LOS ANGELES-Tom Cherry has joined JLL as managing director, focusing on corporate solutions, tenant representation and complex land and building sales. He joins the company with associate Nick Niemann. Cherry brings 25 years of experience to JLL, most recently working as SVP at CB Richard Ellis. During his impressive career he has helped facilitate more than 35 million square feet of assignments in 37 states and 12 countries. We sat down with the newly named managing director to talk about the latest corporate tenant trends.

GlobeSt.com: What are your goals in this new position?

Tom Cherry: JLL already has a very robust and very strong platform. We are looking to supplement it where appropriate. JLL is the premier firm in the field at transacting on behalf of clients that have a multinational portfolio. This provides us with an opportunity in L.A. to discuss a different methodology in working with the multinational companies that are headquartered here. This is really a fresh start for us. We are looking to expand and grow the platform by going after the companies that will benefit from the proposition that JLL offers.

GlobeSt.com: What are some of the major corporate tenant trends you are seeing?

Cherry: You have to kind of bifurcate out from the geography perspective and really where the thought leadership comes from. If you take a look at what our San Jose offices are doing, they are able to effectuate their workplace strategy across the entire world because the companies are newer. L.A. is a little bit different in terms of the corporate occupier on the gravitation toward a more open collaborative design environment workplace strategy. For the big corporations that aren't doing it, it would be very hard for them to change on a portfolio of 75 or 100 offices around the world, whereas it is a lot easier to effectuate change for the companies that are coming out of San Francisco and Silicon Valley because real estate is a bigger part of their business and operations. However, they don't think of real estate as driving revenue by monetizing and selling assets. They think of how they can make their space more collaborative to make more money.

GlobeSt.com: How is the move toward creative office affecting corporate users?

Cherry: You need to look at the market, if you can, and bifurcate it into different types businesses. What is right for one group may not be right for another, and I don't think you are going to see a migration of financial services firms, for example, move over to creative space. I do think though that for companies that can operate in an open environment that is additive and accretive to their business, they will knock those walls down and work toward an open environment. This open environment trend has been around for a long time, but due to the financial collapse in 2007, people just couldn't afford to do it.

GlobeSt.com: What markets are attracting the larger corporate tenants?

Cherry: It is going to be the big six: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, L.A. and Washington D.C. Because there is a demand for engineers and creative types, you are seeing that explosion of creative office.

GlobeSt.com: Are there any emerging markets for corporate users?

Cherry: You see people moving to Houston and Charlotte, but I don't really know if that is a trend. At JLL we do look at different drivers, like housing, education and lower-cost of occupancy, and those move to the middle of the country, but the reality is corporate headquarters are still concentrated in the big six markets.