Chuck Schilke is the Director of the Edward St. John Real Estate Program at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, at both the Washington DC and Baltimore Harbor East campuses. There, he directs the Master of Science in Real Estate and Infrastructure (MSREI) degree program—the first graduate real estate program in the United States also expressly including infrastructure--and leads related teaching, research, industry service, and public service activities. Based directly upon ULI’s multidisciplinary real estate tradition, the Hopkins Carey Real Estate Program fully integrates a multidisciplinary development-oriented real estate program into the finance-oriented comprehensive business school of one of the leading research universities in the world, providing the optimal real estate and infrastructure education that industry and students need.
Previously, Chuck created and directed the Georgetown University Master of Professional Studies in Real Estate program in Washington DC, which over 4 ½ years he and his colleagues grew to 300 students, 75 practitioner faculty, and 50 commercial real estate development, real estate finance, international real estate, and construction courses.
Prior to directing the Johns Hopkins and Georgetown real estate programs, Chuck worked for over 20 years in real estate and infrastructure in Washington DC, New York City, and Boston, and he continues to consult on a wide variety of real estate and infrastructure projects. He has performed real estate work in a wide range of organizational settings, including major corporations like Exxon Mobil and Marriott; nonprofits like The American National Red Cross; and law firms like McKenna Long & Aldridge, Cadwalader, and Rackemann Sawyer & Brewster.
Career highlights include (1) creating commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) at Cadwalader, the Wall Street law firm that created the most CMBS, experiencing both the peak of the CMBS boom and the CMBS crash, (2) serving as the in-house real estate lawyer and developer at The American National Red Cross during the attacks of September 11, 2001, and (3) performing all of the real estate legal due diligence on billions of dollars of real estate for the Exxon-Mobil merger, then the largest merger ever.
Chuck’s exceptionally diverse real estate career gives him experience in all major real estate product types. His experience with office real estate culminated in his role as the lawyer on the development team for the creation of the $135 million American National Red Cross National Headquarters Building in Washington DC, the 11th largest Class A building in that city. His retail work includes the development of the Giant Supermarket and Shopping Center at River Hill in Columbia, Maryland, as well as the analysis of the legal documentation of dozens of regional shopping malls for CMBS issuances. His industrial real estate work includes a wide variety of facilities at Exxon Mobil corporation, including warehouses and terminals. Chuck’s multifamily background includes numerous condominium and mixed use projects. He has particular strength in hotels, and has worked on project teams to build Ritz-Carlton Hotels in Disney World, Sarasota, and Washington DC’s West End, as well as working on Marriott international hotel projects.
Chuck’s career has included several of the major infrastructure product types as well, and he has particularly rich experience with energy and healthcare infrastructure. At Exxon Mobil, Chuck was involved in a number of oil and gas pipeline projects, as well as dozens of Superfund hazardous waste remediation projects. He also sold a portfolio of coal-fired electric power plants held by a Bechtel-Pacific Gas joint venture to GE Capital. He spent a year building a portion of a nationwide fiber-optic telecommunications network in Texas and Louisiana. Chuck’s experience also includes “social infrastructure” from his substantial healthcare real estate experience at the Red Cross, particularly launching the Red Cross’s billion-dollar Strategic Capital Investment Program to rebuild all of the Red Cross’s 22 blood processing facilities nationwide, and he worked on project teams to build such facilities in Pomona, California; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; and Atlanta, Georgia.
In addition to his real estate finance work on the Exxon-Mobil merger, Chuck’s major real estate finance projects include the financial restructuring of the Red Cross’s $2 billion nationwide real estate portfolio and issuances of billions of dollars of CMBS on Wall Street. He also has substantial construction law background.
Beyond his teaching at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, Chuck has taught at Harvard University and George Washington University. At the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, he teaches Legal Issues in Real Estate, Real Estate Development, and Infrastructure Finance.
On the research side, Chuck is currently completing his doctorate at Harvard University, entitled “Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities: An Analysis of Their Development,” with faculty from the Harvard Business School, Economics Department, and History Department.
Chuck holds a JD from Cornell Law School, where he concentrated in Business and Regulation Law as well as in International Legal Studies; an AM in History and International Relations from Harvard University emphasizing 20th Century American History and Russian Studies; and an AB from the University of Chicago, where he focused on economics, history, and American-East Asian Relations. He is a member of the Supreme Court, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Massachusetts Bars.
Beyond directing the Real Estate Program at Hopkins, Chuck is active in a wide range of civic activities, many with a real estate, financial, business, international, and education focus.
Chuck was recently elected to both the Counselors of Real Estate and Lambda Alpha. Active in ULI Washington, Chuck has served as a Mentor in the ULI Washington Young Leaders mentoring program for 5 years. He serves on the board of the Washington DC chapter of Habitat for Humanity. He is actively involved in such other real estate organizations as the District of Columbia Building Industries Association (DCBIA), NAIOP Maryland/DC, NAIOP Northern Virginia, the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA), the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE), and FIABCI. He is also a member of the American Real Estate Society (ARES), the professional organization for real estate educators.
Chuck has served as president of both the Cornell Club of Washington and the University of Chicago Club of Washington, as well as on the board of the Harvard Club of Washington, and has served on the national alumni boards of all three schools. Chuck was recently elected as both a board member and secretary of the Harvard Student Agencies Graduate Council, a new entrepreneurship alumni organization; has served on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative for 10 years; and is a member of the Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization. He is the General Counsel of the Cornell Club of Washington, and a member of the Cornell Real Estate Council. He is co-chairing the DC chapter of the University of Chicago Alumni Law Society.
In 2011, the University of Chicago awarded Chuck the Alumni Service Medal, the highest honor that Chicago bestows upon its alumni.
Chuck may be contacted at
[email protected].