Jeff Graham Leverages Campus Public-Private Partnerships to Advance Mission

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Jeff Graham, UC San Diego’s Executive Director of Real Estate, has spent the last nine years growing the footprint of the top research university and initiating successful public-private partnerships (P3s) that are rare in academia. He also oversees a staff that has repeatedly proven themselves as leaders in the space. All from a guy who jokes that he got his first job out of college because he was good at Microsoft Excel.

Graham came to UC San Diego in 2015 with a wealth of commercial real estate experience and one public service role. He spent seven years working with a public nonprofit corporation affiliated with the City of San Diego, learning what it means to be on the public side of a P3. This experience with complex P3s that transformed San Diego’s downtown impressed upon Graham the challenge of achieving consensus among the multiple interest groups and decision-makers involved in new real estate development projects. Once Graham came to UC San Diego, though, he quickly understood it would be a job unlike any he had before.

“I had no idea that I was joining a team that had one of the most creative and transformational chancellors in the university’s history,” Graham says of UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “He had this vision that has ultimately skyrocketed the university’s rankings across the country and around the world. Our endowments and research funding have risen to levels never seen. My colleagues are inspirational and driven each day by the university’s mission of delivering world-class education, research, and healthcare. It’s an incredible time to be here and help carry out the chancellor’s vision.”

Graham says alumni returning to their former college campus even half a decade later may not recognize it. High-rises continue to go up everywhere in the UTC submarket of La Jolla, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the US. The university is second only to UCLA in the entire country for the number of applications it receives every year, with an acceptance rate of 25 percent.

“It’s an incredible time to be here and help carry out the chancellor’s vision.”

Jeff Graham

As Graham’s portfolio of real estate assets under management has grown, more staff have come on board to support the growth. When Graham started in his role, his office had 11 other full-time employees. Now there are 20. The university’s vice chancellor-CFO, to whom Graham reports, was also integral in supporting Graham’s efforts by embracing new innovative approaches to the university’s real estate program, such as leveraging the university’s investment in a new downtown educational and cultural complex with federal New Market Tax Credit funding.

“It is not my goal to manage more people,” Graham says, laughing, “but it has been required as our portfolio and its complexity have grown.” Graham believes his department’s investment in experienced talent along with systems automation, integration, and the use of AI provide capacity to absorb future portfolio growth without further staff expansion.

One of the real estate director’s key accomplishments has been building a new team. Changing a team focused primarily on negotiating leases and license agreements to one that features creative thinkers with technical expertise in the areas of ground lease negotiations, site planning and project design, development management, financial modeling, and capital markets. That creative thinking has resulted in massive P3 deals unusual in higher education.

“It is not my goal to manage more people, but it has been required as our portfolio and its complexity have grown.”

Jeff Graham

On the horizon, Graham’s P3 pipeline includes 3,600 new rental housing units prioritized for faculty, staff, and professional students, with ancillary retail, on three sites. A new 300-key campus hotel with 30,000 square feet of meeting space is also entering the RFQ phase soon. That comes on the heels of a half dozen P3s that are already up and running, mostly in the science and medical space and in partnership with cutting-edge biotech and life sciences companies and nonprofit institutions. Graham has also negotiated and implemented public-public partnerships, including a new fire station developed by the City of San Diego on university land which will be operated by the city for the benefit of the university and the surrounding communities.

“Our team has attended many P3-focused conferences so that we continue to learn about what’s going on in the space,” Graham explains. “We also share with other universities what we’ve learned doing these deals at a complex level.”

If there’s a project with P3 potential, university leadership is willing to consider it to preserve the university’s debt capacity for core capital projects like student housing, academic and research space, or other infrastructure that needs the capital. Or, in the case of the 300-key hotel, the university prefers to delegate the hotel development and operations to an experienced hotel developer, so a P3 model makes the most sense.

If you are in the academic space and want to monetize the value of university land by partnering with a highly qualified private development partner, you need to speak with Graham and his team. They may be the gold standard for what is capable in the academic space. They’re certainly rewriting the book on what it means to be a proactive department of a public university.

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