An undergraduate Miami Herbert team defeated participants from 16 other colleges to win the Impact Investing in Commercial Real Estate Competition held at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School.
Winners Yamo Deniz, Adem Murad, and Fatima Navarro split a $15,000 first-place award provided by Edgardo Defortuna, CEO and founder of Fortune International Group, a prominent full-service South Florida real estate business.
“This is the first year that we’ve actually separated into a graduate and an undergraduate division,” said Andrea Heuson, Miami Herbert professor of finance.
Now in its ninth year, the annual CRE Competition—hosted by Miami Herbert and sponsored by its Real Estate Advisory Council—draws contestants from top schools such as UCLA, the University of Chicago, Cornell, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Deniz, Murad, and Navarro “really packed a punch, in that they were able to accomplish their win with only three people on their team,” added Heuson, who runs Miami Herbert’s Accelerated MBA in Real Estate program.
The winning undergraduate CRE proposal, titled “The Nest,” focused on a mixed-income residential building in Allapattah, a Miami neighborhood that’s a melting pot for residents from Central America and the Caribbean.
“We met a lot, and we put a lot of time into it,” undergraduate Yamo Deniz said of his preparation for the CRE contest. “We were trying to strike a balance between financial returns and also environmental and social impact,” added Deniz, who will be graduating with a B.B.A. in finance and real estate from Miami Herbert next month.
Adem Murad, who’s on track to get a B.S.B.A. in finance and economics in May, said his team had to be facile and highly adaptable to make The Nest a winner.
“The project that we had changed a lot over time, especially after the first submission,” Murad noted. “This was the first time they (the CRE Competition’s organizers) ever did an undergraduate division, so we had zero reference.”
Winning team member Fatima Navarro is a bit of an outlier, in that she graduated last fall with a B.A. in communications, and is working for a buy-side real estate firm. “I realized that my background gave me a set of fresh eyes,” Navarro said. “It gave me a perspective that wasn’t necessarily seen by other students with a traditional real estate or finance background because it came from a difference set of experiences.”
Deniz planned to invest his share of the $15,000 first-prize award into his Kelvin Investment Group firm, while Navarro said she’d probably apply her winnings toward student loans. Murad planned to invest his $5,000 share of the $15,000 first-place pot in the stock market.
A graduate team from Columbia University won $25,000 for a proposal that put trade schools, affordable housing and business incubators in West Harlem.
Winning Columbia student Nikolaos Kalteziotis, who’s working toward a master’s degree in real estate development, called the CRE Competition “a unique opportunity to apply my academic knowledge and gain hands-on experience addressing real-world sustainability and community challenges.”
