Jaime Lee
CEO at Jamison Realty
It’s simply impossible to talk about adaptive reuse in Southern California without Jamison Realty entering the chat.
The family-run firm, founded in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, is the de facto leader of L.A. office-to-residential conversion projects. Jamsion has completed seven adaptive reuse projects since 2013, with three more under construction and another 10 in the pipeline. That includes the 33-story Arco Tower, for which the company is seeking entitlements to transform into nearly 700 apartments.
Jamison’s roughly 18 million-square-foot portfolio is found within L.A. city limits, particularly in its home base of Koreatown. The company had initially focused on office and retail properties, yet rising office vacancy in the wake of the Great Recession (and later the pandemic), coupled with L.A.’s ever-rising need for housing, made for an opportunity too compelling to ignore.
“One of our competitive advantages is that we have been an office holder for the last 30 years, so we’re pretty hands-full working on our pipeline of our existing assets. … We think of adaptive reuse as just a very fancy [tenant improvement],” CEO Jaime Lee said. “So we’re going that route to address the housing need, and to give new life to these existing office assets that we have.”
Lee has spent much of her spare time in civic roles, serving as an L.A. city commissioner across three separate mayoral administrations. The University of Southern California alum (magna cum laude, no less) currently serves on the organizing committee for the 2028 Olympic Games — an event with particular weight for L.A., given the devastating fires earlier this year and recent immigration turmoil.
“What better purpose does the Olympic movement serve in these times of incredible anxiety and hostility, war, economic uncertainty, and all those other things?” Lee said. “It’s almost like the very purpose of the Olympic movement is to give us some type of beacon of hope, of humanity, of the achievements of the human body — all of these types of things that I think people are really excited to place their attention on for those few weeks.”
