Stanley Longhofer said his proudest accomplishment has been seeing students he’s taught become successful in their careers after they graduate.
Despite founding Wichita State University’s Center for Real Estate, heading the center for 25 years, publishing research on real estate, and winning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kansas chapter of Certified Commercial Investment Members, Longhofer said, “To see them (former students) progress and move through their careers and become the professionals they are — that would be my proudest moment.”
Longhofer founded Wichita State’s Center for Real Estate in 2000 and has been its director ever since. Through the center, Longhofer researches and compiles data on the real estate market for Wichita and Kansas.
While Longhofer will step down from the position in May, he will continue his teaching and research as a professor and chair of the real estate and finance department.
The Center for Real Estate
When Longhofer was hired as a professor at Wichita State nearly 25 years ago, he was given a challenge.
“I was charged with restarting what had been, at one point, a real, thriving, active real estate degree program at Wichita State,” Longhofer said. “It was one of the earlier programs in the country. It was founded in the 1970s … but in the 1990s, it had basically gone dormant.”
He helped revamp the real estate program and in the process, started the Center for Real Estate to provide centralized, academic data for the region.
“I felt like it was important to have an identity, a face for reaching out to the community,” Longhofer said.
Among other data, the center publishes a yearly Kansas Housing Forecast.
“There were two commercial real estate firms that were already doing market analyses and things (with) the commercial real estate markets here in Wichita,” Longhofer said. “But there was no one who was doing anything about residential real estate.”
The forecast helps homeowners and potential buyers know what to expect from the housing market across the state. Longhofer said it’s useful for realtors but can also help policymakers get a sense of where Kansas is in terms of housing affordability.
“Being able to have good quality local information on which to make decisions is really essential,” he said.
Steve Martens, chairman of NAI Martens Commercial Real Estate Services, explained the importance of the center, and Longhofer’s role in it.
“Stan believes in collaboration and in being very transparent in how things are being done and put together,” Martens said. “And he was able to create very strong ties and relationships with the various realtor organizations across the state … because of their multiple listing service, they had all of the housing statistics, and Stan was able to take that raw data and turn it into some meaningful analysis to put his reports together.
Longhofer said the Center for Real Estate also serves another purpose: to grow a connection between the industry, the local community and academia.
“My vision for an academic research center is one where the engagement with the community is deeply embedded with the work that we do at the university, in terms of the teaching, but also the academic research that we do,” he said.
‘A two-way street’
Longhofer said he sees teaching and research as “a two-way street.”
Through the profession, he prepares students to enter and be successful in the workforce. He said his research and professional connections inform his teaching and give real-world insight to students.
One of Longhofer’s former students, Alyson Goodwin, graduated from WSU in May. She said Longhofer helped spark her interest in real estate.
“I actually started as a biology major,” Goodwin said. “I had a semester before COVID, and then dealing with COVID, I honestly felt a little bit lost in what direction I wanted to go with my education and my future.”
After doing research and discussing with advisers, Goodwin said she decided on finance. That’s when she ended up in Longhofer’s Principles of Real Estate class.
“Stan quickly became one of my favorite and most endeared professors at WSU,” Goodwin said. “After that class, I had a really great experience, and he got me in contact with a group called Women in Commercial Real Estate that actually gave me a scholarship for females who were trying to enter the commercial real estate sphere.”
Goodwin started serving on the Women in Commercial Real Estate’s board and interned with InSite Real Estate Group. Now, she’s a real estate agent with the group in Wichita.
Goodwin said one of her favorite aspects of Longhofer’s real estate class was the guest speakers, professionals who she later had as adjunct professors.
“You got the academic side, but you also got a real-world perspective from people who are working in the industry,” she said.
‘Long enough’
Longhofer said he thinks “a quarter of a century is probably long enough for one person to run any program.”
But he’s happy to keep working at the university part-time, spending the rest of his time with his family and pursuing other interests, including public speaking and private consulting.
“I’ve been very, very selective and limited in what I’ve done over the years,” he said. “Whenever I’ve done consulting projects in my full time here, it has been only if I felt like there was something that could really be an aid to me when I’m teaching my classes … So there are many, many projects that have been brought to me over the years that I said no to because I just didn’t see all those synergies.
“And I only have so much time, and now I’m more open to some of that.”
