Title: Director – Real Estate Program
Organization: Johns Hopkins University
Location: Washington, DC

Chuck Schilke is a real estate developer, financier, lawyer, and educator based in Washington DC, where he is highly involved in the ULI DC District Council. At the national ULI level, he is the Program Chair of the Public Development and Infrastructure Product Council. Chuck has worked in the real estate function at industrial companies like Exxon Mobil, service companies like Marriott, and large nonprofits like The American National Red Cross, as well as for real estate developers like Mobil Land Development Corporation, and has worked in real estate finance on Wall Street. His healthcare-related real estate experience comes largely from his work as in-house developer and lawyer at the Red Cross, where he launched a $1 billion program to completely rebuild the Red Cross’s blood processing facilities nationwide, from his work as an academic administrator and real estate professor at Johns Hopkins University and its Medical Institutions , and from extensive consulting for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. He also teaches a course in Healthcare Real Estate, Chuck is particularly interested in applying Building Healthy Places concepts to the healthcare industry itself, and to university medical centers. He is the author of the Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities E-Primer, the main book used to explain CMBS to interested readers everywhere, and numerous articles.

Why are you motivated to participate in the Health Leaders Network? How will your participation enhance your current and future work?

From my work in healthcare real estate at the Red Cross, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere, as well as from the Building Healthy Places program itself, I have come to understand what a frontier healthcare real estate is, and the great potential of bringing the real estate and healthcare worlds closer together. In order to achieve this synthesis with the requisite speed, Health Leaders are needed to accelerate the general awareness of the many ways healthcare and real estate relate to each other–and to discover new ones.

I contemplate that participating in the Health Leaders Program will enhance my current and future work very substantially. At the practice level, the synergy with other Heath Leaders will help me to develop an entirely new generation of healthcare facilities that promote wellness as well as treat diseases–making people happier and more productive while saving money on America’s out-of-control healthcare costs. In short, real estate is a means to achieve the ever-elusive preventive medicine. At the academic level, I’m hoping that the things that I learn as a Health Leader can be folded into my Healthcare Real Estate course, so that it becomes the best such course anywhere, and trains a new generation of health real estate leaders.

Everything I’ve done in health-related real estate tells me that Building Healthy Places is one of the key master trends of the real estate industry–and of the healthcare industry–for decades to come.