Building a Better Real Estate Professional

Educating for Success... The last Dispatch, RE Pros Mix Frontier Passion and Corporate Savvy (Jul 26), asked for suggestions for good professional training programs. Here are three.

Steve Heiney at Bixby Land Company in Long Beach, CA, raves about the advanced education program offered by NAIOP's SoCal Chapter, the Young Professionals Group ("YPG").

"YPG consists of 35 people under the age of 35. We have monthly meetings where there is a presentation by an accomplished executive and a general leadership discussion lead by Wayne Strom, an MBA professor at Pepperdine University. To kick the program off, we had a retreat with Wayne Strom for two and a half days with the opportunity to get well acquainted with everyone involved in the program."

According to Heiney, the SoCal program has been supported by NAIOP national's Karin Soyster, Vice President of Education. Locally, Alan Beaudette at Lowe Corporate Services and Tom Sherlock at Buchanan Street Partners have been instrumental.

Marc Doyle at Grubb & Ellis|BRE Commercial in Carlsbad (San Diego), CA, believes that his training programs give the firm a competitive advantage in recruitment. The company provides both a Professional Career Training (PCT) program for new associates and a Professional Growth and Development series for all professionals. "We often invite our clients to send their key staff to professional training programs that we sponsor."

Adam Bruns pointed me to his article, Making the Grade: Real estate education programs are as varied as the deals they teach you to make, in Site Selection magazine (July 2004). You'll find a great list of corporate real estate education resources at the end of the story.

-- Peter Pike