David Josker, Ricardo Pacheco, Jodie Poirier and Amanda Spangler
President of the West region; managing director in Los Angeles; executive managing director for Greater L.A.; managing director in Orange County and the Inland Empire at Colliers
Colliers’ Greater L.A. office has spent the last few years in expansion mode. Its entire leadership team — David Josker, Jodie Poirier, Ricardo Pacheco and Amanda Spangler — left CBRE for Colliers before and during the pandemic. Josker came first, in 2019, followed by Poirier in July 2020. They convinced Pacheco and Spangler to make the jump about a year and a half later.
“We’ve added 80 brokers across the entire region — bolstering our teams and bringing in a bench of junior professionals,” said Poirier. “Before a year ago, when we bought in a 10-person capital markets team, we had a gap in that vertical, particularly in the mid-cap to institutional space. That gave us the full-service advisory team. We’ve used those teams to gain advantage during these turbulent times on the office side.”
On the office side, Pacheco said they had built out a strong investment sales team. The new recruits have focused on helping distressed owners and special servicers.
“We’ve been looking at how you stabilize the assets with an exit in mind,” he explained. “Gas Company Tower and EY Plaza — both were million-square-foot buildings on the L.A. skyline that Brookfield had defaulted on and went into receivership. Our leasing team is working hand in hand with the capital markets team on underwriting and making sure that deals are checking boxes in terms of preservation of capital.
“There’s a lot of distress right now,” Pacheco added, “but it’s presenting an interesting opportunity for certain kinds of investors who are looking to get into the space. Many of the owners of tomorrow aren’t necessarily the owners of today.”
Spangler, whose team handles industrial properties in the Inland Empire and Orange County, noted that her team had kept busy even with record low vacancy rates for warehouse space. She pointed to a recent,165,000-square-foot warehouse lease with electric vehicle manufacturer Harbinger Motors in Garden Grove in Orange County.
David Josker, for his part, was promoted in July to president of Colliers’ western U.S. operations from head of its Southwest region. He oversees 1,300 Colliers employees across 33 of its offices in the West.
