Is CBRE Moving Its Headquarters To Dallas?

The latest Fortune 500 company to move to Texas could be CBRE.

For now, the commercial real estate firm’s headquarters are in Downtown Los Angeles, but might be moving to Dallas, the Dallas Business Journal reported Wednesday, citing sources with knowledge of the move.

CBRE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The DBJ noted that CBRE currently has four offices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and that a handful of the company’s top executives are already based in Dallas, including its newly appointed chief diversity officer, Tim Dismond. North Texas is one of the firm’s biggest markets, the DBJ said.

CBRE CEO Robert Sulentic has roots in Texas: He is the former CEO of Trammell Crow, which is based in Dallas. Sulentic took the reins after CBRE acquired Trammell Crow in 2006, and has been splitting his time between LA and Dallas since then, the DBJ reports.

Such a move would also be a well-trodden path from California to Texas for CBRE. 

It is unclear what the headquarters move could mean for CBRE’s offices in Los Angeles or Dallas. A number of companies that relocated to the Dallas-Fort Worth area last year were California transplants, mainly from the Bay Area. Experts say that businesses are generally drawn to Texas’ lower taxes, lower office rents and lower cost of living. 

When San Francisco-based Charles Schwab announced last year that it would move its corporate headquarters to the Dallas suburb of Westlake following a merger with TD Ameritrade, the company told Bisnow it planned to keep a significant corporate presence in the Bay Area, but declined to offer specifics. Schwab still has a 10-year lease for 417K SF of office space at 211 Main St. in San Francisco that it renewed in 2016.

When Toyota moved its headquarters from Torrance to Plano, Texas, the move played out over about three years and took 3,000 employees with it, the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2017, the same year that the transition was completed. The company left behind a nearly 2M SF campus with office and industrial space.

Representatives for the GLL Real Estate Partners-owned tower at 400 South Hope St. that is CBRE’s current headquarters didn't respond to a request for comment.