Storied Louisiana retail developers fund real estate scholarship at Tulane
When Jimmy Maurin and Roger Ogden, both graduates of Louisiana State University and Tulane, decided to leave the professional world and start building retail centers in 1975, neither of them had any experience in real estate.
“We thought it was a great opportunity and just started from scratch. It was something you could do back then that today would be impossible,” Maurin said.
Their entrepreneurial venture would end up managing more than 100 properties in Louisiana and the Gulf region and become known as Stirling Properties. But even if the pair had yearned to get involved in real estate after graduating high school, no universities offered real estate majors.
“There were no real estate programs in colleges in the Sixties and Seventies, and they remained rare into the Nineties. But that’s changed now,” Maurin said.
He and Ogden became involved in the ICSC Foundation’s college partnership program five years ago, establishing a $5,000 annual scholarship and an annual trip for five stellar LSU students to attend the RECon show in Las Vegas. Last week the pair’s Maurin Ogden Tulane Real Estate Fund dedicated $10,000 a year for similar academic awards over the next 10 years to Tulane University in New Orleans, making it the 36th college in the ICSC partnership.
Awards will be available to real estate students at both Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and the School of Architecture, which offers a masters in real estate development.
Just last year, the Deloitte Commercial Real Estate Outlook reported that the commercial real estate industry appeared unable to convince enough millennials and Generation Z’ers to fill the many positions being vacated by baby boomers. But Maurin maintains that more and more business-oriented students are looking toward real estate as a career these days.
“If you looked at what fields MBA students wanted to enter 15 or 20 years, real estate would not be in top three or four. Today, if you look at MBA grads or undergrads, real estate is in the top three picks of 90 percent of them,” said Maurin, who performed an executive residence teaching real estate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Maurin feels that commercial real estate’s entrepreneurial nature has great appeal to young graduates put off by institutional corporate settings.
“When you look at ICSC members, 90% are small companies with 5 to 10 people, and there are so many individual paths to take, “Maurin said. “You can go to work for Simon, you can go to work for Stirling, or you can start your own shop. So real estate is very high on the list of top young students.”