CB Richard Ellis

Specialty: Property sales and leasing; corporate services; property, facilities and project management; mortgage banking; appraisal and valuation; development services; investment management; research and consulting

Management: Jim Bowles, senior managing director of the Puget Sound region; George Williams, regional executive account leader of corporate services; Scott Biethan, senior managing director of valuation and appraisal; Steve Penn, managing director of asset services; Brian Jaffe, managing director of project management; David Milloy and Nick Cassino, managing directors of brokerage

Founded: 1906

Headquarters: Los Angeles with regional offices in Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and Kent

Current projects: Leasing responsibilities for the 890,000-square-foot Russell Investments Center in downtown Seattle; retained for three disposition assignments in Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond by the U.S. Postal Service; represented global health nonprofit PATH in its 112,500-square-foot headquarters lease at 2201 Westlake in Seattle; property management portfolio of nearly 35 million square feet of space

Photo courtesy of CB Richard Ellis CB Richard Ellis was hired by Northwestern Mutual to help lease space in the Russell Investments Center.

Jim Bowles, senior managing director in the Seattle office of CB Richard Ellis, said 2009 was a year of adjustment. To cope with uncertainty caused by the recession, his company reoriented its focus towards providing a wider variety of services to customers.

“It’s been quite an unusual year,” he said. “We have a wide variety of services and we’re probably doing a better job now utilizing them together than we were before through having to become more creative and using our resources.”

CB Richard Ellis’ Seattle office has seven different lines of service. Before, Bowles said, companies would contract with one or two areas of CB Richard Ellis. But with the recession, customers are scratching their heads and wondering what to do. CB Richard Ellis is concentrating on integrating different areas of its services for customers to provide them with better information.

“Part of our strategy is to help our customers take a look at the market, give them as much information as we can and ... strategically help them figure out how to adapt to the current situation.”

Because of this, Bowles said he expects the company to see modest growth in 2010. Some customers only use one of his company’s services but in the coming year, they may need more. “We anticipate that’s an opportunity for new business but it’s also an opportunity for us to better service them,” he said.

Appraisals pick up

Internally, some lines of service are doing better than others. The appraisal group is quite busy right now because people want to know what their properties are worth, Bowles said. The property management or asset services group has grown dramatically as some big institutional owners that own big chunks of inventory have outsourced property management to the group.

“That’s happened in the past year,” Bowles said. “Historically, that happened less frequently.”

The debt and equity finance section had the toughest time this year. “Trying to get financing can be brutal. Historically, they’ve been very consistent but in ‘09, that whole business has really slowed down to a crawl.”

Customers are also looking for as much detailed research information as they can get. “People are looking for more and more information delivered in any configuration you can imagine,” Bowles said.

With Washington Mutual’s demise last year, CB Richard Ellis laid off the WaMu team. Other than that, Bowles said the office has had no layoffs.

Early renewals

Locally, Bowles said he anticipates the region will continue to see early renewals and landlords being responsive to existing tenants. Buildings are not being planned, he said, and the region will not see any new construction for a while.

“What we anticipate is although the vacancy rate has crept up without any new buildings being built ... the market should kind of stabilize and get healthy again,” he said.

Bowles said we should see another cycle in a few years when some developers decide to build a building or two.

After being in the business since 1978 and watching three or four distinct cycles, Bowles said the Northwest comes out stronger every time. He said he’s interested in seeing how we come out of this recession and is sure that eventually, we will be stronger because of it. He’s also grateful for the Northwest’s economy, especially after speaking with counterparts in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Bowles is also seeing optimism in the market. Leasing at CB Richard Ellis has recently picked up. The company was hired by Northwestern Mutual to help with the leasing of Russell Investments Center. “The level of interest in tenants looking at the building has been pretty consistent.”