A power family trio of Silicon Valley brokers left Colliers after more than two decades to join Kidder Mathews as the firm continues to expand in key West Coast markets.
John Kovaleski and David Buchholz, who are related by marriage, spent more than 20 years as a team at Colliers' San Jose offices, representing an array of clients from corporate tenants to institutional investors. Alex Kovaleski, John Kovaleski's son, joined their team at the real estate services firm about seven years ago.
"We decided it was time to reset the table and start something new," Kovaleski told CoStar News. "We noticed the Kidder Mathews Silicon Valley office was picking up momentum."
Their ostensible specialty is industrial properties, but the team has handled leasing and sales for a wide range of asset types over the years, particularly in downtown San Jose. They helped facilitate projects including a prominent student housing tower near San Jose State University called The Grad that opened a few years ago and Aquino, a dense eight-story apartment complex that's currently under construction.
The elder Kovaleski has been in the real estate industry since shortly after he graduated from Santa Clara University in 1981. He joined Colliers in 2002, and Buchholz joined his brother-in-law there a short time later.
Kovaleski and Buchholz — who are brothers in law — joined as executive vice presidents, and Alex Kovaleski is a vice president.
They will remain in downtown San Jose and keep their focus on Silicon Valley's largest city and elsewhere in the tech-focused region as it continues to recover from several years of shrinking footprints and plummeting property values.
West Coast expansion
The real estate narrative is now shifting in Silicon Valley, as a flurry of deals signed over the past year resulted in the global tech capital reporting its highest quarterly leasing volume since 2022.
The industrial sector is still grappling with headwinds, but Kovaleski pointed to the ongoing explosion of data centers needed to power AI and other cutting-edge technologies.
"Obviously there's cheaper land elsewhere," he said. "But being in the center of Silicon Valley is obviously a huge draw."
Seattle-based Kidder Mathews has been leading an expansion in the past year across key markets on the West Coast, from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest. The firm averages $9 billion in transaction volume and manages more than 53 million square feet of space, and conducts 2,700 appraisal, consulting, and cost segregation assignments annually.
Silicon Valley's longstanding dependence on the tech industry made it vulnerable to remote work trends and industry headwinds since the COVID-19 pandemic. Tech giants such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft among others were quick to offload significant amounts of space as they scrambled to adapt to a shifting workforce, loading the region up with a record amount of available office real estate.