we went through the great resignation now we're going through a situation where a lot of companies are starting to reduce their uh reduce their head count long term where are we going there's going to be a big shakeup that's happening even it's already starting okay so here we are we're back for another episode of connected conversations season two i am really excited about this guest um i recently met anya who is a senior vp occupier advisory internet transaction services for cbre it's a mouthful those consulting firms always have these long titles but i recently met anya at a conference and we became fast friends and she has so much personality she has so much great insight into the commercial real estate market that i just had to have her on the podcast and she's been gracious enough to share her time with us today so i'm really excited to introduce today's guest anya hello anya hi bob thank you for having me who would have thought that a just quick interaction over a couple of beers and some appetizers or maybe some salads i don't remember in new york would have led to this i know it's basically it's super exciting so anya the reason i wanted to bring you on the podcast today is what we're doing with this season is we're we're talking about specific topics related to the subject matter expert who's going to be on uh on the meeting with us today so for you it's commercial real estate so why don't we start with you giving us your statement of qualification and a little bit background on how you came to be i'm not even going to try your title again but how do you wrote her i'm a broker at the end of the day you became a broker so take us through it yes my title is super fancy for saying that i'm a broker and most people can probably read through that but i appreciate that it that it's a little robust i guess so i am a corporate occupier broker so i focus on multi-market portfolios that are global for large occupiers so fortune 500 companies uh we do a lot of work with with mid cap companies but i lead a team of about 40 people that's based in newport beach in atlanta and we run about 20 plus accounts for companies along various industries so really my focus is more around the office and industrial space i do a little bit of retail here and there uh but that that's my focus and that's predominantly what my team does as well we have some some retail focused accounts but a lot of it's office and industrial okay and then a little bit about your background how did you end up is as a broker you know it's very funny because from a young age i wanted to be in real estate i didn't know what commercial real estate was when i was 14 15 16 years old but i competed was lucky enough to compete in miss teen california which was in the miss america wait hang on did you win no i did so i was lucky enough to to compete in fresno california and and all the other gals you know everyone was getting ready for college we were 16 years old roughly and everyone when they go on stage and talk about what they want to be when they grew up technically everyone would say i want to be a doctor i want to cure cancer i want to be a lawyer and i took the stage and said i want to be a real estate agent and i didn't even know what i just knew everyone always told me i had a personality for real estate so i thought okay i'll sell houses and then as i got older i i realized that i didn't want to participate in the emotional side of residential real estate and so i was sort of shifted into the commercial real estate side of things and i actually got my start from one of my sorority sisters her father offered me an internship when i was at cal state fullerton and i was 19 years old so that that got me into the industry and started there at a company that basically did property management brokerage development so i was exposed to a little bit of everything then went on to intern in industrial development and graduated college i was lucky enough to graduate college in 2009 yes feeling oddly familiar about what's going on you know today in june of 2022. so i was told by some mentors that you should get into brokerage you have the personality for it i thought i wanted to be in development and they just said i really feel like you should you should go the broker route you got the personality for it nobody's making money right now go in and learn and it took about 29 interviews but i finally got a start on a brokerage team at cbre so it's funny because we talked about this before that whole 2000 it was 2009 right yeah what you're referring to is the housing crisis the the crash of 2009 and at that time and this is a weird intersection in our professional histories i was doing a project in orange county for one of the biggest retail property owners managers in the area and it was it was a very difficult project it was a difficult situation and then the crash happened and that project went away it turned it worked out to our advantage it was a profitable project but we never delivered because the circuit cities of the world were closing and all these anchor stores see i know a little bit i know a little bit of the you know enough to be dangerous i know a little bit a little bit to be dangerous um we're closing and they just they they technology was one of the areas they cut and then another i went on to do a project for northrop grumman which is also in that that that southern california orange county area so at the same times like sliding doors we had pivotal moments because that those projects that one the first one didn't quite go for me but this but it was good but the next one did go for me and it kind of launched me on the path of my illustrious career which ends me here talking to you today which i thought i thought the idea of us like yeah passing each other on the 405 or somewhere i'm pissed off driving on the phone not knowing where our careers are going or if we're going to make it through this recession or whatever was going on at the time yes these are and things are feeling oddly familiar right now with just some of the rumblings of of what's going on it's it's definitely concerning me to say the least yeah well that's a good place so let's start here so with every podcast in this season our theme for this season is back to the future i'm a big i'm a big marty mcfly fan so back to the future what i want to do in season two is talk about what the future looks like and now so more than ever there's a lot of uncertainty we went through a period of uncertainty to just step right into another period of uncertainty and when me and fred were preparing this episode fred said when is it going to be safe bob we got to figure that out throughout the pockets now i'm not asking you to break out your crystal ball and tell us the future um but if you could kind of speak a little bit about where you see things going in the near term and maybe in the long term in commercial real estate and fred pulled an article before this from forbes that said office is going to continue to struggle industrial continues to thrive multi-family continues to thrive you told me that hospitality is starting to rebound as people start to go on vacation and then you also mentioned multi-family so if you could talk about kind of where you see things going in the near term in a little bit of long term i know i threw um a bunch of different sectors at you but they're i i know you work in a couple of those so if you want to speak on the ones that make the most sense sure i can share with the ones that that i sort of live in every day so on the office side it's you know no one's coming back to the office and maybe that's a little too much of a blanket statement but it's it's pretty dismal and i think you know we've seen a lot of large statements being made by people like elon musk but at the end of the day up to now and i'm not saying this is going to continue but up to now the the the control was sort of with the employee so if they didn't want to come back they didn't come back and what i'm seeing for the future is i'm really seeing people continuing to need a reason to come to the office not just in a demand from your employer's likely not going to do it i think it's going to there's got to be intention around the office and what i see i don't see these large headquarters you know we see so many of these campuses and i know you've probably worked on them you know bob in the past and i think what we're going to see more is these micro hq's based in various parts of the us i think a lot of folks they're called the big hub and spoke is that the yeah it's so funny i was talking to somebody the other day and we're like what is hub and spoke like it's a it's a buzzword all it means is they're going to be out in these satellite there's going to be satellite offices in these smaller markets where there's a large congregation of employees and really the office isn't going to be you walk in and you've got your conference room and a sea of cubes and a few private offices for those that have earned them by whatever title they've achieved it's going to be hey i've got some awesome technology which i think is a huge opportunity for you bob awesome technology very cool meeting space spending a bunch of time in common areas where where you can have you know large meetings smaller meetings collaboration but i don't think gone are the days are of i go to the office and my desk right there says anya and i'm the only one that sits there that's that's not going to happen anymore the other thing the other term i've been hearing a lot is instead of central business districts cbds they're calling them bbd's better business districts so i think some of these satellites are going to flock to areas that are close to a lot of family family where families live multi-family orange county where i live orange county california what we're seeing is irvine was always the cbd the central business district well now south orange county is where all the younger families are moving it's more affordable the schools are good so now we're seeing south orange county coming back to the office but irvine not so much um and then on the industrial side of things i feel like industrial is going to continue to stay strong but i do feel that there are some markets like phoenix i think phoenix is going to be a big winner but there's a lot of construction going on a lot of jobs being created out there and a lot of companies that just don't feel like california unfortunately my home state is business friendly anymore can i ask you a question is arizona one of those places where somebody might relocate their headquarters to or build a spoke that's more desirable because they can pull from that from that the top talent coming from those universities and draw on some of those uh resources that arizona might have that california doesn't have while arizona is getting a lot of headquarter activity per se i see it as more of a hub and spoke environment where companies will go there because they know that the labor force is there but it's not necessarily going to be a major major hq environment what about industrial industrial same thing is industrial just kind of spread wherever they can find a warehouse or a space to put a warehouse is that or is there a specific market that's hot for industrial outside of phoenix obviously the population also you know phoenix actually isn't that far away from a lot of different port areas so like la you're kind of it's kind of in the middle of la long beach houston so depending on gas prices are a whole other situation but but i'm seeing a lot of development out in phoenix um tucson not as much you know tucson i i've always i think you've probably known it as well as kind of a college town um but definitely out in phoenix and i'm also seeing companies replacing jobs that were once california based jobs in areas like phoenix now is so you also mentioned a market like dallas what's what's your take and you had a good take on dallas like yeah there's a ton of construction and trust me i love dallas i'd like to move to dallas at some point in my life uh but i i think there could be a situation of some overbuilding going on there because there's just so much land and everything's been going so moving in such a direction that everyone wants to be in texas but part of me wonders like or there's a lot of spec development going on and does that mean that we're gonna end up with a lot of more vacancy in that market in places like the inland empire from an industrial perspective we only have so much land out here so if it's spoken for it's spoken for but out in the dallas area you can go as far as the eye can see and i think a lot of people have gotten really excited about that but it's going to be interesting depending on what happens with the economy and all this what happens with vacancy rates out there and if the absorption actually follows all this spec development so what are what's another market i find all this stuff fascinating because to me this is the very smart aspect of real estate corbett real estate industrial however you want to look at it i find it really interesting okay this is the market selection if you will this is the market where we can draw you know from these universities that have developers or we can uh we can draw on unskilled workers blue collar workers to work in our warehousing what's another location i know raleigh was a big hot area for a while there what's what's another geography that's like super hot right now well it depends on the industry sector but i would say so in different on the industrial side actually boise is another hot market actually cbre just released today emerging industrial market boise idaho do you know that population in boise idaho 22 of people there are between the ages of 18 and 34. um is that because of a military presence a university presence a little bit of vote yeah yeah a little bit of all that you got it so it comes down to again that's that market analysis right market selection like where are we going to strategically go yes with our portfolio and it sounds like they're they're heading out to idaho idaho yeah there are a lot of tech companies that are heading out that way as well salt lake and then and then i knew about salt lake idaho was never on my radar was never i'm gonna have to read that report yeah i'm gonna send it to you so it's it's it's quite interesting um and and really like but i think for the financial services sector so if we kind of toggle back to office i think phoenix charlotte those are big hubs for financial services um and even atlanta too one other point i'll make is just that over the course of the last two years a lot of companies are finding we're helping our clients determine where have your employees moved through the panel oh i didn't even think of that yeah that's another that's another piece of it it's like did you know that you've got a large concentration of people in bozeman montana right now that were once living in los angeles that's that's something to contemplate as well and you got to hope these employees are informing hr about their move you know but we're doing a lot of analysis around where where were the migration patterns and how are those migration patterns determining where we decide to retain does your team specifically do that we do we pull in cvr resources do but we drive we drive that process yes i love that this is these are the things these are the things i absolutely love about commercial real estate you know the more strategic aspect i never even thought about that is there off the top of your head i don't mean to put you on the spot is there any place that people have seemed to move to that you know more so than i know you mentioned bozeman montana is there any other that was actually just you know just kind of anecdotally for one of one of my clients but uh nashville and a lot of austin texas reloads i know you know it's funny because austin texas um we were talking about this elon musk moved tesla down there yeah and apple some time ago when i was traveling down there started to build down there and that became a major hub or spoke uh for apple um dell's been down there for years so all of a sudden austin this this city in the middle of of texas all of a sudden becomes this hotbed for uh technology and it's like how oh could you imagine telling somebody from texas that 30 years ago that the city would have said you were nuts there's just no chance nobody even knew where austin was i mean it's the capital but no one really knew where the heck it was just a few years ago and and i will say this reports that i read austin has one of the highest returned office rates really yes and it's a lot of younger population people you know living three four people in an apartment they need to go to an office or they want to they want to be with their teams because they're that's their phase of life but they have one of the highest returned office rates but on the on the the downside and i agree with you because i've been traveling to austin for years and years having done some work with dell in my past i would come back and tell people where i was and they're like oh austin i've never been there i've heard good things but i travel there today and my has the city changed it's uh you know there's a hotel on a corner that used to be a parking lot and it and this is like from one summer to the next and it's like i don't think they're prepared the infrastructure there is is robust enough to accommodate this growth especially when you look at the traffic starting at three o'clock in the afternoon you've got a 405 situation in austin yeah so how how do let me ask you this now when when when you're doing these market analysis and you're helping your customers like it do you factor that into it where it's like oh we we we really like austin for x y or z and then you have to say yeah but oh how how do you how do you come about that how do you arrive at that you know what i say again um is just for me it's anecdotal like like me traveling there i know there's a lot of traffic because the highway wasn't built to you know managing yeah sustain all the all this population so how do you arrive at that how do you how do you say well maybe this isn't a good fit for this how do you arrive at that there's got to be some driving factors as to you know there's got to be key factors into what we're trying to get out of a certain location so it could be yeah access to talent it could be it could be cost of living it could be all these things but then once once we know that we can drill down and basically tell you because you know esg is super important for companies right now and all that we can tell you exactly what the average commute time is going to be for each of your employees based on different zip code analysis and also tell you what carbon footprint what your carbon footprint is by allowing those employees to drive to the office every day so all of that kind of plays a factor it's just how the company ranks each of these data points that's that's so interesting and when you bring up esg um how many off the top of your head is because because that's state-by-state mandates right yes um it's more well it's more company like in my ex it's more what come it's more what the company california has mandates don't they yeah california has some pretty gnarly ones yes yes right but it's also to your point it's how the company values that what the impact on the environment is and from to be quite frank and we're always blatantly honest on this podcast it's to me it's a pr situation you know i've worked for companies in the past that had uh you know as a consultant they had horrible pr for whatever reason they invested a little bit more in their environmental and sustainability programs yeah that showed up in the news a little more but yeah so that's interesting it's less about the state regulations and it's more about how the company are we moving towards a place where the states and potentially federal government not that you know we want to get too much into that right now but are we moving in a direction where they're going to start mandating these things from an environmental perspective are we still a little ways out from that i think in california we're like already there i think it's really state by state ab2840 is this bill that's that's basically there's i missed it today i was going to dial in there there was a hearing about it today and basically th this is this really affects san bernardino and riverside county so it's here in southern california in the inland empire but they're trying to mandate that you cannot build an industrial development over a hundred thousand feet build or expand over a hundred thousand feet within a thousand feet of a sensitive receptor area so that would be like something that's not zoned for industrial yep so if you've got housing in a lot of you know parts of inland empire you've got housing and there's an amazon distribution facility like right across the street they're trying to say that they don't want this anymore because they want to be able to you know help the environment and basically you know they want to bring only certain skilled labor that's local so they want to kind of control how the jobs are being distributed and really i mean a lot of those of us in the real estate side are pushing against because what's happening is now our those companies that we're representing who need space in the inland empire which is already less than one percent vacant are being forced to say do we even want to stay in southern california then they go to texas and they go to texas or they go to phoenix or they go to las vegas yeah so that i think you just made your own point right there yeah you know basically about talking about these markets like phoenix and you know markets in texas and and now boise idaho um because at the end of the day the regulations may force uh companies to to look elsewhere and who better to help them think and that's really like you know when people i think you know this is a really interesting conversation because this is less about terms and conditions of elise and it's more about how do you make a strategic decision on where you grow your footprint and your workforce and i think that's that's probably what we're going to walk away from uh as a big takeaway from this this podcast it's not about it's not just about negotiating a lease and finding the best cost per square foot there's a lot more that goes into your job that people probably don't realize oh i spend more time than i than one would think on tax incentives and and understanding exactly like all of these factors esg labor labor analytics huge huge huge huge uh and it's gone are the days of i run a survey i show a couple buildings and this is you know and then a decision is made and we go to leases it's just not that's not the type of work i do um there are i'm sure there are opportunities to do that type of work but uh i almost call myself more of a strategic consultant and an advisor than even you know a transactional broker i think anybody who watches this and and i hope a lot of people do because that's what i got from this i mean it it's much more we haven't even touched on that piece of the you know the end of the line negotiating the the final contract for the space so with with all that said now in the interest of our you know we kind of talked about the topics that i think we really wanted to cover but the theme of this podcast again is back to the future so and i want to go back to what fred asked me before you jumped on here with so much uncertainty we just went through a pandemic we just went through the whole return to office working from home kind of situation that's still ongoing and now we went through the great resignation now we're going through a situation where a lot of companies are starting to reduce their uh reduce their head count so where do you see things going i you don't need to focus on any one sector but just broadly again i think you gave us a good swatch of the near term long term where are we going yeah that's that's a really good question i i feel like long term people are really there's going to be a big shakeup that's happening even it's already starting yeah a lot of tech companies have come out this week even saying we're gonna you know these hiring freezes and all this kind of stuff but i think long-term uh companies are gonna ai they say there's five generations in the workforce it's like gen x gen z gen y millennials oh and and ai i think artificial intelligence is going to be replacing a lot of jobs okay i now there there's all this talk about you know the metaverse and all that kind of stuff i'm not super well versed on it and i'm not sure that i bought into it quite yet but i will say like the biggest thing i see for the future is ai and how are we going to be able to mesh all of these people and skill sets along with the ai that's coming into the workplace well i'll tell you this the only thing i know about the metaverse is somebody paid like a hundred thousand dollars to be snoop dogg's neighbor in the facebook metaverse or something is that serious there was like a bidding war to be snoop dogg's neighbor so that's what everybody's gonna take away from my takeaway from they're gonna get a lot of smart stuff from anya and then they're gonna say well bob talked about snoop dogg no it's so funny because i heard some brokerage firm like at least space in the metaverse and honestly maybe cbre did i'm not sure but uh in that conference we met at i sat through a whole session on the metaverse i i'm just not there call me old school i'm i'm not i'm not there either because we both started in orange county dealing with property managers yes property owners and these big retail centers and all this other stuff so i do it i i do you know i look at it this way and i talked to fred about this a lot um because fred is fred's you know the next generation before me um i'm a gen xer and what i remind him with you know we just went to the great resignation right where folks had choice because there were companies now looking to fill positions and people could choose to leave what they had for the grasses being greener on the other side yeah but then you enter into a situation like we're in right now where companies hiring freezes and people are there's staff reductions actively happening yep across the board not just the tech sector we're seeing it in other areas gas prices are at an all-time high i guess uh i you know they could be what i'm saying is i don't have the stats in front of me gases or gas prices are very high and inflation is at an all-time high so i talked to fred and i say it's not always you're not always going to have choice and it's not always because when me and you were crossing paths in orange county i didn't my job was not guaranteed and then i saw where things were going and i was like wow i'm going to probably have a real lean if i and i didn't i was very successful in the tech projects fortunately that i had going that if i lost my job it was going to be probably pretty lean for a little while as i looked for another one because i'm not going to have a lot of choice yeah that's what i see well and the the other thing i see is like i i still recession or not i think your generation and i'm right behind you because i'm a millennial i see more entrepreneurs coming out of this even in a recession because i'm finding yeah people are losing their ability to choose but they still want control and i see that with my friend group i see that just you know peer group in business people want to control their own destiny recession or not and so i i have a feeling that you know i like to think i have an ability to be entrepreneurial even though i work for a large company because of what what it is that i do but i do think that that there's going to be more of this coming out you know in the next five 10 15 years and i think even these kids that are coming out of high school right now in college i think they want to work for themselves and they're gonna they're gonna do what they need to do to in order to make that happen i couldn't agree with you more and being a gen xer um you know the and i have that's why we started the podcast it's kind of like this little this is one little thing of many things that i do so it's kind of like entrepreneurial marketing for my company though um that i do have that spirit and someday i would like to say i don't have a boss like i i do agree with that but when you were talking i was like well why didn't i go down a path of entrepreneurship because i lived through the tech bubble yeah we're obviously were you feeling fomo from what i was describing no and how i remember why because the tech bubble was just such a nightmare in the it was the early part of my career yep yeah i made it through the tech bubble yes i made it through the housing crisis i mean and when am i going to run out of my nine lives i don't know it's so true it's so true and i don't know if you see this in your side of the industry but like on the brokerage side there though there were a lot of guys and gals who got out of brokerage when the tech bubble happened because they saw an ability to make fast cash there's there's really big age gaps in our in our business there's a lot of people in their 50s right now there are way less people in their early to mid 40s and then there's kind of my mid 30s group than and and part of me wonders is like coming out of covid i think on the the real estate brokerage side any kid that's coming out of college over the last couple of years and saying i want to be you know an office leasing broker i think their parents were saying yeah try again yeah well that's a good place because i i love working with the younger generation yep because number one they're really i i'll go so far as to say they're smarter than me than i would at that age they're smarter because they have more fred was just asking me how how i learned things when i was younger and i was like fred i taught myself how to fly fish from a book i was learning not from because i didn't have fred has youtube you know you have that i didn't have that so if and i love working with the younger generation because i love to mentor and coach them on things um that maybe were lacking in earlier uh roles they had you know kind of how to interact with people on a personal level um not so much over a cell phone or a keyboard how to be a leader how to mentor how to take somebody under their wing um and how to approach a business situation the correct way that maybe you wouldn't approach the way you approach a social they i feel they need help with those things but then when it comes to a podcast oh i go to fred for i'm like fred should we do this is this a good guess he has all the answers when it comes to that so that was a really long-winded take there but what i was getting at is anya the younger generation you know as we move into the future what advice would you give the is is this is anya's career path a good one to follow so funny be honest okay well just have to a quick story a guy i worked for when i first got in the business said to me i would never tell my daughter to become a broker okay and and he's it's such a rough business and it's just and and people are brutal and there are so many other things you could do and it was funny because he was a broker and he's a very successful broker so i found that to be very interesting because i figured he'd made more money than he ever could have doing anything else but uh hey uh so you're back to your question of like is is my path the right path to go down i i think there is still an insane opportunity particularly for women to get into this business i you know i feel like i i am seeing more and more women come in and it's making me really excited and we're bringing a lot of women on our team and look not nothing against the guys we're all about the guys too but it's really nice to see some variation genders because even just 10 12 years ago when i got in the business i was just around guys like that that was it um so i but i think you know in terms of advice i really feel like people need to figure out what their skill set is particularly if you want to go into a sales role personality wise it's huge if you want to get into this side of the business but i still think there's an opportunity for someone who can write code because corporate real estate technology is just blowing up right now i mean i just was at the cre tech conference i think you might have been there too a few months back and i was blown away so one thing i could say is i don't think anyone that's young should ever be dissuaded to pursue a path in commercial real estate it doesn't have to be a sales pack there there is something for everyone anya i i cannot tell you um how grateful i am that you took the time uh to share your knowledge your experience your history i gained a lot from this and what i what the real takeaway i took from this is just number one the wealth of knowledge you have and number two what it really takes to be a broker for a cbr it's not just again i said this earlier it's not just t's and c's of a contract it's more strategic than that and all the things you talked about market selection talent es esg and carbon footprint it all has to go into the equation and quite frankly anya whatever you're selling i'm buying i would happily apply whatever you're selling and again i'm going to reiterate this in my mind whatever year that was you won miss teen california and you will always be that to me but i want to thank you so much in the short time that i've known you you've become a great friend to me and i really admire you for being a woman in the corporate real estate space and the only thing that i ask you is you keep inspiring the younger generation and you become a leader and grow in this field so that young girls can look up to you and say someday i want to be like anya so i'm going to leave you with that and once again express my gratitude and say thank you very much for your time today anya thank you for having me it was a blast [Music] you