Topic: Real Estate

Economic forecast: Inflation could hit 9% before easing as interest rates rise

|By Kathleen Pender
A shopper reaches above empty shelves at a Target store in Queens, NY.
A shopper reaches over empty shelves at a Target store in Queens, NY, in January 2022. Inflation hit a 40-year high this month. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Don’t be surprised if inflation, which hit a 40-year high of 7.5% in January, spikes even higher over the next few months as the U.S. government’s massive response to the coronavirus pandemic continues to ripple through the economy.

Inflation will likely ease in the second half of the year, but a drop to pre-pandemic levels is not in sight yet, according to a pair of economists who shared their outlook for 2022 and beyond at a virtual conference hosted by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business this week.

“We way overdid it” with monetary and economic stimulus, said Kenneth Rosen, chair of the Fisher Center and a Berkeley Haas professor emeritus. He gave Congress credit for crafting emergency programs—such as enhanced unemployment, stimulus payments and Paycheck Protection Program loans—in 2020, but “I do think the stimulus in 2021 probably was unnecessary and should have been more targeted.”

Once the economy began to reopen, those stimulus programs quickly boosted demand for goods, while manufacturing, transportation and labor-force disruptions constrained supplies. The upshot: Inflation hit 7% in December and 7.5% in January, the highest since February 1982. Rosen said the “slow-moving” Federal Reserve waited too long to curb skyrocketing inflation by raising interest rates.

Inflation could hit 9%

That will change this year, when the Fed finally starts raising rates and fiscal stimulus begins to wear off, said Rosen and co-panelist Richard Barkham, global chief economist with CBRE.

Rosen sees inflation hitting 8% to 9% in a few months, before falling to 4 to 5% by year end. Chief executives he has spoken with recently said they are raising prices. They have labor problems and “don’t think it’s going to end quickly.”

Co-panelist Richard Barkham, global chief economist with CBRE, thinks inflation will peak at 9% in the first half of the year and drop to 3% to 4% by year end as kinks in the supply chain ease up and the reopening of schools and day care facilities let more people re-enter the workforce. But inflation will be “higher and more messy than people currently expect.”

Both economists expect the Fed will raise the short-term federal funds rate, now at 0.25%, by a quarter point four or five times this year. Barkham sees two more hikes next year, Rosen sees four.

Inflation will fall, but not to target rate

The two experts also agreed that after the transitory effects of the pandemic wear off, inflation will fall—but not to the Fed’s 2% target rate because the aging population and immigration constraints will keep an upward pressure on wages. A shift away from fossil fuels along with super-tight labor markets could also keep energy prices a bit higher, Barkham said.

Rosen said the U.S. economy will likely grow 3.5% to 4% this year as international tourism, conventions, and other sectors reopen. Also, individuals and businesses still have about half of the $5 trillion in fiscal stimulus doled out since 2020 sitting idle. Much of that will be spent this year and next, Rosen and Barkham agreed.

Immigration constraints will curb growth

Longer term, neither economist sees growth exceeding 2% annually unless the government bolsters immigration.

“Immigration and inter-regional migration was always the secret weapon of the U.S. economy,” said Barkham, who is a British citizen working in Boston. But legal and illegal immigration have fallen drastically in recent years, due to policies enacted during the Trump administration and Covid-related travel restrictions.

The United States should promote immigration, “but also be more aware of the actual and perceived distributional effects on income groups that have done poorly in the era of globalization,” Barkham said, noting that it’s tricky to put into practice. “I’m not particularly optimistic that we will see that increase in immigration” in the near and medium term. That means economic growth will have to come almost entirely from productivity gains, he said.

Rosen called immigration “the number one thing we can do” to promote long-term economic growth.

As for the stock and bond markets, expect more gyrations. Rising interest rates “will cause indigestion in the financial markets,” Rosen said.

More pain in 2023

Barkham said the real pain may not hit until 2023. Even if you had six rate hikes in 2022, “you still end the year with negative real interest rates,” which means short-term rates will be lower than the inflation rate. Real rates drive the economy and real estate markets, he said, and while they won’t be as deeply negative as they are now, “they will still support higher asset values.”

But by 2023, real interest rates will turn positive, and recent history has shown the U.S. is not very tolerant of them. When rates rose in 2018, there were “two big stock market hiccups,” Barkham said. “The Fed doesn’t want a major correction, but a certain amount of chop is all part of the process of moving out of these emergency policy settings.”

 

 

 

Why Black and Latino homeowners profit less than whites

| by Laura Counts
Credit: Leslee for iStock/Getty Images

New research has found Black and Latino homeowners make significantly lower returns on buying a home than whites, on average. But surprisingly, it’s not because of differences in home prices or appreciation rates in their neighborhoods.

In fact, when it comes to regular home sales, minority sellers realize about the same returns on average as whites. The study found instead that almost all of the disparity is driven by higher rates of foreclosures and other distressed home sales among Blacks and Latinos, which wipes out a huge chunk of potential wealth and lowers average returns.

Amir Kermani
Assoc. Prof. Amir Kermani

“Most of us think of home ownership as an excellent way to build wealth, so I think it’s natural for politicians and policymakers to believe that the best way to reduce the wealth gap is to promote home ownership among minorities,” said Berkeley Haas Assoc. Prof. Amir Kermani, study co-author. “What’s striking is that we found that equalizing rates of first-time home ownership would have almost no effect on the housing wealth gap, whereas helping people keep their homes would make a huge difference.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, co-authored with Francis Wong of NBER, has important implications for housing policy, and also identifies the disturbing and deep-seated disparities in job stability and liquid wealth that underlie the higher foreclosure rates for Blacks and Latinos—even those with higher incomes.

The persistent wealth gap

In the United States, the median white household holds ten times the wealth of the median Black household. But although Black home ownership has increased from 23% in 1920 to 45% in 2021, the wealth gap has barely budged. Kermani was curious as to why decades of policies to increase homeownership hadn’t made more of a difference in closing the wealth gap.

He and Wong harnessed massive datasets linked together by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, capturing 6 million home ownership spells from 1990 to 2017. The data includes Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records with self-reported race and ethnicity from loan applicants, real estate transaction records from data provider ATTOM; credit reports and loan-servicing data from Equifax-McDash; plus loan information from several other government and private sources. The study is the first to estimate the gap in returns on home ownership for Blacks and Latinos using data on individual transactions.

Across the housing market, discrimination has been well-documented, from redlining to unequal tax assessments to unfavorable loans and refinancing deals. And historically, minorities have often faced lower house price growth in their neighborhoods. That’s why Kermani was surprised to find that for regular home sales over the last two decades, average returns were very similar across racial groups—within neighborhoods with many minority homeowners and those that are primarily white. While some individual Black and Latino sellers sold their homes for much lower prices, gentrification pushed prices sky-high in other neighborhoods, bringing up the average. 

Yet averaged across all types of sales annually, Black and Latino homeowners make 3.7 and 2.0 percentage points less than white homeowners, the researchers found. Compounded over ten years, that’s a 44% lower return for Blacks and 22% lower for Latinos. These disparities in returns on home investments exist across all income levels, even the richest one-third of minority homeowners. (The magnitude is greatest among lower-income and single-parent families.)  

Averaged across all types of sales annually, Black and Latino homeowners make 3.7 and 2.0 percentage points less than white homeowners. Compounded over ten years, that’s a 44% lower return for Blacks and 22% lower for Latinos.

Distressed sales

It’s among distressed sales where the chasm emerges. Distressed sales include foreclosures, where a borrower stops making payments on their mortgage and the lender sells the home to recover the balance, as well as short sales, where a lender forces the homeowner to sell for the outstanding mortgage balance. 

Minority homeowners are 5% more likely to experience a distressed sale, and to live in neighborhoods where forced sales carry a steeper price discount, likely because there are fewer buyers, Kermani said. Distressed sales usually carry a price penalty, but even within distressed sales, Black and Latino homeowners make 3.8 and 2.7 percentage points lower returns than white homeowners, respectively. 

“If we could equalize the rate of return on homeownership for Blacks and whites—without any increase in home ownership—we would reduce the Black/white housing wealth gap by about 40% at retirement,” said Kermani. “If we were able to equalize both home purchases and the rate of return on ownership, we’d reduce the gap by 50%.”

Less job security, fewer assets

So why are minorities so much more likely to lose their homes in forced sales? It’s not because they take on more debt to buy them, and although differences in income and overall wealth play a role, they’re not the primary driver, the study found. For Blacks in particular, the researchers found a huge gap in liquid assets—cash or its equivalent—that accelerates from age 50 on. They also found that Blacks and Latinos are much more likely to lose their jobs than whites, across all sectors, education levels, geographic locations, and income levels.

“That was what surprised me the most: Even Black households with income over a hundred thousand dollars are still about 5% more likely to experience a layoff,” Kermani said. “The combination of higher job instability and fewer liquid assets makes people very vulnerable to a temporary shock, and increases the chances of losing all the wealth they’ve accumulated in their house.”

The researchers found that controlling for liquid assets and income shocks explains one-third of the higher mortgage delinquency for Blacks, and nearly half the difference for Latinos. Kermani said he hopes to dig deeper into the causes of the layoff disparities in future research.

Policy implications

“What’s clear is that the main problem seems to be rooted in the labor market, and the main fix has to be creating more stable jobs and ways to build liquid assets,” he said. “But in the short term, one solution is more flexible mortgage contracts and more mortgage modifications.”

The researchers estimated that receiving a modification after three months of failing to make mortgage payments can reduce the likelihood of a foreclosure by 37 percentage points, and increase a homeowner’s average annual returns by nearly 9 percentage points.

MBA team wins 2021 UT Austin Real Estate Competition

| by Natasha Payés
Group of male MBA students and woman faculty advisor holding big check
The Haas MBA team wins first place and $10,000 in prize money. (From L-R: Ian MacLean, Alex Dragten, Abby Franklin (faculty advisor), Carson Goldman, Andrew Johnson, Fukang Peng, and Travis Kauzer.)

Converting an office building into a life science center to lease to medical and biotech companies landed a team of Berkeley Haas MBA students a first place win at the 2021 UT Austin Real Estate Competition. 

The competition was held Thursday, Nov. 18 and hosted by the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. 

Team members include Carson Goldman, Andrew Johnson, Ian MacLean, Alex Dragten, all MBA 22, Fukang Peng, and Travis Kauzer, both EWMBA 22.

Haas bested 19 other teams from top U.S. business schools including Columbia, Yale, Wharton, NYU Stern, and University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and won $10,000 in prize money. This is Haas’ third first place win at this competition in the last four years. 

MBA teams were tasked with creating a business plan for a building with a single tenant whose lease was about to expire. They had to consider maximizing risk-adjusted returns and demonstrate an understanding of macroeconomic trends, including the effects of inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Haas MBA team decided to convert the building into a life science center to attract multiple tenants and maximize high returns.

Team lead Carson Goldman credited the team’s win to practicing case presentations every week this semester and to work they did with their faculty advisors.

“Our coaches Bill Falik and Abby Franklin provided constant feedback and guidance and were wholly committed to this competition,” Goldman said. “Our alumni were just as important as they had volunteered weekly to judge our practice cases and offer constructive criticism,” he added.

“It’s very gratifying to see our students progress over the semester and to win first place,” said Haas Lecturer Bill Falik. “We’ve had victories, but to win first place in three out of the four years at this national competition–this has never been done before.”

Oakland firestorm escape fuels Prof. Nancy Wallace’s research on climate risk

| by Laura Counts

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the Oakland Hills firestorm, which occurred on the hillsides of northern Oakland and southeastern Berkeley, California, over the weekend of October 19–20, 1991.

Chimneys of homes destroyed in the Oakland Hills by fire are visible beyond the black, charred trunks of trees also consumed by the firestorm which swept through the area in Oakland, Ca., Oct. 22, 1991. (AP Photo/Olga Shalygin)

Thirty years ago, Professor Nancy Wallace and her husband scrambled into their car with their family cat and a few belongings and fled for their lives as the Oakland Hills Firestorm roared through their neighborhood. The heat from the fire, fueled by dry pine needles and the Diablo winds, was so intense that within an hour almost 800 buildings were in flames.

Prof. Nancy Wallace
Prof. Nancy Wallace

“By the time we drove out, we were already encircled by fire and couldn’t go down the hill, but there were zero police or fire trucks on the scene. At the top of our street, I wanted to go right and my husband wanted to go left, and unfortunately I won,” said Wallace, who was at the time a new assistant professor with a six-year-old son, who luckily had stayed over at a friend’s house. “That’s when a car came speeding out and said if you go one inch farther, you’re going to die. Tom had to turn around on the rooftop garage of a house engulfed in flames…There were people ahead of us on motorcycles who were on fire. That’s not something you ever want to see.”

They made it out, but 25 people died, about 150 were injured, and about 2,900 homes were burned in California’s third deadliest wildfire. Wallace, who went on to become one of the country’s foremost experts on mortgage markets, has been haunted by it ever since. “We were told this was a hundred-year event, but my street had burned three times before,” she said. “Lots of places in California have burnt multiple times. And yet we build back.”

As wildfires bordering developed areas in the Western U.S., Australia, and around the world grow increasingly frequent and intense, Wallace has been crisscrossing the country and globe, presenting to government, business, and academic groups about the massive financial risk fires pose to the housing, real estate, and insurance markets—and to investors and homeowners. She has developed a new framework to quantify and evaluate the risk not only of wildfires, but also floods and other extreme weather events.

“The markets aren’t priced for climate change, and the situation is dire,” said Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate and Capital Markets, chair of the Berkeley Haas Real Estate Group, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. “Given my experience, I had an incentive to figure that out. I just didn’t have the data.”

“The markets aren’t priced for climate change, and the situation is dire.” – Prof. Nancy Wallace

Her recent working paper, co-authored by Prof. Richard Stanton; Paulo Isser, PhD 13, MBA 98, director of the Haas Real Estate & Financial Markets Lab; and Carles Vergara-Alert, MFE 04, PhD 08, now of Spain’s IESE Business School, is based on a massive data crunching effort.

It combines digitized maps on wildfire boundaries, geospatial measures of wind speed, direction and temperatures and humidity; topographical features such as slope and elevation; and vegetative coverage for 1.5 kilometer-square-grids covering all California wildfires from 2000 to 2018. The researchers combined that with data on housing prices, mortgage defaults, household demographics and wealth, and other market indicators.

“This allows us to quantify the risks of loss and the vulnerabilities in the fire insurance and mortgage capital markets, given changing weather patterns,” Wallace said.

Oakland Hills fire aftermath
Photo: Burned cars abandoned on Charing Cross Road in Oakland, Ca., Oct. 21, 1991. The bodies of six people were recovered from this area. One of them was an Oakland battalion fire chief, another an Oakland police officer. (AP Photo/Sal Veder)

Fire insurance rates in California have been skyrocketing, and many companies are refusing to write new policies on homes in particularly risky areas, such as canyons. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of homeowners have been dropped by their insurance companies. Based on Wallace’s analysis, about 1 million California homes are in high or very high-risk areas, with another 2 million to 4.5 million in vulnerable wildland-urban interface zones.

“Without a better pricing model, all the insurance companies can do is cancel the policies,” Wallace says.

Even so, Wallace and her co-workers found that the incentives in the current system are to rebuild: Wildfires have acted as a sort of gentrifying force, with people building back larger and more expensive homes. Homes in fire zones increased in size and value five years after a wildfire, the researchers found.

Now, Wallace is on a campaign to reform the hazard insurance pricing market, advocating for a switch from deterministic pricing—based on maps of past incidents—to more sophisticated probabilistic pricing, based on the probabilities that fires will occur in  hazard zones. She believes the technology she and her collaborators have developed can be applied to estimate climate-change risk on housing and mortgage markets elsewhere.

“We just can’t pretend it’s not real,” she said. “We have no choice but to face it.”

 

Berkeley Haas real estate curriculum gets a climate change makeover

| by Kim Girard
Flooding in the streets of Pensacola, Fla., in September 2020 as Hurricane Sally made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama.  (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The first thing real estate professor Nancy Wallace asked her students to think about last semester was rain.

 “Pick a city like Miami,” said Wallace, chair of the Real Estate Group at Haas. “When it rains in Miami, the sewage treatment plants flood, the water mains back up, and the streets are flooded. The same with Houston. We’re not talking about a hurricane, which would be 10 times worse—just a regular very rainy day. Because the infrastructure in these cities is below sea level, the risk is just huge.”

Nancy Wallace
Prof. Nancy Wallace

And with that intro, students in Wallace’s Real Estate Investment and Sustainability class began to consider the risks for cities that are fundamentally unequipped and slow to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

From flooding to wildfires to rising temperatures and other extreme weather events, climate impacts have rapidly moved from the theoretical future to the most pressing challenges facing the real estate industry today. Wallace, co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at Berkeley Haas, has responded by reshaping the real estate curriculum to focus on sustainability.

“The classes, our research, and everything that we now do will be taught through a lens of sustainability,” said Wallace, the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate and Capital Markets. “We’re addressing how climate change impacts all parts of the industry—from development and building to mortgages and mortgage-related securities to the insurance markets.”

Course changes

The Fisher Center’s real estate program provides both academic and interdisciplinary training in real estate investment, real estate law, and the role of real estate development in the built environment. MBA students, along with students in the College of Environmental Design and Berkeley Law, can earn the Center’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Real Estate (IGCRE). 

Recent curriculum changes impacted two core real estate courses: Real Estate Investment and Sustainability, and Real Estate Finance and Securitization. 

Project work in both classes centers on developments in cities, which occupy 2% of the world’s land mass but consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for 70% of carbon dioxide emissions, according to C40, a network of the world’s megacities addressing climate change. What’s more, most of the world’s urban areas are on coastlines that are at risk from rising sea levels and coastal storms.  

Project work in both classes centers on developments in cities, which occupy 2% of the world’s land mass but consume two-thirds of the world’s energy.

“It’s so important that Haas is making this shift to help students approach these problems and move to solve them from the sustainability side,” said Michele de Nevers, executive director of Sustainability Programs at Haas. 

Bayfair real estate proiect
Students proposed a multilevel garage-based transportation hub for the Bayfair project, which includes street level retail, a shared electric vehicle program, and a solar canopy.

The Real Estate Investment and Sustainability class, which Wallace co-taught with architect Edward McFarlan, examines the challenges and opportunities in creating the next-generation city, including rethinking density, transit, mobility, infrastructure, and equity. 

Last spring, students worked on final team projects centered on sustainable redevelopment of two Bay Area sites: the Stonestown Mall in San Francisco, owned by Brookfield Properties; and the Bayfair Mall in San Leandro, owned by Madison Marquette. 

Students assumed that both sites could be redeveloped with a “blank slate” approach, and their charge was to convert both sites to a mixed-use development with affordable housing and live-work-shop components.

The Bayfair Project, outlined in a class project book Wallace compiled called “Building the Sustainable City,” included ground floor retail, a solar canopy over the garage, a shared electric vehicle program, and EV charging.  Students also recommended installing puzzle lifts, a semi-automatic parking system that moves cars both vertically and horizontally to create more parking space.

Looking back, Kyle Raines, MBA 21, said the project made him understand how ESG and sustainability extend to the community around a project and can help a project thrive in the long term. “Not only will it get good press, but it will help develop land around the project and create momentum,” he said.

Kyle Raines
Kyle Raines said what he learned in the The Real Estate Investment and Sustainability class helped him pitch investors.

What Raines learned in the class also helped him pitch investors when he was starting Crown Point, a real estate private equity fund. “The thing I think that most struck me from the class is how much investors care about ESG and sustainability—how creating that sense of community at that property is not only a competitive advantage, but also the right thing to do,”  he said.

Angus Maguire, MBA 21, said the Bayfair Project helped him better understand the real estate industry and apply what he’d learned in class from the many industry speakers.

“I took the course because I knew I would be working with real estate developers or real estate asset owners sometime in the future in my renewable energy career, so wanted to better understand how they think about project economics,” he said.

Real-world research

In the Real Estate Finance and Securitization course, Wallace, who is teaching the class this semester, draws from real-world research and the students explore real estate market data in depth.

Sabin Ray, MBA 22, said one highlight was learning about Berkeley Law’s recent findings on the City of Berkeley’s well-intentioned Property Assessed Clean Energy Program. The program allowed property owners to borrow money for renewable energy systems or energy efficiency improvements, and make payments through a special assessment to their property tax bills. But the research found that the program raised the property taxes of low-income residents, while underdelivering the promised green benefits.

For their final projects, students in the class will be able to access the electronic S&P Global database through a subscription that the Fisher Center subsidized. The database includes balance sheet, performance, and corporate Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) strategies. Students tap the data to analyze current ESG strategies in the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) industry.

“The purpose of the Fisher Center subsidy is to provide MBA students with very granular firm-level data that connects the dots between performance and sustainability strategies within real estate operating companies,” Wallace said.  

Ray said the sustainability focus of the course appealed to her and that the project finance work will help her as she pursues an impact investing career. “A lot of things we are learning in class I can apply to other areas of financing,” she said.

Prof. Nancy Wallace wins Williamson Award, top Haas faculty honor

| by Laura Counts
Berkeley Haas Prof. Nancy Wallace
Prof. Nancy Wallace

Prof. Nancy Wallace, who uses her deep knowledge of finance and the mortgage market to influence policy to protect the public good, guide UC Berkeley in complex real estate and financial issues, and help launch the careers of students for 35 years, has received the school’s highest faculty honor. 

Wallace is the fifth recipient of the Williamson Award, named after Nobel Laureate and economics professor Oliver Williamson, who passed away last year. The award recognizes Haas faculty members who exemplify all four of the school’s Defining Leadership Principles.

“Nancy’s research has repeatedly questioned received wisdom, pointing out the structural weaknesses in the mortgage markets and recently sounding the alarm on wildfire risks and the urgent need for more sustainable development,” says Dean Ann Harrison. “She works tirelessly for her students and colleagues, the school, and the greater good.” 

Wallace joined Haas in 1986, and is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets, chair of the Real Estate Group, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. She has served on multiple committees advising the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury on financial crises and reform, and for five years was a leader on the Campus Academic Planning and Resource Allocation (CAPRA) committee, for which she won the Berkeley Faculty Service Award in 2019.

Hard-working and thoughtful

In the award nomination, Professors Candi Yano and Richard Stanton wrote that Wallace has made huge contributions without “the slightest thought of personal gain or advancement” and without demanding “recognition for her contributions.” They also noted that she is “almost universally…viewed as the hardest-working, most thoughtful voice on campus on matters of financial analysis, control, and reporting.”

Wallace played an important role at the national level as one of the very few people who warned of the 2008 financial crisis, after she recognized that the entire underlying structure of the mortgage lending market was collapsing. Since then, she has advised the Fed and the Treasury on reforms to the mortgage and banking industries. She has also warned that the mortgage industry remains on shaky ground today.

Beyond herself

In addition to her work for the campus and the federal government, which required nearly weekly flights to the East Coast, Wallace has for two decades taken on much of the administrative burden of running the Fisher Center, including conferences, fundraising to support PhD students and faculty, and collecting an “unparalleled suite of data sources and computational resources,” Stanton noted. 

Under her leadership, the Haas Real Estate Group “is now regarded as the best in the country,” allowing the school to recruit the best new PhDs to its faculty, he said. 

“It is hard to think of anyone who exemplifies (the principle Beyond Yourself) more than Nancy,” Stanton wrote.  

Passionate teacher

A passionate researcher and teacher, Wallace has also given generously to her students and other faculty members, said Yano, who previously served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. For example, when she co-teaches a course with a more junior assistant professor, Wallace often gives them her instructional points (IPs)—which faculty earn for teaching. 

“Despite this, she has still managed to accumulate probably the largest teaching surplus at the Haas School,” Yano wrote. 

“As long-time chair of the Real Estate Group, even if someone drops out of a teaching assignment at the last minute, she views it as so important that core real estate courses are taught well that she will often step in to teach additional courses herself, despite having a surplus equivalent to almost six years of extra teaching.”

Past Williamson Award winners are Prof. Andy Rose, Prof. Toby Stuart, Prof. Teck Ho, and Prof. John Morgan. Recipients are selected by a committee made up of prior winners and the dean. 

Williamson was the winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and was a beloved teacher and leader at Berkeley Haas. He embodied the spirit of the Haas School Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude; Beyond Yourself; and Students Always.

Edward Peterson, BS 58

Spring 2021|By Staff

Real estate mogul

Edward Peterson, BS 58Edward Hinshaw “Big Ed” Peterson, 84, succumbed to MDS on Feb. 17 at his home in Indian Wells, California. Peterson enjoyed a lifelong career in real estate, selling and leasing what he said was “almost every building in the San Francisco financial district.” He also led fundraising efforts for Berkeley and served as chairman of the UC Berkeley Foundation and later as trustee emeritus. Read a full obituary.