Meet the New McDonough Faculty: Kelly Sewell Nagel

We are pleased to welcome new faculty members to the Georgetown McDonough community this fall.

In our Meet the New McDonough Faculty Series, learn more about the interests, specialties, experiences, and personalities behind the talented academics at the McDonough School of Business.

We spoke with Kelly Sewell Nagel, Steers Endowed Professor of the Practice in Real Estate, about what she hopes to accomplish at Georgetown through her engagement with students, classroom teachings, and beyond.

Tell us a little about your background and what brought you to Georgetown.

I’ve spent my career in commercial real estate, primarily in residential and mixed-use development and investment management. But I’ve done that work from a lot of different seats: leading large teams and portfolios, building new businesses inside established organizations, advising companies and executives, and eventually becoming an entrepreneur myself. That range has given me a front-row seat to very different versions of leadership, risk, decision-making, and what it actually takes to build something.

Over time, some of the parts of the work I’ve enjoyed most have been teaching, mentoring, building teams, and helping develop the next generation of leaders in our industry, including through the Urban Land Institute.

Georgetown, and specifically the Steers Center for Global Real Assets, gives me a unique opportunity to bring those things together. I can stay actively engaged in an industry I love while teaching, building programs, and helping students figure out how to make their own mark on it. That combination was hard to resist.

What is your area(s) of expertise, and what subject(s) are you most passionate about teaching or researching?

My professional expertise is in real estate development and investment, particularly residential and mixed-use strategy and the decisions that turn an idea on paper into an actual place.

I’m also fascinated by how people make decisions and become effective leaders. I spend a lot of time thinking about judgment, context, organizational dynamics, and what happens when qualities that generally serve us well are applied in the wrong situation or taken too far.

In the classroom, I want students to understand the technical fundamentals, but I’m most interested in what happens next: how you use them to make good decisions when the answer isn’t obvious.

How would you describe your work or teaching philosophy?

I don’t think students learn very much by simply watching someone else who knows things. My job is to give them a strong foundation and then make them use it: ask better questions, wrestle with imperfect information, defend a point of view, change their minds when the facts warrant it, and figure out how their education actually works in the real world.

I want my classroom to be rigorous, practical, curious, and a place where it’s safe to be wrong on the way to getting better. I’m also particularly interested in how we can use emerging technology to reinforce and apply the fundamentals we’re learning rather than as a substitute for understanding them.

What are you most looking forward to about your work at Georgetown McDonough?

The students, without question. I love the moment when something clicks and a student stops thinking about a concept as something they need to know for class and starts seeing how they can actually use it.

I’m also excited about creating more connections between Georgetown and the real estate industry. Washington, D.C., is an incredible place to learn about cities, capital, housing, development, and the sometimes messy process of making things happen. I want our students out in the middle of it.

What do you hope to bring to the McDonough community?

A practitioner’s perspective, a willingness to ask hard questions, an extensive real estate network, and an instinct to connect people who should know each other.

And hopefully some fun. We can take the work seriously without taking ourselves seriously all the time. I genuinely love what I do, and I hope some of that is contagious.

What is your favorite book, movie, podcast, or quote?

My current favorite podcast is Good Hang with Amy Poehler. It’s smart, funny, and exactly what the name promises.

A quote I come back to often is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay “The Crack-Up”:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Most interesting problems don’t have tidy answers. I think there’s a lot of value in learning to hold competing ideas long enough to understand what each of them might be telling you.