Barbara and Darla, CBRE
Barbara Perrier and Darla Longo
Vice chairman; and vice chairman and managing director of capital markets institutional properties at CBRE
Barbara Perrier and Darla Longo have been selling industrial space since the 1990s, so they’re used to being overlooked. But that’s changed during COVID.
“We’ve been the stepchild of all the asset classes forever,” Longo said. “Now, we’re the belle of the ball.”
The two sisters and top-producing brokers head up CBRE’s industrial capital markets team on the West Coast, and are part of the firm’s National Partners, a network of investment sales brokers across the country.
Their team executed 80 deals in 2019, at a value exceeding $16.4 billion, according to CBRE. In 2020, the team closed on a $125 million deal with Amazon for a 14.5-acre industrial park in Honolulu, Amazon’s first entry into the Hawaii market; and found a buyer for a Johnson & Johnson site in Los Angeles that is set to close in December, among other deals.
While the fundamentals of industrial haven’t significantly changed, the interest in it has skyrocketed. “What’s changed is capital flowing in,” Longo said. “The pandemic accelerated what was already happening and it put it on warp speed.”
Longo and Perrier both started in leasing and transitioned to investment sales, which was even more rare for women in the 1990s than it is now, said Longo, but they’re doing their part to turn that around. On their team of six brokers, three are women.
“We’ve added a few men to our team, but we had to be purposeful on that,” Longo said. “At first, we were very weighted toward women.”
Longo was the first woman on CBRE’s board of directors, and Perrier is on the board of CBRE’s Women’s Network, which recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary. Perrier helped organize a 1500-person Zoom call to commemorate the accomplishment. “One of the reasons that I felt like I never wanted to leave CBRE is our Women’s Network. I think it’s a real driving factor,” Perrier said.—C.G.
