14th Annual Coming to Terms: Negotiating Joint Ventures Workshop
In November 2025, Columbia Business School welcomed more than 80 graduate students from Columbia, NYU, MIT, and Harvard for the 14th annual Coming to Terms: Negotiating Joint Ventures workshop. Co-hosted by the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate and the MIT Center for Real Estate, the full-day program gave students an immersive look into the strategy, structure, and negotiation dynamics that define real estate joint ventures.
Participants spend a full day discussing the key issues in a real estate joint- venture agreement, with a particular focus on four areas: contributions, distributions (waterfall), governance, and exit mechanisms. Students are counseled by teams of prominent real estate attorneys from six internationally recognized firms, and their negotiations are judged by a panel of expert practitioners from across the industry. This event is an exposition, not a competition.
Alexander Bodini Foundation Competition
Second-year MBA students enrolled in the Capstone: Real Estate Investment course have the opportunity to compete annually in the Alexander Bodini Foundation Competition with their final capstone project. With generous support from Daniele Bodini ’72, this year’s competition marked the 27th anniversary and is a signature offering of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate and the MBA Real Estate Program.
The 2026 Competition winners were Hogan Barnes ’26, Ron Chico ’26, Khrishan Gopal ’26, and Santiago Siman ’26.
Shores Family Real Estate Fund
The Shores Family Real Estate Fund, established through the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate, expands opportunities for Columbia Business School students pursuing careers in real estate. By helping offset the costs associated with experiential learning, the fund enables students to participate in high-impact educational experiences that complement and enhance their classroom learning.
Through the generosity of the Shores Family Fund, students are able to travel, compete, network, and apply academic concepts in real-world settings. During the 2025–2026 academic year, the fund supported Real Estate Association employment treks to Los Angeles, California, and Dallas, Texas, where students explored each city’s real estate market through site visits, industry meetings, and networking opportunities with Columbia Business School alumni and leading practitioners.
The fund also helped support student participation in five national real estate case competitions, providing valuable opportunities to develop and showcase analytical, investment, and development skills. Columbia Business School teams earned second-place finishes in both the Berkadia & NYU Stern Multifamily Investment Case Competition and the Kellogg Real Estate Venture Case Competition.
In addition, students represented Columbia Business School at:
- UT Austin National Real Estate Challenge
- UNC Real Estate Development Challenge
- Schulich Developers Den Real Estate Case Competition
These experiences provide students with practical industry exposure, strengthen professional networks, and help prepare the next generation of real estate leaders.
Dickerman International Travel Initiative
The Ronald Dickerman ’87 fund has been established through the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate to support international student travel opportunities led by the Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business. The fund aims to underwrite and offset expenses related to study tours, widening the experiential opportunity to participate in international travel while in business school, and introducing students to real estate markets and their unique complexities around the globe.
Designed to enhance the classroom curriculum, study tours offer students an intense, firsthand experience of the business culture of a chosen country or region to lay the groundwork for future international internships and careers.
With leadership and guidance from Professor Brian Lancaster, the third cohort of students eligible for the Dickerman Travel Fund award participated in an immersive Real Estate Study Tour to South Korea and Japan. Across 10 full days in Seoul, Tokyo, and Kyoto,
students engaged in an intensive schedule of company visits, site tours, and rich cultural experiences, gaining firsthand exposure to global real estate markets and investment and development strategies across Asia. In South Korea, visits included Korea Investment Corporation (KIC), Samsung SRA Asset Management, Lotte Real Estate, AJU Group at the Ryse Hotel, and Haenglim Architects & Engineers. In Japan, students met with leaders from Mori Building Co., Ltd., the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Development Bank of Japan Inc., Blackstone, and BGO, and experienced the city from above at Shibuya Sky. The tour also emphasized cultural context, with visits to Kiyomizu- dera Temple and Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine in Kyoto, reinforcing how history, culture, and place shape the built environment.
The experience was further enriched by a special alumni gathering with the CBS Alumni Club of Tokyo, strengthening connections across Columbia’s global alumni community. Experiential learning like this is
central to the Columbia Business School experience, bringing theory to life, expanding global perspective, and building relationships that extend far beyond the classroom.
We are deeply grateful to the extraordinary student leaders Pauline Cho, Bowen Guan, and Dennis (Hueyen) Yang for organizing; Professor Brian Lancaster for faculty oversight; and the company hosts, colleagues, alumni, and industry partners who made this exciting journey possible.
Real Estate Forum
The Columbia Forum is an invitation-only group of leading real estate executives who convene throughout the year to candidly discuss issues of strategic importance to the industry in coordination with our faculty, while also contributing their expertise to the MBA Real Estate Program. Members are CEOs and senior executives who own, operate, and manage substantial real estate assets, bringing deep experience across markets in the US and abroad. Their engagement and affiliation with Columbia play an important role in helping us attract and develop the next generation of real estate leaders.