The OMERS & Oxford Real Assets Leadership Institute (the Institute) is a new initiative launched by the Schulich School of Business in partnership with OMERS Infrastructure and Oxford Properties. The Institute aims to attract and develop top-tier students into future leaders while advancing actionable research valued by the real estate and infrastructure industry. Its remit is to focus on applied research and collaboration between industry, government, and academia to address urgent challenges in real estate and infrastructure.

There are three synergistic areas of opportunity for leadership and investment that the newly established Institute would lean into: the economic transition to net zero emissions, urban housing affordability, and the resilience and vibrancy of communities.

According to the partnership, the governing paradigms and business models of the past are no longer sufficient to confront the scale and pace of opportunity at hand, while new collaborative approaches among government, industry and academia have the potential to create new solutions to meet that challenge.

Underpinned by applied research with industry partners and funded by government programs, the Institute aims to avoid the trap of becoming yet another ‘think tank’, opting instead to be a ‘do-tank’ – an objective, fact-based, project-centric, scale-up vehicle for new business models in real estate and infrastructure.

Recent history provides an ideal example of where it could be influential. Post-COVID, governments across the developed world racked up record levels of debt, brought on by unprecedented levels of quantitative easing and economic stimulus coordinated by central banks. Canada, the UK and the US alone have monthly significant debt service costs in billions of their respective currencies – amounts that climb as their fiscal deficits grow. This reality illustrates the constraints on governments’ ability to act unilaterally on major initiatives related to transitioning the economy to net zero emissions, housing affordability and community resilience. As such, private sector partnerships are a key mechanism for addressing these issues, provided that any undertakings can be structured to make the risk-adjusted returns sufficiently compelling.

The Institute believes that public-private partnerships are essential given that, unlike governments, institutional and private investors have balance sheets that have averaged 20% year-over-year growth from 2018 to present with $13trn  in capital under management and a growing array of options for capital allocation. Securing target returns requires the timely and efficient deployment of capital into the right investments; a balancing act that leaders must get right, and very often that efficiency means writing larger cheques.

The old investing mantra, “first test, then invest”, is where the Institute sees its purpose and opportunity: to act as business model innovator, convener, and scale-up facilitator. Already seeded with Schulich Urban Lab’s applied research on project return amplifiers, as well as new digitally enabled project delivery models, asset resiliency considerations for portfolio construction and more, it is building on established partnerships with Canada's federal corporation for housing and mortgage insurance, CMHC, Infrastructure Canada, Oxford Properties and Plenary Group to scale-up new approaches.

Anchored by Schulich’s ecosystem, a vast network of professionals and academics in real estate and infrastructure, and its world-class cadres of graduate students and researchers from around the globe, the Institute aims to be an important platform that helps shape the evolution of the built environment.