Executive Education
AHI offers affordable housing courses to further your knowledge of housing ecosystems and value chains. With decades of experience in affordable housing education, we can customize instruction to the needs of an entity, offering bespoke workshops, symposia, or strategic retreats to build the skills necessary for creating impact.
We also offer recurring courses, and participate as guest lecturers, in Executive Education courses at Harvard Business School, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Oxford Masters in Sustainable Urban Development. Courses are expertly honed to prepare students for a range of obstacles that arise in affordable housing finance and development, and we consistently receive positive feedback from very satistified course participants.
HARVARD GRADUATED SCHOOL OF DESIGN COURSE: How to develop Multifamily in Any Urban Environment
This custom-built course, designed and taught by David A. Smith, locates affordable housing not just in a US context, but as an emerging global asset class and focus of policy imperatives.
Through this course, drawing on lessons from dozens of developing and emerging countries around the world, you will learn about affordable housing as urban infrastructure and the challenges of developing and financing through a real-life, multi-part case study. We demonstrate the universal aspects of affordable housing and the crucial details of its local application.
You will also learn:
- The universal fundamentals, principles, and practices of affordable housing, and how they can be adapted by place, policy and laws—enabling you to analyze the housing models needed in your changing city.
- How to frame affordable housing to external stakeholders as an imperative issue to which they should act to help.
- How to understand the pathways by which political or market desires can be converted into successful housing developments.
- How to recognize development and redevelopment opportunities in an urban context.
- How to identify financial and subsidy resources that, if tapped, turn uneconomic eyesores into profitable development opportunities.
The course is offered twice a year: Fall (two intense in-person days, in Cambridge), with a US-based case study, and Spring (four three-hour sessions, virtual), where the case study comes from a different non-US country every year.
For more information, click here.
REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT FUNDAMENTALS
This Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education program, also taught personally by David A. Smith and drawing on his 48 years in affordable housing, lays out the real estate development process in structural terms. Whether you are a rising executive migrating in a new field, or a seasoned real estate professional from a related discipline (e.g. architecture, urban planning, law, or regulation), this course organizes your experience into a framework. It shows why and how properties become candidates for development, and lays out in detail the sequence of investigation, decisions, resource and financing assembly, and changing risks – everything from initial conceptualization to successful offtake. Nor does the teaching shy away from the pitfalls, unexpected events, and risk management or risk mitigation steps that are just as important.
The course is offered twice a year: Summer (two intense days in-person, in Cambridge) and Spring (four two-hour sessions, virtual).
For more information, click here.
REAL ESTATE FINANCE FUNDAMENTALS
This Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education program, a bookend to Real Estate Development Fundamentals, taught personally by David A. Smith and drawing on his 48 years at the forefront of affordable housing finance, lays out the principles of finance in visual and memorable ways that will resonate with experienced professionals orient aspirational developers seeking to navigate ‘the money store’ of the capital markets. All the principles of capital assembly – what type of money, what time in the development process, wherein the capital stack – are laid out in a clear, interactive approach that will demystify the process of financing real estate, regardless of the participants’ prior experience.
Whatever context you’re arriving from, this course will enhance your ability to understand how fundamentals relate to your primary role as a member of a development or investment team.
To register today, click here.