“Right now the U.S. is experiencing the greatest housing crisis in its history since the Great Depression, “ Davis says. “As members of one of the top real estate programs in the country, we felt it was our responsibility to come up with a potential solution for this housing crisis and that’s why we developed a foreclosure relief plan.”

Read details on WI-FUR here

CNN's Ali Velshi conducts a town hall discussion with students in front of Grainger Hall. Photo by University Communications

CNN taped a segment with representatives of the full-time Wisconsin MBA program on Friday, Sept. 4. The segment aired on CNN’s “Your $$$$,” co-hosted by CNN Chief Business Correspondent Ali Velshi and Christine Romans, Saturday, Sept. 5 and Sunday, Sept. 6.

Interviewed for the segment were Michael Knetter, Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business; Kenneth Kavajecz, associate dean of the MBA program; Assistant Dean Blair Sanford, who directs career services; and two Wisconsin MBA students, Luis Otero and Kemllen Lee.

Asked how the economic crisis had affected how business was taught in the MBA program, Kavajecz said that the past 15 months “have been an extraordinary learning experience for anyone in finance or anyone in business, for that matter. 

Frankly, in my class last year, I had to set aside 20 minutes of every class to talk about who ailed in the last two weeks or two days and what that means for the economy. What are we going to do about it? Do the solutions that people are talking about  make sense? So, we have adapted some of the curriculum to handle the environment we are watching unfold. But the foundation of what we talk about and the principles don’t change at all.” 

 

It was the second day in a row that a CNN Express team taped on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. On Thursday, Velshi conducted a town-hall meeting with Wisconsin students in Grainger Hall’s courtyard on how the economy is affecting their lives.

Read coverage of CNN’s visit.

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