REIT Fund Overview

REIT = Real Estate Investment Trusts

The REIT fund is an exciting opportunity for graduate and undergraduate McCombs School of Business students to engage in an educational, real-world forum on the real estate and asset management industries. Competitively-selected MBA Portfolio Managers and undergraduate analysts take a training course covering active portfolio management and fundamental REIT security analysis during the first semester of their year-long commitment to the fund. Students apply their training and overall McCombs coursework to the task of constructing a portfolio of US REITs designed to outperform an unmanaged market-weight REIT index, as measured by the Dow Jones U.S. Select REIT Index (“the Index”). The REIT Fund presents selected students with learning opportunities designed to integrate their McCombs education with the “real world” experience of managing a portfolio of publicly traded REITs. It provides the students with the relevant academic foundation, and introduces them to managing real money in the U.S. public REIT market. The students’ exposure to industry professionals (through the fund’s soon-to-be-completed Advisory Board and Investment Counselors program) augments their educational experience, and promotes ties between McCombs and the business community.

The REIT fund was started in 2007 with an initial investment from part of the Real Estate Finance and Investment Center's savings, and operates under the umbrella of the well-established MBA Investment Fund at the McCombs School. The fund is managed by a team of McCombs MBA students supported by McCombs undergraduates and overseen by McCombs finance faculty and an outside advisory board. The REIT Fund is unique in the business school because it gives top McCombs MBA and undergraduate finance majors real-money investment experience in a shared classroom environment.

The McCombs REIT Fund is: 

• Focused exclusively on U.S.-based REIT securities
• Benchmarked against an unmanaged market-weight REIT Index
• Managed by a team of five to eight MBA portfolio managers from our Real Estate MBA program
• Supported by a team of ten to fourteen undergraduate analysts, competitively selected from McCombs undergraduate finance majors
• Overseen on a day-to-day basis by McCombs finance faculty members, including Professors Sheridan Titman, Greg Hallman, and Jay Hartzell
• Advised by an outside Advisory Board comprised of senior real estate executives