PHOENIX-Commercial real estate veteran Kathleen Foster has departed Cresa Phoenix to join Colliers International's office properties solutions team as senior vice president. In her new role, Foster will work with the team's senior vice presidents Phil Breidenbach and Peter Nieman, associate vice president Lindsey Carlson and marketing coordinator Sandy Machado. Foster started in her new role during the week of April 15.
The company's office solutions team handles areas including building/office space marketing, tenant representation, build-to-suit analysis, site selection and real estate plan development and implementation. As such, Breidenbach and Colliers managing director Bob Mulhern tell GlobeSt.com that Foster's background – which includes a two-decade involvement in corporate real estate – was enormously appealing to the Colliers team.
Foster's corporate real estate background comes, in part, from her seven years at Cresa. Before that, she managed First Health Group's corporate real estate portfolio, which amounted to more than 2.7 million square feet and an annual operating budget of $33 million. Thanks to this experience, she says she's able to provide a different viewpoint to a commercial real estate situation.
"Sitting in that corporate user chair for all those years gives me a good viewpoint of that side; whether to build or buy, what types of decisions to make," Foster tells GlobeSt.com. She adds that she's also familiar with boardroom decision-making. As such, "combined with Colliers market knowledge and client-first mentality, this will be a great partnership moving forward," Foster says.
Foster joins Colliers International at a time during which the Phoenix market is inching upward on a moderate recovery. "We'd been bouncing along a rocky bottom for quite some time," Breidenbach observes. "But the middle of last year, that bottom started going away." These days, space absorption continues to be in positive territory, and while the metro region isn't on fire, corporate users are starting to come in and, as Breidenbach puts it, kick tires. "For our team, we've been able to take advantage of that, but we wanted to have a more sophisticated approach to tenants and owners, and be able to expand our level and breadth of services," he says. "Kathy's skill sets mesh perfectly with that."
And Foster joins Colliers at a time during which the organization itself has been through some changes. Mulhern points out that, during the past four years, many have left the company, while others have come on board. Foster joining the company, he says, provides a good focus for others who might be interested in doing the same. "In this upcoming market cycle, we hoping to find more people, to take full advantage of their talents," he points out. "We should have great announcements in the coming months and years."
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