Two long-running eras have come to an end among a pair of major commercial real estate firms with large footprints in the Valley.Newmark Knight & Frank has truncated its name to Newmark, while CBRE Group plans to move its corporate headquarters from downtown Los Angeles to Dallas.On Oct. 29, the Business Journal confirmed multiple media reports that CBRE would relocated to Texas after decades of calling Los Angeles its home base.
“Designating Dallas as CBRE’s global corporate headquarters formalizes how our company has been operating for the past eight years,” Lewis Horne, president of advisory services for the Pacific Southwest area at CBRE, said in an email. “We have more than 5,000 employees in California and only an extremely small number of operations-related roles are expected to migrate over time to Dallas.
No client-facing roles will be affected, so California clients will continue to receive the same high level of service they expect.”There are multiple reasons for the relocation from CBRE’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters to Dallas. Among them: Development subsidiary Trammell Crow Co., which was acquired by CBRE in 2006, is already based in Dallas, and CBRE Chief Executive Robert Sulentic, who once led Trammell Crow, has been dividing his time between his Dallas office and Los Angeles.
Also, CBRE Chief Financial Officer Leah Stearns, Global Chief Operating Officer Chris Kirk and Global Real Estate Investments Chief Executive Mike Lafitte and are already in Dallas.In addition to its headquarters at 400 S. Hope St. in downtown Los Angeles, CBRE has a stronghold at Caruso-owned 234 N. Brand Ave. in Glendale, a former Masonic Temple, as well an office at the former site of a Kate Mantilini restaurant at 5921 Owensmouth Ave. in Woodland Hills.“As the industry leader in California and a major employer, we remain firmly committed to supporting the regional business climate and will continue to be highly active in various local civic and charitable initiatives,” Horne said in his email statement.In recent years, several major California companies have relocated their national headquarters to the Dallas-Fort Worth market. In 2017, Toyota moved its U.S. operations from Torrance to the Texas city. In 2019, Charles Schwab announced it would move its headquarters to Westlake, a Dallas suburb.Last month, brokerage Newmark Knight & Frank, a subsidiary of BGC Partners Inc., announced it had officially changed its name to Newmark in a company wide rebrand.This isn’t the first time that the firm went through a moniker makeover. In 2017, the firm, which had been called Newmark Grubb Knight Frank after merging with a component of defunct brokerage Grubb & Ellis, dropped the “Grubb”’ from its handle.
Brokerages: Rebranding, Relocation
