This Summer, the Steers Center for Global Real Estate welcomed Tim Reardon to the team as the new executive director. Tim joins us from Baring, where he was a member of the firm’s Commercial Real Estate Finance Group. Reardon’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for the Steers Center, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary during the ‘24-25 school year. Get to know Tim and how he plans to lead the Steers Center.
Can you share your professional background and what led you to the Steers Center for Global Real Estate?
I worked for almost 19 years for a company called Barings, which is a Charlotte, North Carolina-based global investment manager that is a subsidiary of MassMutual, the life insurance company. I worked that entire 19 years in their Washington, D.C. office and specifically in the real estate lending group, where we covered the mid-atlantic and southeast markets and lent money on all property types including, office buildings, apartments, industrial warehouses, hotels, retail centers, along with some more niche property types. such as student housing, self-storage facilities and parking garages.
What is your vision for the future of the Steers Center? How is your role instrumental in that?
My vision is to take the Steers Center to the next level and becoming the premier real estate program in the country. It’s a lofty goal and it certainly won’t happen overnight, but it’s something to strive for and with the team we have in place, and with help from our wonderful alumni, faculty members, board members, and students - I think it’s something that is definitely achievable.
What are your goals for your first year as executive director?
I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C. area for over 25 years, but hardly spent any time on the Georgetown campus, so my first goal was to find my way around campus, which I successfully completed. In all seriousness, my first goal was to reach out to a number of Georgetown alums and set up a series of meetings and calls and begin a listening tour of sorts to determine what’s working, what’s not, how can we improve the Steers Center, how can we get more alumni involved, what more can we do to support our students, etc. I found this to be extremely helpful and plan to continue meeting with key stakeholders to constantly assess our strengths and weaknesses.
In terms of more tangible first year goals, I think growing our new Masters in Global Real Assets program is incredibly important and we’ve got 24 terrific students in the program this year, so we hope to keep the momentum going with that program. To coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Steers Center, we’ll be revisiting the purpose and structure of both the Steers Center Advisory Board and the Georgetown University Real Estate Alliance, which is the alumni organization for Georgetown real estate alumni. These two organizations have been incredibly important over the years and have been an area of strength for the school and for the Steers Center in particular and we want to make sure both organizations continue to thrive over the next 10 years.
In addition, we’re hopeful we can roll out a newly designed Steers Center website later this year, create more social media content that spreads the good word of the Steers Center, and begin publishing a new quarterly newsletter. We’re also going to look into the potential for collaborating with other named centers within Georgetown McDonough. Lastly, we continue to think about how we can make our student learning experiences even better going forward. Needless to say, we’ve got a lot going on right now, which is super exciting and I’m extremely happy to be a part of it.
What motivates you personally in your work?
Starting here at Georgetown in June in my new role, and what is essentially a new career for me, has given me a new sense of purpose and passion for my work. Seeing all the students on campus every day, the energy they bring and getting a chance to work and interact with both undergraduate and graduate students on a daily basis has been really exciting and rewarding so far.
How do you plan to support the professional development of students and faculty associated with the Steers Center?
I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C. area for a long time and been involved in the real estate business for a long time as well, so I hope to use my connections and resources to help our students in whatever capacity I can. Giving students job or career advice, helping set up a site tour with a developer, bringing in guest speakers, or getting them access to a certain company that they may be interested in are just some of the things that I will do to support our students here at Georgetown.
What advice would you give to students interested in pursuing a career in global real estate?
We’re obviously in a challenging commercial real estate market right now, with elevated interest rates, banks, and other debt providers cutting back on lending which is suppressing deal flow in a lot of markets. Additionally the office sector continues to be challenged in a lot of major markets due to continued work from home policies and the rise of remote work, which has led to a decrease in office space usage in a lot of buildings. That said, in times of distress there are always going to be new opportunities. In a site-tour during Opening Residency, our new MS-GRA students learned about the potential opportunities that exist within the office to residential conversion space, as old and obsolete office buildings are converted into apartments.
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