If you're seeking a Master's Degree in real estate development, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #206 one in the country in terms of popularity.This may make is a little harder to find a school that is a good fit for you.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 7 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Real Estate Development Master's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 337 master's degrees in real estate development to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Real Estate Development School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of real estate development for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on real estate development students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of real estate development students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt real estate development students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized real estate development related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for real estate development students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Real Estate Development Master's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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University of Southern California is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in real estate development. USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
Master's recipients from the real estate development program at University of Southern California make $19,566 above the standard graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
Columbia University in the City of New York is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in real estate development. Located in the large city of New York, Columbia is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, real estate dev master's recipients generally earn about $102,555 in the first five years of their career.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).