prof. karlan is a real estate professional and it shows. he has a lot of industry experience and i enjoyed hearing his stories, deals he'd made, and take on current market trends. the topics in this class are very applicable for people that want to go into the industry (and honestly just pretty interesting in general in my opinion). i liked the structure of lectures, which often went discussion of key terms/topics --> news article or personal experience he had with said topic --> clicker/participation question. that being said, even though i got an A in the class, i disliked how heavy an emphasis he put on learning the financial calculations and real estate computations. if you memorize how to use the 4 excel spreadsheets he gives you, you know how to do half of the problems of his tests already without using your brain.

So I am an engineering major taking this for the tech breadth requirement. I didn't know anything about real estate or used excel spreadsheets before. There is no homework in the class and no discussions, but he does have clicker questions for participation. All you have to do for this class is pay attention to lecture. Although that sounds easy, sometimes, especially when he's just going through definitions and talking about rules or taxes, it's really boring. However he also talks about his own experiences/old stories which I thought were super interesting and fun to listen to. The midterm and final can be stressful because I wasn't sure what to expect, but he releases practice midterms and finals which are extremely helpful to understand what the questions will be like and what to prepare for. But really, all you have to do is pay attention to lecture, take really good notes, and follow along when he's going through his excel spreadsheets because you will need to know what numbers to plug in and which formulas to use to solve some problems in the exams. It's necessary to study even though they are open notes exams because they are such a time crunch, especially the midterm. Also, do not waste your time doing the recommended problems from the book. They are nothing like the exam questions. I would take this class again, and pay better attention to his lectures because I ended up having to rewatch a lot of the parts I zoned out on when cramming for exams.

Overall this class was informative and good but a bit boring. Professor Karlan and the 2 TA's are very helpful. He has a lot of experience in the real estate world so he will often talk about the previous work he has done. The class is structured with him discussing real-world issues pertaining to the lecture and then reading off of a summary of the chapter. He really wants all of his students to succeed which is great. I imagine in person the class would be a bit more entertaining, but in an online interface, it can be a bit boring.