Greater Des Moines middle and high school students are gaining an education in commercial real estate, thanks to a couple of programs involving CREW Iowa.

The inaugural program kicked off last year and involved a partnership with CREW Iowa and Community Youth Concept’s after-school program for girls at Urbandale Middle School. The idea of letting young girls in on the secret that they could have careers in commercial real estate came from Jennifer Schumann, general counsel for Hubbell Realty Co., who borrowed from a similar program she was involved with in Chicago.

Schumann said it took too many years for her to learn the differences between services performed by architects and engineers, for example, and that included understanding that they were career choices for young women.

This year, Carrie Woerdeman, vice president of operations for T&L Properties, is leading the program for CREW Iowa. She said response to the partnership with Community Youth Concepts as well as a separate program with R&R Realty at Waukee’s APEX school have been so successful that they will be continued in 2019.

“In fact, the board of CREW Iowa has shown such a commitment to continuing and expanding our educational outreach that they will be voting to amend our bylaws to allow for creation of a new education and outreach committee,” Woerdeman said.  

This year, the program with Community Youth Concepts ran from Jan. 18 to March 8 (it was scheduled to avoid soccer and other spring sports seasons). 

The program ran for six sessions and the students were assigned the task of creating a retail development project. They met with Toney and Sarah Chem, owners of 5 Borough Bagels in Clive, who told how they opened their shop. Later, students visited the establishment to get an idea of its location, layout and design, and to sample the menu.

To generate the initial financing for their projects, the students played Commercial Real Estate Jeopardy.

With project money in hand, students spent the final weeks of the program selecting spaces to lease, creating mock startup budgets, negotiating terms of financing for the additional money needed to start up the businesses, designing their spaces, and putting together presentations for the group. 

The projects were a pizza/pickle restaurant called Pickza, a 4D movie theater and an open art studio.

Throughout the process, students learned about the variety of careers that land under the heading of commercial real estate, Woerdeman said.

At Waukee’s APEX school, CREW Iowa and R&R Realty teamed up for an eight-week session that focused on commercial real estate careers. 

Students were broken into three groups of four members each and given the assignment of developing a concept for one or more city-owned lots in Des Moines’ Market District. They took a walking tour of the East Village and Market District, met with Hubbell Realty Co.’s Kris Saddoris and learned about development projects in Pleasant Hill from the city’s community development director, Madeline Sturms. They also toured Holmes Murphy’s new office building in Waukee and learned about development financial statements from Carrie Kruse, an economic development specialist with the city of Des Moines.

In the end, they shadowed commercial real estate professionals, which proved to be the most popular component of the program, Woerdeman said.