Instructor Interview
Below, Prof. Siqi Zheng describes various aspects of how she and her colleagues taught 11.350 Sustainable Real Estate in spring 2023.
OCW: How did the discipline of sustainable real estate come into being? How has it developed in recent years, and what direction do you see it going?
Siqi Zheng: Sustainable real estate is a new subdiscipline under the discipline of real estate and at the intersection of real estate and sustainability. In general, the real estate industry has been relatively old-fashioned and slow in addressing sustainability and climate change challenges, but in the last five years, this has been undergoing a lot of change, with increasing awareness and also with pressure from the regulators (for instance, through building decarbonization regulations and climate risk disclosure regulations) and from investors who are committed to ESG principles. And the practitioners in this industry have started to catch up.
For example, the first paper on the rental and price premiums associated with green buildings came out almost 15 years ago, in 2010. At first there were not that many other studies, but over the last five or eight years it has really developed very fast, from the industry side and also the research side, because of the challenge of global climate change and the importance of the building sector—the building sector is responsible for about a third of the entire carbon emission and a third of the energy use of the entire economy. So we can see that this area, both with regard to research and to practice and education, will continue to grow.
OCW: How does 11.350 fit into the overall curriculum of MIT’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) program?
Siqi Zheng: The Center for Real Estate and our master’s program were established 40 years ago—this year is our anniversary! Our curriculum was very stable over most of those 40 years, with very little change over time. But four years ago, because of the rising importance of sustainability, we decided to create this new course on sustainable real estate. And I just devised the course from scratch and we included it in the core curriculum of our MSRED program.
OCW: What role do the guest lecturers play in the overall plan of the course? How do you recruit them to participate?
Siqi Zheng: Because our program is 40 years old, we’ve already trained more than 1000 students, and we keep a very good relationship with our alumni. And besides those former students, we also have a very strong industrial network online. Many of those people play an important role, like senior managers, or they built their own companies. When I started to design this course, of course I understood that I can’t just stand there by myself and give lectures all the time. That would be boring, especially for the students in our MSRED program! It’s very similar to the MBA program; all the students have a lot of experience, more than me.
So I can’t just teach them by myself. I need to invite those experts, guest speakers from the industry who have a lot of rich experience from the practice, especially in the area of sustainability. So I approach developers, investors from pension funds and real estate investment trusts, chief sustainability officers, and major decisionmakers from big development projects. They’re actually very enthusiastic when I invite them to come to my class to speak. They accept my invitation happily. They spare their time to come, and they prepare very well.
OCW: The course is structured around three main subtopics: the economics, business, and design of sustainable real estate. How do those three threads relate to one another?
Siqi Zheng: In our MSRED program we have two other very fundamental core classes, 11.431 Real Estate Finance and Investment and 11.433 Real Estate Economics. Students take those two core classes in the first semester, to build up their foundations in the economic and financial aspects of real estate. Then, in the second semester, they take my course, which takes those basic skills, approaches, and methodologies and applies them to sustainability. And of course, sustainable real estate is not just theory, not just economic analysis or financial analysis; instead, there’s a lot of business decision-making. That’s why we use a case teaching approach for the business part, using teaching cases from Harvard Business School or cases we wrote ourselves. And since real estate is a really physical space, and since green buildings, healthy buildings, and climate resilience really depend on the physical side, design plays an important role. Half of our students come here with a background in design and architecture, the other half from a background in finance and investment. The finance and investment students really want to understand the design, the physical side, and the design students also want to understand how traditional design can be complex, sustainable design. So that’s why we integrate the design module in the structure of the course. After three years of teaching, we really feel that’s a very good framework.
OCW: What would you like to share about teaching 11.350 that we haven’t yet addressed?
Siqi Zheng: Of course, we’re still developing and refining our pedagogy and teaching materials, and hopefully later we can further improve the quality of 11.350!
Curriculum Information
Prerequisites
Students should have a grounding in basic statistics.
Priority in enrollment is given to students in MIT’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) program.
Requirements Satisfied
This subject is a required course for the Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED).
Offered
Every spring semester
Assessment
Grade Breakdown
The students’ grades were based on the following activities:
- 25% Problem sets
- 20% Business case assignments and in-class discussion
- 20% Midterm exam
- 25% Final project
- 10% Class participation
Student Information
Enrollment
37 students
Breakdown by Year
Primarily first-year graduate students
Breakdown by Major
Most of the participants in the course were MSRED students; a few were in the Sloan School of Management or the School of Architecture and Planning; one was cross-registered from Harvard Business School.
How Student Time Was Spent
During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:
In Class (3 hours)
In class, Prof. Zheng, her co-instructors, and a series of guest lecturers presented overviews of the course material.
Out of Class (9 hours)
Outside of class, students completed preparatory readings, worked on individual assignments, and attended the (recommended but non-mandatory) weekly recitation sessions to review the material presented during the previous lectures.
