Cornell students placed third in the National Real Estate Challenge, which pitted teams from 16 top graduate schools in a realistic competition, held at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business in Austin. The results were announced Nov. 2.

The Cornell team earned a spot in the final round of the competition, besting teams from Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Virginia and Wharton. In the final round, Cornell placed third overall, while teams from Northwestern and Stanford finished first and second, respectively.

"The competition was a fantastic opportunity to combine Cornell's learning environment with real-world challenges," said Daniel Lentz, a graduate student in Cornell's Program in Real Estate. "Actual deals are complex and have many different risks and compromises which must be considered."

Cornell's team included Lentz, Zsofia Kondor, Brian Semel and Rachel Wilson from Cornell's Program in Real Estate and Ramandeep Waliaand and Benjamin Weissbourd from Cornell's Johnson School.

Each participating school was allowed one team of four to six graduate students to study a potential real estate investment scenario and provide a 20-minute presentation about that case to a panel of real estate professionals. This year's case study at the competition was a hypothetical hospitality investment opportunity on behalf of a global real estate fund.

The case for this year's competition was distributed by co-sponsor Goldman Sachs and Co. and was judged by professionals from Goldman and such lead sponsors as Bank of America, Credit Suisse, GE Real Estate, ING Clarion, The Lionstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Transwestern Investment Company, and Weingarten Realty Investory.

For more information about the Program in Real Estate at Cornell, visit: http://realestate.cornell.edu, and for information about the Johnson School, see http://www.johnson.cornell.edu.