Peter Belisle, JLL
Peter Belisle
Market director for the southwest region at JLL
Development has always been the name of the game for Peter Belisle.
The Falmouth, Mass., native began his real estate career at Disney, helping the media conglomerate build ABC’s Times Square Studios, which has long hosted Good Morning America. After four and a half years doing development for Disney, Belisle was hired at JLL in 2000 to lead its project development services division.
He went on to lead JLL’s energy and sustainability group, which helps clients develop energy consumption and conservation programs in their offices and other kinds of commercial facilities. In these roles, he was involved in the construction of The Durst Organization’s Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, which was the first major skyscraper to gain LEED platinum certification, and with the energy-saving retrofitting of the Empire State Building.
And, for the past eight years, he has overseen JLL offices in the southwestern U.S., including Southern California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. At the moment, he is helping several of JLL’s large clients in Southern California figure out how to plan their office space during the pandemic.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with occupiers and investors, thinking about safety protocols, how to market their assets, and how they might be using space in the coming months, with people who are in the office part of the time and how that interfaces with their portfolio needs,” Belisle explained.
Much like New York, many corporate tenants in California are leaving their large corporate headquarters downtown for smaller outposts in the suburbs.
“Even if a company is growing, they might need the same amount of space, or they might be redistributing where that space is,” Belisle noted. “Tenants might have had all their space in the central business district, and now they’re going to smaller urban/suburban offices to make it easier for employees who are coming from further out to drop in and work.”—R.B.R.
