Real Estate Finance (now called MGMT 170) with Karlan was really great. He was a very engaging lecturer and well-prepared for remote instruction. Little to no technical issues, clearly presented and organized material, and lots of resources posted on CCLE to help with exam review and further reading. He always recorded the lectures and posted them very promptly. Originally participation was graded based on easy in-class polls (graded on completion), but he gave everyone 100% for participation due to COVID. No homework at all, and midterm (50 questions MC) and final (100 questions MC) were not too difficult but quite the time crunch. Attend the TA review sessions - you’ll see over half of the types of exam questions there. Karlan is super experienced and shares great anecdotes of his industry experience. Would definitely recommend this even if you have no prior experience in finance/economics. A lot of practical and fascinating topics were covered without feeling like information overload.

Karlan is the BEST professor I have ever had at UCLA. I have never been in a class where the professor cares so deeply about his students or puts so much effort into a class. He has custom made resources for each class (imagine how much time that would have taken). His lectures are engaging, he is a genuinely nice person and has a huge wealth of experience. He is a highly successful real estate investor himself with an incredibly impressive resume and weaves real world examples from his career into his lectures.

His lectures themselves are better than anything on Netflix. They’re clear, practical and are something to look forward to. There aren’t any assignments in this class, only a midterm and exam which are both fair and don’t contain anything that wasn’t covered during class. They’re open book and mostly excel based. The textbook isn’t required to do well in this class.

Karlan says that you need experience with Excel and a good foundation of finance to succeed in this class. I don’t think you need any background in Excel at all because he creates all the spreadsheets you’ll need. All you need in terms of finance is a conceptual understanding of discounting and annuities and very very basic interest theory (ie compounding).
The one criticism I have is that he sometimes speaks very fast (he speeds up as the class went on) and it would be nice if he slowed down a bit.
This is a GREAT CLASS!

I would recommend this class. You learn a lot of good real-world stuff. It's a good intro to finance even if you aren't particularly interested in real estate. Professor Karlan is really knowledgable, engaging, and fair. Pretty light workload. Just a midterm, final, and clicker questions during lecture. Midterm and final are open book, but you still need to study because there is a time crunch (especially for the midterm). If you actually go to class, take decent notes, and study for a few hours before the exams you'll be set. The TAs were also really helpful and basically tell you what's going to be on the exams, so be sure to actually attend the review sessions.

This class is soooo interesting. I loved Prof. Karlan’s lectures. And I learned a huge amount of information that’s actually useful in real life! That’s definitely a first. One thing that really surprised me (in a good way) was how doable the excel problems were. At the beginning of the quarter, he warned that only people familiar with financial calculations in excel should stay in the class. I decided to stay but it really freaked me out tbh. Don’t listen to him! The calculations are not difficult at all and he literally teaches you how to do them all and gives you spreadsheets for all of them. I don’t know why he discourages people from taking the class. It’s not difficult to learn at all.
The workload is pretty small. No mandatory homework (you should still do the homework though to study for the exams). Only participation and the exams counted towards your final grade. The whole iclicker thing was a tad annoying though because he’d often ask questions at the very beginning of class so you could miss the points if you’re literally a couple minutes late.
Also, I see some reviews saying the curve is very generous. Maybe it is generous on the lower end but personally my grade was barely different from what it would have been on the straight scale. Or maybe my class just performed really well overall so our average was high? I just don’t really think I benefited largely from the curve.
But overall this is a very useful and interesting class and I’m glad I took it. I’d definitely recommend it!

Overrated