JLL Hires Expert Industrial Team in Los Angeles
Jon Reno, Mark Vanis and Trevor Gale join the firm as managing directors and will specialize in representing institutional owners and occupiers.
JLL has hired an expert industrial brokerage team in Downtown Los Angeles. Jon Reno, Mark Vanis and Trevor Gale have joined the firm as managing directors, and they will represent institutional owners and occupiers in the Greater L.A. market.
The team has a combined 60 years of experience and has collectively completed $1 billion in transactions. Charlie Smith, JLL senior managing director and Los Angeles brokerage lead, calls the three brokers a “premier industrial brokerage team” in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles industrial market has had a wildly successful year, building on already record-breaking activity. The market has led the country in leasing activity and rent growth in the last year. According to Yardi Matrix, rents grew by nearly 7% through the middle of last year, and the vacancy rate fell to .52%.
The Los Angeles market may lead the country, but industrial growth has been widespread. The US industrial market closed 2021 with dramatic leasing activity across the board in the fourth quarter, with asking rents growing at near-record levels and capital markets volume reaching record territory at $160.3 billion. A new report from Newmark signals that 2022 will be another blockbuster year for the sector, which has seen surging demand throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Los Angeles, the activity has helped to drive strong investment appetite. Rexford Industrial is one such example of the investment activity. The firm recently closed $170 million in acquisitions in February alone, and it has posted aggressive spending rounds nearly every month. Its most recent acquisitions bring the REITs industrial portfolio to 37.2 million square feet. The properties were purchases with cash on hand and proceeds from a 1031 exchange.
The strong fundamentals have also fueled significant new construction activity. Earlier this year, for example, Duke Realty Corp. announced six new industrial projects totaling 1.4 million square feet in the Inland Empire and Orange County. All of the projects are speculative and located in some of the most in-demand markets in Southern California.