Last night in LA, we snapped DC visitor Joe Stettinius talking shop to friends and clients at downtown's swank Jonathan Club. As Cassidy Turley CEO since October 2012, he spends 70 days a year traveling to the firm's 28 regions and 60 offices and is in demand for his national perspective. For example, he pointed out that the current challenge in office is that 90% of recent absorption has been in A product, even though that represents only 15% of the asset class. He also suggested that differing views between tenants and landlords can often be bridged if both sides find common ground thinking of employees as their clients and how to make them happy and productive.
And Cassidy's DC-based chief economist, Kevin Thorpe, to the relief of the crowd, predicted a robust economy this year--and said to ignore some of the recent home sales, auto sales, and other numbers skewed almost purely, he said, by the polar vortex. "Trust me," he said, "I spend a lot of time with seasonally adjusted numbers--although I am saddened by the commentary that reflects on my life."
In the crowd, we met LA's Tom Ricci, co-founder of newly formed Coretrust Capital Partners, which has just purchased three Northern Virginia properties: Reflections I and II in Reston, and b in Fairfax. And with him, architect Nelson Algaze, who as far as we know has nothing to do with the DC area, but is critical to the symmetry of the picture. (We are always aiming for a Pulitzer.)
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