Building Bridges Between Academic Theory and Real Estate Practice

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

17 Jul 2025

Share

Share via Facebook

Share via Linkedin

Share via X

Copy to clipboard

The real estate industry has changed significantly over the past three decades, creating new challenges for academic institutions tasked with preparing students for careers in an increasingly complex field. At DePaul University’s Real Estate Center, the emphasis has always been on delivering a blend of practical skills and theoretical knowledge. But in the fast-paced world of LLMs and AI, required practical skills are evolving quickly. 

Reagan Pratt, director of The Real Estate Center at DePaul University, brings three decades of institutional real estate experience to his role bridging academia and industry. His career trajectory—from industrial research specialist to public securities and investment management—provides unique insight into how the real estate sector has evolved and what today’s graduates need to succeed.

“The industry that I knew 30 years ago when I landed at JMB Institutional in 1994 is not the industry that exists today,” Pratt explains. “It was a lot of large asset managers trying to collect more assets, trying to get more pension funds in the asset class. Fast forward to today, I think all the pension funds that are going to be in real estate are in real estate.”

The Changing Landscape of Real Estate Education

This industry shift has created significant implications for how universities prepare students for real estate careers. Where once large institutional firms provided comprehensive training programs, today’s leaner organizations expect graduates to arrive job-ready with specialized skills.

“I find all of these firms now have outsourced all of that training to us,” Pratt notes. “They want people to land ready, ready to hit the ground running. They want them to understand what their specialty is, they don’t want someone who might want to do research and might want to do acquisitions.”

This change has prompted DePaul to consider the next step in the evolution of its approach to real estate education. The university is exploring a formal co-op program that would embed students directly within industry firms, providing hands-on experience beyond today’s traditional classroom learning.

However, many successful real estate firms are mid-sized operations with 20 to 25 employees running at full capacity. “These firms don’t have time to think through intelligent internship programs, let alone co-op programs,” Pratt observes. So, we at DePaul and the Real Estate Center will have to help the firms evolve as well.

Developing Industry-Ready Graduates

To address this gap, DePaul has developed innovative approaches to industry engagement. The Real Estate Center serves as a conduit between university and industry, bringing practicing professionals directly into the classroom.

“We really engage with those professionals one of two ways,” Pratt explains. “The first way is to say, ‘Jim Schilling is teaching capital markets to our MSREs. He’d love to do a section on securitized debt. Can you come from JP Morgan and talk about how you do the securitization process?’”

These industry guest lectures often become the most impactful sessions of entire courses. “It’ll be the best three hours of the entire course because there’s somebody who’s actually bringing it to life,” Pratt says. “You’re talking about how the mortgage market went off the rails, and now you have somebody who lived through it.”

The program also recruits industry professionals to teach full courses, ensuring curriculum remains current with market realities.

Emphasizing Numeracy Over Technical Skills

One of Pratt’s key insights involves distinguishing between technical competency and analytical thinking. While many employers focus on technical skills like Excel proficiency, he argues that deeper analytical capabilities are more valuable long-term.

“I really focus on what I call making students numerate,” Pratt explains. “I stress to every student: any number in isolation is meaningless. If you can’t benchmark it against something, it doesn’t mean something. If you can’t put it on a distribution of probability, it doesn’t mean something.”

This emphasis on numeracy reflects broader changes in how information is accessed. “With AI, fact-based education—testing students on a formula for what a cap rate is—is useful but not useful. They can look that up quicker on their phone than I can explain it to them in class.”

Instead, the focus shifts to interpretation: “How to use it, how to manipulate it, what it means, how to compare it” becomes the educational priority.

Navigating Career Development in a Fragmented Industry

The move toward smaller, specialized firms has also changed how students should approach career development. Rather than expecting linear progression, today’s graduates must be prepared for multiple career transitions.

“I think there’s a distinct difference between what I expect and coach from an undergrad versus somebody in our Master of Science in real estate,” Pratt notes. “At the undergraduate level, I really try to impress upon students that a lot of what you’re going to be doing in the first five years of your career is figuring out what you don’t want to do.”

This perspective acknowledges broader labor market trends. “The average person entering the workforce today is probably going to have more than 20 different jobs in their career,” Pratt observes, contrasting this with previous generations who might spend entire careers with single employers.

Chicago as a Real Estate Laboratory

DePaul’s Chicago location provides unique advantages for real estate education. “The best part about our program, our MSRE, aside from bringing in industry professionals, is that outside the window is the laboratory,” Pratt explains. “You can walk out the door and see what a career in real estate looks like.”

The nature of Chicago’s real estate market has changed dramatically, however. “Chicago has gone through an evolution,” Pratt notes. “Thirty years ago, Chicago was considered one of the six U.S. gateway cities for international capital deployment. Buildings up and down Wacker were often owned by international capital”. 

Today, for most international investors and many nationally focused U.S. based institutional investors, Chicago is no longer a market that demands exposure. It may not be explicitly red lined (except by a small minority of institutional investors), but Chicago does feel a bit like a flyover market. Said differently, for the most part Chicago is “sold not bought,” i.e., an acquired taste for many non-local investors. 

Despite challenges including property taxes, demographic trends, and urban issues, Chicago presents opportunities for risk-taking local capital. Chicago has experienced strong fundamentals in certain sectors. “We’re seeing local investors in the loop do multifamily conversions of office buildings. You’re seeing Google commit to the central loop with the Thompson Center reimagination. We’re seeing a lot of this entrepreneurial capital realize that the flyover mentality and the resultant absence of outside institutional capital is creating the opportunity for outsized risk-adjusted returns for local money.  

The apartment market exemplifies this dynamic. “The strongest apartment market in the country by a lot of metrics, in terms of rent growth, has been metropolitan Chicago over the last 12 months,” Pratt reports. “It’s been a market where there really has been no supply.” Yet Chicago cap rates continue to be elevated, suggesting a risk premium that market fundamentals don’t agree with.

Adapting to Private Wealth Focus

The shift from institutional to private wealth sources has implications for how students prepare for careers. “Increasingly, the real estate industry is looking to private wealth sources, whether it’s RIAs, smaller individual investors or sophisticated family offices,” Pratt explains.

This trend affects the types of skills and knowledge students need. “We have programs at DePaul that expose students to the possibilities of private wealth. They are just not housed in the real estate curriculum. So, I’m making sure that our real estate students are aware of the evolution of where the capital is coming from.”

The change also influences career paths. While DePaul historically trained many “fighter pilots” —private equity entrepreneurs focused on investment and development—current market conditions have made development more challenging, requiring adaptation in program focus for some students.

Building Scalable Industry Partnerships

Recognizing the limitations of ad hoc industry engagement, Pratt is working with external partners to develop scalable internship models that can be implemented across multiple firms. “What I’m working on with some external folks is, how do we develop an internship model that can almost be off the shelf for these mid-sized firms?”

This approach acknowledges that while individual relationships remain important, systematic solutions are needed to serve both student and industry needs. “If we can develop that model, then we can provide the pipeline of students for it.”

Looking Forward

As the real estate industry continues to change, academic institutions must balance theoretical foundations with practical preparation. DePaul’s approach, emphasizing industry engagement, analytical thinking, and adaptability, offers a model for how universities can remain relevant in preparing students for dynamic career environments.

The success of this approach will ultimately be measured by graduate outcomes and industry satisfaction. Early indicators suggest that programs emphasizing real-world application and industry connectivity are better positioned to serve both student and employer needs in an increasingly complex real estate landscape.

For academic institutions nationwide grappling with similar challenges, DePaul’s experience demonstrates that effective real estate education requires ongoing industry engagement, flexible curriculum design, and recognition that preparing students for their first job may be less important than preparing them for career-long learning and adaptation.