Let me begin by saying that everyone recommends this class but I feel like nobody adequately explains that you will not be taught at all about 1/3 of the midterm and final. These are calculations that you are expected to know how to do on excel. Karlan does say in the first two weeks that if you're not good in finance, don't take this class, because he does not want to teach anyone how to do the calculations because that's not what this class is about. I think this is unfair because most students in the class are taking it as an econ elective or just want to learn about real estate and have never taken finance before. But, if you have a really good Excel spreadsheet that knows how to calculate mortgage payments, balances, incremental cost of borrowing, effect annual rate, APR, things like that, you will do really well. Because other than those calculations, his exams are straight forward. He spent literally no joke 2 minutes on the 2 chapters that teach all the math concepts which was messed up. Overall, he is a really cool guy, super successful in real estate, but puts a lot of information on his exams that he does not at all go over in class even for one hour which in my opinion is wrong. Anyway, I have a really good spreadsheet, studied the key concepts he posts on ccle, and I ended up with an A in the class. TIP: don't do the textbook homework problems (they're optional but recommended but they are so tedious and not at all necessary for the exam), instead, go over the chapter based on what he has in his key concepts that he posts ccle and read the textbook for more detail on those specific concepts.

The lecture material was phenomenal. We should be grateful we get someone as prestigious as Prof. Karlan as a lecturer at UCLA. He has a wide breadth of experience and is pretty modest regarding his accolades.

That said, he won't be of any help outside of lecture. I tried to reach out to speak with him, only to quickly get rejected. Apparently he's a busy man.

What's strange is the lectures don't really prepare you for the exams. The midterm and final are almost entirely Excel based, which we covered very little in class. So to do well on them you need to be comfortable running calculations on provided calculators. It seemed like the business students who have taken classes using Excel, well, excelled, and the others did okay.

Karlan is a very interesting and experienced professor. Dude knows real estate like no other and has some great stories to share. As a finance/econ person, this class was not too challenging as a lot of the concepts/terms were simple review from other courses. The grade is only from a midterm and final, although I found it helpful to skim through the textbook readings and practice problems he assigns. I do understand a lot of students are coming from not econ backgrounds so maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt but overall I found this class to be light in terms of workload and test difficulty. Beyond your grade in this class, a lot of the information surrounding buying a home or investment property covered in 170 that you will learn in this class will be very helpful/useful for those who imagine themselves purchasing a home or investing in real estate in the future.

I believe the curve this quarter was a bit harsher than previous from what I garnered with other people, but this guy is definitely one of the most engaging professors I've had so far. Super knowledgeable about his stuff and shares a lot about his real experience with the class when we review important key concepts. Quite the entertaining guy and brings in a lot of relevant commentary about current housing markets, state of domestic investments, etc.

Breakdown:
-Participation portion part of grade is mandatory, attend his lectures and just do the iclicker questions for credit. he doesn't care if responses are right or wrong.
-Grade is most entirely exam based where midterm and final cover usually 80-90% of overall historically. However, if you do the 2-3 hour review session with the ta, understand all the key concepts in his always updated 1 page per chapter notes, and know how to work basic spreadsheets to emulate certain formulas, then exams aren't difficult at all. FWIW, exams are entirely mc.

Would definitely take again for credit, not a totally easy class but not hard at all if you do some amount of exam prep.