Financing Sustainable Commercial Real Estate ProjectsCornell Course

Jeanne Varney serves as the Arthur Adler ’78 & Karen Adler ’78 Director of the Center for Real Estate and Finance and is a Senior Lecturer at the Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University. Jeanne is based in the Properties Development and Management department, where she is responsible for the curriculum in Fundamentals of Hotel Development and Management, Hospitality Asset Management, Sustainable Development, and Introduction to Sustainable Tourism.

Jeanne has chaired/co-chaired multiple industry roundtables, chairs several Nolan internal committees, and has led multiple student industry competitions. She is a current member of the Hospitality Asset Manager Association (HAMA) Education Committee and an International Past President for NEWH, Inc.

Jeanne holds an MBA from The George Washington University and a B.S. in Hotel Administration from Cornell University.

Brad Wellstead has gathered several careers on his way to becoming a faculty member at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. In 1983, he graduated from the Cornell School of Architecture, Art, and Planning and worked as an architect for several years as a design-build developer and as a senior design architect with Group 70 International in Honolulu, Hawaii. The work in Hawaii awakened a passion for hospitality and resort design.

Mr. Wellstead reoriented his career toward project and construction management with an MPS/M.S. degree from the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in 1996. That degree afforded him the opportunity to explore some of the early research forays into sustainable development, resulting in a thesis on sustainable tourism development. Mr. Wellstead relocated to Portland, Oregon, to pursue his dream of founding Ethos Development, a project management services firm. Over 18 years, Ethos managed over $2.1 billion in projects across numerous sectors, including hospitality, healthcare, research, government, and higher education.

Mr. Wellstead returned to Cornell to initiate his third career in academia. His academic research interests include new trends in hospitality design, exploring the dynamics of the feasibility/development transition, the art and organization of project management, the value of sustainability practices, and participation in the continued status and excellence of the Nolan School of Hotel Administration as the ultimate hospitality business school.