HBCU Students Invited to Campus After Winning Case Competition

This year’s Titans of Real Estate conference welcomed the winners of the Philip Payton Society’s HBCU Real Estate Case Competition to campus in Ithaca. Now in its third year, the Competition seeks to leverage Cornell’s status as the preeminent home for real estate education and expose the world of commercial estate to those outside the Cornell community, by teaching students at Historically Black Colleges Universities basic commercial real estate concepts. And afterwards providing them with a commercial real estate transaction case study to analyze and allow them to present their recommendations. This year’s winners were four undergraduate scholars from North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC. The group consisted of Mikayla McDaniel a senior in Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Yentell James a sophomore in Business Administration, Jacquoia Hunter a freshman in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and Faheemah Fabre a freshman in Marketing and Supply Chain Management.

In addition to winning a cash award, which was once again sponsored by the Cornell Real Estate Council (CREC), scholars had the opportunity to hear Richard Baker, Chairman/CEO of Hudson’s Bay Co. talk about the current state of retail real estate. After which, all the Titans conference goers convened to the Statler Park Atrium for a reception where they were officially presented with a 1st place check from CREC in the amount of $2,500.

The goal of the Philip Payton Society’s HBCU Real Estate Case Competition has long been to provide access and exposure to the world of commercial real estate with hopes of bringing others into the Cornell community through new and unconventional paths. And through the collaboration of the Baker Program, CREC and the Center for Real Estate Finance, who all support the idea of diversifying Cornell’s future leaders, this goal was certainly accomplished.