Longwood University’s College of Business and Economics students take FINA 455 Real Estate Finance & Investment if they plan to pursue a Real Estate concentration. This specialized curriculum equips students with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel in the real estate industry. By completing this concentration, students will be prepared for diverse career opportunities in real estate investment, mortgage banking, property management, sales, appraisal, and development.
The Real Estate Finance & Investment course is designed to expose students to the complete life cycle of an investment decision from ownership entities, tax impacts on investment decisions, capital decisions, maintaining value during ownership, risk analysis, asset valuation, and fundamentals that affect property disposition decisions. This course also provides an in-depth analysis of secondary mortgage markets, derivatives, portfolios, and various types of real estate investment funds.
Dr. Yiwei Zhao, Assistant Professor of Finance, recently invited Kyle Yeatman to visit his Real Estate Finance & Investment class and talk about the residential real estate field. Yeatman is the owner and president of The Yeatman Group, as well as an alumnus of Longwood University with a double major in business administration with a marketing concentration and pre-law. The Yeatman Group is a Richmond-based real estate team of professionals specializing in buying, selling, and negotiating transactions and investment properties in the Richmond and Farmville areas, with plans to move into other markets this year. You may have seen their logo on the floor of the new Joan Perry Brock Center.
Yeatman's journey into the real estate field began after a pivotal encounter with Ryan Homes during a Longwood career fair. Reflecting on his post-graduate experiences, Yeatman offered reassurance to students, emphasizing that uncertainty is a common part of the journey. He recounted his own lack of clarity about his career path, stating, “Don’t freak out if you don’t know because I had absolutely zero idea of where I was going to go.”
He talked about the importance of positioning oneself for success and actively seeking out opportunities, “A lot of luck comes into play, and it happens to everybody that’s out there. You just have to put yourself in a position to have that luck happen to you. How did I put myself in positions for good things to happen to me? I wasn’t smarter than anybody. I didn’t necessarily have any more skill sets than anybody. The only difference is I made sure I was always at the additional functions to be in front of the right person. You never know when your opportunity door is going to open, and it’s usually when you least expect it or are ready for it. Make sure you’re in a position to not miss when that opportunity strikes because it might not open again.”
As he described the success of The Yeatman Group, he offered a powerful message of encouragement to students, “The reason that it worked is because we believed in it and we didn’t let other people write the story for us. We were determined that we were going to be the authors of our own journey.” The Yeatman Group, a division of Long & Foster Realtors, is the No. 1 selling real estate team in Virginia as well as the No. 1 team at Long & Foster in units sold, volume, and GCI in the region and in the company footprint.
More information about the Real Estate concentration can be found here: https://www.longwood.edu/business/business-administration/#RealEstate. For more information or to sit in on one of our classes, email the Executive Director of CBE Student Success, David Zirkle, at zirkledw@longwood.edu.