For Jim Stuart, a partner at the development firm Matter Real Estate Group, the real estate work boils down to a sense of hospitality, mixed with a commitment to community building. It’s giving people a reason to visit, stick around a while and come back again.
His regular tasks these days include experimenting with on-site events at UnCommons, his company’s growing mixed-use project about 10 miles west of the Las Vegas Strip. Developers staged about 150 community events at UnCommons during 2025 from live music and arts festivals to farmers markets and rallying events with members of the NHL’s Golden Knights. Some were surprisingly successful, with others garnering a disappointing turnout, though Stuart plans to increase the lineup in 2026.
“It is an endless amount of energy that you put into creating activizations, so that the community can live and thrive,” Stuart told CoStar News. “And importantly, the great promise from a planning standpoint of mixed use" is answering the interest of the residents or the businesses and providing "an environment where everything they could imagine and things they wouldn't even have thought of are right at their doorstep.”
Stuart grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, gaining an interest in hospitality during his school days that extended to commercial real estate in his early career work. In 1994, he co-founded a commercial brokerage firm in Las Vegas that was eventually acquired and absorbed into Colliers International.
Stuart went on to develop projects including the 100-acre Town Square Las Vegas dining and entertainment center, and in 2018 founded Matter Real Estate in San Diego with partners Matt Root and Kevin Burke. Stuart for the past 20 years has resided in San Diego, but for the last decade his focus has been on Las Vegas, where Matter Real Estate developed several industrial buildings and most recently the mixed-use UnCommons project.
Nearly all of UnCommons’ offices, retail slots and 355 apartments have been leased up, and construction is now underway on a multinational Asian food hall to debut this fall. UnCommons recently closed on a $310 million refinancing and has landed numerous high-profile office and retail tenants, including Deloitte, CBRE, Morgan Stanley and the headquarters location of sports betting operator DraftKings.
Stuart discussed getting started in the industry, his approach to development and what keeps him up at night with CoStar News. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you make your way into the real estate industry?
Originally the plan was to move into hospitality — that’s what first brought me to Las Vegas, and along the way, by mere circumstance, I ended up working for a hotel developer in my final years of school, and from there, just continued my love affair with commercial real estate and development, and never looked back. When you think about the business we are in, it is hospitality. It is anticipating the needs of others and then designing solutions for that. So, in many ways, I feel my job is that I'm a customer service representative day in and day out.
I loosely like to consider myself a creative and an artist. I think that's where I find my passion shows up the most, and the idea of imagining a better future with vacant real estate and then designing a path to do that future grabs hold of my excitement and attention. And it's a place where I can utilize my historical experiences in commercial real estate, and deliver a result with a project that can make a positive impact on community.
What’s the toughest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
There's an endless number of lessons, and I would say I'm still learning to this day, which I think is probably the greatest lesson, is that you need to remain curious and you need to remain a student. The difference between the younger version of myself and my current version is I have learned not to follow my own biases and instead solicit and carefully listen to the input of others.
There's a lot of information available to people, and there's a lot of experienced people who are willing to offer guidance and help. I think the critical qualifier here is to understand that people are usually offering you their opinion, they are not offering you facts. So, the resulting exercise as a developer is to discern the essential few from the trivial many. Because in the end everybody does have an opinion.
Everyone from my young daughters to very experienced friends in the industry, they all understand what a building is, what a parking lot should look like, what landscape feels like, and therefore most believe they have a reference for telling you how it should be done, and then you have to sort through the noise, and come up with your own picture of what it should be.
What’s your most memorable deal or project?
The most important project always seems to be the most recent, so it's UnCommons. I think in many ways it is representative of perhaps a culmination of my own experiences. It reflects many of our shared values. It reflects what I believe has my more mature design sensibilities. It reflects my quest to create community and social connection, so if there's a project that I would point you to and say, 'Hey, you know, this is what I want to be known for,’ it would be UnCommons.
I think as developers, we naively look at mixed use, particularly at scale, as yet another commercial project, and that will end up steering you in a wrong direction. At the end, bringing the project to life and standing it up is only phase one. Phase two is how do you insert life into that project, and for me that feels more about creating and curating events in the culture and community. I feel more like you have a civic responsibility to create a small town, and the energy that defines that town. This is not collecting rent and managing landscape groups. Mixed use is a very dynamic, ever-changing, highly responsible process that lives long past completion of the building.
What keeps you up at night?
Today more than ever, it is the uncertainty surrounding the macro and geopolitical events, and this time more than any other in my career is riddled with unpredictable scenarios that simply surprise us almost on a weekly, if not daily, basis. That makes our jobs and our ability to bring any project to market just rife with potential disasters.
So if you just think about the continuum from when you bring a project to mind in your finances to when that project is delivered to the market, there's an endless number of points of departure from the process that will change that course and direction. How do you plan for what has become completely unpredictable? This is our industry.
We're caught in what has arguably been a three-year recession perhaps in real estate development with no end in sight, no certainty in sight. Costs are remaining super elevated, cost of capital remains super elevated, uncertainty remains super elevated. I think you really need to have something that is very well envisioned that has strong fundamentals before you're going to take a step forward. At the end of the day, commercial real estate development is risk mitigation, we constantly are striving to find the mistakes before they happen and make sure we correct those mistakes along the way, that is job one.