Over ten plus years of teaching, I’ve received a wide range of questions. Usually, I get asked the normal stuff such as advice on getting a job, a technical issue in finance that someone finds challenging, book suggestions, etc.

And then there are the fun ones.

My favorite one is:

“There are a lot of good books on real estate development. Are there any movies?”

Unfortunately, there’s really only one I can recommend. It’s Sunshine State.

It’s somewhat obscure, but it’s really good. It’s basically about what happens when a large real estate developer comes to a sleepy town, and how the development process affects a community. The reason I like it is that unlike most movie and television depictions of real estate developers, this is the only one that doesn’t show them to be uniformly evil. It shows them, and the people who work at development firms, as people who have a job to do, and bring their own perspective to what progress means.

In any event, it’s a good movie, and it’s the only one I’ve ever seen that actually tries to show what the real estate development process is actually like.

If you’re interested, check out the DVD or the online version.