PHOTO: Courtesy JLL
Anna Shaffer
Senior vice president of brokerage at JLL
Anna Shaffer has made the rounds of the commercial brokerages starting with six years in landlord representation at CBRE, then six years of tenant representation at Savills, and then, finally, moving to JLL in 2019. This year, she was promoted to the broker lead for JLL’s tenant representation practice in the D.C. area, with a team of 26 people.
Shaffer had initially planned for a career in real estate finance, but after graduating from Virginia Tech some friends from school encouraged her to go into brokerage. “I had friends in CRE, guys I went to school with, who said, ‘Hey Shaffer, you should get into it. It’s really competitive, you’re gonna love it,’ ” Shaffer said.
And she hasn’t looked back. These last few years have, of course, been challenging, but Shaffer has completed 35 deals spanning 300,000 square feet in the last 12 months. “We have a unique set of tenants: government, government contractors, associations — those organizations really do need to be in D.C.,” Shaffer said. “But there has been a shift in how they use space.”
Both Shaffer and her team have been helping tenants figure out exactly how they use space these days. Mostly, companies are focused on finding or creating office space that appeals to workers, with a lot more input from the employees themselves. “The wins are the clients are more focused on better space,” Shaffer said. “It’s kind of fun to work on those projects with a lot of input. The decision-maker pool is getting wider.”
Shaffer is one of a handful (or not even that) of women on her own team, and is proactively trying to introduce more women into the field, along with other historically marginalized groups. As the co-chairperson of her alma mater’s real estate industry advisory board and an advisory committee member for Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, Shaffer advises undergraduate students on real estate careers and summer internship placements.“I love speaking with young people in the industry. There are so many paths to go down,” Shaffer said
