Jaime Lee spent two decades figuring out how to build housing in one of the nation's toughest development markets. Now the former CEO of office and residential developer Jamison is taking those lessons beyond greater Los Angeles as investors look for more places to put money.
Real estate investment firm Kennedy Wilson hired Lee as senior managing director of capital markets and real estate investments. In her new role, started this month, Lee is charged with raising capital, building institutional partnerships and identifying investments across the firm’s global platform.
Lee said multifamily will be a particular focus as she looks to connect investors with opportunities created by a persistent shortage of housing.
“If you can build something in Los Angeles, you can build something anywhere,” Lee told CoStar News.
High interest rates, construction costs and economic uncertainty have constrained new development even as housing shortages keep need elevated — a dislocation Lee said is beginning to draw investors off the sidelines.
Kennedy Wilson has about $37 billion in assets under management across equity, credit and development strategies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Beverly Hills, California-based company has increasingly emphasized rental housing and investment management, with 44,500 multifamily units including its Vintage Housing affordable platform and its recent acquisition of Toll Brothers’ Apartment Living business and development pipeline.
Lee, the daughter of Jamison founder David Lee, grew up around executives in the Los Angeles real estate business, including Kennedy Wilson Chairman and CEO William McMorrow, whom she has known since she was a teenager.
She has other connections to her new employer.
Jamison and Kennedy Wilson have traded properties and partnered over the years, and more recently formed a venture targeting roughly 4,000 affordable Los Angeles apartments, beginning with the planned conversion of the former Los Angeles World Trade Center downtown.
Housing investment
Jaime Lee joined Jamison more than 20 years ago and helped transform one of Los Angeles’ largest office landlords into a major housing developer. During her tenure, she helped oversee an 18 million-square-foot portfolio and advance more than 7,000 residential units across 36 buildings, including adaptive reuse and affordable housing projects.
That experience came in a development environment shaped by high land and construction costs, lengthy approval processes and increasingly complicated financing. It also put Lee on the front lines of two problems colliding in Los Angeles: an abundance of aging offices and a shortage of homes.
Los Angeles apartment rents remain roughly 30% above the national average, according to CoStar data, while higher borrowing and construction costs have slowed multifamily development and left relatively few new income-restricted apartments being built even as demand for lower-cost housing grows.
The shortage she confronted locally has increasingly become a national problem.
“We’ve spent a decade talking about the housing shortage and still haven’t produced enough housing,” Lee said. “That structural undersupply doesn’t disappear because the capital markets change.”
That disconnect is central to the opportunity Lee sees at Kennedy Wilson. The rapid rise in interest rates in 2022 forced investors to rethink property values and expectations. She said capital markets have since become more normalized, and investors that spent several years waiting for greater clarity appear increasingly ready to act.
“For experienced, well-capitalized investors, this creates a compelling, long-term opportunity in multifamily,” Lee said.
A larger stage
Kennedy Wilson gives Lee several ways to pursue that opportunity, including conventional multifamily investment and development, affordable housing and real estate lending.
Its relationship with Jamison also provides some continuity as Lee moves from operating and developing properties to a role with a greater emphasis on bringing together investment opportunities and capital.
Lee’s career has regularly crossed the boundary between private real estate and public life. She serves on the executive committee of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the California Coastal Commission. She previously led the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners and is the first Asian American woman to serve as a trustee of the University of Southern California.
Those roles have exposed Lee to the government, community and institutional interests that increasingly shape whether housing gets built. At Kennedy Wilson, she wants to apply that experience to a larger network of investors and partners while remaining involved in the city where she built her career and is raising her family.
Lee already has a benchmark for whether the career change succeeds. Five years from now, she said, she wants to look back and know she was “instrumental in the acceleration of Kennedy Wilson’s investment platform" across deals, market cycles and regional trends.
“It’s a great big world out there,” Lee said.