CBRE’s Kristina Metzger Went From Amateur to Expert in Data Centers

When CBRE wanted someone to step up and become a leading data center analyst — their go-to expert on the subject, as it were — Kristina Metzger eagerly raised her hand. 

There was just one problem: She had no idea what a data center was. 

It wasn’t as though there were an abundance of data centers surrounding where she and her three brothers grew up in Southern California. She wasn’t passing these facilities on her way to go surfing at nearby beaches and living what she describes a “very typical Southern California life.” Metzger was the first in her family to graduate from college, earning undergraduate degrees in business finance and Spanish from San Diego State University, where she also played volleyball. 

During school, she got an internship at CBRE and, after graduating, went to work there full time in the consulting group doing underwriting and analytical support for all property types. 

“This is 2006-2007, and office was very much the sexy product of the day, and it is funny to think about because data centers were a very nominal percentage of what our group [was working] on,” Metzger said. “Data centers were highly unique in the way that the transactions were structured, and required a deep level of understanding just to understand the basics.”

So she started asking broad questions: What are these buildings? What do they do? How do we use them? The answers altered her career. 

“There was a lightbulb that went off and I just thought, ‘Wow, we’re going to need a lot of these,’ ” she said. 

She was right about that. Global data center deals in 2025 totaled $61 billion, according to an S&P Global report, compared to under $1 billion in 2019. 

“Data centers are all about power, so there’s a lot of math associated with that, and so that math element of it drew me in a little bit from the beginning, too,” Metzger said. “It was just a little bit more analytical than some of the other product types I was working on. I quickly became the go-to CBRE data center analyst.” 

Fast forward almost 20 years and Metzger, 41, is the Southern California-based vice chairman of CBRE’s data center capital markets division. She personally closed around $4.5 billion of capital markets transactions in the U.S. in 2025, and has closed over $50 billion since 2009. Those transactions range from sales of existing developed assets, fully funded forward or forward takeout sales of to-be-delivered assets, joint venture equity, and partial interest recapitalizations.

She has represented over 50 unique developers, operators and investors in execution of data center capital market transactions. Some of her clients include Brookfield, Hines, Blackstone, Blue Owl Capital and Yahoo. 

“Kristina is arguably one of the most impressive people that I’ve come across — not just at CBRE but in any business I’ve been in,” said James Millon, president and co-head of CBRE’s U.S. and Canada capital markets business. “I came out of the investment banking business surrounded by a lot of very smart, driven people, and Kristina is very much in that camp.” 

Since 2021, Millon has worked with Metzger on a variety of large-scale data center transactions involving some major tech companies — the Googles, the Metas and Amazons of the world — and has been wowed by her forward-thinking approach, and ability to earn respect and trust from clients as well as colleagues. 

“I would love to be able to say that CBRE put Kristina on the map — yeah, we have a nice platform and service offerings — but Kristina is self-made,” Millon said. “Make no mistake about it, I think that’s what sets her apart from many of her peers out there. She’s competing in a spectrum that’s hyper competitive at the moment because of the size, the economics and the investment at stake.”

The competitive nature of data center transactions means that — at least for now — Metzger will be pretty busy even if there are those who believe it’s all largely a bubble heading toward an eventual burst. 

Some 40 percent of respondents to a survey by law firm Foley & Lardner believed the current rate of data center development is “unsustainable,” and 63 percent of those surveyed expect a “strategic correction” in the market by 2030.

“There is a gold rush mentality right now around securing power. That’s a big part of why people feel there’s a bubble,” Daniel Farris, partner and co-lead of Foley’s data center and digital infrastructure team, said in the report. “There’s going to a period in the next two to three years where power at necessary levels is going to be really hard to come by.”

And it isn’t just the potential bubble bursting that impacts data centers. Community outrage in the areas where these centers are built or planned is also a headwind for the market, something Metzger acknowledges. 

“Data centers absolutely face some headwinds from just overall municipalities,” she said. “With the expansion of these facilities, there has been some negative headlines relative to their large use of resources, including power and water. There are some guardrails around development, some of them are really good, and some of them may be more challenging or not really necessary. But there absolutely are some headwinds to the overall ability to develop in many of these regions.” 

Economic and political uncertainty — including steeper tariffs and stubbornly high interest rates — are another headwind for the data center industry that Metzger is dealing with.

“Tariffs affect the cost to build,” she said. “A lot of these facilities are structured in open-book transactions, so open-book yield on cost transactions. So groups are trying to solve for a potential run in tariffs through like [guaranteed maximum price] contracts or through force majeure language that allows for the expansion of what those costs may be.”

From a capital markets perspective, these projects obviously require financing and investment — nobody is building multibillion-dollar facilities on an all equity basis, she said. So the fluctuations in interest rates can put pressure on exit cap rates. 

But the challenges impacting the market are part of what Metzger finds exciting about the data center space. And, if you were to ask her what fulfilling projects she’s worked on over the course of her 20-year career, she won’t tell you the ones with the stunning price tags, but rather those that required her strategic thinking from start to finish. 

“The projects that make me the most proud are the ones where I developed the investment thesis from the beginning and then we fully executed on it,” she said. 

One example of this was Legacy Investing, an investment firm that acquires and manages assets such as data centers, life sciences properties and logistics hubs. Metzger and CBRE recapitalized Legacy into an old infill, middle-market facility in Minneapolis, which is a secondary market for the firm. 

“We worked with them through the lease-up of that facility, and we just sold it last year for $439 million,” Metzger said. “What’s most significant for me is that for Legacy Investing, this is the deal of their lives. We sold them on the dream of this asset where they recapitalized into it for about $17 million, and then we just flipped it for them for $439 million. Coming up with a strategy — and then executing that strategy and having the wherewithal to see where the puck is going — that, to me, is the most fulfilling.”

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.