Felipe Ernst Georgetown University Professor: Building Real Developers, Not Theorists

Most graduate-level real estate programs teach development from textbooks. The Georgetown University course I teach starts from a different premise: the best way to learn multifamily value-add is to study the actual deals, the ones that closed and the ones that did not. Felipe Ernst is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, teaching the Multifamily Value-Add Investment and Development course, and he brings an active development practice directly into the classroom. I am also founder of Capitol Rock Partners (formerly Ernst Equities), a vertically integrated real estate firm that has grown from a single three-unit acquisition in 2015 to more than 2,300 rental units, all within the Washington, D.C. metro region. The course exists because theory alone cannot prepare someone to execute in a high-barrier-to-entry market.

Who Is Felipe Ernst, Georgetown University Professor?

Felipe Ernst is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, teaching the Multifamily Value-Add Investment and Development course. I also founded and lead Capitol Rock Partners, a vertically integrated real estate firm focused on value-add multifamily acquisitions and development in the Washington, D.C. metro region. The firm started in 2015 with a single three-unit acquisition in Shaw, funded by a mortgage on my parents' house. That deal determined the trajectory.

Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies houses the real estate program where the course lives. It is a practitioner-oriented program designed for working professionals and graduate students who want to understand development from the inside. My role is to deliver that inside perspective, not to summarize what other developers have done.

The course does not teach residential sales, commercial brokerage, or general real estate finance. It covers one thing in depth: how to acquire, improve, stabilize, and exit value-add multifamily properties in a market where entry is hard and execution separates winners from everyone else.

What the Adjunct Professor Role at Georgetown Means

The adjunct professor role at Georgetown is a practitioner-led position, not a tenure-track academic appointment. I teach one specialized course: Multifamily Value-Add Investment and Development. The curriculum is built around real case studies drawn from our firm's project history, covering the full vertical integration, from acquisition underwriting through construction management, leasing, and asset stabilization.

Most full-time professors at research universities publish peer-reviewed papers and teach broad survey courses. That work is valuable, but it is different from what this course delivers. The course I teach prioritizes application over theory. Students do not read academic abstracts about capitalization rates. They underwrite a real property, evaluate its deferred maintenance, estimate the cost of renovations, project post-improvement rents, and decide whether the numbers support an acquisition.

This distinction matters because the students who enroll are not looking for a survey of real estate as an asset class. They are looking for a blueprint. They want to know how a deal actually gets done, where the money comes from, how construction is managed, what happens when a renovation runs over budget, and how you stabilize a property for refinancing or sale. The course answers those questions because the person teaching them has answered them in practice.

The 2024 Tropaia Award recognized this approach with the most outstanding faculty member designation at Georgetown's School of Continuing Studies. The award reflects a specific judgment: students found the course valuable because it was grounded in real execution.

What Sets the Georgetown Multifamily Development Course Apart

Several structural features distinguish this course from other real estate programs.

The instructor is an active, currently operating multifamily developer. Many real estate courses are taught by retired executives or professionals who left the industry years ago. Their experience is real, but it is historical. The market they describe no longer exists. My course draws on projects our firm has underwritten, renovated, or walked away from in the past twelve months. The capitalization rates, construction costs, rent comps, and regulatory conditions are current.

The curriculum is built around case studies from our firm's own portfolio. Every deal we present includes the actual underwriting spreadsheet, the actual renovation scope, and the actual financial outcome. Students see the good decisions and the missteps. They learn that value-add investing is not a formula, it is a series of judgments about physical condition, market timing, property management capability, and exit strategy. A case study from a textbook cannot teach that. A case study from a real project can.

The focus is exclusively on workforce and affordable housing in the Washington, D.C. metro area. This is not a general real estate course. It does not cover suburban office parks, retail strip centers, or industrial warehouses. It covers multifamily housing in a high-barrier-to-entry market where zoning, construction costs, and political dynamics create a specific set of challenges and opportunities. Students who want to work in this market leave with a usable mental map.

The course emphasizes value-add strategies that produce both financial returns and community impact. The two are not in conflict. Acquiring an underperforming building, making targeted improvements, improving management, and stabilizing the asset creates value for investors and better housing for residents. That is the core thesis of our firm and the core lesson of the course.

The Principles Behind Teaching Value-Add Investing

Value-add investing in multifamily real estate follows a repeatable logic. You acquire a property that is underperforming relative to its potential. The underperformance can come from physical deferred maintenance, below-market rents, poor property management, or some combination of these factors. Your job is to identify the gap, estimate the cost of closing it, execute the improvements, and stabilize the property at a higher net operating income.

The course teaches this logic through a specific sequence. Students learn to identify value-add opportunities in the DC market by analyzing local supply and demand trends, vacancy patterns, and rent growth trajectories. They learn to underwrite the improvements: what a kitchen renovation costs per unit, what a new roof costs for a mid-rise building, how long a renovation timeline runs before rent growth kicks in. They learn to manage construction risk by building contingency budgets and staging renovations to minimize vacancy loss. They learn to execute the business plan by coordinating leasing, property management, and capital improvements in sequence.

The teaching is grounded in live market dynamics, not theoretical models. When we cover rent growth assumptions, we use actual comps from similar buildings in the same submarket. When we discuss construction costs, we reference line items from our recent renovations. When we talk about exit strategies, we examine cap rates from recent DC-area multifamily transactions. The numbers change every semester. That is the point.

Students also confront the trade-offs that do not appear in a textbook. Should you renovate units while they are occupied or wait for vacancies? Does a curb-appeal upgrade produce a higher ROI than a unit interior renovation? How do you underwrite a building when comparable sales are thin? These are judgment calls, not math problems. The course gives students a framework for making them.

When to Choose This Hands-On Education Approach

This course fits a specific profile. You are interested in multifamily real estate as an asset class. You want to learn value-add from someone who is actively doing it. You plan to work in or invest in the Washington, DC metro area. And you are at a point in your career, early to mid-career, or in a graduate program, where actionable skills matter more than a general survey.

The course is part of Georgetown SCS's comprehensive real estate program, which offers a range of courses for different professional needs. If you want a broad overview of all real estate sectors, office, retail, industrial, hospitality, that program exists, but it is not this course. If you want a deep dive into a single acquisition strategy in a single market, this course is the right fit.

Consider your learning style. Do you learn best by studying real cases and making real decisions? Do you want direct access to an instructor who can explain why a deal worked and why another one did not? Do you need a network that includes active developers, lenders, and operators in the DC market? Then this approach works.

Consider your career goals. If you plan to work in multifamily acquisitions, development, or asset management at a firm that operates in high-barrier-to-entry markets, the course builds directly toward that outcome. If you plan to work in a different city or a different asset class, the principles of underwriting and execution still transfer, but the market-specific detail will matter less.

Our team responds to inquiries about the course and program. Enrollment details are available through Georgetown SCS's real estate program page.

Common Misconceptions About Practitioner-Led Teaching

A widely held belief is that adjunct professors are less invested in student outcomes than full-time faculty. The 2024 Tropaia Award from Georgetown's School of Continuing Studies contradicts that assumption. The award is given to the most outstanding faculty member in the real estate program, based on student evaluations and peer review. It reflects a level of teaching commitment that matches the intensity of the subject matter. Students who take this course consistently rate it highly because they can see the direct link between what they learn and what happens in the market.

Some assume value-add investing is too speculative for a university classroom. In fact, value-add is a well-established institutional strategy executed by pension funds, REITs, and private equity firms. It is not a niche gamble. The risk lies in poor execution, not in the strategy itself. That is precisely why a practitioner-led course is valuable: students learn to evaluate execution risk, not just spreadsheets.

Workforce housing is often conflated with affordable housing governed by Section 8 or Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. The two overlap but are not the same. Workforce housing targets households earning 80 to 120 percent of area median income, teachers, nurses, police officers, young professionals, who earn too much for most subsidy programs but cannot afford market-rate rents in a city like Washington, DC. The course addresses both the financial mechanics and the regulatory environment of this segment, which is a distinct niche from subsidized affordable housing.

Many think real estate education must be broad and generic to be useful. The opposite is true for students who know what they want to do. Specialization in high-barrier-to-entry markets produces more actionable skills than a survey course that covers every asset class at 30,000 feet. If you know you want to develop multifamily housing in DC, a course that focuses exclusively on that topic is worth more than a general real estate certificate.

How My Development Background Informs Every Class

The course does not exist separately from the firm. They are the same operation. Every semester, I bring the deals we are working on into the classroom. The underwriting models we use are the same models the students learn to build. The renovation timelines we manage are the same timelines they plan. The asset management decisions we make, when to hold, when to sell, when to refinance, become case studies before they are even completed.

This creates a feedback loop that benefits both sides. Students get live data and real-world context. The firm gets questions from students who are not yet conditioned to think inside the industry's assumptions. A student once asked why we budgeted for a new roof on a building where the roof had ten years of useful life remaining. The answer, that the existing roof was poorly installed and would cause ongoing maintenance issues, led to a better underwriting practice in the firm. That kind of exchange does not happen in a course taught from a textbook.

My full track record from a three-unit rowhouse to a portfolio of over 2,300 units is the foundation of the course. The firm's vertical integration model, covering acquisitions, development, construction, asset management, and property management under one platform, means I can speak to every stage of a deal from direct experience. When a student asks about construction cost overruns, I have examples from our own projects. When they ask about leasing velocity, I have the lease-up data from our own buildings.

Why vertical integration matters in real estate investing is a topic that surfaces naturally in every class. A firm that manages its own construction and leasing can control outcomes in ways that a firm that outsources those functions cannot. Students see this demonstrated in the case studies, not asserted as a talking point.

The 2024 Tropaia Award confirms that this approach works. But the real measure is what students do after the course. Some have joined acquisition teams at DC-area firms. Others have started their own small-scale value-add projects. A few have gone on to graduate programs with a clearer sense of what they want to build. That is the outcome the course is designed for.

To learn more about the firm that grounds this teaching, visit Capitol Rock Partners. For press, media, or speaking inquiries, our contact page reaches the right people directly.