Real Perspectives Podcast

In a recent webinar that we held online, we took a deep dive into the drivers of the construction industry across the Bay Area and how it is evolving in light of global challenges affecting every aspect of development.

I sat down with leaders at Clark Construction, Pankow Builders, Nibbi Brothers and Gidel & Kocal to ask how their businesses are doing, what challenges they’ve encountered over the past few years, and how the industry as a whole is adapting to the new normal of a post-COVID world affected by labor and supply chain challenges.

Here is our conversation!

Bill Galipeau is BKM Capital Partners’ new Chief Financial Officer. Joining the organization from his role as EVP and Head of Investment Operations at PIMCO, Bill brings 25 years of institutional-grade commercial real estate investment and operations experience that will help BKM in its new trajectory to be the leading industrial investment and operations platform in the Western United States.

The Newport Beach company is an active player in the industrial market on the West Coast, which has been one of the busiest ones in the country. Where the industry is heading can be anyone’s guess, but BKM and Galipeau will certainly be part of that evolution in the years to come.

The life science industry has been on everyone’s mind since the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We all became experts in epidemiology and have been anxiously awaiting vaccines to help us get back to some semblance of normalcy.

As a result, life sciences have been on a vertical trajectory, and the commercial real estate industry could not provide enough lab space for all the innovation and ideas percolating around. 

Form4, an architecture firm based in San Francisco, has taken on this challenge and is helping developers and property owners to reimagine space, in some cases obsolete property, as centers of biotech innovation. James Tefend and Colin Mosher work on these projects every day, and their understanding of the industry is deep and broad. 

Here’s what they have to say about life sciences and the journey ahead.

Today’s conversation takes us back to the hospitality industry, and I have the great pleasure of speaking with Greg Kennealey, the CEO of Denver-based Mission Hill Hospitality.

Greg’s tenure in the industry has taken him from managing groups of hotels for KSL, which helped him springboard into a partnership with this firm to form Mission Hill. The company today is looking to grow its portfolio in the select-service/extended-stay hotel industry, which, as we’ll hear has been doing pretty well since the global COVID-19 pandemic began and is on the target list of many institutional investment organizations. 

Greg’s business is growing, and he’s joining us from his office in Denver to share how the industry is changing and how his company looks to build a differentiating advantage from the rest.

In mid-2020, as the global COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to make its way across the globe, the hotel industry was anticipated to be extinct in the near future. And it very nearly came to be!

However, just a year later, the swing has been one of the most remarkable in the commercial real estate industry, and today’s guest, Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, will tell us just how that came to be.

Alan has been one of the most prominent brokers in hospitality in California and has had the front seat to a remarkable industry that continues to break records even while the uncertainties linger and business as usual is anything but that.

Today’s guest is Vancouver, British Columbia-based Tom Rossiter, the president and CEO of RESAAS, a business network platform that real estate agents across the globe can utilize to communicate, exchange ideas and information and ideally close deals faster. 

Tom’s company is well known within the residential brokerage community, however, the company recently discovered a group of commercial brokers also adopting the platform for their use, bringing Tom’s vision of expanding into other verticals more into focus.

Now, as RESAAS is looking to grow, it is also seeking ways through which it can become relevant within commercial real estate and how it can add value inside that communication value chain.

There are few people who understand better what makes the Bay Area tick than Jim Wunderman. He is the CEO of the Bay Area Council, an organization that is fully focused on making the region the most globally competitive and economically productive in the world! The Bay Area Council is a public policy and advocacy organization that was formed in 1945 in an effort to shape the future of the region and keep it as the most innovative, competitive and sustainable in the world. 

But now that these goals have largely been achieved, the region is faced with a set of new challenges, in some cases challenges of riches, but nonetheless challenges that need to be addressed. In our conversation with Jim, we talk about those and provide a sense of the great opportunities that lie ahead, should these problems be resolved.

Ofer Avnery took a slightly different route to real estate. He created a technology company, sold it and then embarked on the path of easy life in real estate. Well, that’s what he hoped to achieve but quickly found himself trying to transform one of the biggest business innovation laggards by building intelligent software that allowed him to see development opportunities where others may not.

And, so Real Wave came to be, which today focuses on using some of that artificial intelligence to help him and his investors grow the business, expand into new markets and even create a development company for a new type of affordable housing.

In today’s conversation, we sit down with Jerry Zevenbergen and TR Hazelrigg, co-founders of Seattle-based Avatar Financial. As CEO and President, Jerry and TR, respectively, run an organization focused on bridge lending across the commercial real estate spectrum, and they give us a sense of where the industry is today and some of the challenges that their clients are facing. Bridge lending can be a life-savior in some cases, and their perspective on the market helps us understand how it will evolve over the next few years.

Understanding the state of the commercial real estate industry today requires a global perspective, and RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) is one place to get that. In today’s conversation, we sit down with Ann Gray, the Pasadena-based President-elect of this organization and also Principal of Gray Real Estate Advisors. Ann will lead the global organization in the fall of 2022, but today she tells us about their work and how it helps shape the world of commercial real estate across the globe. We also discuss the current state of the industry, which RICS evaluates quarterly through their Global Commercial Property Monitor, a sentiment study of occupiers and property owners.