Austin, Texas - On Friday, November 15, six talented graduate students from the Haas School at University of California at Berkeley won 1st place - a prize of $5000, at the McCombs' inaugural Real Estate Finance Challenge, the largest graduate real estate finance competition in the country. A host of schools that included, Wharton, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, Columbia, NYU, Kellogg, Chicago, UCLA, and Cornell traveled to Austin and competed in front of judges from Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, among others. 

UT-McCombs won 2nd place, and Harvard Business School took 3^rd place. This competition represented the most talented pool of graduate real estate students to ever assemble in the country. Each school entered a team of 4 to 6 graduate students and made a 20-minute presentation to a panel of real estate professionals from some of the most prominent investment banks, financing institutions and development firms around the nation.