Commercial Investment Real Estate is the magazine of the CCIM Institute, the leading provider of commercial real estate education. CIRE covers market trends, current developments, and business strategies within the commercial real estate field.
Issue link: http://cire.epubxp.com/i/897832
W hat made the CCI M courses different from uni- versity courses? Practitioners. From the start, CCIM courses used seasoned commercial real estate practitioners to teach its courses, while consulting with those in the education field. " W hat t he st udent s couldn't find anywhere else in the marketplace was courses taught by prac- titioners," says Dunn, who was designated in 1974. "I have always thought that 's what made the courses what they came to be. It was one of the things that attracted me." CCIM Institute also offered technol- ogy not found else- where. Designees have long heard the stories about the cumbersome Ell- wood tables. Eager to embrace new technology, in the late 1970s the Institute introduced the hand-held calculator to the courses. But these, too, had a period of adjustment, says Dunn, who was a CCIM instructor for 20 years. "There was a very significant, sometimes heated argument as to whether they should be used in the classroom for fear the students wouldn't learn the process," Dunn says. Fueled by the enthusiasm of members and 1997 Institute presi- dent Palmer Berge, CCIM, the hand-held calculator was incorporated into the courses in the late 1970s. "The first instructor up Monday morning had at least 25 percent of the class just tearing the cello- phane off the calculator, which was difficult because at that point we had to teach them how to use the calculator as well as what it meant," Dunn says. "But once they learned how to use them, the calculations they had to make went faster and, in all probabil- ity, were more accurate. From day one the financial calculators were programmed to calculate the IRR, so all you had to do was make the entries, and that just saved a lot of time." Changing Industry Dynamics The 1980s saw a very different climate for the commercial real estate industry. After a boom in commercial construction activity fueled in part by the Economic Recovery Act of 1981, the end of the decade brought a market crash due to overbuilding in many markets. During the early 1990s, the number of savings and loan institutions that failed and the volume of their losses hit record numbers. "The market did collapse substantially," says Mark Lee Levine, CCIM, CIPS, MAI, professor at the University of Denver in Denver. "CCIMs were right on top of it. We had to survive through these changes for a number of years and make changes." This was further complicated by tax law changes. "Subsequent to the 1986 tax act, we had rampant inflation, high interest rates, and many foreclo- sures," says Patricia Lynn, CCIM, CDEI, a senior instructor and principal at LYNNK in San Fran- cisco. "1989 saw the creation of the Resolution Trust Corporation, a U.S. government-owned asset man- agement company, which was selling off properties en masse. Auctions became a popular disposition vehicle in the early 1990s." The Institute was quick to respond. "We saw a need for dealing with a different kind of client and a different disposition approach," Lynn says. "We brought in experts, as well as used some of our own people, to develop a course that helped our clientele understand how to work with regulatory agencies, such as the RTC and the FDIC. Since we were selling large blocks of property as opposed to indi- vidual one-off properties, a nontraditional approach needed to be deployed. That was either the auction or the sealed bid sale." But the Institute had more changes in store — beginning in the early 1980s with the introduc- tion of computers and investment analysis soft- ware into the classroom. "Technology became another reason why people flocked to the courses. We were ahead of our time at that point," says Myles, who worked on the education committee that embraced the investment analysis software that Palmer Berge, CCIM, had developed using Hewlett-Packard's equipment. CCIM Institute very early on adopted comput- ers, says Ralph Spencer, CCIM, SIOR, principal with Innovative Learning LLC, in Richmond, Va., and a senior instructor. Bob Ward, CCIM, developed the Excel workbooks for CCIM courses. COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE / NOV.17 20 CCIM.COM "WE BROUGHT IN EXPERTS , AS WELL AS USED SOME OF OUR OWN PEOPLE." — Patricia Lynn, CCIM, CDEI filadendron