Philip Voorhees has used client connections to help close more than 1,000 deals totaling some $15 billion in value as one of the top retail brokers for CBRE in California.
Now, he is putting his professional ties to use to launch his next career chapter — and move on from the brokerage sphere.
Voorhees is closing the door on a 25-year run at CBRE to join Irvine, California-based investment firm Bison Partners as a partner leading acquisitions and capital markets activities. Voorhees will guide the company's search for retail property acquisitions that offer the chance for Bison to increase their value, seizing on what he calls a prime opportunity to buy West Coast properties at attractive prices.
Voorhees invested in Bison Partners upon its launch in 2022. It was started by Brad Rable, a former coworker of Vorhees' at CBRE, and Wil Smith, a former client.
Voorhees, who most recently served as vice chairman at CBRE, hired Rable out of graduate school, trained him in brokerage and maintained a close connection after Rable left to help launch Bison. Voorhees met Smith in 2002 when Smith's investment firm Greenlaw Partners was a client of Voorhees’ CBRE team.
Three years after Bison's launch, Voorhees is officially joining the team in a move he said takes advantage of "a sweet spot where strong retail properties can be purchased at deep discounts to replacement cost."
In September, Bison Partners and PCCP purchased Bernal Plaza, a 139,559-square-foot, open-air retail shopping center on approximately 16 acres in San Jose, California, for $38 million. Bison said it plans to boost the property's performance by remixing the tenants and investing in cosmetic upgrades.
The move comes as the U.S. retail property market stabilizes after turbulence this year, with leasing activity and tenant move-ins surging to multiyear highs, availability leveling off and minimal new supply reinforcing long-term resilience despite lingering macroeconomic risks, according to CoStar research.
Building a career
Like many brokers, Voorhees didn’t start in real estate. A job running a restaurant startup in Newport Beach brought him from Washington state to California in the late 1990s. But as it became clear the restaurant would fail, an opportunity emerged from an unlikely source. Bruce Kahl and Joe Goveia of Dana Point, California-based Kahl & Goveia Real Estate, the firm hired to scout locations for the restaurant, invited Voorhees to join their team in 1999.
“They taught me to be an investment broker,” Voorhees recalled, noting that his early work focused on coastal commercial properties from La Jolla to Santa Monica.
In 2001, CBRE recruited Voorhees to the firm's Newport Beach, California, office.
“That’s where I met my future partners Todd Goodman — the king of shopping center sales at the time — Gary Stache, Mark Larson and Pat Scruggs,” he said.
Power of partners
While at CBRE, Phillip Voorhees met Rable as he was completing a master's program in real estate at the University of Southern California.
“It took only one interview for me to know we needed to hire him,” Voorhees said.
For a young professional at the time, Rable brought substantial development experience from Evergreen Devco, a Phoenix-based commercial real estate firm that's completed 20 million square feet of retail since 2010, Voorhees said. He joined the team as a deal runner and quickly excelled in brokerage.
The two also forged a strong friendship, bonding over athletics, shared interests and their common alma mater, the University of Colorado in Boulder.
When Rable left CBRE to become a principal at Paragon Commercial Group, the friendship endured. When Rable shared his ambition to launch his own firm, Voorhees encouraged him to approach Smith, the Greenlaw Partners owner, about a partnership.
That conversation led to the creation of Bison in 2022, with Voorhees serving as an investor in the platform and its acquisitions. The firm has been buying across California, Arizona and Nevada with backing from institutional and private capital.
Now Voorhees is taking an active role. "For me, moving to Bison is a natural conclusion after 25 remarkable years with the best people in commercial real estate at CBRE," he said.
Targeting value-add properties
At Bison, Voorhees plans to zero in on retail properties that could benefit from repositioning and modernization, or value-add properties.
His thesis is that many owners have held legacy properties through the pandemic and a rising-rate environment, creating opportunities to acquire aging centers and rethink their merchandising, tenancy and value-creation strategies.
Voorhees says his playbook is informed by a market that no longer rewards passive ownership. Institutional capital and real estate investment trusts have already acquired many of the top-performing properties, leaving a large base of aging, smaller retail centers that lack the capital, creativity or risk tolerance to evolve. That’s where he sees Bison stepping in.
Another trend he’s watching closely is the changing cost structure of operating retail in the West — rising labor, cost of goods and regulatory requirements.
"There’s little room for operator error," Voorhees said. He added that high costs for tenants and developers alike are likely to limit new supply, prompting investors to add value to existing properties.