Colliers U.S. Brokerage President Gives His Outlook For CRE

Colliers International President of U.S. Brokerage Marty Pupil has seen the ups and downs of the industry. While he sees challenges ahead in areas such as recruitment, he also sees a lot of opportunity arising through technology and retail disruption.

Pupil has been with the brokerage for 14 years. He previously ran the firm's Montreal office then ran the LA office before taking over the entire West Coast operations. He was named to his current position at the end of last year.

The real estate veteran now leads brokerage, which is the company's largest service line. Colliers also has other services, including property management, appraisal, corporate services and facilities management.

Attracting talent is a big challenge at the moment.

“The ability to recruit and retain talent has been unbelievably challenging in the last 12 months,” Pupil said. “There’s a lot of competition for talent.”

Two companies that want to be publicly traded have revved up the competition for talent to prepare for a public offering, according to Pupil. More firms are publicly traded now than a decade ago.

"I think the pressure is on growth, figuring out the need to grow," he said.

The industry struggles to organically grow talent, he said.

As he looks at the different sectors, Pupil sees some driving trends for the rest of this year and the years ahead.

Pupil said there has been a big shift in office. There is less demand for office than 10 or 15 years ago.

"Every job created in this cycle is generating almost 250 SF less of office demand, so in other words, the trend among all office users, traditional and tech, is do more with less," he said.

Office is using more tech, including becoming paperless in a lot of cases.

Tech is also having an impact on industrial, with the impact of e-commerce helping lead to the birth of 1M SF distribution centers, according to Pupil.

Amazon and e-commerce are driving the need for same-day delivery and food delivery options.

"So technology has crept into being the big driver on the industrial side indirectly," Pupil said.

He also sees opportunity in retail even as others predict its doom.

“Retail is certainly exciting,” Pupil said. “I think retail is dynamic right now, and I know a lot of people are talking about the end of retail, and we’ll never have retail stores again and the apocalypse of retail.”

There have been more than 300 retail bankruptcies filed this year and multiple store closings, including Bebe Stores, The Limited and hhGregg.

Los Angeles lost 56 national retail chain stores last year. The closures are more of an indication of how consumer preferences have changed, and how retail is evolving as opposed to what’s happening with brick-and-mortar, according to JLL research.

Pupil said now is the time to see the glass as half full in retail.

“I think any time you’ve got major disruption in a sector, it’s exciting,” he said. “It forces us all to think about how we’ve been doing business and how do you want to do business, and how can you reposition retail and what can you do with retail.”

An Allen Matkins/UCLA Anderson Forecast survey for California released earlier this year showed the Bay Area has a great deal of optimism when it comes to retail compared to SoCal. LA and Orange County respondents were more pessimistic about retail's future.

Southern California has unique advantages when it comes to being able to take advantage of the changes that are happening in the retail landscape.

“I think Southern California, given its size and the sprawl ... and all the housing and the amount of retail that was built, kind of like Florida and Texas, we’re kind of at the epicenter of that transformation, and it’s kind of neat to see and be a part of,” Pupil said.