Peter Allen’s career as a real estate developer can be traced back to his days as a college student, selling homes in the summers on farmland his grandfather developed with single-family detached housing beginning in the summer of 1964.
But it was the Vietnam era.
After graduating from DePauw University in 1967, it was his four years in the U.S. Navy — two on a destroyer, two spent teaching the safe handling of nuclear weapons — that perhaps launched him into the arena where he may be most influential: the classroom.
Allen, 76, is retiring after the fall semester as a University of Michigan lecturer on real estate development, having taught in what is now the Stephen M. Ross School of Business as well as the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning for four decades, seeing some 4,000 students cross his gradebook.
“I was always teaching bright, young people headed all over the globe,” said Allen.
Although teaching was always a part-time position for him, never shedding his development hardhat for academia completely, he nonetheless didn’t let that dampen his passion for the lectern, former students say.
Those thousands of pupils range from some of the most influential in the business nationally to long-eminent local developers, from behind-the-scenes powerbrokers to emerging talent in and around Detroit, in the private, public and not-for-profit sphere.
He peppers conversations with their achievements and accolades. Jeff did this while a young student, just a junior surrounded by grad students, more than 30 years ago, Allen said. Hannah did that, Alex is up to this, Myles and Clarke and Dang pulled off that.
And then there is Sterling Heights native Omar Uddin, a recent former student who is now an intern with Allen, working on Allen’s next initiative, the Equitable Ann Arbor Land Trust, focusing on affordable housing in Ann Arbor.
Uddin’s dream: working on real estate development to the east in Detroit.
His dream is much like many of those who have gone through his course starting in 1981, when Allen was talking about things like walkability and large cities when so many had fled them for the suburbs.
“While Peter served generations of students formally as a professor, I think he also played a role as a kind of Willy Wonka of commercial real estate, inspiring generations of students with the potential of buildings and public spaces, encouraging them to use their brains and hearts and imaginations to build great places — and build wealth in the process,” said Hannah Mae Merten, urban innovation and strategy director with Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock LLC real estate company.
Allen says great real estate investment starts in areas that carry a certain amount of risk. So, he says to students, look to the areas you want to be after graduation, wherever they are on the globe.
From there, find gold.
“You know the great neighborhoods, you know what’s the best emerging neighborhood, and you want to find the worst property in the best emerging neighborhood to do as your development project because it’s got the most upside and it’s already being lifted by the other boats,” Allen said.
But trumpeting walkability and city living didn’t always resonate with students, particularly in the early days of the course.
“What I found really interesting about him, which I didn’t realize but certainly realize now, is he was really visionary in thinking about walkable cities,” said Richard Broder, a former student from the early 1980s who is now CEO of the influential Detroit-based Broder & Sachse Real Estate development firm, said. “He was like, ‘People are gonna want to walk to work, live in a downtown, work, live and play in an urban area.’ To be honest, we’re like, ‘That’s just crazy talk. Suburbs are burgeoning and we’re all going to go to the green fields and that’s the way life is.’ He was right.”
That shift came well into Allen’s career in the classroom, long after he was sounding its rebound.
The suburban migration came as, decades earlier, freeways like I-75, I-375, M-10 and I-94 were built over bulldozed, largely Black neighborhoods, providing white city residents the ability to easily commute from outside Detroit’s borders into the city for jobs and then return to their suburban homes at night.
But Allen was described as ahead of his time in identifying what people would be looking for when scouting places to develop, live and work.
“I think he’s still ahead of the curve, trying to identify where the emerging markets are,” said Derric Scott, CEO of the East Jefferson Development Corp. and a former Ford Land Development Co. executive.
“Twenty-five years ago I said Detroit’s the most undervalued big city on the planet,” Allen said. “I was always touting Detroit as such a great gem in the rough, before way before the bankruptcy.”
It’s been decades since Broder had Allen’s class in the early 1980s. Ditto with Jeff Blau, the CEO of Stephen Ross’ Related Cos., who Allen famously in real estate circles helped land his first job with Ross.
Scott; Merten; Monique Becker, cofounder of Detroit-based Mona Lisa Development; Peter McGrath, associate director in the Detroit office of brokerage house Savills plc; Dang Duong, managing partner of Detroit-based SRG Partners LLC; Luke Bonner, senior economic development adviser for Sterling Heights and CEO of Ann Arbor-based economic incentive, real estate and economic development consulting company Bonner Advisory Group LLC; and Josh Bails, a public private partnership specialist with the city of Detroit, all took Allen’s course in the last 15 years or so.
They all had different recollections, different experiences of Allen’s class.
If there is one constant memory, however, it was the term project.
For virtually as long as Allen has been teaching, his course has been weighted with 15 percent of the grade based on textbook work, and the remaining 85 percent based on a group term project in which an interdisciplinary cohort of students worked together on a local real estate development proposal — not theoretical, not pie-in-the-sky, but practical and implementable, somewhere around Ann Arbor.
“The ideal team was an architect, urban planner, and a business school student, and then having an engineer or public policy or law student was a nice addition,” Allen said of his earlier versions of the group project roster.
“The evolution was the teams got smaller, no more than four, but the ideal teams were three,” Allen said. “They learned the most. They worked the hardest, but it all came together more smoothly with three than four people. And then I expanded the geographic boundaries beyond our region, and we began to take on Detroit. And eventually, the last 10 years, I said you could do your term project anywhere in the country, anywhere on the planet. I had term projects in Shanghai, Paris, Italy, all over.”
“Brazil,” he added, remembering a country he almost forgot.
Uddin, who was a business major, and his group — consisting of three other students — proposed a nine-story development on the burned-down former First Unitarian Church (long suspected as an arson target) at Woodward Avenue and Edmund Street immediately across from Little Caesars Arena.
There, his group floated a residential building called The Circuit with first-floor restaurant/dining space.
“It’s really evolving, there’s not much residential in that area to suit all the commercial movement happening,” Uddin said, almost as a sales pitch behind the project, which gets its name from the idea of “completing the circuit” of development in the vicinity.
Many of those term projects Allen remembers well, such as a recent Detroit effort by students Duong, Clarke Lewis and Myles Hamby, all of whom went on to work for Detroit-based The Platform LLC, which took on their Baltimore Station project’s first and second phase.
The first phase has been completed although the second phase has been stalled as the company re-envisions what goes on the site east of Woodward Avenue at Baltimore and John R streets.
“That was probably the most urgent, the most obvious to them, and it caused their team to form, it caused them all to go work for The Platform,” Allen said.
Duong remembered Allen’s instruction fondly.
“Due to the large upfront capital and critical network of stakeholders, real estate development is very hard to break into, especially as an outsider to Detroit and a minority, unless you come from a real estate development family or have lots of money,” he said. “From Peter, I was able to learn the technical skills in the business and make the critical connections. But above all, I’m always inspired by Peter’s positivity and perseverance — traits critical in this business that has so many dead ends but offers worthwhile rewards to those who are relentless in finding solutions.”
In the sometimes wonky and theoretical world of commercial real estate, Allen’s former students described his class as having a practical approach, former students said.
That practical approach largely came in the form of the capstone project.
“Peter had the ability to sort of influence in real life deals, which I thought was refreshing because, in a program like Michigan, it’s a very theoretical, you didn’t get the real practical sort of hands-on approach,” said Scott, who during his time with Ford Land was responsible for the Wagner Place development in west downtown Dearborn.
Students learned about the circle of risks in commercial real estate, with the risks growing as more were identified. First, there were eight or nine. Today, there are 13 or 14, depending on who you ask and when they took the course.
They include things like the economic cycle, construction costs, sales and leasing, the environment, political concerns and equity and debt.
“All that holds true today and all those things are things that we analyze on a deal. It was a great learning experience and I would say still very applicable today,” Blau said.
For people like Blau, whose Related Cos. has been active in Detroit real estate in recent years with a pair of known projects planned — the Detroit Center for Innovation and an affordable housing development with The Platform — some of the most valuable work Allen did came well after final grades were submitted.
“The class doesn’t end at the end of the semester,” said Blau. “He’s always helping people get jobs or helping people with their careers.”
Allen keeps a detailed spreadsheet of former students: contact information, regions of the country they ended up in, their real estate specialties. He keeps in touch with them on LinkedIn, too, congratulating them on new jobs or promotions, or telling them they are spot on with published white papers.
In a way, he creates an ecosystem and fosters it.
“So Peter was really encouraging, like, ‘Here’s my Rolodex,'” said Scott. “He would literally share his entire Rolodex. He had like 5,000, 10,000 contacts. Like, Steve Ross’ number in there, OK? ‘Call it,’ (Allen would say.) ‘He might not answer the phone, but Steve Ross’ number is in there.'”
“Peter also set it up to bring in those real estate experts and professionals so students can build those relationships from the outside,” said Becker, whose Mona Lisa Development is active in the city’s Virginia Park neighborhood — where her class term project ended up being the first Mona Lisa redevelopment effort, a duplex with the company’s cofounder, Elyse Wolf. “Peter played a huge part in my career and kind of shaping that.
Blau’s case is perhaps one of the more well-known in Michigan real estate lore.
Blau, who took Allen’s graduate-level course as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, ultimately ended up interning for Allen and established a relationship with him. And Ross, the billionaire Related Cos. chairman who had gifted the university some money, was in attendance at what was then the University of Michigan/Urban Land Institute Real Estate Forum, now called RECON, shorthand for Real Estate Convention.
“Peter introduced me to Stephen (Ross) at the conference and we both sat in the back row, and listened to the conference and talked and that’s how we met,” Blau said. “Peter, for sure, gets all the credit for that.”
But sometimes, for all the term projects, all the lectures and all the guest speakers — sometimes three or four in each class — the best lessons can come over a slice or two of pizza.
Allen would order his two glasses of red wine and glass of milk, spring for the first few pizzas for people who showed up and the informal chatter began between students and professor, students and speakers, all intermingling at The Pizza House of Ann Arbor a few blocks from the class.
“Sometimes the wait staff knew it was coming,” said McGrath, who took Allen’s course in 2013.
Speakers included Fernando Palazuelo, the owner of Detroit’s Packard Plant, representatives of the Ilitch family’s Olympia Development of Michigan and others.
For Bails, that experience — although he didn’t know it then, perhaps — was instrumental.
“That experience alone has been very helpful in my job,” he said. “The city gets all sorts of grand scale pitches of what people want to do if you give them these 200 vacant lots on the east side and how they’re going to build a whole neighborhood. I feel like I have a more critical eye, and know what questions to ask, because of the experiences of seeing people come in with these grand ideas and now seeing down the line what has and hasn’t worked.”
