LA Tech Hubs Leading Subleasing, But One Area Could Be Turning A Corner

More than any other industry, real estate has a vested interest in making sure office occupiers don’t cut their real estate footprint. Office is the largest of the real estate asset classes, and a reduction in demand would lead to falls in rents, valuations and fees for huge swathes of…

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Skanska broke ground this week on its first commercial development site in Los Angeles, a three-story office building at 9000 Wilshire. Construction of the 46K SF office building will be managed by Skanska’s Western Region commercial construction team.

The building is designed by Los Angeles-based Neil M. Denari Architects in collaboration with HLW and located in the Golden Triangle section of Beverly Hills. Skanska purchased the site in November 2019, paying $18.15M, according to commercial real estate data site Reonomy.

Skanska is also building two Metro stations of the Purple Line Extension, which will link Downtown LA to Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood. The groundbreaking isn't the only big LA news from Skanska. The global development and construction firm also announced it has acquired a second commercial development site, this…

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In Case You Missed It...

The nightmare scenarios pundits paint about commercial real estate right now — malls and retail boarding up, offices remaining empty for months, large-scale developments pulling the plug — truly become horror stories when lost business leads to lost income and jobs. 

Talk with leading industry recruiters, however, and the scenario may not yet be as dire as some worst-case scenarios suggest. Chris Papa, founder and senior vice president at Bacharach Group, a CRE-focused recruiting firm, said the volume of job searches and recruitment activity hasn’t wavered for the last six months, bouncing back after the initial March and April downturn.  

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This series asks rising stars in commercial real estate about their thoughts on some of the biggest issues facing the industry, including inequality, climate change and technology.

Katy Gragg knows how much a good training program can shape the experience of newcomers in commercial real estate. She went through one herself just five years ago, and she reaped the benefits of supportive senior leaders and camaraderie with fellow new hires. 

Not all junior experiences in CRE are positive, owing to the persistence of traditional sink-or-swim attitudes at some firms. But as the industry continues to look for ways to attract and retain top-tier candidates, Gragg told Bisnow that she sees leadership-involved training programs as the best way to invest in the next generation of brokers.

The combination of robust junior training programs and greater emphasis on brokers at all levels learning to use data and analytics to spot new trends could make a huge difference in how successfully CRE firms get through the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.

“Having that organization-wide buy-in, specifically from leadership, is really important to making a program successful, because it sets the tone throughout the hierarchy that training the up-and-comers is critical to the future of the company,” Gragg said.

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