JLL Gets Julia

JLL just netted a big fish from Studley: Julia Wilhelm, the first broker in S.F. to get LEED certified. (That's real Lewis & Clark type pioneer stuff.)

The 10-year tenant rep vet in the Bay Area just started as SVP on Friday. She climbed from being a founding broker at a regional company (Cornish & Carey) to national tenant rep (Studley) to now a global full-service firm. That trajectory matches the way her clients are moving; even early-stage companies in S.F. think in terms of global reach, she tells us.

Wells Fargo is a client, and her specialties are repping nonprofits (Nature Conservancy, United Way of Bay Area), tech (Say Media, Tagged) and law firms (Sideman & Bancroft, Shearman & Sterling). She was exposed to real estate at an early age (like Peter Parker being bit by a radioactive spider) because her dad was a boutique hotel developer--future female brokers play with master plans, not Barbies. The hotels sat on the Monterey Peninsula, and she tells us she recalls vacationing in the Carmel area and getting the bug to move to S.F. one day.

She got to know a lot of JLL's landlord reps over the years while sitting on the other side of the negotiating table. She was also impressed by their sizable deals for tenants like Twitter and PracticeFusion (JLL brokers were involved in 12 of the 25 biggest deals here last year). The Duke grad's first job was at a real estate appraisal company in Chicago. The sales component to brokerage interested her more than the analyst part of the transaction side.