Real Estate

The structures built by the real estate industry comprise over a third of the world’s tangible wealth, and are responsible for as much as one-third of the world’s total global greenhouse gas emissions – primarily through the use of fossil fuels during their construction and operational phase. For the industry to maintain responsible leadership in the global community, it must encourage a culture of sustainability and innovation that meets the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world.

This evolving global City-Making Industry culture measures value of a development project not only by financial returns to the developer, but also social returns to communities. This new real estate industry is more interdisciplinary, data driven, and performance measured, involving ever larger, city-scale projects composed of hybrid real estate products and asset classes. Through the Center for Real Estate, we aim to take on a leadership role in the global real estate industry, as it transforms from traditional models of project-based development while also addressing challenges such as fast urbanization, sustainability, sea-level rise, dwindling resources, technological disruption, and growing inequality at the city scale.

The MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE), housed within the School of Architecture and Planning with the core faculty from Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was founded in 1983 and was the first professional master’s degree program in real estate in the US. Operating in the context of rapidly evolving real estate practices CRE educates the next generation of global innovators and industry leaders. CRE’s associated faculty pursue research initiatives to provide the foundation for the best training of the next generation of real estate thinkers and leaders to impact professional practice as well as academia.

Learn more about the MIT Center for Real Estate.