Faculty
Education
PhD in Finance, The Ohio State University
Expertise
Alternative investments
Commercial real estate finance
Institutional investment
Biography
Spencer Couts is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate Development. Prior to entering his Ph.D. program, he worked in real estate investment and development as a Senior Analyst for UDR, Inc., an S&P 500 multifamily REIT; an Associate Acquisition Manager for Evergreen Devo, Inc.; and a Senior Project Engineer for Rudolph and Sletten, Inc.
He has authored real estate finance cases on single-tenant valuation; single-use, mixed tenant valuation; and mixed-use, mixed-tenant valuation. In 2018, he chaired The Ohio State Real Estate and Housing Doctoral Conference.
Spencer Couts also holds an M.S. in Finance from Purdue University, a Master of Real Estate Development and an MBA from the University of Southern California, and a B.S. in Construction Engineering and Management from Purdue University.
Selected Publications
- Couts, S. J., Gonçalves, A. S., & Ross, A. (2024). Unsmoothing Returns of Illiquid Funds. The Review of Financial Studies, 37(7), 2110–2155.
- Couts, S. (2022). How do Non-Core Allocations Affect the Risk and Returns of Private Real Estate Funds?. The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 68, 715–748. doi:10.1007/s11146-022-09886-0.