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.

Assistant Professor of Real Estate Urban Land Economics Morris Davis is critical of a recent move by Congress to extend a tax credit for first-time homebuyers and offer a new credit to people who already own a home but are looking to move.

Davis told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that home prices were stabilizing without further intervention and cautioned that extending the first-time buyer credit will be costly and only pull forward home sales that would have happened at a point in the future anyway. “There’s just a fixed pool of potential first-time homebuyers. So that means if you incent them to buy today, they are not going to be available to buy tomorrow,” said Davis.

Read more.

Morris Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics at the Wisconsin School of Business, is contributing to the national debate on the best methods to help jobless Americans from defaulting on their mortgages.   

 Read  an article quoting Professor Davis on the impact of housing vouchers here.  

 Read about The Wisconsin Foreclosure and Unemployment Relief Plan (WI-FUR)  here.

A design presented by a team of students from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and the Wisconsin School of Business Real Estate MBA program was selected as the winning plan in the 2009 ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. Final-round presentations were held at the University of Denver on April 2. The winning team received a prize of $50,000. [Read more]

The Wisconsin School of Business of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will partner with HEC Paris in the development and delivery of a new Real Estate program at HEC, as part of the HEC Real Estate Chair sponsored by Morgan Stanley and Unibail-Rodamco. [Read more]