According to a press release on the school website, Carolyn Grimsley has been appointed as the director of the Master’s in Real Estate Development program at George Mason University’s School of Business.
Grimsley began her career in the private sector doing market research, financial modeling, and transactional work in commercial real estate, first as a commercial broker in the DC Metro before moving in-house to support the portfolio expansion plans of a national franchisor.
Grimsley then went from focusing on DC to the entire world when she began managing an international portfolio of real estate actions for the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, where she developed acquisition and disposition strategies for diplomatic properties in more than 25 countries and represented the U.S. government in the implementation of each.
Grimsley earned her doctorate from the University of Cambridge focusing her research on global tenure and title insecurity by uniting policy with existing international best practices and technological capacity in the context of global administrative solutions. She also holds an MS in Real Estate Development from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in finance with a specialization in real estate investment analysis from the University of Illinois.
Grimsley is an active member of the American Real Estate Society (ARES), the organization of Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW), and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). She has also been appointed as a member of the Standard Setting Committee of the International [real estate] Ethics Coalition, which operates under the auspices of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in London. Further, she serves as an external land expert for the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s Working Party on Land Administration (WPLA) and has presented her research on informal property rights, global property standards, and interregional land governance at conferences of the WPLA and the World Bank.