The Bergstrom Center is bridging industry and academia

In the 1970s, UF real estate professors Halbert Smith and Wayne Archer saw a gap in business education: real estate students were learning in classrooms and from textbooks, but not alongside the professionals they’d eventually work with.

So, despite no funding or staff, they decided to launch a real estate research center to help students engage directly with industry professionals and apply their technical knowledge to real-life projects.

Fast forward 50 years and their modest idea has become the University of Florida’s Kelley A. Bergstrom Real Estate Center, which has gained a reputation for launching careers, advancing research and providing insights to Florida’s commercial real estate sector.

The center is a metaphorical three-legged stool, explained Executive Director Tim Becker (DBA ’23), who was hired in 2008 as the center’s first professional leader. “We’re here to support students first and foremost,” he said. “But we also exist to help faculty produce impactful research—and to make sure the industry benefits from that knowledge.”

From its modest beginning, the Bergstrom Center has grown to include seven full-time staffers, 160 advisory board members, and plays host to one of Florida’s most important annual gatherings of academics and real estate professionals.

The center’s widening impact has been made possible by the backing of Kelley A. Bergstrom (MBA ’68), a long-time industry professional. In 2006, Bergstrom created a multimillion-dollar endowment to support the center for years. In 2020, he provided a second gift to establish an applied research initiative to provide the real estate industry with practical, timely and usable information.

From an academic standpoint, the Bergstrom Center supports the Nathan S. Collier Master of Science in Real Estate Program, ranked as the nation’s No. 1 real estate program among public universities in 2024, as well as the college’s Real Estate minor, which has approximately 200 students and the Real Estate Society, which regularly attracts over 100 student attendees per meeting.

In 2022, the center launched Due Diligence, a magazine published three times a year by a team that includes data scientists and a rotating cast of graduate student contributors. The full-color publication — distributed to more than 3,000 professionals in print and online — specializes in data collection and in-depth research to examine a wide range of important real estate topics.

“If you look at the broader mission of UF, giving back to the industry with knowledge is critically important,” Becker said. “That’s what we’ve tried to do over time: fill the need of getting unbiased research and information to the industry so they can make better decisions, and we can improve over time.”

Another way the Bergstrom Center shares its findings is through its Real Estate Trends & Strategies Conference, which each year draws more than 400 top industry professionals to Orlando. The gathering has become an invaluable opportunity for the real estate community to hear insights from real estate business leaders, learn about new research findings and network with others — a crucial aspect in an industry famously known for the importance of personal connections.

There’s little doubt that real estate touches almost every part of our lives, which makes the work of the center all the more critical in helping shape the future. And, with a growing student pipeline, real-world research and strong industry ties, the center is poised to meet the demands of Florida’s increasingly complex real estate economy, Becker said.

“We’re here as stewards of the state of Florida,” he said. “The citizens of Florida should benefit from the things we’re doing by having an industry that is more thoughtful, focused and data-driven, which allows the industry to do things that make our state better.