“Don’t Fear A Crash”: Dr Andrew Wilson
A rapid fire tete-a-tete with the leading Australian economist and founder of My Housing Market.
By Terry Christodoulou
Wed, Apr 21, 2021 8:59am
3 min
3 min
Kanebridge News: Let’s cut straight to it – your response to the almost daily diatribe being espoused by the naysayers in regards to the national housing market, specifically Sydney, and predictions about its alleged imminent failure?
Dr Andrew Wilson: Such attention-seeking crash predictions have consistently proved to be wrong in the past, and will again prove just as wrong this time. The prospect for the preconditions for falling house prices – sharp increases in interest rates – has never been more remote.
KN: How do you view market movement in the major capitals the next 12 months?
AW: Strong growth in all capitals – Melbourne, Sydney and Perth top performers all likely higher by 10%. Price’s growth will likely decline over the year as affordability falls through higher prices with flat interest rates and low incomes growth.
KN: And the residential rental market?
AW: Lower vacancy rates and higher rents for houses compared to units generally across the board.
KN: Perennial question then – advice for those trying to get into the property market this year?
AW: Maximise your buying potential. Be prepared to compromise. Be prepared to be disappointed. Consider buying first and then selling. As always, consult a financial advisor.
KN: How important is data use in property and how can a novice best apply such sets in regards to a purchase?
AW: Reliable, real-time data provides the foundation for property decision making – enhanced by objective, rational commentary that joins the dots.
KN: What do you see as the most important data consideration(s) when assessing movement in a specific market?
AW: Local supply and demand factors, matched with the overarching macroeconomic drivers and real-time market activity measures of prices and volumes.
KN: Clearance rates across the country, specifically Sydney, have recently hit record highs — how do you analyse such numbers, given this is unprecedented?
AW: The Sydney market is responding to high levels of affordability with prices – despite recent strong growth – still at the levels of four years ago. Over that period mortgage rates have fallen by over 1% and incomes have increased by over 6%, giving buyers the capacity to pay more for property. With credit restrictions and coronavirus impediments now eased – the market has clear air to catch up.
KN: Your take on why we’re a property engaged culture?
AW: High aspiration for home ownership and investment underpinned by a strong financial sector and enhanced taxation benefits.
KN: To those that might not know you – you formerly worked as a chief economist for the Domain group, Australian Property Monitors before launching My Housing Market.
AW: Well, my background is in the science and philosophy of housing market economics — I was an academic researcher and lecturer at RMIT University before I worked my way to chief economist at Domain Group and, now, running my own offering and analytics through My Housing Market.
KN: What was the impetus to launch My Housing Market – and how does the platform differentiate itself from what else is out there?
AW: My Housing Market combines high-level, comprehensive, real-time data insights into property markets with detailed, credible and reliable expert commentary. The ‘what’ and the ‘why’.
KN: What is it about property that you’re drawn to?
AW: I have to live somewhere.
KN: Well played …
Kanebridge News uses real-time data supplied by My Housing Market.
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A student-run real estate investment fund is proving that hands-on experience can deliver real results. Managing $12 million in equity, the undergraduate team recently achieved a 65% gross return on its first property sale, highlighting the growing role of experiential learning in preparing the next generation of real estate professionals.
By
Tue, Aug 4, 2026 5 min
5 min
On a recent summer Sunday afternoon, Brooks Hiller was hunkered over his laptop at his apartment in Chicago, dialing in to hour three of a marathon series of conference calls on real-estate deals.
The 21-year-old isn’t a professional, and he doesn’t make a dime from this work. He is a rising senior at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he leads a team of 20 undergraduates who manage about $12 million in equity.
Those students operate their own real-estate investment business, called Sample Gates Management, named for the Gothic-style limestone arches that are the gateway to the Bloomington campus.
Unlike the many student investment clubs that deploy university money or rely on donations, the Indiana group raises funds from third parties and invests in properties across the country, such as apartment developments and industrial parks.
As a high schooler, Hiller was so enamored with the program—by most accounts, the undergraduate-run real-estate investment group that manages the most capital—that he chose to attend Indiana with hopes of being a part of it.
“Students get the experience, the school gets a better education for their students, and the investors are making their money back and get to be a part of the program again,” Hiller said. “I really wanted to be part of that.”
The group’s success is emblematic of changes transforming both higher education and the real-estate industry.
An industry that once revolved around information shared at private clubs or events has become a highly digitized landscape. It’s now flooded with standardized public-market data, so much so that undergraduates can readily peer inside and participate on nearly equal footing.
Meanwhile, colleges in recent decades have championed what is called “experiential learning,” encouraging students to do the hands-on work that will teach them the practical job skills they can’t learn in traditional classroom settings. Plus, dozens of universities now offer real-estate degrees, minors or concentrations for undergraduates.
“At its core, this program wouldn’t have existed 30 years ago,” said Harvard University real-estate professor Avis Devine.
This summer, Sample Gates Management sold its first investment, an industrial warehouse development in Indianapolis. In about 16 months, the fund earned a 65% gross profit on that property.
“That’s a really fantastic return in this environment,” one that would be “good for sort of any professional firm, not just students,” said Tim Morris, a member of the board responsible for approving the students’ investments, who is a founder and co-managing partner of the real-estate firm Proprium Capital Partners.
That property was an “easy yes” investment, Tom Peck, the students’ faculty adviser, recalled. It would diversify the group’s investment portfolio, and a reliable tenant was committed to leasing the building once it was finished, Peck said.
Most of the fund remains tied up in investments, making it difficult to gauge exactly how well it is performing overall.
A decade ago, there were only a few student-managed real-estate funds in the country. Today, there are at least 18, and two more are set to launch this school year, according to Mariya Letdin, a real-estate professor at Florida State University who has researched student-managed investment funds and advises one herself.
And yet, although a program like Sample Gates is an attractive resume line that provides unique experience among undergraduates, it isn’t necessarily a launching pad to help students secure jobs. Because of Wall Street’s summer-internship pipelines and early recruiting timelines, many of the 20 seniors in the group have already secured full-time jobs at global giants before they even touch Sample Gates funds.
In fact, the students’ professional experience—some of them participate in internships all three summers of college—is often a boon for Sample Gates. Students’ stints at institutional shops have left them with a “networking mindset” that “snowballs very quickly into a really, really good Rolodex,” Morris said.
At the Kelley School, where currently 278 students are majoring in real estate, faculty picked only 20 to manage the private-equity fund. The rising seniors were selected from Kelley’s already competitive roughly 60-student commercial real-estate workshop, in which students analyze deals and pitch them to mock committees.
In 2022, for the group’s first round of fundraising, Sample Gates raised $4.2 million from 46 investors, 40% more than their goal of $3 million. Last year’s cohort raised $7.8 million from 74 investors in the second round of fundraising, with one investor forking over $700,000. Some investors put money into both funds.
Many of the investors are Indiana alumni now working in the real-estate industry themselves. They expect the students to return a profit, but they are also enthusiastic about fostering the young program and meeting standout students.
The student managers screen between three and eight deals each week, which could mean they evaluate up to 400 potential investments a year. However, between 2023 and 2025, they selected only 12 investments, ranging in location from Indiana to Arizona.
Once a potential investment passes an initial screening, a team builds financial models and meets with prospective partners to pressure-test the viability of a deal.
For students to move forward with an investment, they must present it to their investment committee, a board of 10 seasoned real-estate executives. The committee has to sign off on all deals, and they reject roughly a third of the ones the undergraduates bring to the table.
And if the students think they can pitch an investment without getting their eyes on the physical property—regardless of where it is located— they would best think again.
Some observers predict that students might be disappointed when they start their full-time jobs because of the shift from doing the highest-level work of managing a fund to being a lowly analyst at a large firm.
“To have all of these skill sets in a short period of time and then to go be an associate for Blackstone would be mentally defeating,” said Rhett Trees, an investor in Sample Gates and Indiana alum who is the chief executive of a Denver-based real-estate private-equity firm.
