Kerry Vandell

Dean’s Professor
of Finance

Kerry Vandell, Dean’s Professor of Finance, joined the Merage School faculty in July 2006 as the founding area head of its new academic focus in real estate and Director of its new Center for Real Estate. He comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the Tiefenthaler Endowed Chair in Real Estate and Urban Land Economics, and was former Director of the Center for Urban Land Economics Research and Chair of the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics. He taught previously at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Southern Methodist University.

Professor Vandell has researched and consulted widely in the areas of real estate investment, urban/real estate/environmental economics, mortgage finance, housing economics and policy, and valuation theory, and has written or co-authored more than 80 papers which have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Finance, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Real Estate Economics, the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and the Wharton Real Estate Review. He has presented at conferences and meetings in Asia, Europe and throughout the United States and currently is serving as a board member of the Asian Real Estate Society. He is responsible for development of some of the first models of default risk in the commercial mortgage market, and his recent research on real estate illiquidity provides institutional investors with important tools to ascertain proper allocation to real estate in mixed-asset portfolios. His work distinguishing real estate value from business enterprise value (BEV) in the appraisal of complex real property interests has had international influence on tax assessment practices.

He is currently an NAIOP Distinguished Academic Fellow, a member of the Urban Land Institute, a Fellow and member of the faculty of the Homer Hoyt Advanced Studies Institute, and a past president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). He is on the editorial boards of Real Estate Economics (former co-editor), Land Economics, the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, the Journal of Real Estate Research, Housing Policy Debate, and the International Real Estate Review.

Prior to obtaining his PhD from MIT at the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, Professor Vandell received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at Rice University, and a master’s in city and regional planning at Harvard University.

oc2015