Professor Richard Peiser

Professor Richard Peiser (1973) is a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene.

Professor Peiser is the first Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). He founded and served as the first director of the university-wide Real Estate Academic Initiative as well as the university’s highest-level real estate executive training curriculum, the Advanced Management Development Program. He is past director of the MDES Concentration in Real Estate and past Director of the Urban Planning program at GSD. Before coming to Harvard, he founded the Master of Real Estate Development (MRED) Program and the Lusk Center at USC.

Professor Peiser’s primary research focuses on developing an understanding of the response of real estate developers to the marketplace and to the institutional environment in which they operate, particularly in the areas of urban redevelopment, affordable housing, and suburban sprawl. His current research focuses on mixed use development, office-to-residential conversion, PropTech, and new towns. His latest books are New Towns for the 21st Century, with Ann Forsyth (2021) and the fourth edition of Professional Real Estate Development: the ULI Guide to the Business (2022) which is the Urban Land Institute’s all-time best seller.

Professionally, he has developed housing, apartments, land, and industrial properties in Texas, California, and China, and has served as the lead expert witness in a series of high profile cases on affordable housing, apartment investments, REITs, parking, master planned communities, and most recently a major fraud case prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission on a resort community in Belize.

He was born in Houston and grew up in Dallas. He received a BA from Yale University, an MBA from Harvard University, and a PhD in land economy from Cambridge University. He has served on a number of boards including the publicly traded Berkshire Income Realty, and currently is a Governor of the Urban Land Institute, Trustee for Mount Auburn Cemetery, and a Councilor for the Native Plant Trust.