Soon Hyeok Choi Headshot

Soon Hyeok Choi

Assistant Professor, Real Estate

Department of Finance and Accounting
Saunders College of Business
schoi@saunders.rit.edu
585-475-2873
Office Location
LOW-2072

Soon Hyeok Choi

Assistant Professor, Real Estate

Department of Finance and Accounting
Saunders College of Business

Education

BA, Bowdoin College; MPS, MA, Ph.D., Cornell University

Bio

Professor Soon Hyeok Choi is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate Finance at the Saunders College of Business in RIT. He is a real estate and financial economist.

Professor Choi studies how contracts, prices, and networks interact in real estate and finance. He develops arbitrage-free methods to value contingency options such as retail co-tenancy and policy-triggered early termination options in federal leases and maps their ripple effects into mortgage-backed security bond prices, property valuation, and spillover effects. 

Related work decomposes the mortgage–cash premium using the post-pandemic mortgage innovations. He investigates bubbles and overvaluation (equities, crypto, and housing), showing how competitive bidding generates a “winner’s curse” that depresses later returns and raises mortgage default risk, especially for vulnerable buyers. 

A third line models how early ties in broker networks shape survival and performance. Across projects, he pairs structural theory with credibly identified empirics and LLM/neural-network tools to deliver policy-relevant insights.

Professor Choi holds a Ph.D., MA, MPS from Cornell University and AB from Bowdoin College

schoi@saunders.rit.edu
585-475-2873
Personal Links
Personal Website
ORCID
Curriculum Vitae
LinkedIn
Areas of Expertise
Corporate Finance
Credit Risk
Real Estate
Contracts
Option Pricing
Climate Risk
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
Real Estate Finance (residential, commercial, hospitality)
Durable Asset Financing
Asset Price Bubbles
Financial Inclusion
Sustainability

Select Scholarship

Publication

Working Papers

Work-in-Progress

  • "Decline in Residential Mortgage Lending by National Banks: Who Are Affected?" (with Dongshin Kim)
  • “Is Nifty Going Up Too Quickly? The Case of the Indian Stock Bubble” (with Robert A. Jarrow), Working Paper.
  • “A Theory of Durable Asset Leasing” (with Crocker H. Liu), Working Paper.
  • “Selling Houses as Minority Broker: Quantifying Diversity Discount”, Working Paper.
    - Innovative Thinking Award - "Thinking Out of the Box", sponsored by Greenfield Advisors, American Real Estate Society 2024

Non-Peer Reviewed Column

 

Currently Teaching

ESCB-810
Financial Economics
3 Credits
Economics is an important foundation for business research. This course focuses on the behavior of individuals and firms in various market settings. Classical issues of demand, supply, and market equilibrium, as well as topics more germane to business research such as contracting and theory of firm are covered. Throughout, focus is on developing economic intuition, understanding applications to business research, and accumulating an in-depth understanding of useful economic theories and tools.
FINC-120
Personal Financial Management
3 Credits
Examines financial decisions people must make in their personal lives. Covers personal taxation, housing and mortgages, consumer credit, insurance (including life, health, property and casualty), and retirement and estate planning. Also reviews the common financial investments made by individuals, including stocks, bonds, money market instruments and mutual funds. This class involves extensive use of the internet for access to information. (Students in the Finance Program may use this course only as a free elective, not as a course creditable towards the Finance Program.)
HSPT-465
Hospitality Asset Management and Investment
3 Credits
This course introduces the foundations and processes of hotel asset management, including real estate and the physical asset, franchising, hotel chain affiliations, hotel management and franchise contracts, hotel valuation, and financial analysis of hotel investments. This course provides a framework for understanding hotel asset management and real estate investment from the financial and operational aspects.
HSPT-760
Hospitality Asset Management
3 Credits
This course provides a quantitatively rigorous overview of hospitality asset management. Furthermore, it builds on the theoretical foundation of portfolio optimization and capital asset pricing theory, which are applied directly to hospitality assets and their management. Students will learn how to solve for an optimal financing solution (e.g., refinancing, selling, leasing) given a hospitality asset’s cash flow issues with budget constraints. At the end of the course, students will be able to: (1) Understand complex cash flow information and quantitatively identify asset management issues; (2) Use discounted cash flow model and computations to recommend an improved financing and management decision; (3) Draft a technical report and recommendations based on statistical analysis; (4) Apply the obtained quantitative acumen to hospitality-like durable assets and extend the analysis in other asset classes; (5) Perform textual analysis using factor models and generative AI to extract key information of distressed hospitality asset and debt conditions.

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