Interview by Matt Valley

The retirement of Julian Diaz as chair of the Department of Real Estate at Georgia State University (GSU) on June 1 capped a fulfilling 25-year career as an educator. The native Georgian's relationship with GSU actually began much earlier -- in 1971.

To financially support his way through school, Diaz worked in a lithography shop in downtown Atlanta during the day before walking over to the campus to attend afternoon and evening classes. During this time, he also started doing some computer programming for his father's appraisal company, which eventually evolved into a full-time position as an appraiser.

Diaz graduated with an undergraduate degree in real estate from GSU in 1975 and later earned a master's degree in business administration, with a focus in real estate and finance, from the University of Georgia. He returned to GSU in 1983 as a doctoral student and graduated with a Ph.D. in business administration, with a focus in decision sciences, in 1987.

After teaching statistics for a few years at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia, he accepted a temporary appointment at GSU, was later promoted and awarded tenure and became the chair of the real estate department in 2005.

Southeast Real Estate Business (SREB), the parent publication of Atlanta Commercial Properties, recently caught up with Diaz to discuss his legacy as a professor and the impact of GSU's real estate program.

SREB: When did you realize that you wanted to be an educator? Was it always your ambition, or did you grow into the role of professor over time?

Diaz: I always loved learning new things and discovered that I enjoyed sharing knowledge with others. But as an undergraduate student, I never really thought about becoming an educator. One day I overheard some professors say that they considered their job a sacred calling. That struck me. My personal pattern over the next decade was to follow my own curiosity. I often wondered how being a university educator was a sacred calling. Gradually, I came to believe that the university life was about empowering dreams. That understanding is what finally made me decide that I wanted to be a university educator.

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The pleasant surprise in an otherwise disappointing U.S. nonfarm payroll report for May was the healthy increase in jobs tied to the industrial sector, says Bob Bach, chief economist for Grubb & Ellis. The manufacturing, wholesale trade, and transportation and warehousing sectors added a combined 63,500 jobs in May compared with just 3,600 in April.

"The surprising surge in jobs important to industrial real estate indicates the continued health of the manufacturing sector and the strong volume of goods flowing through corporate supply chains," says Bach.

His analysis is based on the latest employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last Friday, June 1. Overall, the U.S. economy added 82,000 private-sector jobs in May while the government shed 13,000 positions, resulting in a net gain of 69,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, well below economists' consensus forecast of 150,000.

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-- Matt Valley