Commercial Investment Real Estate November/December 2017 | Page 79

In
1991, if commercial real estate professionals
had to choose a country where the CCIM Institute would
hold its first international classes, the Soviet Union might not
have been their first pick.
And in fact, says Parker Hudson, CCIM, “of all the places
on earth — England, France, Scandinavia — of all the places
to launch into in 1991, it really was an amazing thing.”
Amazing, for a number of reasons. While the U.S.S.R. was
slowly opening up to the West through perestroika, it still
had a command economy; and real estate laws — never mind
real estate education — were nonexistent. In the pre-internet
1990s, communication between the U.S. and the Soviet Union
was slow and cumbersome.
And then there was the coup.
Nevertheless, the two-week class that Hudson taught,
along with Sandy Shindleman, CCIM, and F. Allen Decker,
CCIM, was groundbreaking for international real estate edu-
cation. The three traveled to Moscow in September 1991 to
teach a group of about 50 Russian engineers the fundamentals
of commercial real estate. And the next month, the Russian
group arrived in the U.S. and traveled to five cities, where
they saw the principles they had learned in the classroom put
into practice.
“It was the beginning of a bridge,” says Hudson, which
helped to standardize processes and link professionals between
the two nations.
Series of Coincidences
At the time, the Institute was exploring venues for inter-
national offerings; classes were well established in Canada.
Hudson, who was on the international committee, had been
a CCIM instructor for about a decade; he also spoke a little
Russian, which he’d studied in college in the 1960s.
Then CCIM President John Stone, CCIM, approached
Hudson at a meeting and suggested that since he spoke Rus-
sian, Hudson might figure out a way to teach commercial
real estate in Russia. After Hudson said he would consider it,
there followed “an amazing set of coincidences,” he says, “that
brought this together.”
“Our small company was in an office building in Atlanta
and down the hall, on the same floor, was the one U.S. devel-
oper who had ever done anything in Russia,” he says.
Hudson talked to the developer, Earl Worsham, about
teaching classes in Russia and whether he knew of a group
that might be interested. “He said, ‘My Soviet partner hap-
pens to be in town today. Why don’t we have lunch?’ ” Wor-
sham’s partner connected Hudson with Moscapstroi, a major
construction trust in the
U.S.S.R., which was inter-
ested in teaching its staff
about Western commer-
cial real estate practices.
Hudson’s initial nego-
tiations proceeded slowly.
“At the time, there was a
total of about 90 phone
lines between the two
nations,” he says. “So to
fax anything or call any-
body just took forever.
You’d have to dial a num-
ber 100 times.”
In another coincidence,
Hudson went to Kiev,
then part of the Soviet
Union, with a church mis-
sion group in May, and the
group returned through
Moscow on its way home.
This gave Hudson the
chance to meet with
Moscapstroi in person and
— Parker Hudson, CCIM
negotiate the deal for the
classes and the U.S. visit.
“They told me at the time that they really didn’t need
to know too much market stuff, because the Soviet Union
would never be a market economy,” he says. “That changed
six months later.”
Hudson had four months to put together a course and have it
translated for the Russian audience. “I took CI 101 and CI 102,
and sort of like a deck of cards, shuffled them together,” he
says. He found a translator in Atlanta who was able to produce
written materials. “He had a Mac, and at that time, only Macs
could do Cyrillic fonts,” according to Hudson.
“They told me
at the time
that they really
didn’t need to
know too much
market stuff,
because the
Soviet Union
would never
be a market
economy. That
changed six
months later.”
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