Kelly Sewell Nagel is the founder of Residy, an advisory firm working with senior leaders, leadership teams, and real estate organizations on consequential decisions involving strategy, capital, leadership, and execution.

She brings more than two decades of experience in commercial real estate, including institutional investment, development, strategy, and organizational leadership. Her career has included oversight of Aimco’s East Coast portfolio of more than 5,000 apartment homes and building a national residential platform at EDENS, alongside her advisory work through Residy.

Kelly is the Steers Endowed Professor of the Practice and Head of Real Estate at the Steers Center for Global Real Assets at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where she teaches real estate finance.

She is also a Trustee of the Urban Land Institute, Chair of ULI’s Urban Development & Mixed Use Bronze Product Council, and Senior Advisor to ULI Americas’ Women’s Leadership Initiative.

Kelly is the creator of the Near Enemies framework, which grew out of a pattern she kept seeing in leaders, organizations, and in her own life: real strengths can become obstacles through over-indexing, changes in context, or being asked to do jobs that do not belong to them. Increasingly, the question underneath the framework is one of jurisdiction: what is actually yours to carry, decide, or solve?

She is developing a book based on the framework. The through-line across her teaching, advisory work, writing, and Near Enemies is the same diagnostic move: finding what the apparent problem is obscuring, figuring out what is actually happening underneath it, and giving it language precise enough to use.