USC Defeats UCLA in Annual CRE Challenge

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LOS ANGELES—The five-member team from USC Lusk Center for Real Estate at USC's Marshall School of Business and Price School of Public Policy took home the esteemed Silver Shovel award at the NAIOP SoCal Real Estate Competition. This year, the competing teams were challenged to propose a plan for the highest and best use for a 950,000-square-foot indoor mall in Hawthorne. The USC team won with a plan to develop an urban park with housing, retail and hospitality.

"It's exciting to see the new ideas from our student teams," Angela Azizian, SVP and relationship manager at Wells Fargo Commercial Real Estate and a board member and chair for the NAIOP SoCal Real Estate Challenge, tells GlobeSt.com. "This year was an especially challenging site, and the diversity of proposal presentations from each student team was dynamic. This event really demonstrates the quality of the next generation's thinking."

The event took place at USC's Town and Gown. The five-member team from UCLA's Ziman Center for Real Estate at the Anderson School of Business presented Hawthorne Crossing, a mixed-use complex characterized by 390 multifamily units, 250,000 square feet of ground floor retail, 100,000 square feet of class-A medical office and more than 55,000 square feet of community-oriented uses. The winning USC proposal, Avenir Park, included an events and celebration venue in addition to the housing, retail and hospitality components. Both teams focused on projects that would revitalize the Hawthorne area.

The NAIOP challenge is an important annual event that lets the next generation of real estate professionals work on a real-world proposal. "Each year the student teams devote countless hours to develop the best proposal for presentation at the NAIOP SoCal Real Estate Challenge," Chris Redfearn, Associate Professor, USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. "As faculty, our goal for students is to have them experience a real project, to invest in generating their own vision, to build ties to teammates and the industry, and to exercise the skills they're picking up in class—in other words to make the transition from students to real estate professionals. Both the USC and UCLA teams made all of us proud of the next generation of industry leaders."

UCLA took home the Silver Shovel award at the 2014 competition.

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