Wharton team wins National Real Estate case competition
James Lenhart WG'05
Issue date: 11/22/04 Section: News
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Real Estate Club members Bruce Kirsch, Ben Dunford, Ephram Lustgarten, Kevin Roberts, Drew Herold, and JJ Lenhart drove the winning team that bested HBS and Stanford GSB to take the National Championship for the first time in school history.
The competition required each team to prepare an analysis of a real estate private equity portfolio investment that was loosely based on an investment that had recently been made by Goldman Sach's Whitehall Real Estate Opportunity Fund. The case was distributed on Tuesday and the team had to travel to Austin and turn in a final presentation by Thursday night, with the first round of competition taking place on Friday morning before a panel of real estate industry judges.
Given only 48 hours to prepare the case, the team had to work fast. Bruce Kirsch volunteered his massive 450 square foot studio as the group's de facto meeting place, a piece of generosity he quickly regretted. Running on three hours sleep through 15 hour meetings and fueled by hoagies, teriyaki, pizza, Skittles, Mountain Dew, and the occasional "let's get pumped up" theme song (Eye of the Tiger and AC/DC's Thunderstruck), the six analyzed the case and drafted their presentation. They slept on the plane to Texas on Thursday morning, and after a stressful last minute run to the Kinko's in downtown Austin, Ephram Lustgarten, the sole First Year on the team, successfully delivered the case copies to the competition organizers.
The team dined that evening with their fellow competitors and the judges, a dinner in which the team was barred from mentioning their school's name to avoid biasing the judges. Nonetheless, during dinner Drew Herold successfully solicited capital from one of the competition judges for his fractional ownership deal codenamed "Big Daddy."
After dinner, the team spent another late night practicing their presentation. Channeling their WHCP professors, team members Ben Dunford and Bruce Kirsch held the team to high standards on posture and elocution. Professor Warshaw would be proud, and might want to reconsider those QCs.
Despite a few presentation hiccups Friday morning, including a misguided opening quote from MC Hammer, the guys beat their first round competition of USC, UT Austin, and Columbia to advance to the final round of three. During the Q&A portion of the first round presentation, Kevin Roberts came through in the clutch with a few pearls of wisdom that cemented the team's entrée into the next round. In its previous two attempts at the competition, Wharton had never made it to the final round, so just getting there was sweet vindication for team captain JJ Lenhart, who barely missed out on the final round last year.
In a stunning final round presentation before all 18 judges and 80 competitors, the Wharton team blew away the field. The judges noted that the Wharton analysis had touched on almost every critical aspect of the case and was the most polished of the presentations. Harvard Business School took a distant second, while third place went to the well-tanned squad from Stanford. Rumor has it that a tear was shed by certain members of the Wharton team upon word of the victory, but that has yet to be confirmed.