Building on trust

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the population growth that had powered Florida real estate gave out. Development projects ran aground. New ventures couldn’t get financing.

Jim Spaeth, who had built a career as a real estate developer in Florida, needed a new plan. In 2011, after three years of closing down troubled development projects and working on real estate startups, he did what any good developer would do. He ran the numbers.

“I did this really nerdy regression analysis of all the places I thought were going to be successful in the innovation economy,” he says. “And it turned out that Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill is one of those places.”

Chapel Hill reminded him of where he grew up in Northern Virginia: strong public schools and high quality of life. His kids were six and four at the time — education mattered.

“When I saw this opportunity, I’m like, ‘Wow, I can kind of replicate what I had growing up, but for my kids, without the traffic and the congestion,” he says.

He landed a role at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s MBA career center in 2011, helping graduates get jobs in real estate and investment banking. It also turned out to be the start of his UNC Kenan-Flagler career.

Today, Spaeth is a professor of the practice at UNC Kenan-Flagler, teaching applied real estate finance and a capstone MBA development course which teaches students to combine real estate judgment and cutting-edge data science to find deals that work.

The developer who once used maps and aerial photos to assess deals is now preparing the next generation of real estate professionals to take full advantage of AI, machine learning and huge amounts of data, backed up by the critical human traits of storytelling, judgment and trust.

Building something lasting

He moved from the MBA career center after two years, when UNC Kenan-Flagler asked him to become the first full-time executive director of the Wood Center for Real Estate Studies.

The Wood Center, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2026, had been led by alumni on a part-time basis up until Spaeth took the job. It was like a “small family business,” with Professor Dave Hartzell, staff member Susan Drake and himself. The center’s annual budget was $300,000 — but they had ambitions.

“My charge was to institutionalize the Wood Center so that it had the infrastructure to grow without losing that family feel,” he says.

Under Spaeth’s leadership over the next decade, the budget grew sevenfold, to about $2 million annually, funded almost entirely by alumni.

A dedicated staff member, Katie Hambrick, now serves as a single point of contact for real estate companies seeking to hire UNC Kenan-Flagler students and alumni. And the number of undergraduates entering commercial real estate has grown from about 10 per graduating class to more than 90.

Spaeth credits Leonard Wood Sr. (MBA ’72), the center’s namesake benefactor, with providing financial backing and strategic vision. Hartzell is the foundational figure without whom none of it would exist, says Spaeth.

“Everything that we’ve set up here is really built on his shoulders,” Spaeth said. “He was my thought partner.”

Where data meets judgment

During the pandemic, a faculty member who historically had taught the capstone development course retired. Spaeth was asked to step in as a co-teacher and he’s been teaching it ever since, continuing as a full-time faculty member after stepping down as the Wood Center director in 2023. The shift to teaching has been a great success: The Full-Time MBA Class of 2026 awarded him the Gerald Barrett Faculty Award for Teaching.

When Spaeth shifted into teaching, he brought a practitioner’s instinct for what the industry needs. In his development course he teaches students to use two modes: sophisticated, digital data analysis alongside human judgment.

“It’s kind of like ‘Moneyball,’” he says, referring to Michael Lewis’ book about how the Oakland A’s built a competitive team on a small budget using data analysis — an approach that flew in the face of baseball’s century-old reverence of human judgment, but was proven on the field.

For decades, real estate decisions were driven as much by experience and intuition as they were by the limited data developers and investors could access. Now, a nearly infinite sea of data about how consumers behave and what tenants are looking for is available. AI tools make analysis faster and easier than ever.

Working with Drew Conway, head of data science for hedge fund Two Sigma’s private investment businesses and the Wood Center’s technologist in residence, Spaeth has built a case that puts students inside that new reality — analyzing a shopping center project using both traditional metrics and data science inputs. The goal is to teach them to use advanced data analysis and teach them how to answer questions software might miss.

“This is the future of real estate investment, where it’s not just the real estate practitioner making the call,” he says. “It’s the data science team helping them make that call. We don’t think you’re going to be able to pull the two apart in the very near future.”

The right call

With or without his “nerdy regression analysis,” Spaeth says he made the right decision coming to Carolina.

“I raised my kids here. My son’s a junior here at Carolina, he’s doing real estate,” he says. “I love the people here. Seeing them go out and do great things and knowing that they come back and give back — that’s so much fun for me.”

Spaeth’s dedication to students is evident, from those he helps attract to UNC Kenan-Flagler to study, to those he teaches real-world real estate, and the graduates who are part of the powerful network of real-estate alumni.

UNC Kenan-Flagler is different from many other business schools, he says. He sees it in how his students prep each other for job interviews, even when they’re competing for the same position. “Those students don’t think in a zero-sum game type of way,” he says.

As long as that holds, the real estate program and the Wood Center’s future will continue to thrive — regardless of what algorithms do.

“We’re going to be fine in real estate.”