What is Blueprint

By Blueprint Leadership Team

NYU SPS Schack Blueprint (Blueprint) was founded during the 2020 academic year as a platform for students to connect, network, and share their thoughts and insights on real estate industry trends, when the world shut down. The initial goal of Blueprint was to bridge the gap for student networking and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic through an innovative digital platform. From this, the first-ever student-run real estate publication at NYU SPS Schack Institute of Real Estate (NYU Schack) was born.

Blueprint offers students a new way to engage and create meaningful connections with their peers, NYU SPS Schack faculty, and leaders throughout the industry. Much success within the real estate industry, particularly earlier in a career, can be attributed to creating connections through networking. Blueprint embodies this theme, and encourages students to create connections with their peers across a variety of real estate industry sectors.

Over the past four years, Blueprint has expanded its article offerings to cover conference recaps, property tour highlights, interviews with NYU Schack faculty/industry professionals, and well thought out student conducted research pieces. The publication provides a unique opportunity for students to improve their professional writing skills and showcase to their peers, and possibly future employers, their knowledge of topics across the real estate industry. Since its inception, Blueprint has been advised by Professor Stuart Brodsky. Professor Brodsky brings a wealth of experience and real estate knowledge to help guide writers throughout the research and writing process.

Blueprint has seen tremendous growth in its short existence as a club at NYU Schack. This edition has twenty four articles, which is almost triple the number that we had during the previous academic year in a typical Blueprint edition. During the 2023/24 academic year, Blueprint has and will release seven editions, which includes 107 articles. Through recent initiatives, Blueprint has also partnered with other NYU Schack organizations such as the NYU SPS Schack REIT Investment Fund, NYU SPS Urban Lab, NYU SPS Schack GFI coverage, as well as a significant number of NYU Schack faculty. Our goal is simple, to provide a voice for students to write about real estate topics that are interesting to them and to engage in all aspects of the NYU Schack community. Most recently, we have implemented a new section called “Schack Professor Insight” where professors write articles that provide insight to the community about what they are working on in their careers. This is an excellent opportunity for both full-time and adjunct professors to showcase their robust knowledge and research.

Blueprint is a student-led real estate academic journal; distributed to the NYU community and industry professionals. The mission of Blueprint is to showcase the diversity of real estate perspectives at NYU Schack, publish original writing by NYU affiliates, and curate noteworthy articles or research for our readers. Blueprint covers a broad spectrum of real estate topics such as the REIT industry, sustainability, innovation, urban design, development, capital markets, and current industry trends.

Our goal with launching a Substack prior to the Fall 2024 semester is to expand Blueprint's growth through digital avenues. We have seen tremendous growth of the publication through its physical printing initiatives but would like to evolve from a physical magazine into a digital real estate journal. Our goal is to release content produced in the Spring 2024 semester for new readers on Substack to learn what type of content to expect from Blueprint writers.

Beginning in the Fall 2024 semester, we will release new Blueprint articles curated by NYU Schack Institute Real Estate students focused on original real estate research.