John McMahan has enjoyed a professional career in real estate as an investment manager; public board member; consultant; educator and writer; and industry and community leader. In the 1980's, he merged his firm with Mellon Bank to form Mellon-McMahan Real Estate Advisors and, as CEO, built the firm into the 16th largest pension advisor in the nation. In 1996 he became Chairman of BRE Properties and led the public apartment REIT in a restructuring and expansion program from $300 M in assets to over $3 B in eight years. He is currently an advisor to California State Teachers Retirement fund and other real estate investment organizations.

In addition to his business activities, he taught real estate at the Stanford GSB for 17 years and at the Haas Graduate School of Business (UC Berkeley) for 5 years. In 2006, John received an award from Harvard University for Lifetime Achievement in Real Estate Education. Previously, he received the Louise L. and Y. T. Lum Award for Excellence in Teaching and the William S. Ballard Award for writing.

He has written four books on real estate including The McGraw Hill Real Estate Pocket Guide (1979), Property Development (1989), Cases in Commercial Real Estate Investing (2005), and the Handbook of Commercial Real Estate Investing (2006). He is currently working on Professional Property Development which will be published by McGraw Hill in Spring, 2007.